Latest / Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom / Episode 339: 8:15 - The Moment Everything Changed - Chantal's Parents

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Episode 339: 8:15 - The Moment Everything Changed - Chantal's Parents · Losing a Child: Always Andy's Mom

• 0:02
  Marcy Larson: Thank you so much! Today, I have two guests I'm very excited to announce, so I have Jean and Shelly. So, did I say that right?
• 0:12
  Marcy Larson: Yes, you did. I think I did. Okay, and they're coming to us from Alberta, Canada, so, even snowier than here in Michigan, probably.
• 0:21
  Jean Dubois: Oh, yeah, yeah. And colder.
• 0:25
  Marcy Larson: Definitely colder.
• 0:27
  Marcy Larson: I'm certain about that. So, welcome to the podcast!
• 0:32
  Jean Dubois: Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you.
• 0:34
  Marcy Larson: So, this is kind of an interesting one, because I have never…
• 0:38
  Marcy Larson: had my husband, Eric, find me a guest, and yet, that's exactly what happened this time!
• 0:44
  Jean Dubois: That's right.
• 0:45
  Marcy Larson: Bit of a funny story. Eric was listening to a different podcast, has nothing to do with grief, really.
• 0:51
  Marcy Larson: I can't remember what it was, it was something…
• 0:53
  Jean Dubois: It's like, yep.
• 0:54
  Marcy Larson: a little bit?
• 0:55
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, it is, yeah. But it was… it was about me speaking about my book, because I've known this… these podcast hosts for some… for many years.
• 1:02
  Jean Dubois: And you were gracious enough to have me on the show to talk about it.
• 1:06
  Marcy Larson: So anyway, but it was financial, and so Eric's listening to this, and apparently got to the end and thought, I think he would be perfect for Marcy's podcast, so emailed you, and then told me later, actually, after he emailed you, he said.
• 1:20
  Marcy Larson: So, I've never done this before, but I just want you to know that I emailed this guy, and he might be getting it back to you, and literally you did, because it took a little while for him to tell me.
• 1:31
  Marcy Larson: I think maybe 45 minutes later, I get an email from you. We're at a basketball game, and an email
• 1:37
  Marcy Larson: to you, and I turned to him and I said.
• 1:39
  Marcy Larson: here's the email, and he said, what? I said, the guy! He's emailed me already, so…
• 1:43
  Jean Dubois: There we are! Worked out great! Yeah, small world, hey? It is, it is! Isn't it crazy?
• 1:52
  Marcy Larson: Like, it's a really big world, but then it feels really.
• 1:55
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 1:55
  Marcy Larson: Well, in a way.
• 1:56
  Jean Dubois: It's right.
• 1:56
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, right?
• 1:57
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so…
• 1:59
  Marcy Larson: Anyway, I want you to tell us all about your daughter, Chantel.
• 2:02
  Jean Dubois: Well, do you want… I'll start, like, just as when she was a kid, what her.
• 2:10
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, go ahead.
• 2:11
  Jean Dubois: Because we both play music, she was interested in music at first. She wanted to play piano, she wanted to play the violin, so we got her into lessons for that, and I think she was about 5 years old when she started the violin.
• 2:28
  Jean Dubois: And so we got… we still have that little violin. We got a few, actually. Yeah. And, then I… around 10 or 11, she started to kind of show interest in golf.
• 2:41
  Jean Dubois: And at the time, my… one of my older brothers was really into golf, which he still is, but he,
• 2:48
  Jean Dubois: he kind of took her under his wing to take her golfing, and she really got into golfing, and then music was out the door. Oh, figure skating and dancing, that was another thing. Anything artistic was out the window, and now it went to sports. So now…
• 3:06
  Marcy Larson: Totally.
• 3:07
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 3:08
  Marcy Larson: Huh?
• 3:08
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, at around 10, yeah, between 10 and 12. And, yeah, she really got into golfing, and he took her out all the time, because we weren't really into golfing. He even bought her a set of golf clubs and everything, because he saw the potential in her. Then she started getting into golf tournaments, and just…
• 3:28
  Jean Dubois: Loved golf. Junior and senior high, she was into, basketball and volleyball.
• 3:36
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, her sports. She was… had a really great group of friends. Like, I've never seen so many girls come together and be such a knit group of friends, yeah.
• 3:50
  Jean Dubois: And, so they, they did all sorts of things together, and they knew how to party hard, and, and, she really loved, doing hairstyles.
