Today is Veterans Day in the US and it is the day that we stop to reflect and give thanks for our freedom.

And we give thanks to the men and the women who have helped us protect our freedom.

As we all know, freedom is not free and we all have a part to play in maintaining our freedoms.

But for today, it's a day to give thanks to the people in the military who have worked and sacrificed to protect the freedoms that we have since the beginning and the founding of our country.

Imagine waking up to silence.

Silence that used to hold laughter, shared moments, and the everyday rhythm of companionship.

You lose someone and suddenly you're left with that empty hum of time stretching out before you.

Sure, your friends will call and you'll get emails and people will try and stay in contact, but the loss of somebody and the void that's left continues and this was my guest's world after her husband passed away from a long illness that left her submerged in grief, wondering if this was all her life would be.

And for 28 days the tears flowed.

But then came the 29th day and she realized she hadn't cried that day.

Of course she was still sad.

She was still grieving.

But something had shifted.

There was a spark, flickered, a choice.

She didn't want to fade into that picture of loss, the widow in the mauve flannel bathrobe shut away from life.

So she reached for something else.

She began to write.

Today you'll hear from Molly Peacock, a poet who found a path forward through the pain, who captured love, loss and hope in verses that speak to our deepest fears and to our quiet courage.

What changed?

How does one find light in the midst of loss?

Join us to find out.

And welcome to Boomer Banter, the podcast where we have real talk about aging well.

My name is Wendy Green and I am your host.

One of the things I hear often when talking to aging friends or family and podcast listeners too, is how you want to be part of an engaged, vibrant community who are approaching aging with the same vigor, curiosity and practicality that you are.

But the only problem is none of your existing communities have quite the same view of aging as you do.

Maybe it's your friend who only ever complains about their health problems, or the neighbor you used to walk with who now says, no, they're too tired or too achy or too old to walk with you anymore.

And the reality is, some of the members of our friend groups have passed on.

Relationships, especially with a like minded community, are one of the core components of aging well.

But let's Face it, finding that community, especially in your 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond, can be challenging.

And that's why I created Boomer Believers.

Boomer Believers is a community of curious, engaged, optimistic folks who believe learning and thriving together as we age.

Well, if you've been yearning for a sense of camaraderie, opportunities for personal growth and development, and knowledge and support in aging, well, this community was made for you.

The community features regular chats with guest experts, group discussion discussions, resources to help you navigate the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities that aging presents.

So to find out more, go to buymeacoffee.com heyboomer0413 and check us out.

I hope I will see you there.

As I said, my guest today is Molly Peacock.

Molly is a poet as well as a biographer, the author of seven volumes of poetry.

She is also the author of two biographies.

As a poetry activist, Molly was the co founder of Poetry in Motion on New York's Subways and Buses, and founder of the Best Canadian Poetry.

Her newest collection of poems, the Widow's Crayon Box, dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and Rejuvenation.

Molly makes her home in Toronto Welcome Molly, to Boomer Banter.

It's fantastic to be here.

Wendy.

Thank you for having me.

Molly.

I am so grateful that we connected and that you can be here today.

And I want to give people just right out the gate a taste of your poetry.

So I'm wondering if you would start with the reading for us from the before section.

I was thinking about maybe Threshold.

How does that sound to you?

Yes, Threshold sounds wonderful to me because Threshold is the beginning of my relationship with my husband.

By the beginning.

Not the total beginning since we knew each other as teenagers, but the beginning of our marriage.

Threshold.

We'd unhitched the shutters the night before and went to sleep on the pallets we pushed together to make a prenuptial bed, the window framing a darkness we ignored.

Too exhausted to make love, heads crushed into skimpy pillows.

We had fled the first 45 years of our lives for this spartan room.

No surface lush with objects, just a table and a lamp, bags on the chair, suit and dress on the door.

I woke before you, a 28 year habit.

After that, here was the start.

Lake Opaline Mountains.

Amethyst.

To think that window had been blank the night before and I didn't have to make the scene up Water, Sapphire Peaks.

Quartz.

