He Watched the Woman He Loved Die—And Learned How to Live Again
The courageous journey of navigating grief becomes a path to renewed life and love in this heartfelt conversation with author and Certified Grief Educator Tony Stewart. An accomplished filmmaker, visionary software designer, and global leader in advertising technology, Tony shares the intimate story behind his acclaimed memoir Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving.
With unflinching honesty and tender grace, Tony recounts his profound 35-year marriage to his late wife, painter Lynn Kotula, and the experience of watching her die from a terminal illness, and the pivotal conversations that helped him move forward. His memoir offers a deeply intimate exploration of love, loss, and the quiet strength required to face life’s most harrowing moments. Tony brings a unique blend of insight, compassion, and hard-earned wisdom to this powerful interview as he reflects on the shift in perspective that allowed him to reframe his grief, how sorrow can be woven into our lives without overwhelming us, and what joy might look like even during mourning. This conversation is an invitation to witness resilience, honor love, and discover how grief can open unexpected pathways to healing and renewal.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How to approach a terminal illness diagnosis as a unified challenge to maximize “good time” rather than collapsing in pity or pursuing a “false trap” of a cure.
- The concept of grief as a form of “alchemy,” in which, over time, we can transmute our grief into something stronger and more valued, a kind of gold.
- The healing modalities that helped Tony cope with his wife’s terminal illness, his grief, and his transition to a new life.
- The meaning behind the Tai Chi metaphor “Carrying the Tiger”: if you carry a tiger for someone, you are lifting their load.
- Why grief is something to honor rather than something to fix, and the truth that “you can’t heal what you don’t feel.”
- The reality that you never stop grieving, but the gradual building of positive new experiences allows joy to coexist with enduring love and sadness.
- The complex journey of finding new love while still deeply grieving for a previous partner, and how a new partner’s openness can aid in the healing process.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS TONY:
- What would you like to share with us about Lynn, how you met, and the age difference between you?
- How did your relationship with Lynn change in the face of her terminal illness, and what did you learn about love’s capacity to adapt and deepen?
- How can we transmute our grief into something stronger and more valued, a kind of gold?
- In what ways did writing Carrying the Tiger help you process your grief?
- What about the tiger image helped you shift your perspective on grief?
- What is your message about the importance of healing and the journey back towards the light after a deep loss?
- How do we find ways to integrate grief in our lives and stop being crippled by it?
- Would you like to briefly share with us how love found you again?
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GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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He Watched the Woman He Loved Die—And Learned How to Live Again
From Global Tech Leader to Certified Grief Educator
I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Tony Stewart, who is joining me from New York City. Tony is an accomplished filmmaker whose work has earned prestigious awards, a visionary software designer whose tools are trusted by three of the world’s largest charitable organizations, and a global thought leader in advertising technology.
He spearheaded the creation of Advertising Markup Language, the international standard for advertising transactions, which led to speaking engagements across Europe and North America, and his software. Tony Stewart’s home office was featured in the New York Times for its innovation and impact. Tony is also the author of an acclaimed memoir titled Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving, a deeply intimate exploration of love, loss, and the quiet strength required to face life’s most harrowing moments.
In honoring his late wife, Lynn Kotula, Tony tenderly recounts their shared journey through her terminal illness with unflinching honesty and grace. One reviewer called it a beautifully devastating memoir, capturing not only the raw ache of grief, but also the enduring resilience of love and the transformative power of sorrow.
Tony recently became a certified grief educator. His unique combination of insight, compassion, and hard-earned wisdom promises to make this a powerful and deeply moving interview. I’m eager to explore with Tony what it means to live fully in the shadow of loss and revisit two pivotal conversations he shared with Lynn, one at the very beginning of their journey and another at its close.
We’ll also reflect on the shift in perspective that allowed Tony to reframe his grief and on how sorrow can be woven into our lives without overwhelming us. What joy might look like even in the midst of mourning and more. This conversation will surely remind us that healing is not found in turning away from pain, but in facing it with courage, creativity, and compassion.
Tony, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
Irene, that was beautiful. Thank you very much. I’m glad that in reading my book and looking at me and my story, that’s what you saw, because what you talked about is exactly what I would like to present to the world.