• 4:03
  Jean Dubois: even when she was younger, she would dress up her younger sister as a little bride, and get all the… I'd had lots of flowers out in the… in the yard and stuff, and she'd take all the potted flowers down, and create, like, an altar, and she'd be the…
• 4:19
  Jean Dubois: Like, officiating the wedding and everything. So we got pictures of her, you know, like, her little sister dressed up. She did her hair and everything. Like, I was a hairdresser, and she did updos better than I did. Oh, that's awesome! Yeah, so she, yeah, so she was artistic that way, but really got into sports, and even…
• 4:44
  Jean Dubois: After she graduated, she still kept into golfing. She had done tournaments. She had wanted to get… actually, she wanted to go pro.
• 4:52
  Jean Dubois: And, yeah, she was that good. Yeah.
• 4:55
  Marcy Larson: Wow.
• 4:56
  Jean Dubois: time we took her to pros to have lessons, they just couldn't get over her swing and everything, so yeah, she was… she was a really, really good golfer. Yeah, so, anything else as a kid?
• 5:11
  Jean Dubois: Growing up.
• 5:13
  Marcy Larson: Her personality was very bubbly. Oh, yeah. And she would… she just loved to have fun, and all her friends… her laugh…
• 5:22
  Jean Dubois: She's taken after her mother on her laugh.
• 5:26
  Jean Dubois: And they all called her the trucker laugh, because she had quite a loud, loud, really boisterous laugh. So they… everybody always says, oh, that trucker laugh, you know? She got labeled that way. The laugh we heard, especially when she watched Friends.
• 5:45
  Jean Dubois: That was her favorite TV show. Oh, yes. It was… it was,
• 5:49
  Jean Dubois: pretty much a highlight in the house when she was watching Friends.
• 5:54
  Marcy Larson: So it was more fun watching her watch it than.
• 5:57
  Jean Dubois: That's right, that's right.
• 5:59
  Marcy Larson: So, as soon as I heard you talking, I was like, it wasn't even that you wanted to watch the show, you wanted to…
• 6:04
  Jean Dubois: Oh yeah, I can do it. It's like, oh, good friends is on. Yeah. Oh, I know.
• 6:11
  Marcy Larson: I love hearing about her laugh.
• 6:12
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 6:13
  Marcy Larson: How much of an age gap was there between the sisters?
• 6:15
  Jean Dubois: Four years.
• 6:16
  Marcy Larson: Four years, okay.
• 6:17
  Marcy Larson: I was wondering, I thought, it must be a little bit bigger. If she was doing her hair and doing all that stuff, she must have been able to kind of treat her a little bit like a doll, right?
• 6:27
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, pretty much, yep. And there'd be, you know, like, when… because we both played music, we had a studio in our house, you know, we'd have…
• 6:36
  Jean Dubois: Where we have a bunch of people over New Year's or something, and play music, and then one of her and her friends, who looked much like her, lots of times people thought they were twins, they would actually, bartend.
• 6:50
  Jean Dubois: At 13, 14 years old, they loved doing that. And then, I remember her friends saying that when we had band practices down in the basement, they would be upstairs in her bedroom and pretending they were at a wedding dance, and dancing and everything, so all her friends, that tight-knit group of friends, they all grew up with us playing music, so…
• 7:14
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, they would always, be… They'd have fun. Yeah.
• 7:18
  Marcy Larson: Well, now I need to know, what do you play?
• 7:20
  Jean Dubois: For me, I… mostly it's my voice and guitar, but I can play other instruments. Not very good, but I can play other ones. And then Mr. Multi-Talented here. Yeah, I play guitar, bass, drums…
• 7:38
  Jean Dubois: Harmonica, mandolin, And… a lot of other things I can, you know, just…
• 7:45
  Marcy Larson: Whoa!
• 7:45
  Jean Dubois: dabble at. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, an accordion. I play accordion. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was my first instrument, yeah.
• 7:53
  Marcy Larson: know this!
• 7:54
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, yeah, so we're… that's how we met, is through music. Yeah.
• 7:58
  Marcy Larson: Oh…
• 7:59
  Jean Dubois: His band needed a new singer in the band, so I got auditioned, and… And then she married me. Yeah.
• 8:06
  Marcy Larson: Well, that's a good way to keep a singer.
• 8:09
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking long-term.