It wasn't art, but a threshold and we'd arrived there.

Threshold.

I Love that.

It's so beautifully sets the scene and puts you right in the feeling and the location where you were.

Thank you for that.

So, to continue with this wonderful love story, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your husband, Mike Rodin.

Mike Grodin was one of those little boys who was incredibly bright and astonished everyone all around him.

And everyone wondered what he would do, what he would become.

I discovered him when he was across the hall in middle school.

We were in two different classes.

He was the kind of kid who.

The kind of boy whose leg never stopped moving.

If you no kids like that, that leg was going and going and going.

By the time I was 16, I decided I wanted a boyfriend.

And I was very proposive about it.

I thought, well, who am I going to pick?

And I thought, I want to pick the smartest boy in the school.

And so I would kind of make myself available to him, just sort of stand around.

Basically I'd stand around where he was standing around.

And it was one night, there was the junior carnival at our high school in Tonawanda, New York, outside of Buffalo.

And that was where we finally got talking and he finally asked me to go to the movies.

And after that we ended up going to the junior prom.

Senior prom.

We lasted through our first years of college and our relationship couldn't quite take a vast commute between two universities.

So we broke up for 19 years.

Okay.

And he'd been a math major at that time in the 19 years.

I only discovered this later.

We were both married to other people in the.

In the same year, divorced from those people in the same year.

Wow.

And I.

I became a poet.

Miraculously.

I come from a working class family and there certainly were no.

There were no examples in my family support, but no examples.

And I'll just leave it there and say that 19 years later we would find each other again through an old girlfriend of his whom I ran into and who after a lot of urging from me because she didn't want to do it, actually sent him my address.

Oh my gosh.

This was.

I mean, this is.

This was.

This is before email, but at the same time he saw a review of my second book of poems in the New York Times.

I've been very lucky as a poet to have that appreciation of my work.

And so we both wrote to one another at the same time.

And now I'll leave it there.

So you discover him in middle school and then all these coincidental things happening at the same time.

Definitely the universe was leading you to Each other again.

Well, so you had 28 years together, is that right?

Yes, we were married for 28 years.

Okay.

And then he passed away in 2021 after a long illness.

Yes, he.

When we got back together, we, I mean, we were in touch with one another through those letters, but when we actually met, we were both involved with other people.

So it was a kind of a reunion where we caught up on each other's lives.

But there was no romance or if there'd be a flicker of romance on one of our parts, the other one would back off.

And I had been told by his ex girlfriend that he had had melanoma cancer.

And so when, but when we met, he never mentioned it.

All he did was say, let's move out of the sun.

We were sitting outside and I actually, I thought he was dying then.

Oh, he obviously, he wasn't dying.

He was quite vigorous.

I was living in New York City.

He came in to run the marathon.

So.

But because he never said anything and I didn't know how to bring it up, I ended up writing a poem about that and then sending it to him.

And then we started calling one another periodically.

I mean, he told me that, yeah, he, he had been a five year survivor of his cancer.

He felt like he was going on in his life.

We, we both would just call each other periodically for about six years.

Oh, wow.

Until these other relationships, his faded away and mine exploded and, and then, and then we started connecting in obviously a very different way.

And finally I went to visit him and it was only getting off the plane when I gave him a full body hug and he gave that back to me, that we actually physically reconnected since we were 19.

And it was at that moment where I thought, Molly Peacock, talk about getting in at the shallow end of the pool.

I mean, are you finally, finally ready to be with this person.

Person again full time?

I mean, I wanted to marry him the minute we hugged.

It took.

I didn't say that of course, but you felt, but that, that was definitely.

Well, during those 28 days when I was getting flowers from everywhere and going online and getting massive amounts of emails because my late husband was no longer.

He was no longer a math major when we met.

He had become a James Joyce scholar and his research and his dissertation made changes in the James Joyce world.

And he was quite a notable and distinguished scholar.

So by the time he passed away, he knew many people around the world in his, in his field, which we would think of as a very, very small area of life, kind of tucked Way to one side under the bell curve, but there's still many people there who were responding.