I’m honored and thank you. I really want my listeners to know that the person I’m interviewing has expertise and is credible, and you have amazing accomplishments, and now you’re a grief coach, my goodness. What a combination that is. In a way, like I wrote a book, Good to the Last Drop, and this is your legacy now with all that you’ve done. Now, your legacy will be helping people in grief, which is truly beautiful. You wrote this book.
This is what I dreamed of. It’s why I wrote the book was in order to help people who faced what Lynn and I went through, and then what I went through after she died. We need examples and guides, and just the hand-holding that comes from seeing how someone else made their way through these things.
We need examples, guides, and the handholding that comes from seeing how someone else made their way through these things. Share on X
That came out okay. Let’s begin with the beginning. What would you like to share with us about Lynn? How you met, the age difference between you, and the way she changed you during your 35 years of marriage.
Three wonderful questions all wrapped up in one. Lynn Kotula, for those who want to look and see her paintings, was a painter, a vibrant, unusual person who didn’t do anything the way everyone else did, no matter what it was, dressed in her own special style, and was 39 years old when I met her. I was 29. I was coming off a divorce and talking to just about any attractive woman that I encountered, hoping to prove to myself that I had it.
Lynn swam at lunchtime in the same swimming pool, the Columbia University swimming pool that I swam at. One day, I just spoke to her in the pool, like, “How come you were swimming in that lane? You usually swim in this faster one.” Which was the innocent comment I was making again and again, without even thinking about it, to all these different women I encountered, not necessarily intending anything.
She, at that point, 39, had not been in a serious relationship in a few years, had resigned herself to never being in one again, and thought that I was like hitting on her and falling for her. She thought, “He’s cute. She’s seen me swim there. When you see people swim, you can see their politeness, how they handle themselves. She said, “He’s cute. I like his style.”
The next day, she stopped at the end of the lane and did a bunch of leg stretches in my lane, specifically so that I would stop and talk to her, which she thought was giving me the opening that I had asked for. I innocently, having no idea about any of that, thought, “I’ll start talking to her.” That was the beginning of our relationship, which went on for 30-plus years.
Love’s Capacity to Adapt: Facing a Terminal Illness Together
Sadly, 35 years go by, and now she gets a terminal illness, and your relationship with her had to change in the face of that. What did you learn about love’s capacity to adapt and deepen? You were in love with her, and look what was going on. How did she handle that, Tony?
The first thing is, we got this diagnosis, even before we got a diagnosis, we had like the results of an MRI and her doctor saying, “Lynn, you’ve got tumors. You need to see an oncologist.” Which scared the hell out of us. The formal diagnosis actually took a little while from then. The first thing to say is we immediately saw this as a challenge, not necessarily that we would overcome. It’s very hard to thread the needle here. We saw this as something that we were going to walk through together, and that we were going to do everything we could to extend the good years that she had that we could have more time and she could have more life.
Can I just say how wonderful that is that she did that? What a blessing that is that she left that to you. For other people who get sick, it’s very easy for everybody to join them on a pity pot. She didn’t do that at all.
Totally. No pity. This has happened to me. At the time, she was in her late 60s, and she was like, “I’ve had a really good life. I didn’t want to die this young. I would like to have more time. Maybe we can find doctors and treatments that will give me more time, but you play your hand as you’ve got. We did neither of the two extremes. We neither collapsed into what the hell are we going to do, and that life is over.”
We totally didn’t do that. We also didn’t fall into what I consider to be the false trap with stage four cancer of thinking we were going to beat it. In our society, we present cancer as an enemy to be fought. All these beliefs are as if only you have the right attitude, and if only you take the right holistic treatments, etc., it’s in your control, which sets you up for a terrible feeling of failure if, as is almost always the case with a major stage four cancer, you’re not going to beat it. There were no miracle drugs yet. We hope there will be. Where the best you can do is get more good time. That’s what we aimed for.
That’s beautiful. I really have to say, and not only that, because I read your book. What you went through with the doctors and the processes and all that was demoralizing, and you still managed to find happiness and joy with each other.