• 8:15
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 8:16
  Marcy Larson: Well, we talked about Chantel and her personality. Now, let's talk a little bit about, kind of, what happened with Chantelle.
• 8:23
  Marcy Larson: About her illness.
• 8:24
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, well, we had, like, we… we're from… originally from northern Alberta, so, we had…
• 8:34
  Jean Dubois: moved to Vancouver Island, BC coast, British Columbian coast. There's, Vancouver Island. And we had moved there in 20… 2005.
• 8:46
  Jean Dubois: And it was a year before Chantel graduated from high school, so we had decided that we would go to… move to the island, that she would…
• 8:58
  Jean Dubois: Do school… half of her grade 12 on the island, and then come back
• 9:03
  Jean Dubois: Live with my parents and finish off her grade 12 year with her friends.
• 9:09
  Marcy Larson: With her graduating class.
• 9:10
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 9:11
  Jean Dubois: Right. That makes sense. So it was… so she was… we were on the island, and…
• 9:17
  Jean Dubois: It was about a month… May, it was May. May, yeah, it was about a month before her graduation. My mom had called.
• 9:26
  Jean Dubois: And said, Chantal's not well.
• 9:30
  Jean Dubois: And so she said she's been having headaches. We took her for.
• 9:35
  Jean Dubois: Went to the doctor, and they did a scan, and so I'll let you, Chantel, tell you the rest.
• 9:40
  Jean Dubois: So, that's when she told us that they found a brain tumor.
• 9:46
  Jean Dubois: So, here we are, what, a thousand miles away, and…
• 9:52
  Marcy Larson: Right.
• 9:52
  Jean Dubois: And your 17-year-old
• 9:54
  Jean Dubois: Well, she was 18? She was… Yeah, she had turned 18. She turned 18. Yeah. Because, yeah, that cut off of her school. Anyway, so yeah, so right away, I got on the plane next day.
• 10:07
  Jean Dubois: And flew up to, back to Alberta. And then…
• 10:12
  Marcy Larson: Well, how hard would that have been to, you know, not be with her?
• 10:16
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, first thing you want to do is hold her. Yeah, exactly.
• 10:19
  Marcy Larson: Of course!
• 10:20
  Jean Dubois: Telling that over.
• 10:21
  Marcy Larson: Of course!
• 10:21
  Jean Dubois: over the phone, right? So…
• 10:24
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so I flew up right away, and then, Jeanne made plans to drive up, so that we got our youngest daughter. So we are in northern… now we're in northern Alberta.
• 10:35
  Jean Dubois: And, the nearest center, like, major center is 500 kilometers away. 300 miles. 300 miles.
• 10:44
  Marcy Larson: And so…
• 10:46
  Jean Dubois: were at my parents' place with her, and the doctor, a specialist had, contacted us, like, our family doctor there in Peace River, hometown.
• 10:58
  Jean Dubois: I contacted a doctor in Edmonton, and he said if she starts to have really bad headaches, throwing up.
• 11:07
  Jean Dubois: Then, you need to ship her out right away.
• 11:11
  Jean Dubois: So, of course, it's a week before graduation, so the parties are happening, and they're getting together, and they're preparing for, decorating. Decorating and stuff, right? So I'm being very protective and saying, you know, you can't go do all those things, you can't… no strain, or whatever, right? But she's wanting to go, and I don't want to start a big fight, or whatever.
• 11:36
  Jean Dubois: So, she goes, but I say, you know, like, just…
• 11:39
  Jean Dubois: You know, nothing crazy. Keep it calm.
• 11:42
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 11:43
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 11:43
  Jean Dubois: But then a few days later, she started to be really tired, and then the vomiting started.
• 11:50
  Jean Dubois: So then we call an ambulance, and then get her to the local hospital in Peace River, and right away, the doctor, they fly out to Edmonton.
• 12:00
  Jean Dubois: So, so we're there in Edmonton, then they do,
• 12:05
  Jean Dubois: Like a… they had to drill a hole in her skull, they had to do a, like, a biopsy, and the tumor was located at the back of her, brain, so it was squeezing off the,
• 12:19
  Jean Dubois: Spinal fluid. Spinal fluid.
• 12:22
  Jean Dubois: So they had to do something to… because her temperature kept going up.
• 12:28
  Jean Dubois: Really bad.