And I was trying to, you know, trying to write back to them, trying to speak to them.

And so I wasn't.

And it was.

This was also during COVID So I had a little bit more time to think and a little bit more time to process in one way, because I wasn't going out a lot.

This was in 2021, so it wasn't that first lockdown year, but still.

And I took the time to just ask myself, are you going to cry again today?

Is this going to happen again?

And I didn't know.

I was just.

I was watching myself.

I'd never been in a situation like this and will never be in the rest of my life.

And because I'm a poet, I'm sort of.

I'm used to observing the world and noticing things, and I just turned my observation on myself, wondering about myself.

But I.

And immediately I thought, gee, I think I'm supposed to be sort of numbed out, weepy all the time, that everything.

Everything's supposed to be gray.

I'm supposed to be wearing that mo flannel bathrobe.

But I didn't feel that way.

I felt relief at certain points in conversations.

I laughed hard out loud, and I thought, are you supposed to be laughing?

Are you supposed to be feeling relief?

I mean, not supposed to be, but is that something you're gonna have to cover up because you're not getting the mold of a widow?

Yes, of the widow.

Yeah.

And I.

By that 29th day, I started to realize that I was having many feelings all simultaneously, that my life wasn't one color.

It wasn't even the basic eight colors of the crayon box.

It was the entire 152 colors of the giant crayon box.

And once I sort of woke up to that, I began to think, well, if all these things are happening, I'm feeling very alive, even though I'm feeling deep loss.

And I didn't understand that that was the contradiction I was going to live in.

And as a matter of fact, that's the contradiction of our emotional lives that.

You continue to live in today.

Yes.

Yeah.

So there must have been the sense that you needed to still keep that quiet with all of those questions of, should I feel this and am I supposed to be like that?

And so when you started to write, was that a very private thing for you at that point, or was there a sense that you could share that with anybody?

Well, you know, I've been a poet for a long time, a publishing poet, so I have a sense of an audience out there.

On the other hand, when I'm writing, I'm trying to write to what an old teacher of mine, Milton Kessler, once said.

He said, write to the next head on the pillow.

That.

That you write intimately, that you take risks as you would take with someone, you know, who you feel is going to listen to you.

So.

And that's a private space.

And later on it becomes a public space.

If you feel what you've had to say, it's worth it.

I mean, you.

You don't know.

It's just like doing a lot of sketches.

You can throw out a lot of sketches.

I wasn't sure.

I.

I'm one of these poets who knows a lot about technique.

And I've written a lot of sonnets in my life, but I'd never written a sonnet sequence.

So I started one sonnet and I thought, well, just let the poem take you to the next place.

So I would use the last line of the first sonnet to start the next sonnet.

Maybe not completely, but phrases from that that would begin the next one.

And I was building a structure.

I didn't know this, you know.

I mean, I was just feeling my way through it, but I was building a structure that would hold me even as I was making it and telling my story and our story.

I mean, so we.

In the second or third sonnet, there we are in high school together, you know, and continuing on until the sonic.

The cycle closed with sonnet number 15.

Yeah, I found that very interesting, the way you did that, because it was almost like.

As I was reading it, it was almost like, so you told a section of the story.

And then, you know how sometimes when we tell a story, we think for a moment we go.

And.

And so then you start from where you left off.

That's a wonderful way to put it, Wendy.

And that's exactly right.

The pause in between sonnets is the.

And, yeah.

And in the book, I number them just so that we're all sure where we are as we're going through the story.

And that sometimes when you tell a story to someone, you are out of time sequence.

You go backwards, you go forward.

And if you're just talking to a friend.

We all tolerate that from our friends.

I mean, we don't expect them to tell us a streamlined screenplay version.

And the sonnet sequence allows you to do that and not confuse whoever is reading it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought it was a great way to do it, Molly.

So I want to.

You mentioned that when you were growing up, you know, you were supported, but nobody in your family had really been a poet.

And that early in your life, too, being a poet, I think you said something about that's not normal.