With each other, and in every day that something good happened. Two things definitely happened during that period. We drew closer and closer together because we’re going through this together, and there were all these twists and turns. There were major hospitalizations. Things that went wrong. Lynn almost died. All of that we just saw as what do I do next? What’s the next step? In between, in the early days, when she could, we would walk to the hospitals.
We’re in New York City. We could have taken a taxi, we could have taken the subway, but they were only a few miles to the different hospitals that we dealt with, and we loved to walk. It was a beautiful autumn. That first autumn. We were walking through Central Park, admiring the golden ginkgo leaves as they fell and generally saying, “This is life. We’ve still got it.” Look how beautiful this is.
That’s such a beautiful memory and such a wonderful moment. I also want to tell everyone that Lynn had two pivotal conversations with you. One at the beginning of this journey, which we’re talking about, and one at the end. Would you like to tell us about? She was a wonderful, amazing person. Do you mind telling us all?
They both occurred in our small kitchen at the kitchen table, where we were drawn to each other. The very first night on the day that her GP called to say, “Lynn, I’m looking at this radiology report. You’ve got tumors in your lung and in your spine. You need to see an oncologist.” It was a Sunday. We couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t even make the appointment that we needed until the next morning.
We sat together that night at the kitchen table, and we held hands, and we started just telling each other how much we loved each other, and what a wonderful marriage we’d had. I should mention, as I say in the book, we were not demonstrably affectionate in this way. We never celebrated Valentine’s Day. We hardly ever gave each other presents in all those 30 years preceding this.
Suddenly, the words just came spilling out, “I love you so much. You mean everything to me. You’ve made my life beautiful and wonderful, and I thank you for that.” We told each other how much we loved each other again and again. The next morning, we started calling doctors and trying to line up the appointments and start.
Living Fully in the Shadow of Death: The Two Pivotal Conversations
As you put it, I began to live fully in the shadow of death.
That was the first of these conversations. The second, five years later, if not six, I’m not going to try and remember the exact dates at this moment. We were very lucky for five years. Some miracle drugs worked for Lynn for years and held down the lung tumors so they didn’t break out. After 5 or 6 years, as we had been told from the very beginning, they would eventually stop working. The miracle drugs stopped working.
We went through a very difficult year as the cancer started to grow. This is what many people would have experienced in the first year. If you’re not lucky enough to get one of the miracle drugs and you’re quoted, “Just on chemo,” sometimes the prognosis was a year or two when Lynn was initially diagnosed. We got 5 or 6, but then the day came when it was just too hard. We had tried other drugs. We had done various things, and life for Lynn was getting more and more painful.
One night, with some help from our beloved oncologist, who actually called and said, “I’m looking at these reports. They’re really horrible.” Sometimes you have to say enough is enough, and possibly this is the time Lynn decided to stop treatment, and that we would start home hospice. After we hung up the phone, we sat again at the same kitchen table, holding hands just as we had done the first time, and saying many of the same things to each other.
This time, we were wondering, what’s it going to be like? What do you think death will be like? What do you think a hospice will be like? What do you think death will be like? Do you think there’s an afterlife? I should say, neither of us was religious. We’re not dogmatically scientific, but we don’t subscribe to any of the religions that tell you there’s an afterlife.
We’re just open to the question. Probably the most important thing that happened in that conversation for me, and what happened to me later, we started wondering what was going to happen after Lynn died. I said to her something like, “I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll just be broken to pieces for several years.” Eventually, I’m only I was barely into my 60s. I was in my mid-60s at the time.
Maybe I hope I’ll find love again. She looked at me, and she shook her head and said, “I don’t ever want you to have another girlfriend.” She nodded right after that. She said, “Yeah, I do want you to have a girlfriend.” She shook her head again and said, “No, I don’t ever want you to have another girlfriend.” Finally, she nodded her head and said, “Yeah, you should. I want you to have another girlfriend.”
Which is so beautiful. She gave you permission.
She gave me permission while acknowledging the immense importance of the love that we had for each other. What I read it as, “I want you to love me forever, but I also want you to be happy.”
I want you to love me forever, but I also want you to be happy. Share on X
That’s so important. You also speak to grief and a form of alchemy, you call it, which, over time, we can transmute our grief into something stronger and more valued, a gold. Would you like to talk to us a little bit about that, Tony?
