Mary joins Matthew for an extended interview about the last year of her husband’s life. Louis died of pancreatic cancer almost exactly a year ago, at the age of 45. Mary—who has asked that her last name be kept off the record for privacy concerns—loved him and cared for him throughout that journey. It was hard, not only for the reasons we all share, but because Louis spent his last months under the influence of quantum chiropractor Joe Dispenza. At one crucial point, he was on the verge of stopping his chemotherapy treatment, believing that a Dispenza meditation technique might be more effective. Mary is an Applied Psychologist with a science background and an evidence-based mindset. She didn’t share Louis’s beliefs or ideals, and at points was terrified that his death would be hastened by conspirituality. But of course, she loved and served him nonetheless. And it seems he had a good death, perhaps blessed by beliefs that made Mary wonder if they might provide relief for her as well. If we’ve learned one thing over the course of this project, it’s that we’ll be living and dying together for a long time at the crossroads of data and imagination, science and spirituality, evidence and the unknown. We’re grateful that Mary has shared this love story of how she navigated it all. Note: If you have recently lost someone close to you, you may find this episode difficult to listen to.Show NotesJohn-Roger, New Age Spiritual Leader in California, Dies at 80 - The New York Times ARCHIVE Cult Leader John-Roger, Who Says He's Inhabited by a Divine Spirit, Stands Accused of a Campaign of Hate
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I'm at Embodied Sacred.
It's my old yoga Twitter account.
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Conspirituality 89, till death do us part with Mary.
Mary joins Matthew for an extended interview about the last year of her husband's life.
Louis died of pancreatic cancer almost exactly a year ago at the age of 45.
Mary, who was asked that her last name be kept off the record for privacy concerns, loved him and cared for him throughout that journey.
It was hard, not only for the reasons we all share, but because Louis spent his last months under the influence of quantum chiropractor Joe Dispenza.
At one crucial point, he was on the verge of stopping his chemotherapy treatment, believing that a dispensa meditation technique might be more effective.
Mary is an applied psychologist with a science background and an evidence-based mindset.
She didn't share Lewis' beliefs or ideals, and at points was terrified that his death would be hastened by conspirituality.
But of course, she loved and served him nonetheless, and it seems he had a good death, perhaps blessed by beliefs that made Mary wonder if they might provide relief for her as well.
If we've learned one thing over the course of this project, it's that we'll be living and dying together for a long time at the crossroads of data and imagination, science and spirituality, evidence and the unknown.
We're grateful that Mary has shared this love story of how she navigated it all.
Some of the toughest feedback I think we get on this podcast is about tone. - Yeah.
Whether we empathize with our subjects, whether we're too acidic, whether we should be more alkaline, let's say, whether we add more division to an already polarized world.
Also, do we look down on all alternative healing and New Age spiritualities and the people who practice them?
Um, we don't have really clear answers for these good questions, except for the last one.
I don't think we looked down on anybody.
Uh, you know, but I think we can say that we're just people who do many different types of things and we have different lenses and different affects and moods.
Uh, and it really wouldn't be honest to maintain some sort of objective detachment from the disasters of the past two years.
And sometimes the cruelty of conspirituality is so odious that You know, contempt just seems to be the only clear response.
But today, no contempt or satire or cynicism because we have a really good story about two people on either side of a porous line that seems to divide some important ways of looking at the world.
And on either side of another porous line that divides those who expect to live and those who can feel that their time is getting short.
In talking with Mary, I was thinking about all of the listeners we have whose stories we don't know.
All of the friends and family members who stand on either side of those lines, looking at each other.
So, we've got a few notes before we begin for some added context.
Firstly, you're going to hear Mary talk about the influence of Joe Dispenza in Lewis' life.
We're going to do a full episode on him at some point, but for now we're going to refer you back to episode 85, which is called Gaia Buys Yoga International, where we introduced this galaxy-brained chiropractor as one of the wacky Gaia TV mainstay content providers.
Now Dispenza, just to review, started out as the in-house chiropractor for the cult of Jay-Z Knight in Yelm, Washington at her Ramtha School of Enlightenment.
And he claims a lot of things, that he's a researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics, and neuroscience.
And if you don't believe him, he's got buzzwords.
For instance, in the pitch for a Gaia program that he offers, Derek reported on this, dispense a promise to help participants with the following, to enter deeper levels of the subconscious mind and learn how to be your own placebo,
Secondly, to liberate emotional energy stored in your body and then use it to create a new destiny, to broadcast new electromagnetic signatures, to create new opportunities in your life, to open your heart and strengthen your immune system by changing your attitude, and to balance your autonomic nervous system by thought alone.
So, that's the kind of thing that's on offer at the Dispenza Outlet Mall.
Hold on a second, I need to turn on my snark disabler.
I'm purposely not going to say anything right now, so go ahead.
Go ahead.
Okay, buffering, buffering.
Okay, the second item to flag is that we're going to hear Mary talk about how Lewis came to know Joe Dispenza in part through taking courses at the University of Santa Monica towards his Master's in Spiritual Psychology degree.
Now, this is also the place where he was introduced to other alternative modalities and also gained a friend group that he really appreciated.
Now, Mary's pretty open about having poked like gentle fun at her husband over his University of Santa Monica journey, but Julian, you have some notes about the more disturbing aspects of this university, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Let me just say it's a very powerful and touching interview, Matthew.
And with regard to USM, this topic is personal for me as well, in a less intense way, because I've known many people who went through the University of Santa Monica program, it's close to where I live.
It was the gateway into this world of spiritual ultimate charlatanism that Mary's going to tell us about with regard to what her husband got drawn into during his battle with cancer.
They offer a master's in spiritual psychology, which is very appealing to curious and open-minded therapists or to people who You have an undergrad psychology degree and want to go further but have a sort of a spiritual temperament and they've sort of over the years that they've been in existence they've gone back and forth between being accredited, being unaccredited, having some sort of halfway in between sort of position depending on various bureaucratic logistics I guess.
It just so happens that these kinds of people who end up in the program are usually really nice.
They're smart.
They're earnest people.
And many of them have populated my yoga classes and social set for the entire 30 years or so that I've been in L.A.
And so I have to say, when I first encountered the USM ideology, it took me a while to realize that my thinking, and I imagine you might resonate with this to some extent, Matthew, about how on the one hand, psychology could help scaffold people out of spiritual psychology could help scaffold people out of spiritual bypass.
Like that would be a good integration, right?
Right.
And spiritual bypass, and then what I see as a more kind of And on the other hand, how specific embodiment and mindfulness techniques might be wonderful adjuncts to legitimate therapy, like it might have something to offer so you're not, you know, the stereotype of Woody Allen just endlessly, recursively reflecting on your mental cogitation.
But this is not really the USM angle.
And in fact, what I found over time by talking to people is that it's the reverse.
And my sense is it's essentially training in how to perpetuate spiritual bypass, blame the victim, deny trauma and suffering and sort of buy into this self aggrandizing, right?
Because you're becoming a therapist, magical thinking and false claims about why things happen to people.
And how you heal.
Somehow via this idealizing of incongruous and incoherent models of reality, the ideas then foster this belief that some kind of higher order integration is happening and that this is somehow better than non-spiritual therapy, right?
That boring old mainstream therapy or ways of thinking about emotional life and psychology.
It's pernicious to think about the same old material being wrapped up in a kind of pseudo-clinical presentation that has the word, well what is it?
Masters in Spiritual Psychology.
I guess there's a sense in which people are becoming therapists, is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
And from talking to people over time, this is not based on data, the sense I get is that in a way, fairly similar to the yoga teacher training landscape that we're familiar with, a lot of people who take the course never end up becoming therapists.
It's more of a sort of personal growth journey, a deepening of your own practice, if you will.
Right.
And then there are a certain number who do end up going for becoming therapists whether they're licensed or not.
The other interesting detail that most people either don't realize or strategically decide not to mention when talking about USM is that it was actually started by the cult leader John Roger.
I don't know if you're familiar with him.
I hadn't been, I wasn't familiar until you sent these notes and then I looked him up and yeah, I have a few things to say but this is really important.
Yeah, he founded something called the Movement of Inner Spiritual Awareness, M-I-S-A, which listeners can look up if they're interested and he founded the University of Santa Monica.