• 12:29
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 12:30
  Jean Dubois: And she was throwing off everything, like, she was hot, and they couldn't bring her temperature down because that was happening, so they had to go in, and they had to drain that fluid. A shunt? Kind of a shunt, yeah, that they had to reroute it, the fluid, so that it would flow better, so…
• 12:50
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, just… All the things that she had.
• 12:55
  Jean Dubois: Okay, I'll carry on. So hard, yeah. Yeah. And initially…
• 12:59
  Marcy Larson: The beauty of having both of you.
• 13:00
  Jean Dubois: So initially, when they did the test from the biopsy, they told us it was benign, which was a huge relief for us, and they couldn't determine if it was growing or just staying at that certain size.
• 13:15
  Jean Dubois: And they said, well, they'll have to do some surgery, but when they did the scans, they determined that it was, inoperable.
• 13:23
  Jean Dubois: So, the best hope was for us to, you know, for them to be able to shrink it.
• 13:28
  Jean Dubois: And there was no talk about any kind of… what the treatment would be.
• 13:33
  Jean Dubois: But once the spinal… once the pressure in the head was reduced, she was feeling much better, and suddenly it seemed like she was out of the woods, and some of her friends come over and seen her, and she ended up missing grad because of it.
• 13:51
  Jean Dubois: on,
• 13:54
  Jean Dubois: And then things seem to be actually going pretty well. So, okay, good, we don't have to worry about this now, it's…
• 14:01
  Jean Dubois: you know, like, don't have to worry about it being cancer, that kind of thing. Yeah, we were in a state of, like, elation, because we thought everything was perfect. So once she finally got released from the hospital in Edmonton.
• 14:15
  Jean Dubois: Shelly got working with some of her friends there, and some of Chatelle's friends, and we made a little, graduation ceremony for her.
• 14:24
  Marcy Larson: Oh.
• 14:24
  Jean Dubois: So that she could graduate with her friends. Yeah, sure. And her principal and one of her favorite teachers was there to give her her, diploma. They got dressed in their gowns like they would for a regular grad, so that was really, really cool. Yeah. And then, so after grad, we moved back to… we went back home.
• 14:43
  Jean Dubois: And then Chatelle started feeling ill again. Yeah, her eye… I said, something's wrong with your eyes. Like, that's not right. Yeah, it's like the… it's like her eye, one, her left eye? Yeah, I can't remember. Wasn't, yeah, it's a blur. That wasn't working properly. We can kind of tell. Yeah. So we brought her back in.
• 15:01
  Jean Dubois: And that's… On the island. On the island. Yeah. And
• 15:07
  Jean Dubois: go back, and they had to do another biopsy. This time, it was a lot more invasive, because I don't know, there's a picture floating around in our documents somewheres, with a huge scar on the side of her head there. Yeah, they had to go in from the side. So, now we're living in a community on Vancouver Island, but the nearest center is an hour away.
• 15:27
  Jean Dubois: From, yeah, from where we live there. Over a mountain pass. Yeah, over a mountain pass. So now we go, to Victoria to go see the specialist there.
• 15:37
  Jean Dubois: And that's where they had this
• 15:39
  Jean Dubois: Famous brain surgeon, he went and did the biopsy.
• 15:44
  Jean Dubois: And then… then it was shortly after that. Like, we… they called us in, but they never said anything about cancer or whatever, so just her and I went to the doctor.
• 15:56
  Jean Dubois: And that's when they told us it was cancer. Well, oh my god, like, we were just… her and I were just in absolute shock.
• 16:05
  Jean Dubois: We just couldn't believe what we were just being told. And so now, here, it's just her and I, like, if we would have known it was gonna be that kind of diagnosis, what would have been… Jan would have came with us. Yeah.
• 16:19
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 16:19
  Jean Dubois: So it's now, you gotta… you got this shock, and they're telling you now what the protocol is of chemo drugs, and radiation treatments, and your… our lives changed.
• 16:32
  Jean Dubois: Instantly. Instantly. Like, it was… now she's gotta take these chemo drugs, and now we gotta take her for radiation. Every day. Every day? Every day. Or once a week. Every day for 6 weeks, yeah.
• 16:47
  Jean Dubois: on-the-go drive every day. I had to take leave from work, so now my… my income… I had some vacation time, but I hadn't been working there for very long.
• 16:58
  Jean Dubois: So I had very little vacation time.
• 17:01
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, they gave me, yeah, they gave me leave of absence. I was kind of working… yeah, I would take her, and then I think I would work afternoon, something like that. So, yeah, so it was that, the radiation, and the chemo drugs, and of course, she was…
• 17:18
  Jean Dubois: The chemo drugs started to make her hair fall out.