So how did you finally embrace this idea that Molly Peacock, you're a poet?

Well, let's see.

I'm hoping that Mrs.

Bummler, my seventh grade English teacher, is listening.

Not many of us get to still be in touch with our seventh grade English teachers, but she was only 12 or 13 years older than I was.

Was.

So.

So when I was 12, you know, she was 25, maybe, something like that, so.

And she's still very much alive and we are in touch with one another.

I know.

What a gift.

It's a.

It's a great gift.

And I.

So I started.

She encouraged me to write and to write poetry, and she created a little literary magazine so I would have an outlet for my.

How nice is that?

Yeah, it's so, so wonderful.

Yeah.

And it just.

I just want to, I don't know, give a shout out to every single teacher out there, especially English teachers and every young teacher.

She was a new.

A relatively new teacher and, you know, in her enthusiasm connected with me.

Yeah.

A little girl who frankly didn't have the easiest time at home.

You know, this is a.

This is post World War II.

My dad was a veteran with heavy duty PTSD, self medicated with alcohol.

Could be really violent.

Could be.

I mean, it was, it.

It was an unpredictable atmosphere at home.

But my grandmother would write me letters, my maternal grandmother, and she would include little poems that she would cut out of the newspaper.

So I had these little.

I had just inklings, just a sort of a.

Some models, and I was a reader.

So any girl of a certain generation who identified with Jo March and Little Women was identifying with a writer.

So as things went on and when I went to university, I went to a state university, Binghamton University, part of the New York State University system.

And there was a poet there.

I took a poetry class and he encouraged me to start writing.

And I did.

I.

I saw.

I understood how to structure a poem because I read a lot of them.

And one of the reasons I read a lot of them is they weren't really taught in school very much.

Teachers are a little nervous about teaching poetry.

And for me, I thought, yippee, I don't have to do this in school.

It just can be mine and I can write these things.

So.

But it took me a long time.

I I graduated.

I was writing advertising for a local television station.

It took me a long time to.

To.

To.

To say that I was a poet.

And one of the reasons is I wanted to have a, quote, unquote, normal life.

I got married.

I had a job.

I thought, oh, poets commit suicide.

Poets are substance abusers.

I really did not want to go down that road.

I didn't know how to be, quote, unquote, normal.

And a poet who was supposed to be like half nuts, raving around.

And I stopped writing.

I thought, I can't do all of this, and I'm just.

I want to be normal, so I abandon poetry.

And I started to get sick.

I got every cold, every virus, every anything that came down the pike.

I ended up at home on the weekend with a box of Kleenexes, and my young husband Ben didn't quite know what to do with me.

And we were supposed to go away.

And he said, molly, you know, I'm going to go on this trip.

And I said, fine.

I said, I'm blowing my nose.

Fine, you go ahead.

And almost.

Well, the day after he left, I woke up all alone.

And I got out a mechanical pencil and a legal pad and I wrote a poem.

And a couple of hours later, I wasn't blowing my nose.

And I had an energy that I hadn't experienced in a long, long time.

And I thought.

And I loved what I wrote, even.

Even though, I mean, you know, it wasn't quite publishable.

I just loved having written it.

And then I knew I had to find some way to do that and to lead the life I wanted to live.

And it took a long time to figure it out and to give myself the confidence.

I mean, I'm the person giving me the confidence.

The people around me aren't doing that.

Yeah.

And so it, you know, it was.

It was.

It was quite a journey.

Luckily, by the time I met Mike again, Michael Grodin, my late husband, I had published a lot.

I published a couple of books.

I was a young player in the world of literature.

And so by the time we married, the fact of my being a poet was entrenched.

It wasn't anything to be disputed, but I have to say, it's still a miracle to me that I became what I became, an absolute miracle.

You know, it's interesting as you describe that story and then the story of the 28 days, like the perceptions that we have of, you know, a poet's life is not normal.

A widow should be sitting on the couch in gray colors or mauve Bathrobe.

And, you know, we.

We have to break out, break away from some of these limiting beliefs that hold us back.