I'll just say here, some of the things he's more well known for include sexual coercion, Death threats against critics and, you know, that old trick of having hidden microphones all over the headquarters of the MISA that he used to create the illusion of having psychic abilities.
So he's listening in on everyone and then when he would have conversations with staff or students, he would act as if, you know, he was picking things up that he could only have known if he was psychic.
He's also, sadly, well known for a photo he took against a green screen handing a big check to Mother Teresa herself.
So that his PR people could then make it look like he had gone to Calcutta.
They put all that sort of, they put sort of some stock image of the impoverished people who Mother Teresa serves in Calcutta behind their image.
Oh no.
Yeah.
And he handed her a check for $10,000.
So, you know, people are also critical of her being complicit in this, in this ruse to, to, to legitimize his, uh, his, him as a, as a kind of, um, uh, what's the word philanthropist Yeah, they sound like two peas in a pod, but I think Mother Teresa is a whole other episode.
Yeah.
But I'm really glad that you dug this out.
I wasn't familiar with John Roger.
I found a 1988 investigative report from People Magazine, and we'll put that in the show notes.
I just think this is a super important element because as we hear Mary talk about Lewis's beliefs, I think we should remember that those beliefs are intrinsic to the relationships in which they are shared.
And when we're talking about relationships in New Age communities, it's pretty much cults all the way down.
Now, I'm not implying that Lewis was in a cult at University of Santa Monica, but when you're studying unaccredited materials at a pay-to-play college, the only real capital that you're investing in is social.
And then he runs into Dispenza, who literally came into his own in the cult of JZ Knight.
All the way down.
So, the demographic I move in here, as I mentioned on LA's West Side, who find USM appealing is also very open to the influence of charlatans like Joe Dispenza, who cuts a kind of, you know, legitimate-seeming, science-y figure through that world and the courses that he offers and, as you said, the buzzwords that he uses.
I mentioned on the Gaia episode that a therapist I know and love recently attended one of these week-long destination retreats off the coast of Europe, I forget which island it was, that promised to teach this meditation meets neuroscience tool set that will deliver the ability to affect matter at the quantum level, of course, because that's what all the ancient texts were about.
And therefore heal disease, which, you know, there's such an incredibly hard line there that's being crossed.
I'm stunned.
I want to also say that, you know, this friend who I'm talking about, in case they ever hear this, is not an anti-vaxxer, not a COVID denialist.
So somehow they're, you know, able to hold these things in different compartments.
But the legitimizing and mainstreaming of these kinds of beliefs over the last 30 or 40 years, I see is so damaging for so many people both psychologically and now in terms of the anti-vax and COVID denialism that is in a way a logical conclusion of these kinds of wild claims about how to stay healthy and how to heal from disease, right?
It's always been a problem, but when these seemingly harmless and fanciful ideas about how to be more holistically healthy bleed over into mind over matter fundamentalism, About serious illnesses like cancer, we've definitely taken a wrong turn.
Well, thanks for the added USM context, Julian.
All right then, here's the interview with Mary.
Mary, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
I just want to acknowledge off the top that we're talking about, I think, one of the richest and most consequential experiences that human beings can have and that is, you know, caring for a person that we love as they die.
And so, I just want to Acknowledge that off the top and to thank you for being willing to explore it.
Yeah, no, I'm happy to be here.
Now, we'll get into more detail a little bit farther down, but I just want to provide a thumbnail up top.
You reached out to us and described how your husband Louis died of pancreatic cancer almost a year ago.
This was February 8th, 2021.
He was 45 years old, and this was following a seven-month illness.
Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult condition to treat, but the prescribed chemotherapy did seem to be working.
However, you described that tensions arose between you when, under the influence of Joe Dispenza and other alt-health spiritual gurus, whose ideas and values you don't really share, Lewis considered stopping his chemotherapy. Lewis considered stopping his chemotherapy.
Eventually, however, he carried through with the treatment and then later died.
Why did you reach out to us and what do you hope will come from sharing your story?
When I actually initially reached out to you, I was doing a puzzle and just hanging out and listening to your podcast, which I do often.
It's been a way that I kind of disconnect from the rest of my world, and the last year has been pretty challenging.
So I was doing that, and then you just hit a trigger when it came to Joe Dispenza.
Joe Dispenza is a figure in my life that I never anticipated having in my life as somebody who didn't, wasn't a part of this world, wasn't a part of of having these deep beliefs in these different spiritual, really conspiracy, conspirituality aspects of the world.
I never thought that this would come into my world and so it just it was a knee-jerk reaction.
I just felt like I needed to share it and I think that One of the reasons I want to share my story is that I think on this podcast and other places there's sort of you know that there's real people behind this but you don't necessarily know the real consequences and it's one thing if somebody's saying hey I'm going to use this alternative medicine to heal you know try and heal my back pain.
It's a very different thing when somebody says I'm considering stopping chemotherapy for One of the lowest survival rate cancers.
And the reasoning is, is because I believe that this meditation practice is healing my cancer for me.
And I think that there are, like myself, there are other people who are, we're real and we experience this.
And I think there's something about sharing that personal story that, that, you know, it's impacted me when I hear other people talk about this.
So I'd like to be able to share that too.
Maybe we can start with you taking us back to how you and Lewis met.
So we met, actually our relationship unfortunately was cut incredibly short.
We met about, on Monday it will be three years ago, and we met on a dating app on Bumble.
And I had met a few people and he was Awesome.
He was just such a quirky person.
And when we had connected on the dating app, I asked him what he did for a living.
And he worked in leadership development at a company that I respect so much in our area.
Especially because it's very evidence-based leadership development.
And that's the world that I come from is very evidence-based.
And so it's something that my graduate program, we had a lot of respect for people, we sent interns there, they had a lot of our alumni.
And so I had been looking for a new job at the time.
And I thought, well, you know, if this doesn't work out, it's a good networking opportunity.
But it did work out really well.
And we ended up together.
So that was in, yeah, almost three years ago.
Leadership development, I guess I'm not really that familiar with the discipline or the form, but you say that it's evidence-based, but it also sounds like it might be a little bit aspirational or a little bit coachy or something like that, or am I mistaken?
No, you nailed it.
So there's different elements of leadership development.
My professional background is as an applied psychologist, so an industrial and organizational psychologist, and we really observe and study behaviors in the workplace.
And so that bleeds into a couple of different areas.
And one of those areas is leadership.
And so, yeah, there is an inspirational part of that.
Absolutely.
And there's also, you know, there's ways to measure success in leadership programs.
There's ways to measure behaviors within organizations.
Right now, I work in a lot in employee experience and how we experience the workplace and how that impacts our performance.
So it is a lot of the different Consulting firms that do leadership development are very fluffy.
And this particular one is not.
And Lewis had previously worked as a consultant for many years at Deloitte.
And he had an MBA from Duke.
And he had a very, you know, robust consulting background.
And then he went into this organization and he also had a side business, two of them.
So one of them was coaching.
And you know, when he told me he was a life coach, I was a little bit put off by it.
So I was like, well, you know, what does that mean?
And I don't know about that.
Was that on the Bumble profile?
Oh my God.
No, it was not.
I would not have swiped.
Isn't that amazing?
I know.
It, you know, it gives you such a short amount of information and it really, like, so I try and be, you know, I was always trying to be really open-minded, but um... We have to say he was lucky.
He was lucky with his profiling then, right?
He put the right stuff on there, but yeah, he definitely would have swiped the other direction.
Now, you say that he had always been, I think this was in your initial DM to us, that he had always been into natural healing and woo, which you put in quotation marks.
And you also said that this was never your thing.
Now, how did that play out between you?
So I guess when I say that, how he's had, he'd always been into that.
As far as I had known and met him, he had always been into that a little bit more, just generally more spiritual than I am.
I'm, I've never been, you know, I wasn't raised with religion in my life and I've always come from things from a much more very like This is science.
We have to follow science.
It just wasn't something that was really on my radar.
Now, I did have a little bit of some of the experiences that you all talk about on this podcast a lot.
You know, I went through YTT in 2015.
You know, I have my own experiences with that and my own opinions there and, you know, a lot of those things The experiences that I have had in the yoga community myself has been a lot of this.