I’ve done a number of podcasts now, and no one has zoomed in on that. It’s one of the most meaningful sections of the book. After Lynn died in my book, In Carrying the Tiger, I chronicle my grief in great detail for the first few months, especially, which is what many of your audience probably know, you’re shattering disorientation, very hard to find any joy in anything. One of the things that I had to do was this during the pandemic.
Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving
I decided to have a Zoom memorial for Lynn, who had hundreds of friends and who’d been following along because we were posting in a private site about this journey. I decided that we would do a Zoom memorial. I, a former filmmaker, wanted to do a slideshow, a slideshow of Lynn. In the decades, starting even before I met her, you people sent me photos. I had to go through all these photos from our life together, picking the ones that would go into the slideshow that would start the memorial.
I went through this whole process again and again. At first, every time I looked at one of those photos, I would just start sobbing because it reminded me of something fun that we had done together, a goofy expression she had, whatever, that I was never going to have again. I forced myself to keep going back. I had a task to accomplish, and I would go back and look at the same photo again and again and think, “Do I want this?”
Eventually, slowly, I started to learn to smile at these same photos, because what was happening was that I was starting to be able to hold on to the original reason that I had taken the photo or that we had taken the photo. That is what I was talking about, that by letting myself feel it and by pushing myself, in this case, to go right into the heart of the grief over those photos, they actually started to speak to me positively and to give me joy again.
The Alchemy of Grief: Transmuting Sorrow into Deep Gratitude
Correct me if I’m incorrect, but I would bet that you started to form tremendous gratitude that you had had those experiences with her.
Absolutely.
That’s how I feel about my husband. I’m so grateful.
I am so grateful. I don’t want to overstate this as a magic bullet that just a few months after Lynn died, spent a couple of days or a week looking at photos, and magically the grief transmuted into happiness and gratitude. No, I was still sobbing for hours day after day as things would set me off for quite a long time after that, well past, way through the year and into the next year as one does. It was this glimmer. It was the beginning of realizing, “There is light at the end of this tunnel. Look, this photo is making me smile today.” That is something I couldn’t smile about in the two months before that. The first few months were just so hard.
Now that you’re a grief coach, I have to ask you what healing modalities helped you cope with grief. You had to be getting some help through all of this. You’re coping with her illness, your grief, and now you’re trying to transition to a new life. That’s not easy to do.
That’s totally not easy. The single biggest thing that helped me, which in fact is what gave me the material to have Carrying the Tiger, to have a book out of this whole thing, was that early on, at Lynn’s request, I started writing posts on a site called CaringBridge.org where we could share our journey with our family and friends. It was like a private Facebook social. Only friends could get to it. I was journaling from the very beginning.
We saw this doctor, whatever. As time went on, I started saying more about what it felt like and writing more about our emotions. I had been doing this for 6 or 7 years, however long it was, before Lynn died. From the first day of home hospice, I found I was writing more than ever. I was journaling my feelings. I was journaling the experience. I’ve never been a journal before. I have never kept a diary. I was sharing this with our 200 friends in a private forum, and it helped me so much.
After she died, I actually wrote a post saying, “This is the Lynn Kotula story, and she just died, so I guess I’m going to stop.” Two days later, I couldn’t stop, and I wrote another post about what my grief felt like. The single biggest thing that was happening was that I kept thinking about what I was experiencing. This strange beast called grief that takes you over and is just so unpredictable and confusing and non-linear and whatever. I found it so fascinating, and I was sharing it with my friends, and they wrote back in the comments on CaringBridge, “Thank you so much for sharing this. Reading the details about your grief is helping me with mine.”
Looking back, “I was like having a grief group.” It wasn’t just that they said, “Thank you.” Sometimes they would write back about, “When my mother died, this felt like it for me. When my partner died, this was what it felt like for me.” It was really like as if I were attending a private grief group focused on me, on my grief, but with all these friends, some of whom had been through very serious grief themselves and were sharing their insights.