And you gained the strength to do that early as a poet and then that you carried that forward in your book, the Widow's Crayon Box, which is full of some of these wonderful poems that you have written to share and to help, I think, to help others as they're on this journey.

So there's four parts to the Widow's Crane Crayon Box.

There's the after.

And it's interesting, the order you put them in.

There's the after, before, when, and afterglow.

Yes.

So can you explain the order and what we will find in each of those parts?

I.

I wrote.

I didn't write the poems in the order that they are.

Exist in the book.

They.

They came out of me at various times and.

But when I had to put them all together, I thought, I can't tell this story in a straight line.

I have to start with where a person would be in the feelings of loneliness, of the beginning of widowhood.

I've realized that widowhood, it's not a state.

It is instead, it's a way of moving through life now, and it has its stages.

And so I began with after so that I could just show people a little.

Give them a little bit of an insight into that loneliness.

And I begin with a poem called Touched.

And I say when I feel moved and then say, I am touched.

It's another presence inside me.

I sense, and I'm talking about this feeling that I have that I am both the or and the water, and as if I were in a canoe.

And I say, after you died, I felt you next to me.

And over months you entered gradually into that lake and disappeared.

So my husband is gone in the beginning.

And I feel that that was important, that these poems wouldn't have gotten written in his presence.

They were written in his absence.

And.

And in the poem I say, and my loneliness is so extreme that I feel moved by almost anything, even the forehead of a dog that leans against my knee in an elevator.

Things as brief as all the ways you.

And I'm speaking to my late husband here.

All the ways you would lean against me getting a glass of water at the sink.

Everything touches me now that I'm not touched but moved.

And I thought, that is a poem that will let someone who's unfamiliar with this experience, or someone who's very familiar with this experience into the emotions of.

Of loneliness and give them the imagery of loneliness and Then I go into the sonnets of the widow's crayon box, which are.

You know, that whole sequence which uses as many colors in the Crayola box as.

As I can possibly fit in, from pinky pink to.

To manatee.

Manatee is an actual color.

Gray in the crayon box.

Yes.

You do a beautiful job of bringing those colors in.

But I especially liked the way you set the scene in that first, because we can all relate to that.

You know, you'll hear a song, you'll smell a smell, and it brings back a memory of somebody that you loved and lost.

No, absolutely.

Yeah.

And you totally captured that and that first poem.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's just.

It's.

It's return.

I just keep.

Return.

If I return to my senses, then people, even people who don't usually read poetry, can use their senses to feel themselves feel their way through the pole.

Because I'm.

I'm.

I'm making a gamble.

And my gamble is that if.

If I felt something, probably other people have felt it.

I'm not unique in that way.

I mean, my feelings cannot be unique to myself.

That other people must have felt them too.

And if.

Yeah, if I can describe them clearly enough, then other people will recognize themselves in the poem.

And that's the gift of being a poet, and that's the gift of your book, the Widow's Crayon Box, is that you have the language.

You're in touch with your feelings, and you have the language to express it.

Where a lot of us may not have that language, but we feel it.

So that is a gift.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And just to be able to.

It.

It is.

When you say you want to help people.

It's a funny kind of thing that help comes from just putting something into words that you know how to do.

And then other people can.

Can just say, oh, yes, I recognize that.

Exactly.

And you're less alone then.

Oh, that's a great way to put it.

That's right.

You've now brought other people into your.

World, and other people feel less alone because they're partaking of that.

Yes.

Oh, I love that.

So let's go to the afterglow section.

Yeah.

So.

So you did find some.

Yeah, I.

I do be.

I.

I go to before.

And then when I actually wrote several poems of the actual situation in which he died and he elected the maid process in Canada, the medical assistance in dying, which gave him a man who by the end had so few choices, it gave him a choice.

And it really was.

It was Magnificent to be able to see that he could determine those last few days of his life.

Yeah.

But then there was the beyond.

The beyond after the afterglow.

And I called it afterglow because of that incredible sense of being so actively alive.