You know, well, like that's not really, that seems a little bit off to me, but you know, do your own thing.
It's fine.
It's not, I'm not going to shut you out of my life or pass too much judgment any other way that I would with, you know, somebody with any other religion or any other spiritual beliefs.
I'm not, you know, that doesn't really, Sit with me.
So I was really open-minded about it And it wasn't in some ways.
It was a prevalent part of our relationship in some ways It wasn't I think when he was he hadn't gotten a master's of spiritual psychology Which made me laugh because as a psychologist, I was like, oh that's a field.
I And then I remember one of the first times I was at his place and I joked with him about it.
You know, I was like, Oh, well, you know, tell me more about this.
And it wasn't, it was not psychology.
And I remember seeing on his bookshelf, this book that said it was one of those psychology for dummies.
And I started laughing.
I was like, was that your, was that your main textbook?
Yeah, so, I mean, you know, and he laughed back, and he knew that this was, that as a psychologist, like, that was my profession and that was my world, and we also, he acknowledged that I used to say he's got two master's degrees, but only one of them's real, and that's his Duke MBA, which I was a very proud wife and girlfriend before that, that my partner was smart and everything else.
Anyway, he had this this master's and from this place called the University of Santa Monica, which I mentioned to you and it's not a real university.
So let's be clear on that.
I think that at this point they have some sort of credentialing program for you know, where you start with your associates and then finish in psychology, but and it is run by some PhDs in psychology.
However, You don't study anything related to psychology that I'm familiar with.
There is a little bit of Jung in there, a little bit of Freud slips in, like no pun intended, but it's not the way I think of it.
There is no dissertation or research involved.
So that was his background.
And when he was in that world, With those people and those friends, most of them were very into all of these alternative things, you know, holistic approaches.
Everyone was into tarot card reading and angel cards and akashic readings and breath work and yoga and all sorts of meditation and things I had never heard of, like, you know, does this, did you know that this helps this?
I'm like, I have not, this world was so foreign to me.
But it wasn't so foreign that I couldn't, that I didn't understand where he was coming from at all.
I think the longer we were together, the more I saw really the problems with it, of it not just being, okay, this is your, like anyone would have a religious belief, you know?
I just hadn't experienced that, and I hadn't seen Really the selling of what I consider to be a religious type of belief, and that's where We butted heads on that.
I didn't see why you would be paying somebody if they're supposed to be one of the ones I always got a kick out of healing past lives.
I always thought we were supposed to focus on the current one, but apparently past ones are important.
It didn't make sense to me.
Why would I be paying someone or anyone be paying someone To heal, go back, and I don't even know what they're doing, to be honest.
I don't know if they know what they're doing, but to go back and heal these past lives.
Well, why am I, you know, if this is a spiritual thing that's supposed to help me get to a better place, I can go, you know, to a church and I can go to confession or go talk to a priest or a pastor and, you know, get Have their ear and have them listen to me and they're not charging me, you know, a thousand dollars to go back and do this there.
This is a you know, and while they may Was there also a sense that if you were Catholic by heritage and you could go to confession or something like that, that there would be some sort of institutional credibility behind that?
There would be some sort of gravitas or relationship that wouldn't just be about what seems to be a commodity?
Yes, I think that was definitely, it still is, it's an issue that I have with a lot of these types of things.
Well, if you're going to bring in life and death and, you know, how you interact with people and, you know, for lack of a better word, are processing your sins, you know, why
To kind of make it up as you go, which is what I feel like is going on most of the time, to kind of just wing it seems really inauthentic and that it's just a commodity rather than being a more deeply held religious or spiritual belief like Catholicism or Judaism or something that's more established.
I don't think it's controversial to say that Love is very strange and like when you're describing how you're kind of dunking on him a little bit like right from the beginning about the psychology for dummies on his shelf and you know you would have swiped left if the coaching thing was on his profile.
There are some immediate tensions between these two paradigms that you bring into your living space together.
But I'm wondering if there was some spark with that as well, if there was some way in which these contrasting values were actually complementary.
And it was interesting when I saw that question, because there actually was.
In a way, I remember at one point, before we knew he had cancer, we were talking about our future life and what kinds of things would we hope that the other person would bring into our children's lives.
You know, what are the things that we wanted them to get from the other person?
And something that I would have wanted our children to have from him would have been a sense of spirituality.
That was so important to him, and it really made him a very reflective, self-reflective person.
He had a structure around how he did things, and I think that for a lot of people, they need that structure.
And in my life, that wasn't there, and I feel like I've navigated that fine.
I also think that there's a lot of people who thrive on that kind of structure.
Having that sense of feeling like you know what happens or are at peace with what happens when we're no longer, you know, living.
What comes next?
It's the one thing in the world that we just absolutely don't know and never will know, you know?
It's the sense of faith and it's something that I had hoped, you know, if we had had children, It's something that I wanted them to have was that sense of faith because it can be scary.
I mean, from my side of things and not having these beliefs, there was a lot less for me to lean on during the time that he was sick, during difficult times in my life period, and most certainly when he passed away.
You know, I didn't expect you to answer that question from the perspective of visualizing or imagining children in the future and the qualities that they'd have, but that's an amazing way of answering that question, actually.
You know, to say, well, you know, we have these differences, but what would they really look like in a kind of alchemical form?
Yeah.
What did you most love doing together?
So Louis was and I both are big travelers and he wins with stamps on his passport but I am a little bit younger so I've got some catching up to do.
So we both loved to travel.
We loved trying new things.
Both very curious people.
We liked both of us We're really thirsty to learn.
I mean, when you have two people who work in, you know, leadership and professional development, it's kind of like, well, what are you doing next?
Like, what's your next developmental move?
And we're kind of dorks like that.
So which next leadership book did you read?
And so we did kind of geek out on that stuff together and listen to You know, podcasts or, you know, watch different documentaries around this sort of thing.
And we were the people who were putting this all into practice and, you know, at our home life.
And it was, which was really cool to have somebody like that in my life.
And we both like to hike, really like to be outdoors, and we're both super independent people.
And so We were really focused on doing our own thing and coming back to our relationship and sharing that and sharing those experiences with each other.
So those were probably some of my best memories.
There seems to be some joke in there about how if you're both into leadership things that you would be competing, you would be out-leadering each other or trying to figure out who is going to optimize most or something like that.
Yeah, I think he would have won on the competitive side of that.
I think he was committed to being the, I mean, and in some ways, he inspired me so much, right?
So he was taking this, he was in a job that when I first met him, I was like, oh, this is something I would really love to be doing.
And being, Lewis was nine years older than I am.
And so he had that You know further in his career and and so to me I was like oh this is so exciting because we have these fun things to talk about and we can and um you know as our relationship progressed we kind of saw the strengths in each other and yeah I mean it's a really kind of a weird it's only it's like who can outdork the other person and I feel like two people who are in similar careers but kind of different like you you definitely do that.
At a certain point, Lewis is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Can you share the conversation that you had together around that time?
Yeah, so that was in July of 2020, and we are in peak pandemic.
And he had gotten into one of his modes where he would set these with his goal setting modes and he had gotten this goal of I'm gonna do 12,000 steps a day for 30 days and he would you know really on top of measuring things and he was losing weight really quickly and he was having a lot of like pain and I thought he was just being a big baby and had heartburn.
In the beginning.
And so, as I'm thinking like, because he was the healthiest person you'd ever meet.
I mean, this man never got sick.
He never had, he was 44 when he was diagnosed, but prior to that, I mean, he never got colds.
He never, he could do anything he wanted and get sick.
He was incredibly fit.
And so even before he was diagnosed we had gone on a road trip to see my sister in Denver and we had driven through Arizona and Utah and gotten out to Denver and I had to work during the week and he climbed three 14ers within two days and 14,000 foot peaks within two days and then was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three weeks later.
I mean he was really remarkable and how well his body worked and so
As it you know he said I'm losing all this weight and my stomach hurts and I'm having this pain and and we knew something was wrong and it was also really hard to get into doctors offices at that point because we're in the middle of a you know a pandemic and everything's flooded and every time you try and get an appointment for a scan or something else that gets pushed out so I think he was diagnosed later than he would have been if there were
A pandemic going on, but he was really good at advocating for himself, so we definitely got in earlier for different appointments.