Carrying the Tiger: The Tai Chi Metaphor for Life’s Biggest Challenges
In a way, that’s a lot about what this show is about. I want to ask you, because from this CaringBridge came this wonderful Tai Chi image that you used for the title of your book, Carrying the Tiger. Tell us how that came about.
This came very early on, like just a few weeks after we started treatment in the early days. We were just seeking the best treatment at that point. A friend wrote Lynn an email in which she said, “In our Tai Chi group, we carry tigers for people who are facing difficult challenges. The three motions of bending low, picking up the tiger, and putting it on a hilltop far away make that tiger so much less threatening.” Lynn wrote back to her friend, “That’s beautiful. Would you carry some tigers for me? Also, could you teach me how to carry a tiger?”
The link to the journal leads to Carrying the Tiger. Is there anything else you’d like people to know about your wonderful memoir? You’ve been talking about it, but is there anything else you’d like as they rush to Amazon and the bookstores to purchase the book? What else would you like them to know about it?
I would like people to know that I wrote this book hoping that it would help people, hoping that by reading it, people going through either living with cancer and being a caregiver or the grief that we live with after losing our loved one. I hoped that reading the details of my story would help people, and it is succeeding beyond my wildest dreams.
I hope that by reading the details of my story, people living with cancer, caregiving, or grief will find comfort and connection. Share on X
The book has been winning awards. There are now over 250 Amazon reviews, with more than 175 five-star reviews. What people are writing on Amazon is, among other things, thank you so much. “Your book really helped me.” This really captures the experience. Thank you for sharing it. That’s why I wrote Carrying The Tiger, and it appears to be happening.
It’s wonderful. It’s your legacy. There’s more to your legacy. What led you to become a certified grief educator after you wrote the book? Now you go from personal experience to professional support. You had been in therapy. Tell us about that. Did that lead to inspiring you to become a certified grief educator?
I just want to mention that, along with journaling, I did have a therapist. I went and consciously found a therapist about a year in when I had a breakdown trying to support Lynn without enough support from me, which is a life lesson for anyone who’s caregiving. You subsume yourself in the caregiving process, and then you don’t realize that you’re sucking all of your energy out. Anyway, I got a therapist way back then, and specifically from the beginning said, “I need someone who’ll be with me when Lynn dies. That’s going to be such a big crisis, and I want to have a relationship with someone who can support me.”
That was going on. At the same time I was doing the journaling, I also had private therapy sessions, which were huge for me. There is no connection that I’m aware of between the therapist and my taking the course at Grief.com and becoming a certified grief educator. What happened, and you’ll be tickled about this. I wrote the book, and I wanted to get the word out. I put my name out to go on podcasts like yours, but this was early on.
Quite a few podcasts that focus on grief, caregiving, healing, and recovery asked me to be on. Starting six months ago the book came out about six months ago, and I started recording conversations. After the third or fourth conversation, I realized, “These conversations are really helping me. I think they’re helping the listeners of the program. This is really cool.”
I wish I knew more, though, because I’m only talking about my grief, and I’ve only had the experience of my grief. I wasn’t at the time confident that the experiences I had had would be universal enough that they would apply to many people. By coincidence or by Lynn’s intervention or whatever, the next day I saw an ad, I don’t know, on Instagram where David Kessler, one of the top grief expert counselors, teaches a course to become a certified grief educator, and his next iteration of the course was going to start next week, and there were only a few slots left.
You never know about that last sentence, because it was done by Zoom, and there were about a thousand of us from all over the world who took the course, but I jumped on it. I had had the idea yesterday, I saw this thing today, and I just clicked the link, and I signed up for the course without any particular idea what I was going to do other than become more knowledgeable and become more able to help people when I talk to them about grief.
Spiritually, Tony, they would say this was not an accident.
There are several things in my life where I’m totally willing to believe, even though I’m a skeptic, even though I’ve never been to a medium, there are several things that have happened since Lynn died, where a very real possibility is that Lynn had something to do with it. There’s just like these. It’s too much. You can call it a coincidence.
Grief Is an Honor, Not a Problem to Fix: A Certified Educator’s View
I want to ask you to get your certification, and you write about, which really touched me, that grief is not about something to fix, but something to honor. Tell us what it was about the tiger image that helped you shift your perspective on grief, and as a certified grief educator, how do you hope to guide and support others?