After he passed away, I didn't realize the intensity of the morning experience, how that would feel, how that would make me feel so alive.

I realize now that I was connecting morning with depression.

I mean, it's depression that makes you shut down and feel dead.

What I was feeling was alive and raw loss.

But I was feeling it.

I.

I was open to it.

I hadn't.

I expected to numb down to it, but I did, but I didn't.

And I realize now, with my feedback about the widow's Crayon box from other readers, that many people have this experience.

And it's very confusing because it seems like, again, a perception.

Right.

It's seems like, how can you feel alive when you've had this great loss?

Yes.

How can you look forward to anything when you've experienced this great loss?

And you.

You do show us in this book on how the journey goes.

And it doesn't mean you stopped feeling loss.

Yes.

You're so.

Words in your mouth.

It meant what, though?

Well, I mean, you're so right.

It.

You're.

You're feeling this loss at the same time as you're feeling so alive.

I'm feeling the loss at the same.

At the same time as I'm looking forward to something.

And it.

The contradictions.

The thing is a grown up.

I mean, this is boomer banter, okay?

The people who are listening and you and I are of a certain age.

Right.

And you can't have lived as long as we've lived without the continuing experience of feeling contradictory emotions at the same time.

You love someone and you hate them at the same time.

You know what I mean?

You're joyful and you're furious at the same time.

All of these things.

But it was more intense for me.

Yeah.

During the initial period of my morning.

So, you know, there.

There's a.

I tried to write about everything.

Even.

Even I tried to write about.

You wrote about the hard stuff too, Molly.

You did.

And you wrote about the love and.

Yes, absolutely.

I had to write about my love of him and sometimes my exasperation with him.

You know, I mean, as someone, at least in my experience, as people get closer and closer to their death, they withdraw.

And that wonderful sense of marriage that I had with him, of the both of us sort of pulling together, no longer existed.

And so I was in mourning for my marriage before my husband died.

Even though we had, you know, obviously we were together through, throughout it was, I was losing him.

And then in writing the poems, I did get him back again in a, in a, in a, in a certain way.

And I wrote about every day things like he ate an apple every day and I could not throw out the last apple in the fridge.

His last apple.

Yeah, yeah.

I, I wrote about.

I never thought I would be really calm again.

I mean, he calmed me down and I never thought I would be able to do that for myself.

I have to say, three and a half years later, I can do that for myself.

Okay.

But that was a learning, I had a learning curve there.

Well, and like you said, we are all at that age where we have had to learn a lot of life lessons and you still have more to go.

Your courage and your warmth in writing this and what you're sharing with everybody.

I would, anybody who knows somebody or who is going through any kind of a loss, I would say, you know, try and pick up a copy of the widow's crayon box.

There are so many things in that that are going to touch your soul.

But Molly, I want you to imagine right now that you are talking to one of your best friends.

Friends who has also just experienced great loss.

What advice or suggestions would you give them about coping with the loss of a loved one?

One of the things that happens is that you have to recognize and if you can forgive your mistakes, that there'll be a lot of pressure on you to just fill out forms and, and, and do things and meet meet death benefit deadlines.

And doing, settling someone's estate, even if it's a simple estate, takes an entire year.

And my husband's wasn't, I mean we weren't you financially extravagantly wealthy or anything.

But, but there were a lot of things that we, that I had to take care of.

I wasn't, I wasn't emotionally up to it and yet I had to do it.

Yeah.

So I ended up, and I say this in the, in the widow's crayon box.

I end up crying at the bakery.

You know, I end up, I end up yelling at some poor kid at the farmers market who didn't make the right change.

I mean I, there was, I could, I could, I, There were moments where I just turned into a crazy, just a crazy witch.

And then I would go home, I'd be so embarrassed.

How could I have yelled at the 16 year old kid who wasn't making Change properly.

I mean, what kind of, you know, what kind of a nasty old lady have I turned into?

And then I, and then I would say, everything is too much for you.

Even waiting for someone to make change.

Right?

And I'm saying this as a poet now, thinking, oh, he was making change.

I was making a change.