So basically, we'd gone through several different doctors and then finally getting a CT scan that confirmed that he had pancreatic cancer.
And I think leading up to that, in the week or two leading up to that, we kind of knew the direction things were going.
The first time I heard The word cancer I was terrified and I was a wreck and you know I think I processed these things one step at a time because in my mind okay it can't pancreatic cancer never crossed my mind never in a million years would I think that this person who was 44 at the time and in such amazing health would have Pancreatic cancer, stage four metastasized pancreatic cancer.
And he did.
And so as they narrowed in on it, and then went in and saw how much it had spread everywhere in his body, it was shocking.
But I think we went step by step through the process.
And by the time we got there, it was confirming what we knew.
And when I was around him, when we were going through this process, I tried not to, you know, I tried to be really brave about it and to be really supportive and say, you know, we're going to figure out what this is and we're going to do everything we can.
And then when we got there, you know, he was so, it wasn't that he was stoic about it.
I just, I think that And he did tell me at times, had it been me or one of his immediate family members.
He would have probably been a wreck and worried.
But in his own body, I think it was almost surreal.
Like, is this actually happening to me?
And everything felt surreal at that point.
I mean, we're all locked at home and have to wait an hour in line to go get groceries, and then suddenly, the love of my life has cancer.
And not just any cancer.
One of the most deadly cancers you could possibly have.
It's still unreal when I think back.
To what that experience was like.
Was it early on that Louie's interest in alternative medicine entered into your conversations about his diagnosis?
So, alternative, I don't even like calling it alternative medicine because to me it's not medicine.
It's, you know, alternative, I don't know, health, health I don't know what to call it.
That's copyrighted, by the way.
That's copyrighted.
Alternative Health Boosts.
We can't use that on this podcast.
I don't know if I've heard of that one.
That would be pretty cool if I came up with a new one just now.
It was a given that that was going to be a part of the experience.
Ironically, when we had met, I want to say it was maybe six months in or something, and he had started expressing these beliefs and these alternative modes of taking care of yourself, and I was a little bit taken back by it.
You know I understood a lot of the spirituality but then I didn't understand like you you would do what you know you would you would use this you would use diet if you had cancer and I remember getting really upset with him and saying you know so you're telling me that if you had cancer you would go and try and just eat clean or eat a specific diet and he was like well I'd you know I probably
Abusing an approach of both, you know, more holistic stuff and, you know, Western medicine, also known as medicine that is backed by evidence in science.
But he had said to me, and I remember being really shocked because that was, and No, you don't think that that is ever going to come into play.
Certainly not that early, you know, maybe that would come into play when we were when he was 75 or even younger than that, but certainly not.
You know, a year and a half into knowing each other.
And so I always knew it would be a part.
And then from the beginning, it was immediately a part.
But it wasn't to the place where I thought it would ever replace the actual chemotherapy or the other types of approaches.
But we had the, and I was with him on this, you know, take the approach of, let's throw everything at this.
And, you know, in my heart, I knew what I believed to work.
And I also know the power of faith and personal beliefs is strong, and particularly with people who have cancer diagnoses and other very serious illnesses.
People with cancer do tend to fare better if they have positive outlook, if they have oftentimes that comes with religious and spiritual beliefs.
I didn't look at it as that was taking away I just looked at it as a complimentary thing to add into the mix.
But it was a part of all of this stuff that we talk about, all of this woo-woo stuff.
It was a part of his treatment.
It also sounds like there was some kind of boundary that might have been difficult for you to really delineate in your mind about how the belief would have moved over into an activity.
Where the thought that diet would help with the cancer diagnosis would suddenly not be seen as something complementary or supplementary, but would start to have its own magical power.
And for the most part, you know, what you find when you go through these things is that everybody has You know, try this, try that, and you're getting all of this information coming at once.
And with cancer, you're not just meeting with your oncologist, you're meeting with the pain doctors, and you're meeting with a dietician, and you're meeting with, you know, you have everybody, you're meeting with all sorts of support.
Then people are throwing these other things at you, and it can be very overwhelming, even if you're just coming at it from one angle.
So then you add in this whole other layer of beliefs and treatments that aren't found or grounded in any sort of evidence.
And then you have to try and navigate that too.
And it's a lot.
You know, I haven't actually considered that, that in a typical cancer treatment scenario, it's already holistic in the sense that, you know, a social psychologist is going to be there and there's going to be somebody sort of in charge of logistics a social psychologist is going to be there and there's going to be somebody sort of in charge of logistics and And then, you know, there's this, there's a, there's a coordination of specialists that are taking care of different aspects of care.
And, And in that sense, the kind of unifying principle is, well, these are best practices and this is what we have evidence for.
But I can really see how it's already complicated at that level, but then to add a completely different epistemology into that as well.
You don't realize it until you're there, right?
And so, you know objectively from the outside, yes, people get And you may have friends or family and you've heard of this, but when you're in it, it's, um, there's a lot.
I mean, we're learning about, I'm learning about an organ that I knew nothing about in the human body.
I don't know.
I didn't know what a pancreas really did.
I had, I knew it was a part of your digestive tract.
That's it.
And you're learning about all of these medications and the treatment and the protocol and the potential side effects and what you end up having as side effects and the medications to counter that and I mean there was a point I'd say where he was taking at least 20 different pills a day and I managed all this medication and it was you know very time specific.
If you don't take this specific medication every 250 calories while you're eating it's not going to digest and you don't get credit for those calories they won't stick to you.
So there's just so much and you're learning as you go and you know I wasn't unfamiliar with having with dealing with you know medical issues.
It's not like I had never interacted with a lot of doctors like from my own personal care that I've dealt with.
So to me that part It made sense to me.
The doctors telling me this is what we have available, this is the best out there, this is the best practice.
You're going to get second opinions and third opinions and I really loved our team.
They were incredible and they were professional and they were kind and caring and supportive.
There's a detail that you're describing in the treatment of pancreatic cancer that I also don't know anything about, but it's making sense to me that it sounds like In the treatment process, there's a race against time because not only is the cancer metastasizing, but the person can't retain the calories that they're taking.
And so, the specific medications are helping with the kind of moment-by-moment digestive process.
And I think that is not only nightmarish for all human beings, but I think it would be particularly offensive.
Absolutely.
And it is, I mean, and the other thing is that diet is an absolutely critical part of the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
We worked with a dietician who's incredible and You know, we were having appointments with her initially weekly and we had, you know, you really had to understand and we literally, I kept track of every single thing that he ate and every time that he ate it and the symptoms that came with it and the medications that he took.
Every single day I have notebooks full of this.
Of what, how did you feel when you did this?
How many pounds are we up now?
How many have we lost?
You know, what were the related symptoms to this?
And it's very complex, and it's not, it's a learning experience.
There's a curve to it, and they can't tell you everything.
They can tell you, and the reality is, is that when you talk to the dietician, as opposed to somebody who may look at at, you know, eat a bunch of celery.
That's the one I would always hear.
Celery.
I'm like, I don't, first of all, you're talking to somebody who doesn't even want to eat because they feel awful and you want them to eat celery all the time.
Like it was a joke.
I mean, and, and I can see how it was conflicting, you know, because everyone cared about him.
It's, It had nothing to do when we would have these outside influences, you know, friends or family members that had, you know, different approaches to this and how they would have handled it for themselves.
Everybody had his best intentions in mind.
You know, everybody wanted him to beat it.
And, you know, we never gave up hope.
We knew how bad it was from the beginning.
There was no question that being told that you have advanced stage pancreatic cancer is, for most people, saying you have a death sentence.
And some doctors will even say that to you.
I mean, they're not... We had to learn how to set boundaries with doctors and say, this isn't how we want to be talked to about this.
You know, we never gave up hope until the very end.
You know, it wasn't until the end when he said, okay, I'm ready.
Like, I'm ready to stop with this.
Because there is that one-in-a-million chance, and there is those, you know, sporadic remission stories.
And, you know, they... And even though you know that it's not realistic, you have to have hope.
And, like, You know, mentioned to you, he was doing really well.
I mean, he got back to a place within a couple of months where he was going on six, seven mile hikes.
He was traveling.
He had gained, he had lost 40 pounds at his lowest and then gained back 30 pounds.