• 17:22
  Jean Dubois: Gain weight. Gain weight, really fast, because she had to be on prednisone.
• 17:28
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 17:28
  Jean Dubois: And she was this beautiful little figure, and just ballooned right up, and the… her skin would actually break.
• 17:37
  Jean Dubois: Because she moved up so fast. Yeah. Yeah, so I, you know, you're nursing…
• 17:43
  Jean Dubois: Cracked open, wounds, and… and, because of the prednisone, her appetite was…
• 17:51
  Jean Dubois: It was crazy. Like, I just couldn't fill her up. So, I started getting more, into… I thought, this is crazy, what this is doing to her body, right? There's… it's,
• 18:03
  Jean Dubois: Can't think of the saying right now, but… One…
• 18:08
  Marcy Larson: Having peeled with fire a little bit?
• 18:09
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, the cure is what it does to you and your body. So I was just like, I can't stand seeing this happen to her, so I seeked out…
• 18:22
  Jean Dubois: more natural methods. And because on Vancouver Island, there's a lot of people there that are… that were…
• 18:29
  Jean Dubois: Into natural healing and stuff, so I found practitioners quite easily. So we started to do more, some natural things, and seemed like the tumor was starting to shrink.
• 18:44
  Jean Dubois: And it was. Yeah, and it was, yeah. Actually, from scans, it was starting to shrink. And then, yeah, it was…
• 18:54
  Jean Dubois: I'm just trying to think here, in succession, but,
• 18:59
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so we started to do more of the natural stuff, and then it also…
• 19:05
  Jean Dubois: there's some bureaucracy here in Canada with all the drugs. And what I mean by that is Canada has… everybody always says, oh, Canada has the best healthcare system, because we don't have to pay for it. Yeah, that's not true. It's not true, until you get really sick. Yeah. Because what happened was, at a certain point, even,
• 19:28
  Jean Dubois: with the Victoria BC Cancer, Institute.
• 19:33
  Jean Dubois: They allow you so much money.
• 19:36
  Jean Dubois: I guess, for your drugs, and then it comes to a cutoff point. Yeah. So now you have… you have to start paying for it. Yeah, but the biggest part here was because,
• 19:48
  Jean Dubois: things kind of escalated a bit for Chantel, like, we're gonna back up a tiny bit, okay? Just because she did feel…
• 19:56
  Jean Dubois: at one point, much better after the first round of chemo and radiation. She ended up going back to university, or she got into university, got back into golfing, and that was for about 9 or 10 months, right? 9 months. Yeah, 8 or 9 months. And then she got
• 20:13
  Jean Dubois: worse again. She's starting to lose mobility now in her, on one side of her body.
• 20:19
  Jean Dubois: So we had gone back to see the, oncologist again. They did the scans, and then he told us that the tumor had grown back significantly. Yeah. And there was another one. Yeah, and there was a second tumor that appeared.
• 20:33
  Jean Dubois: So, at that point, he said, we are…
• 20:38
  Jean Dubois: If the chemo that we used before is not working, we're gonna have to do something different. So, there was a, an experimental drug that they could use. It was more or less a last resort, because they couldn't operate.
• 20:51
  Jean Dubois: And this is when we found out what the reality is with the medical system in Canada, is we… the doctor gave us a prescription for this experimental drug, which was available, right, basically in the pharmacy across the road.
• 21:09
  Jean Dubois: Then we went to,
• 21:11
  Jean Dubois: to get it. Okay. Yeah, that was in Victoria, but he said there's a doctor in Vancouver… Right, yeah. …th knew how to administer this drug. Yeah, and that's how we ended up. Yeah, so we had now… we had to take the ferry and go to Vancouver.
• 21:26
  Jean Dubois: And get a hotel room, and, you know, so now there's extra costs. But we go take her to this doctor.
• 21:33
  Jean Dubois: who has run off his feet, by the way, like, holy moly, like, you could barely get a word in edgewise, and he was gone. Come back, and then he was gone. So… so then he kind of tells us, well, you… he points to Jan, he says, you have to go talk to a social worker, and then he left me in the room, he took him to a social worker, and we're like, what the hell is going on? Yeah.
• 21:53
  Jean Dubois: So then, I think she kind of told you that now we have to go to a drugstore across the street from the hospital and get the one drug.