I realized now I was yelling out of this sort of pain of metamorphosizing.

And I, I don't even know this boy's name.

I wish I could find him and apologize.

Yeah.

So I would say to a friend that you're so.

All of your.

It's like your borders are changing.

It's, you know, when you, in school biology, when you look at an amoeba and the, and the outlines of the amoeba are all squiggly and wiggly and blobby and amorphous, there's just that blobby, amorphous quality to you.

And you're going to need a lot of, A lot of naps and a lot of rest, because we only heal when we rest.

That goes for physical healing.

Of course, we only heal when we sleep, but it also goes for emotional healing.

You just have to rest.

And I finally said, okay, it's 5:00 in the afternoon.

You shouldn't need a nap now.

I mean, 5:00 would feel like the end of the day.

It felt like nine.

And I would just say, so, so, so just rest.

Just go to sleep.

You hit.

I would never know when I would hit an energy wall.

Like, I couldn't predict my energy.

I would just slam into a wall of not being able to do anything and just kind of drop.

And so I, if I, you know, as I'm talking to my close friend, I would say these vagaries in energy and the.

What you don't recognize in yourself coming bubbling up is, it's, it's part of it.

It's me.

It felt like adolescence where you just didn't know who or what you were.

And there.

But here's what happened.

There was this, in this feeling of adolescence, I realized there was a kind of brightness to it.

And I was reconnecting to the girl I was before I had big relationships, before I, Before I had romantic relationships.

And there was a kind of creative energy there that I didn't expect to have.

And I was reconnecting with, like, the little Molly Peacock and.

And that.

What a surprise that was.

Yeah, what a surprise.

Well, Molly, thank you so much for what you shared today.

I think this whole episode, the story of your love the story of the loss, how you have thrived since then, and what you've shared with the world with the widow's crayon box.

It's an important episode.

I did share your contact information.

It's mollypecock.org I have to tell everybody the most beautiful website I think I've ever seen.

Visually appealing colors and images.

Amazing.

Thank you so much, Wendy.

And thank you for talking about this book and letting me talk about it.

I just want to say that, you know, by, by.

By the end of this book, I do.

I wake up and I.

There is a poem called the Faun where I have a dream about waking up and, and see this fawn and the deer, the.

The deer is curled up in all these branches.

And I say at the end of the poem, the deer is talking just to me.

Not in words, but in understanding.

And then I say, neither the deer nor I were yet standing.

And there's just that hint of being able to stand on two feet.

Well, or if you're a fawn, four feet.

Right.

Well, we are glad you are standing.

Now, Molly, before I let everybody go, I do want to encourage you to check out our community of curious, engaged, optimistic people who believe in learning and thriving together.

So go to buymeacoffee.com hey boomer0413 and see what we are all about.

It's a, it's a great group.

We call ourselves the Boomer Believers.

And I also want to say if you enjoy what we talk about on Boomer Banter, I want to suggest that you check out the Women Over 70 podcast.

These are some friends of mine who have a beautiful show and interestingly, their latest episode is with a woman who found mental health resilience by embarking on her third career as a poet.

Oh, okay.

So look for women over 70 wherever you listen to podcasts and, and next week we're going to continue this discussion about our perceptions and how we move through those and how they hold us back or move us forward.

And my guest is someone named Jill Yesko, Diana.

And she has created a non profit.

Jill had a moving company that was kind of a white glove, high end moving company and she found that a lot of people in their 70s and 80s needed help moving small moves.

But they didn't financially, they weren't able to pay.

So she created this nonprofit and it started in Pittsburgh and has since gone national.

It's just been a couple of years.

So join us next week to learn how an entrepreneur in the moving business saw a need and found a way to fill that need as a means of giving back the perception shift.

Tune in next week to learn more.

Molly, thank you so much.

Continued success with your poetry.

And if you decide to write another book, we'll be looking for it.

Oh, thank you so much, Wendy.

Thank you for the opportunity.

And thank you for doing this podcast.

We need it, and we need you.

Thank you, Molly.

Talk soon.

Bye.