He was, the cancer was scaling back in certain areas of his body.
I like where he physically knew he had had a, um, a lymph node that had a tumor on it and his neck was gone.
So it was even, you know, he looked, he was looking like himself.
He looked like himself again.
And, um, so chemotherapy was working and he was so determined and, um, he was so determined.
He was so determined.
It was like at the end of the day, even if he was, if it was forced, he was going to get in 3,500, 4,000 calories a day.
And that's, it sucks to do it.
Even if people think like, Oh, that sounds like a tough, tough thing to have to gain weight.
Like it's really hard when you don't want to be doing it because you're sick.
Um, but he, If there was anyone who was going to survive this by the stretch of a miracle, it was him.
And unfortunately that didn't happen.
It wasn't for lack of determination and trying and really having such a great healthy body to begin with.
I think that really worked in his favor.
You mentioned outside influences and this is where I want to ask about When you first came to know about Joe Dispenza's content and how that was influencing the way Lewis felt about his illness and treatment.
So, Joe Dispenza is an interesting character in this whole story because the first time that I had heard about Joe Dispenza was prior to any of this.
Lewis at University of Santa Monica had done this other certification called something like Conscious Health and Healing.
It's like a certification in this and it was a year-long program and I don't understand exactly.
It's not like Joe Dispenza was a part of the curriculum, but for whatever reason he had a knee injury at the time and part of what he was working through and again, I don't know all of the details.
I didn't know him then, was he was working through this healing his knee.
And that's when he first was introduced to Joe Dispenza.
He might have been introduced before, but that's when he first applied this method, if you will.
I don't even know what to call it.
And where he was doing these meditations for an hour a day.
And he, over the course of time, as he would put it, he healed his knee.
And he ran a half marathon.
And that was the goal, was to get to this half marathon.
and so on.
I wasn't there, I couldn't tell you, but my best guess is that when you rest something and when you really put a lot of energy and focus on it, that you're probably, he was probably doing more than just meditating.
If you talk to him ever, I mean up till his last day, he would tell you that he healed his knee using this method.
And of meditation.
So I had heard that and you know, he would tell me this night, it didn't, it didn't matter.
Like it didn't apply.
So to me, I was like, well, whatever.
He thinks he did that.
I'll let him believe whatever he wants to believe.
Like, I don't, it doesn't make a difference in our day to day life now.
But then when we got into cancer treatment,
I and you know he would say well I was able to heal my knee I can do anything and I'm like all right well great like let's put that energy into what we're dealing with right now and and so he did and he would talk a lot about you know I want to do this Joe Dispenza stuff and he wouldn't really like get into it he wasn't making time for it and so and he would sometimes be critical of himself and I would always
Encourage them to take a step back and say, you know, what, look at all the things that I am doing.
Like, is this really the priority?
And, you know, if, if you want to do it and it makes you feel good, then great, let's do it.
And I support you.
I know if, if it's not something where you want to spend your time, then I'm not going to, I don't care, you know, then it's not, you're not finding value in it.
Now the same is not true for any of the treatments, the chemotherapy.
That's not true.
I didn't feel that way about that.
Like, oh, you know, take it or leave it.
Like it, it didn't, I didn't feel that way.
And so Joe Dispenza enters the picture when Lewis started feeling, started doing better, and we'd had this big lockdown world.
And Joe Dispenza was then able to start doing his week-long intensive retreat things or whatever they are.
And I didn't know a whole lot about this, right?
So I had heard the meditations and Long before Lewis was sick, the first time I heard Joe Dispenza's voice, I think I mentioned this in my DMT, was that he I think we were using meditation to fall asleep and this voice came on.
I was like, that is so creepy.
And so I just, his voice irked me.
It felt like this, I don't know, mega church, like God complex.
I just didn't like it.
And it kind of, the whole meditation about getting down into yourselves is kind of creeped me out.
It was just, it wasn't my thing and he never, you know, played it anymore because like what he's not gonna, there was plenty of other meditations for falling asleep that we could listen to.
And so, so fast forward and he's telling me about this retreat and I'm trying to be really open-minded as I generally am, or I believe that I generally am.
Other people may argue differently, I'm not sure.
And they had started opening up these week-long retreats again, and he said, you know, will you go with me?
And I was like, well, there isn't one in San Diego or in Southern California until There isn't one in Southern California until April, and that was quite a ways out.
There was one in Florida, and Florida is the last place I wanted to go in the middle of the pandemic.
This is not a place where people, I mean, there's no vaccines out yet.
We're still locked down in most of the country, and Florida is just running around like they do not.
I'm sure not all of Florida, but let's be real.
Yeah, the case rates were really, really high.
Yes and so I didn't want to go but at the same time it was going to be he hadn't traveled without me since he had gotten sick we had gone one other we had traveled one other time during the pandemic while he was sick for his birthday and and it was hard it was really hard um so with this he he asked me if I wanted to go and you know I said okay like I'll you know I'll go with you but then really I didn't want to because I had I was hardly working.
It was hard to work while we were caring for him, so he was doing better, and I really needed to focus on my job that I had been neglecting for several months.
And then it was expensive, and I said, I don't want to pay for this.
This isn't something I want to pay for.
If you want to go, I think that's great.
And then ultimately he went with and stayed, ultimately he went and stayed with his parents when he went and so he had, you know, family there to support.
And he went to this retreat for a week and we talked during that whole time but he was very busy and I'm having anxiety in my head the whole time thinking that he's probably all these people aren't wearing masks and nobody's you know they're all probably hugging each other and getting too close and all you know it was just it was pretty overwhelming to me so
I tried not to think about it and just trust that at the end of the day he gets to make the decisions that he wants to about his own body and his own health and safety and of course I didn't want him to do that.
I also, I just always took the approach that This is your journey and I'm here with you to support you and love you and care for you.
And so that's what I did.
That was the the only time in his entire cancer treatment that I was when he came home from Joe Dispenza that I just lost it.
He came home and he had not had a chemo treatment in three and a half weeks.
His typical regimen was every other week.
And he had to postpone one week and then he had this trip planned and it ended up being three and a half weeks and what happens with chemo is that when it's not coursing through you and you are on a break from it for a while you feel better because you're not having all this poison flush through your body to kill cancer and so
You know, he was doing a lot better physically and then we added in that he didn't have chemo and he came back and he's all high on life from this great retreat with, you know, and I'm not there saying, uh, this is a little weird, you know, like I normally would have been.
So he came back and the next day he had chemo scheduled and he told me, you know, I need to talk to you about something and I'm debating not Not going to chemo tomorrow and stopping for a while.
I mean, outside of him actually dying, it was the most devastation I've ever felt.
It was like he was telling me that he was giving up.
And I know in his head he didn't feel that way.
And he didn't know.
You know, I think that there was a mixed feeling.
I think he wanted to believe that this was working, that this meditation was working, because he didn't want to be sick anymore.
And he wanted to, and he was feeling better.
And I don't think he wanted to feel that way.
And I remember just, like, to the point of just bawling and, like, screaming.
I just wanted to be able to take the cancer away from him and have to deal with it myself for a while, just to give him a break.
He was so, he just wanted to feel better and he was getting a little bit of a reprieve and it was so hard because he knew that he needed to keep going and so he did ultimately end up going back to chemo and the next day and
You know, as it turns out, Joe Dispenza's method didn't work.
But he did continue.
From that point forward, he would wake up, but there's something about like the melatonin is highest in your system at a certain time in your sleep cycle.
And so you get up and you do this meditation at whatever, it's like three in the morning or something.
It takes an hour and most of the time you fall asleep and he was dedicated.
He did it every single night until he got really sick and ended up in the hospital.
He was very dedicated to it and believed it.
He asked you to come to the retreat knowing likely how you felt about it and knowing that you had asked him to turn off Joe Dispenza's, you know, sleep meditation CD because it creeped you out.
There's something really, I mean, poignant and moving about that.
I know that it sounds like you're also keeping track meticulously of his eating and of his medications, and I'm sure that going with him on the retreat, that would have helped him keep track of all of those things as well.
And I'm wondering whether he wanted you to believe in these things by asking you to come, if it was more than just the logistics.
No, he wanted me to believe.