Two different things here.
I like to put some of my questions together.
Two different questions. The tiger, which has been with me this whole time, is a wonderful metaphor because the challenge that you face is real. In my case, in my book, there are three parts to the book. I think each one was a different challenge. Learning to live with cancer. There was helping Lynn have a good death, which is the middle part of the book, and helping her through home hospice and the conversations we had.
Those were the most meaningful few weeks of my life. There’s finding joy while grieving, which is the challenge that we’re talking about, that you talk about every week on your podcast. I see each one of them as a tiger, as a challenge. In each case, you don’t make it go away by pretending that it’s not there. You go right through it, but you try and take that challenge and put it somewhere where it doesn’t paralyze you, where you can live the step by step through the experience and feel what’s really going on and still find the strength to take the next step.
That’s what I took from carrying the tiger from the three parts of my book, the three different tigers. I have the certification, and I am much more knowledgeable about grief and much more capable of talking to people about their grief than I was before. I haven’t yet had any single client, and I’m not actively pursuing.
Honestly, if there is someone who thinks they would benefit from talking to me, I would love to help you. I would love to talk to people. Anyone who’s in need and in grief, who thinks that having a conversation or a series of conversations with me might be helpful, please do reach out to me. My website is TonyStewartAuthor.com, and there’s a contact us form there.
What I have found already is that in conversations like the one we’re having and in conversations with dear friends who are now in the early stages of their own grief because they’ve lost partners, I’ve been so much more helpful and so much more comfortable having the conversations than I used to be. I don’t know how being a certified grief educator will affect my future. I don’t know.
You’ll find out there’s a plan. I have no doubt. I would like to know what Tony’s message is about the importance of healing and the journey back towards the light after a deep loss that you’d like to share with our audience.
Thanks, Irene. What I wanted to do was thank you, A, for having this show, for sharing these stories with your audience. Also, I’ve now recorded quite a few podcasts, and you asked me more interesting questions than many, and you took me into places that I found deeply meaningful for me, and I hope are deeply meaningful for your audience. I assume you do that every week because that’s who you are. You are bringing a wonderful service to the world with this show, very much the way I hope to do with my book with Carrying the Tiger. I just thank you for being who you are and for doing all the work that’s involved in bringing these stories to the world.
Thank you, Tony. Thank you so much. I really deeply appreciate it.
The single most important message that I would like to share is that if you allow yourself to grieve, and I would share David Kessler’s quote, “You cannot heal what you don’t feel.” If you allow yourself to realize, I am grieving, this sucks. This is horrible. “I cannot get anything done today. I’m crying all the time.”
A, this is normal. It’s okay. B, it will get better. That, for me, is the single biggest thing because when you are in it, and for some people it’s only a few months before they start to feel better, I was blessed that some of these good things, like the journaling and like the new relationship that I’m in now, came along to help me find my way forward. For other people, it takes years and years. There’s no timeline.
There’s no right or wrong. If you allow yourself to go through the grief rather than trying to suppress it and to acknowledge that this is what’s happening and that everything you’re feeling is actually normal and all these other people have gone through it and will go through their versions of it, that very process, the process of living will slowly bring you out of the deep grief and to a place where you can appreciate the world around you.
Does Grieving Ever Stop? What Long-Term Love and Loss Look Like
I’ve got a question for you. Do we ever stop grieving, and does it change as it goes through the years? I personally have done all this healing with my grief and all, but there are times when my body remembers. Do you want to talk about that?
You will never stop grieving. Another David Kessler thing that I love, these little quick ones, “How long will you grieve? How long will the person be dead?” You never stop grieving. What happens is you start having and appreciating more and more good experiences in your life. You start being able to notice a good day, the sun shining, being able to get out the door and take a walk when, for the last few weeks, you couldn’t even bring yourself to do that.
You start building up the positive experiences of whatever your new life will be. It will not be the same as your previous life. It will not be. Slowly, they form the foundation. They fill your life so that it isn’t only all grief. The moments come. It’s now been a few weeks, if not a couple of months. I’ve been very busy for the last few months, and I don’t think I’ve deeply cried for Lynn for a couple of months.