• 22:03
  Jean Dubois: And we're like, what? Okay. That's weird. Why can't we just get it through here? Yeah, like, I thought you just administered that here in the hospital. That's why we're here, isn't it? Yeah. So we go to the pharmacy, and so we get this drug, and then…
• 22:19
  Jean Dubois: The cashier says, that will be $4,300, please, and we're like, what?
• 22:25
  Jean Dubois: And she said…
• 22:27
  Jean Dubois: And we were like, we don't got that kind of money. Like, at this point, we're pretty tapped out.
• 22:33
  Jean Dubois: And so,
• 22:36
  Jean Dubois: I said, well, if I don't buy this drug, that means my daughter doesn't get treatment, and she kind of, like, sad, look, and shook her head no.
• 22:45
  Marcy Larson: Then we're like, what do we do? Like, and so…
• 22:49
  Jean Dubois: We called my one brother, and he put it on his credit card for us.
• 22:55
  Jean Dubois: And so then we, then we take this… now we take this drug back to the hospital, and now they're mixing, mixing it with another drug, and…
• 23:07
  Jean Dubois: And that's how they… they gave it to her. And so it… digging in a little bit more, we found out that maybe one drug could get covered, but we had to go to one clinic in Vancouver to get it administered, then hurry up and go to another clinic and get the other one administered. It was… it was a schmoz. So, Jeanne worked at the hospital in Duncan.
• 23:31
  Jean Dubois: On the island. Small town. And he was telling one of the nurses about… I knew the pharmacist there at the hospital. And telling them what we were doing, and she was like, what?
• 23:42
  Jean Dubois: That's crazy, we can get those drugs here, and… Well, 90% cheaper. Cheaper.
• 23:48
  Marcy Larson: Oh my gosh.
• 23:49
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. So that's when we found out that hospitals will get together, and they can have buying power to buy drugs. Yeah. So, you know, like, for…
• 24:01
  Jean Dubois: So that… that was…
• 24:03
  Jean Dubois: such a piss off. It was angering, because here you are, trying to do everything for your kid, you know, to keep them alive, and the bureaucracy of drugs is draining us, financially.
• 24:18
  Jean Dubois: I'm not working, it's also causing, extra stress, because now we have to do all this other stuff, instead of just going to the hospital and it being administered there, so…
• 24:32
  Jean Dubois: Anyway, we managed to go to the Duncan Hospital.
• 24:37
  Jean Dubois: And, they got the drugs there, and still, we had to pay for them. They were still expensive. But, yeah, so they're…
• 24:46
  Jean Dubois: And so we started putting out to our families that, you know, like, like, we're broke, you know, paying his money, and we still got bills to pay and stuff, so fundraisers started happening for us.
• 25:02
  Jean Dubois: This is where, you know, it's always great to be part of your community all the time, because when you need your community, your community's there for you.
• 25:11
  Jean Dubois: And our community was there for us, both in Duncan and in Hometown. So they… they raised thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands. And we got private donations from friends and family, and so it helped us financially to keep paying for these drugs.
• 25:28
  Jean Dubois: and to just live, because you phone the bank, the bank will give you one month relief. They don't go, oh, well, oh, you got a sick child? No. They don't care. They want their money, all the bills.
• 25:42
  Jean Dubois: Everybody wants their money, right? Yeah. So… But, then you kind of fast forward here, and
• 25:51
  Jean Dubois: Despite, you know, all the efforts of the doctors and… Ourselves, our family.
• 25:58
  Jean Dubois: she got, you know… Really? Yeah. She went downhill really, really fast, in the matter of… A few months. Yeah, from the month of May, maybe,
• 26:11
  Jean Dubois: 2008.
• 26:12
  Jean Dubois: Until, maybe July?
• 26:15
  Jean Dubois: that's when we really saw, her mobility. She… she needed… she needed a wheelchair to get around. We weren't equipped, we had to get,
• 26:24
  Jean Dubois: A lift to be able to get her up the stairs to her room, and all she could do is sleep, and she was starting to get some seizures as well.
• 26:33
  Jean Dubois: I think we've… we… at the… near the end there, the last few weeks, we had called the ambulance
• 26:39
  Jean Dubois: Three times? Yeah. In fact, one time it was the same, paramedic was there, and she was pretty saddened by what was going on, because she understood, right? And,
• 26:53
  Jean Dubois: the,
• 26:55
  Jean Dubois: the toughest, of course, it just so happened that her parents were visiting. It was at a Canadian Thanksgiving. Yeah. Right? It was right around that time.