It was a point that we, and we discussed in our relationship that would be, you know, if we talked about, we would sit there and think, okay, what, what would be areas of potential conflict in our relationship?
I mean, you have two people who love to just dive into like the psychology and the background and really get into the nitty gritty of everything.
So this sounds like a leadership exercise actually.
Yeah.
So we had these, um, We had this long conversation about, like, what potentially, you know, with relationships, how you manage conflict and because it's going to come up and what do we see as potential sources of conflict.
And for him, he saw this as a, not this Joe Dispenza, but the overall experience of his version of spirituality, which I wouldn't say I'm not a spiritual person.
I just think that it shows up differently for me.
It just isn't In this world of like, I call it this woo-woo world.
It's not like that.
And so, you know, he thought that that would be a conflict.
And I, you know, I always wanted to keep an open mind.
And I, you know, with this, I think that there's no As awful as it was, and as horrific as this experience was, I mean, Lewis and I lived 20 years in the span of seven months.
Like, you just grow so quickly.
There's nothing more intimate than Taking care of your partner when they can't stand, when they can't get to the bathroom by themselves, when they can't, you know, and then and he was there for me too with all of this.
He was always there for me making sure, you know, how I remember one night when he was hospitalized and I was sleeping on like a cot thing there and I guess he couldn't sleep and I woke up and he had put blankets on me.
You know, he was always looking out for me too.
It was not a one-way street.
I think he had hoped that I maybe had gotten to a place where I was I guess open-minded enough to believe in the possibility of this.
And I think that he also probably saw it as a bonding experience.
You know, a way that we could go and do something in his world together.
And that this was probably the only Opportunity that he'd seen where I was really open to this stuff because I was and willing to be able to participate because to me it was it was in addition to everything else.
Again, I never I didn't I would never say to him, like, this is wrong, and this is, this is, because at the end of the day, I don't know, I still go back to this scientist mind of like, well, nobody's really tested this, so who knows?
You know, I can't, I'm never gonna erase the possibility of something that I don't know being out there.
And, you know, you get desperate for one of these things to be real.
You get really desperate for it, and I can see how people Not myself.
You know, I didn't get there, but I could see how people could really go down a path where they have to believe this in order to keep going.
Because the reality is just so much harder to wrap your head around.
And it also feels like the reality never really leaves.
And I hear a little bit of that in the ambivalence that you describe after his return from the retreat, where Yeah, he says, I'm considering not going back to chemotherapy.
But you also described having the sense that perhaps he's giving up, perhaps he doesn't want to go through the sickness and the poisoning of the chemotherapy and that the meditation actually is giving him a different type of relief, a different type of healing or a different type of cure.
And There's going to be some sort of balancing act between these two things, where there might be an implicit acknowledgement that only one of them is really going to work if we're talking about surviving.
I think that that's exactly right.
So to me, hearing, I don't want to go to chemo said to me, I heard, I don't want to do this anymore.
And, and I didn't think he was there.
Like, I didn't think that that's where he was.
And because he was getting, he was doing really well, you know, he was showing huge signs of improvement.
And, um, so I didn't think he really wanted to give up.
I think he just He talked to me first about it, and I think he needed He had just spent a week with so many people who were just reaffirming all of these beliefs that I can meditate my way through this.
You know, so he's surrounded by all of these people who are, it's very raw, raw, like, yes, you can do this.
And, oh, this person cured this and this person cured that.
And they come up and they, you know, give their, Joe Dispenza talks about this person and that person and how they healed X, Y, and Z with this, you know, with this method.
And if you're having that entire week, you're being reinforced of like, yes, this works.
And you meet people who insist on the same things.
I understand where he was.
But I think that he came back and at the end of the day, I don't believe in these things.
I believe in what I know to be Truth or science and and you know evidence and so I think coming in to me and talking to me about it I mean it was a safe place to talk to me I'm I'm his wife I wasn't at the time we got married um in December uh but You know, I was his person.
And so I think he felt safe talking to me.
And I said, you know, whatever it is that you decide, I need you to, if you decide that you're not going to do this, I need you to talk to your family and tell them because you're, you know, parents and siblings, because I'm not going to just, you have to explain what it is that is going on in your head.
And, um, And I said, even before you make this decision, I want you to talk to them.
And he talked to his brother the next day, and he called his brother, and his brother believes in this stuff too.
And his brother's immediate response was, well, why can't you do both?
It was a big relief to me because I was, I mean, honestly, I was nervous that he was going to say like, you know, since he is on board with a lot of this stuff too, I, I was scared.
I was afraid in saying, I need you to call your brother.
I was, I was terrified that his brother was going to say, yeah, I think you should give that a shot.
And I just had to take that risk and, and trust that.
That, you know, at the end of the day, what his brother says and what he, you know, his beliefs, that it lined up better, that at the end of the day he did believe in doing chemo.
There's something very complicated here because it also sounds like believing in the Joe Dispenza method is a way of avoiding saying, I'm giving up.
It felt like that sometimes.
I think that No matter what the people in our lives who also believed in, say, Joe Dispenza, being a cure-all for every ailment, apparently under the sun you can cure with this, and other people's.
I didn't realize that, but that's allegedly a thing that you can do with Joe Dispenza's method.
You can remote cure them?
Yeah, you can remote cure people.
You didn't know that?
You can do it remotely?
That's awesome.
That's great.
Yeah, it's really, you know, they're up with the technology, so.
There's not... I don't really know how it works, to be totally honest.
Do you pay, like, the farther back the life is, do you pay more or is it less?
Like, which ones are more important and more complicated?
I don't know.
I'm going to argue that the current one is the most important.
However, some people will argue that these other ones are just as important.
So, I don't know.
Agree to disagree, I guess, with them.
I mean, it did feel like Like that but I think ultimately we got to the place in his treatment where you know he did well for a while longer and then he was going to have to regardless of anything else he was going to have to change the type of chemo he was doing whether or not it was working because the side effects are compounding for the particular type of chemo and his side effects were getting worse and so you get to a place and so we started having some other symptoms were reappearing and some new ones and
So we had decided, our oncologist had, you know, we decided to start a different kind of chemo and we were really waiting to get into a clinical trial for him and it's the same clinical, the same drug that is, you know, they're only in phase two right now, put Senator Harry Reid into remission and so The irony of this, of course, is that an immunotherapy is basically vaccine therapy, right?
Right.
And so in this world, this seems like a completely all, you know, different world to me when I look at You know, how I live my life and the people that I'm around most of the time.
And then this other world, this, you know, wellness influencers and the Joe Dispenses of the world, it seems so different.
And so we have a lot of this vaccine hesitancy and also complete anti-vaccine approach.
And yet, here we have us desperately trying to get him into a vaccine therapy drug trial.
And how much the irony of that is, he came back and we had this taste of what it was like to live normally, the two of us, and in a home that we had bought over the summer, and he was starting to work again, and You know, going back to work and we were excited about all these things and then we ended up getting married.
We eloped, we went to Vegas and in under 48 hours we went from, we called our families and said we're here and we're about to go get married and everyone was happy and it was wonderful and a week later...
About a week later it was starting the hospitalization started and by this time last year he had gotten out of the hospital after about three weeks almost three weeks total and that was when you know I promised him we would never we would never go back if he didn't want to we'd never go back to the hospital if he wanted to be done and not be hospitalized ever again like I would support him in any direction he went I think he was to the place where he wasn't quite
Not quite there yet.
We still did a couple more rounds of chemo, but he didn't want to live in the hospital.
And these are hard things to decide.
And I think one of the things that broke my heart was seeing him go into the hospital so sick and being so critical of himself for not being able to do these meditations anymore.
And it was so painful to watch that because here he is and he couldn't eat.
Ultimately, when he left the hospital, he was on a feeding tube.
And he was just so sick and it was hard to walk.
And he's the youngest person on the unit, mostly cancer patients unit.
He's the youngest person by a lot.
And I remember one of the doctors talking to me about um about everything and and him tearing up and saying you know it's it's really hard because they see your husband and he's my age.
To watch him feel like he was letting anyone down even himself by not meditating just crushed me because he worked so hard he tried so hard we did everything we could and And to think that being in this hospital and getting one doctor after the next coming in with more bad news, you know, give yourself a break.