Lynn died like five years ago now, just to put this in perspective, and I’m in another relationship. Just a few months ago, something happened that set me off, and I started sobbing. I cannot predict what my grief will look like for the rest of my life. I liked it. I don’t actually want to lose my connection to Lynn.
My love for Lynn is deep and everlasting and is not replaced by whatever is going on in my life now. It’s still there. It’s a part of me. Every time that something comes up where I get a little teary or a little sad or wistful, or in my case, start sobbing. I now remember I was just looking at like a bowl, my breakfast cereal bowl in the kitchen that I use every day. I suddenly remembered when Lynn and I bought it in Chinatown. It’s an inexpensive Chinese bowl.
It doesn’t matter.
This year, this was just a few months ago. You cry. I cried. I was sad, and I was happy because I felt connected, and I felt my love was honored and real.
The other thing that I love that you’re teaching everyone tuning in is that you can have happiness, can accept where you are, but you also accept when that grief comes up, and you can love yourself enough to allow yourself to do that and give yourself permission and not be embarrassed by it. This is what it is, right?
Yeah. Not being embarrassed is huge for me, and it’s a theme running through the whole book that I try and put in the things that could have embarrassed us or did embarrass us at the time to try and normalize it, to say, “Don’t be embarrassed if this happens to you.” It goes all the way back to living with cancer and the side effects of the drugs and various things. That’s the theme. We all live in our own private world, and we’re so quick to be embarrassed, to think that other people aren’t experiencing these things, to think that this is shameful or I have to hide this. When in fact, we’re all going through this, we’re all human.
We all live in our own private world, but there’s no need for shame—everyone experiences these struggles, and we’re all human. Share on X
Finding Love Again: Integrating a New Relationship While Still Grieving
We’re all going through it. What you’re doing is role modeling for people both can exist, and it’s okay. I also want to ask you, you talk about the fact that even after profound loss, love is never truly gone, and it can find us again. Would you like to briefly share with us how love found you again?
It’s actually the whole last part of the book that talks about the complexity of this. Just a few months after Lynn died, I got in touch with an old acquaintance of mine, I should say. I was close to her parents. One of her stepmother’s had died, they had done a Zoom memorial, and I invited her and her siblings to Lynn’s Zoom memorial, even though they had never met her. We started talking about grief.
She started sharing that her husband. She wrote me back a little email exchange, and it turned out her husband had just told her he was leaving her after 30-something years of marriage. I wrote back something about how that grief. It’s so huge, and it parallels mine because you imagined you dreamed of this life together, and now it’s gone. We started exchanging emails about grief. We started making phone calls. We realized we had developed a crush on each other.
Eventually, she came to town. I’m in her house now in Minneapolis, and she came to New York. Eventually, we started having a relationship, which was hugely hard for me because, despite Lynn’s giving me permission, I had always thought of that as being years away. My relationship with Cordelia started just months after Lynn died. I had unbelievable guilt. I would push Cordelia away from me. We would talk about it. It just went on for several years as we worked through how the heck you integrate new love into your life while you’re still deeply grieving. We did it.
That says a lot. Have to say that says a lot about Cordelia because she loved you so much. She was weathering what you were going through and not taking it personally. She was understanding it, and that made you love her even more.
I would say that she was the third leg of my recovery healing was the fact that she, from the get-go, just out of instinct, said, “Tell me about Lynn. I want to understand this woman. I want to understand who you had this deep love for that you’re crying so much.” As I learned in the grief education course, the single best thing you can do for someone who is grieving is to give them an opening to talk about who they lost.
The single best thing you can do for someone who is grieving is to give them an opening to talk about who they lost. Share on X
Just tell me about so-and-so. Just tell me about them. Don’t shy away from it. We often don’t ask each other that question, or strangers, or acquaintances. We think it’ll hurt them, because we don’t want to upset them and get them crying. In fact, what they’re dying for more often than not is a chance to talk about their love for the person they just lost and what a special person that was.
That is part of the totality of who you are by having had this relationship in your life. That relationship will lead to what happens in your next relationship.
We build on these. They become a part of us. Cordelia gave me that without any training, just because that’s who she is. She let me grieve in the several years that it took for this dance of slowly coming closer together.