You're doing everything you can.
Your body just doesn't want to work.
And that was really So that's when the meditation actually ended, when the Joe Dispenza stuff ended, because he couldn't physically do it anymore.
It also tells me that the meditation, that it was instrumental for a particular purpose, but beyond that it wasn't about, it doesn't sound like it was about presence or self-regulation or about equanimity or conjuring wonderful memories or gratitude
i mean those things might have been part of the instruction but it also sounds like if there was so much pressure to have to do it in order and and and that and that you were your death was going to be hastened somehow by your inability to do it that just i don't know any form of meditation from any kind of spiritual tradition legitimate spiritual tradition that would that would do that
i don't i don't understand what No, and that's the position I always took is that if this adds value and if it adds to your experience here in a positive way, then I think it's great.
And if it brings you peace and any sort of relief, whether it's emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, I don't care what it is.
And you know, I mentioned this, I think, in an email with you is that we, we were in a financial position that we can afford these things.
And what scares me is that people, some people can't, and they will go this path.
And These alternative healthcare practitioners can suck them dry financially.
And really, and then at the end of the day, there's no accountability for it.
It's like, well, you know, you didn't, you weren't able to meditate down to the cellular level and the quantum field.
And so that's on you.
It's it doesn't that's what's it's really painful because you know or you oh well I couldn't get through healing enough of your past lives sorry you know it's like it's put on you and I feel I felt like with this particular Joe Dispenza stuff I felt like That was an area where he felt like he had some level of control, right?
Like, I am the one who's doing this, I'm meditating, where nothing in his body was in control.
And at least I feel like maybe I'll have some control here.
And I mean, ultimately he didn't, but you know what?
It was the idea of having control when nothing else in the world is in control.
I think that's the Why he stuck to it and stayed with it because as things, they just felt so out of control.
They felt out of control for all of us because it was out of our control.
It's wild because it's all out of our control sounds like the statement of a religious aspirant actually.
Whereas a meditation technique that promises to give you a certain amount of control sounds like the opposite.
Yeah.
And I think that's how I used to look at it, was that that was the value he was getting from it.
And again, as long as it wasn't taking away from the other stuff, from chemotherapy, it didn't make a big difference to me.
So once we got over that hump of the, I think I'm going to stop, and then me didn't, then it was, okay, okay, we are relying on these experts and our expert treatment team and all of the doctors who have, you know, spent their lives dedicated to treating people.
And not just that, you know, it's the dieticians, it's the chaplains, all sorts of people who are involved in this.
And I just get so angry when I think about Joe Dispenza and others like him, because Can you just imagine watching the person you love more than anyone in the world saying, I'm going to stop.
The one thing we know could be helping me and go down this path of, and in my opinion, they've got blood on their hands because they stand there and they say, you can, you can cure your own cancer.
And that's just not true.
I wish we had that capability.
And if there was anyone in the world who I feel like would have had it if it was available to them, then it would have been Louis.
I took care of my mother in hospice last year, at the end of last year.
So I suppose while Louis was quite sick and perhaps being hospitalized, we brought my mother home and I helped my father take care of her for 10 days as her life came to an end.
And I think one of the most striking things about That experience is how profoundly alone
It can be, and how one really has the sense that whatever death is, whatever dying is, the person going through it is really entering an unspeakable experience that no one else can really know about and we don't really have access to.
And it feels, when I think about how my own mother's cancer progressed, The moment of the diagnosis actually initiates a kind of fork in the road where the person who's going to survive is going one way and the person who's going to die is going the other way.
And the distance between them gets farther and the ability to communicate across that gap gets a little bit more difficult.
But what strikes me about your story is that Part of the fork in the road is this difference in belief systems and that as he, as Lewis goes to the retreat and begins the course of meditation,
That you can support it to the extent that it makes him feel better, but he's also going into a zone of relating to life and living that is more and more foreign to you or is less accessible to you.
And so one thing that I wanted to ask you is that it's You know, one thing that people always say about alternative medicine, otherwise known as whatever, whatever these techniques are, what they provide or they claim to provide is somehow, in their promise of holism, a more emotionally receptive space for the person who seeks that care.
Now, was there ever a sense that with you being a scientist and with the differences between you being clear, that for Lewis, the emotional support that you would have to give him just in an existential sense, like, I'm a human being and I'm with you, that that was less somehow than what he needed?
That's an interesting question.
I think in the beginning of his Treatment I think that was true to a degree.
I think that You know Like I said, we we grew we we lived 20 years in the span of seven months.
I think in the beginning That there was hesitation there.
I and I think Ultimately at the at the end of the day we got to a place and it wasn't didn't even take that long where I It didn't really matter what I believed happened, you know, at the end of life or what I believed with... He would have liked us to be on the same page about that, but I don't feel like he didn't feel supported by me, and I don't feel like...
He wasn't able to communicate with me when something didn't feel good, if he felt like I wasn't supporting him.
And he did feel like he was able to connect with other people in the places where I may not be able to help him.
You know, I may not be the best person to talk to because it's hard for me to swallow that you believe in these things that I don't.
And he had people in his life that he could turn to when he wanted to talk about those things, and I encourage that.
I mean, these were important people in his life.
It's not like these were all new strangers.
I mean, there are other loved ones that we have who followed the same path.
And certainly at the end of his life, the sense of spirituality at the end of his life was so beyond one specific practice, right?
It really became this level of Of having really important relationships and really loving fully and really being okay with everything going the way it was.
He was never married before me and he was 45 when we got married.
You know I it took him it was not because other women wouldn't have been interested in Miriam But he was a hard nut to crack when it came to falling in love, and I think that this everything He opened up in so many ways from this experience.
I I think he probably would have gotten there anyway, but I I feel like I was And he would tell me that I was an incredible support for him.
I just think that the way, what he saw as spirituality, it didn't change, but it had more to it by the end.
Just due to the experiences of dealing with cancer and really being in love to the place where you want to spend your life with somebody.
Because when we went down that path, we didn't get married thinking he was going to die seven weeks later.
We didn't think that was going to happen.
I don't know.
You know, I think that that's hard to say.
I remember asking him, like, you know, you do all these different things and have you ever felt a sense of relief?
Like physically, you know, when you go into one of these other types of holistic alternative treatments, whatever they are, have you ever felt anything?
You know, have you ever felt a sense of relief physically, emotionally?
And he was like, no, I've never felt anything from it.
And so, which was really shocking to me, because why would you keep doing this stuff?
And I said, and that's what I asked him, you know, why, why do you?
And he was like, because I like to leave space for miracles.
And that is a phrase that I've taken with me in my life and will forever have it, you know, emblazoned in my brain is that we always leave space for miracles.
And again, like that's where the problem here is.
It's not that he was leaving space for miracles was a problem.
It's a great thing.
We want to leave hope out there.
The problem is when you shut down what we know to be effective ways of treating something.
I think it's very natural and incredibly moving to leave space for miracles, and I think it's very unfortunate that there are many people out there who are really, really excited to colonize that space.
Yeah, it is.
And again, I can't express enough how heartbreaking It was to, you know, I mentioned this a little bit, but after his, after he passed, um, having people from that world, um, reaching out to me and pitching their programs or books or whatever to me.
And I'm like, God, fuck you.
Like, I'm sorry, but that's what I would think.
Because these are people who are offering their products for somebody who was in grief.
And it was just awful because I'm like, this was your friend.
And now you're trying to sell me something like this is your cat and that was a really I mean and I wouldn't say that that was all the time and when I talked to different friends of his who you know are coaches or work in different even other Alternative healing modalities and stuff and I talked to them.
I mean nobody thinks it was appropriate, but that didn't mean it didn't happen and it didn't happen several times With people that I was very shocked would even Like why would you even first of all it wasn't really a secret that I didn't believe in this stuff That wasn't a secret.
And it also wasn't a secret about where my support system was, that I had a therapist the entire time and still do, and that I had a family, and that I went on to be in young widow support groups and everything.
So it's not like they were seeing me grieving without anywhere to go.
It was just an opportunity.
And to not even be able to separate that out with your own friend, And his widow is I mean it it just I don't think again I don't think that any of these people are bad.
I don't think that's what it is and I really do believe that for the most part they really believe it whatever it is and whether that's just like you know this life or coaching aspect of it or it's um you know Whatever it is, I really do believe that they think that they're helping.
And structurally, what they have to sell is coming within the context of an unregulated environment in which any social opportunity can possibly be transactional.
And, you know, in which the ideas of healing are also wrapped up in ideas of being prosperous.
Yep.
And so, it might not be morally repugnant to reach out to the widow to further your business because everybody wins, right?
You have a wonderful product and the widow buys it because she's got a settlement or whatever, you know.
And so, the lucre keeps turning.
Yeah, and I do think that that's, I think that that's how they looked at it.
So I don't want to paint people as monsters, though it was, when I would tell my family or my other friends who were not a part of this world about it, it just made their blood boil.
You know, how, how you could be so, um, just, just blind and, and so Not tuned in to what it must be like to lose your husband, especially so young.
There are so few people that you can really relate to.
You spoke about your mother having cancer and, you know, I was his full-time caretaker and And there are not very many people who have that opportunity who are young because they have kids, they have to work, they do all these things that they need.
But I was able to be with them all the time and that's such a gift.
It's an incredible gift, yeah.
I was fortunate that my partner was able to take care of our sons while I was at my parents' house.
You know, I wouldn't trade any of this for anything.
I wish he was still here more than anything in the world.
I miss him terribly.
Well, I wanted to move towards the end by echoing that with something that you've already written in a direct message that's been pretty haunting to me.
You said, as a wife, I miss my husband terribly and would do anything to bring him back.
But then you also write, I wish I believed in the magic he did because it may have brought me peace after his death.
So I'm just wondering if you can say a little more about that.
Yeah.
Like I said, you know, I wasn't raised with any sort of religious or spiritual beliefs.
And I even talked about how something that I would have wanted Lewis to take the lead on with our children.
I saw how at peace he was at the end of his life, and I was with him when he passed away.
He was okay with it.
He was content.
He wasn't angry.
He wasn't, in fact, he said to me that the only reason he, the only thing he was really disappointed in is that we didn't get to experience more of a married couple.
But he had done so many things in his life, and he was just so content because to him, he was so, he knew what was going to happen to him.
He didn't know but he knew he was safe and that all of these beliefs he had carried him to that place and I wish I believed the things that he believed.
I wish I believed that he was sitting here next to me.
I wish I believed those things because it's really hard to know that you're never going to see someone again.
And it would be really lovely to believe that I was going to see him again, or that he was You know, people will, they believe in signs, and I don't believe in signs, you know.
Oh, that, that, the snow started falling at just this moment, and it must be him, whatever it is, you know, and, and I don't believe those things, and I wish I did, because sometimes I think maybe, maybe I wouldn't miss him as much, maybe it would make it easier, and,
Yeah, that's, but I don't, I mean, even this whole experience, if there was something that would bring me to believe, I would think it would be this, and it still didn't.
I can understand why it didn't, because it was so fraught with confusion, and there were hints of charlatanry.
And then there's also, speaking about Leaving Space for Miracles, the capacity for a person to also somehow skim the cream off the top of all of that?
Because that's what it sounds like you're describing, is that by hook or by crook, he had a good death.
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, he loved living so much, and he was also not afraid to die.
And that was one of the things when he was diagnosed he told me.
He's like, I'm not afraid to die.
I'm just, just really not done living yet.
So, you know, it just gives you one more thing to be grateful for every day that you wake up.
Mary, thank you so much for sharing so clearly and lucidly this incredible story.
I think this has been very impactful for you, certainly for me.
I know it will be for our listeners.
I have this instinct to end by saying that, by asking you whether you're a Star Trek fan.
I'm not.
You're not?
So maybe you're not as tuned into me as you are.
Yeah, maybe it's good to break that spell, if there is one.
But I mean, because the orientation between you and Lewis that you're describing, it reminds me of several episodes.
I've watched about 70 with my nine-year-old son.
In which Jean-Luc Picard, who is the consummate scientist, who is, but also this incredibly deeply moral and ethical man, is often in this position Where he has appointed the caregiver or the main friend of somebody who has different beliefs altogether.
Somebody who, you know, comes from an alien species and they have some ritual culture that is difficult to understand and they're going through a life transition.
And he's been in several situations where he's been asked, he's been asked, can you be the caregiver or sometimes even the priest for this particular ceremony?
And he'll say, okay.
And then he'll just learn the incredible, strange belief structure and myths and the prayers and the songs.
He'll learn them all.
He'll go into his study and he will memorize everything so that he can do the ceremony really well and so that he can honor this person who he loves in a way that they would really appreciate, that would honor everything that they believed in. that would honor everything that they believed in.
And so, the way in which I hear you having come to accept Lewis's orientation towards the world, I just feel a little bit of that.
And there's a real elegance in it to me.
There's something very dignified about it.
Not easy, and certainly not without, like, all of the sorrow in the world.
Which you can see Picard going through as well.
But like, you know, there's always this sort of resolution of, you know, I served this person who I really loved doing things that I did not understand.
And yeah, I just love that.
I love those stories.
And so it's Anyway, I hope that wasn't an intrusion.
I really appreciate that.
It was on my mind as I was listening to you.
I think it's a huge compliment.
It's a huge compliment, because I hope that that's what I gave him.
And that's a huge compliment, so thank you.
Mary, thank you.
Thank you so much.
Okay.
So once again, a big thank you to Mary.
And as a denouement, I'd like to provide some social media evidence for how widespread the circumstances she's describing might be and what some of the outcomes are and can be.
Yesterday I put a brief promo up for this episode on Instagram and there was a flood of comments.
And I'm going to read four of them with thanks to these commenters who gave me permission to do so while preserving their anonymity.
So the first one says this.
My 30-year-old brother with stage 4 colon cancer is making this choice, and the choice is to refuse conventional care.
He insists chemo kills and is trying to cure himself with fermented foods, weird drinks, and vitamin C. When you talk with him, he genuinely believes that his chances of dying are slim.
It's really heartbreaking to watch someone you love make this choice.
The second one says, My mom might have survived her ovarian cancer.
Six years of macrobiotics, juicing, castor oil packs, Louise Hay, and young living essential oils for her slow-growing tumors.
It was horrendous to witness what the cancer did to her body, and I wonder how much longer she would have lived had she considered chemo.
Number 3.
My former wife was diagnosed with an aggressive but early stage breast cancer involving the lymph nodes.
We were eating macrobiotic at the time and always leaned to natural cures first.
Also, her mom had recently died of metastasized breast cancer.
We ultimately opted for chemo and radiation, and she's still cancer-free after 16 years.
Had we went natural, I'm quite sure she'd be long gone.
And I'm holding back tears, because this topic cuts so close.
And then finally, my best friend chose not to have a breast tumor removed and also declined chemo.
She was mainly influenced by Dr. Murcola and a doctor in Utah who made her believe an alkaline diet and colonics would cure her.
And she was influenced by others like Tony Robbins and Brzezinski.
Now, I looked up Brzezinski.
This is Stanislaw Brzezinski, who's a cancer quack based in Texas who developed some BS therapy in the 1970s.
So, the commenter says, my friend ended up moving to Florida where she started seeing a therapist teaching German New Medicine, which we covered last week, and would tell me on the phone that she was fixing her past trauma And her tumor was shrinking.
She went to Mexico to, quote, heat the tumors and make them dissolve, unquote.
She carried radioactive rocks in her bra.
And if you said anything about her therapies, she would cut you out of her life.
And by the time she returned home and I saw her, she could no longer walk and her body was riddled with tumors.
She was on her deathbed.
From the first tumor's appearance to her untimely and needless death, it was little over a year.
She had just turned 40 and left a baby boy behind.
Rest in peace, beauty.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
As always, we're open to hear your thoughts and feedback through our social channels and on Patreon.
Please consider supporting us there as well.
Next week we'll be talking to Elizabeth Simons of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network about the Trucker Convoy protest still dragging on in Ottawa.
The week after that, we'll be examining the history and emergence of post-germ theory quack medicine.
And then the week after that, Matthew hosts a panel of four women who share their experience of watching their childhood friend, a yoga and maternal fitness influencer, spiral into conspiracism and become a leading figure in the Canadian anti-vax movement.