Here you are in Minneapolis.
Here I am in her house visiting in Minneapolis.
Tony, do you have anything you’d like to tell our audience about any special promos coming our people’s way?
Several promos are coming for my book on the Kindle version of my book. I should say that if you’re in Kindle Unlimited, you can read Carrying the Tiger for free at any time. For those who aren’t and who would have to pay for it, on December 1st, which is probably in the past when this show airs, Amazon is putting it on sale for $0.99 for Cyber Monday, which I really appreciate because I didn’t ask for that. They emailed me and said, “We’d love to put your book on sale on Cyber Monday. Do you approve?” Also, in January, I’m going to put it on sale from January 12th. The week of January 12th, it’s going to be the Kindle version will be on sale. I haven’t decided on either $0.99 or $1.99, possibly $99.
What Joy Looks Like in the Midst of Grief: A Message of Hope
We’ll put it in the show notes so that people can access it. The other thing I want to ask you is that your book doesn’t shy away from sorrow, but it also celebrates joy. What does joy look like in the midst of grief? How can people permit themselves to feel both?
The funny thing is, as you asked the question, I was remembering a moment that was not in the midst of grief, that was in the midst of living with cancer, when we had been through some very hard times. One day, the drugs started to work better, and Lynn felt better, and we went to a party, and she danced. That, for me, is remembering this moment of joy, Lynn dancing and swirling to the music in the midst of, like she’d been in the hospital not that long ago.
I realized this show is more for people who are grieving than people who are caregiving and living with cancer at that moment. For me, joy is the slowly growing appreciation that we’re alive, which is a miracle, and that we live in a beautiful world. I’m very worried. I’m a liberal and Democrat, and I’m very worried about what we’re doing to this world.
Whether you agree with my politics or not, we are surrounded by beauty every day. Joy is being able to go take a walk and appreciate the buds on the trees in the spring, or as we record this, it’s the fall and I’m looking at beautiful autumn leaves out this window, and realize how special and precious life is and what a gift it is to us, to have this time here to be able to live and appreciate and to love.
Even though all these negative or hurtful, or painful things can happen to us, we can still go for that love and that joy.
It may not seem that way in the first period when you’re immersed in the horrible early stages of grief, but actually, that’s what started to happen for me. I started to notice these sorts of things. I started to notice the buds and the breezes, and it was just taking walks and getting out of the house. Of course, having a relationship with Cordelia started to layer in later on.
It’s wonderful. It’s such a pleasure to talk with you, Tony. In closing, I want to say that your memoir, Carrying the Tiger, is so much more than a love story or a reflection on loss. It’s a guide for living fully, even in the shadow of death. Whether a person is grieving, supporting someone who is, or simply seeking to understand the human experience more deeply, Carrying the Tiger offers a much-needed light in the dark. Thank you for sharing your story, your wisdom, and your heart with us on the show. From my heart, I wish you so much joy and abundant blessings.
Thank you so much.
My pleasure. In our audience, I’ll see you again soon, everyone. Take good care and bye for now. Thank you, Tony.
You’re so welcome.
Guest’s Links:
- Tony Stewart
- Connect with Tony Stewart on Instagram and Facebook
- Carrying the Tiger, Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy While Grieving
Links mentioned
Carrying the Tiger: Special Kindle Deals
Host’s Link
About Tony Stewart
Tony Stewart has made award-winning films for colleges and universities (“A Union of People,” “Skidmore: Concurrence of Ideas”), written software that received rave reviews in The New York Times and the New York Daily News (“Tony Stewart’s Home Office”), designed a grants-management application that was used by three of the five largest charities in the world (“Riverside Grants”), and led the development of an international standard for the messages involved in buying and selling advertisements (“AdsML”) for which he spoke at conferences across Europe and North America. Carrying the Tiger is his first published book.
Tony and his late wife Lynn Kotula, a painter, traveled extensively in India and Southeast Asia, staying in small hotels off the beaten track and eating delicious food with their fingers when cutlery wasn’t available.
Inspired by the experience of writing Carrying the Tiger, Tony is now studying to become a Certified Grief Educator.