• 27:04
  Jean Dubois: And we called the ambulance, and she had gone into pretty much a Grand Mall, right?
• 27:11
  Jean Dubois: And, they took her in, and they did a scan on her, a CT scan.
• 27:17
  Jean Dubois: And the doctor was…
• 27:20
  Jean Dubois: I want to say a little bit blunt about it, and he said, your daughter is probably going to die today, it's not gonna… it's not gonna be long.
• 27:30
  Jean Dubois: And I think it was just within hours, right? Well, it was a few days if… because we were able to contact the rest of our family, and lots of them flew down to come visit us. Yeah, they were there within a day. Yeah.
• 27:44
  Jean Dubois: To say goodbye, basically.
• 27:48
  Marcy Larson: And.
• 27:52
  Jean Dubois: I remember… I remember it was 8.15.
• 27:54
  Jean Dubois: That morning. Yeah.
• 27:58
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 28:00
  Marcy Larson: It's funny, those details that you remember, right?
• 28:03
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. Yeah.
• 28:04
  Marcy Larson: No.
• 28:05
  Jean Dubois: You know, it's been 18 years this year.
• 28:09
  Jean Dubois: And, you know, it's…
• 28:12
  Jean Dubois: There's times when you can talk about it no problem, and then there's times that you can't.
• 28:17
  Jean Dubois: kudos to you, Marcy, because when I listened to you and your husband talk about the loss of your son, only a year after you did this podcast, I thought, wow, what courage you both had.
• 28:30
  Jean Dubois: to do that only a year afterwards, because I was in such deep depression for at least 3 years.
• 28:38
  Jean Dubois: Where I just…
• 28:40
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, you were not yourself. I was not myself. I quit music. I quit everything. Life, to me, wasn't worth living. And it took me a long time to come out of that. Yeah, you couldn't work? No. Yeah.
• 28:54
  Jean Dubois: And so I still have…
• 28:56
  Jean Dubois: And I'm sure you prob- maybe haven't experienced yet, but you might, some PTSD.
• 29:03
  Marcy Larson: Oh, I definitely…
• 29:04
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, you get into a situation where you get flashbacks, and yeah, you just…
• 29:10
  Jean Dubois: So, you know, you have to have, some tools.
• 29:15
  Jean Dubois: to help deal with that, I did hypnotherapy.
• 29:19
  Jean Dubois: I found a wonderful hypnotherapist who's still a friend today, and you know, I always say if it wasn't for her, I would have never
• 29:29
  Jean Dubois: I think I would have been a drunk in a ditch, I always say. Yeah, like, I would have been a mess. I wouldn't have come out of it, I don't think, because there's a lot of people that do say that, that have lost a child, and they go… the question I get asked is, you're still married? And I say, yeah, and they go, wow, because other people…
• 29:49
  Jean Dubois: Because of the way they handle their grief, they… one can't take it with the other anymore, and they…
• 29:55
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, they…
• 29:56
  Marcy Larson: Interest.
• 29:57
  Jean Dubois: they split up, so… Yeah.
• 29:58
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 30:00
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, I remember Eric and I sang that very first night.
• 30:04
  Marcy Larson: Just promising each other that it would not break us, because we were so scared that it would.
• 30:09
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 30:11
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. Yup.
• 30:12
  Marcy Larson: It's interesting hearing you talk about music, because,
• 30:15
  Marcy Larson: We're kind of a musical family, too. You know, if you listen all the way to the end, you will hear Andy singing.
• 30:21
  Jean Dubois: Oh, yes, yes, that's right. Oh, yes, yeah, great voice.
• 30:26
  Marcy Larson: So, so I sing in the band at my church.
• 30:29
  Marcy Larson: I'm one of the main high vocalists there.
• 30:33
  Marcy Larson: It took me 3 years before I sang at church again.
• 30:37
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 30:38
  Marcy Larson: He died in 2018, and… It was… Sometime in…
• 30:44
  Marcy Larson: I think late 2000… later 2021 that I went back for the first time. It just… music is so emotional and so personal, right? I don't know, that's the way I felt. I just…
• 30:58
  Marcy Larson: It's too hard.
• 31:01
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 31:02
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, I believe that. I mean, since, chantelle's passing.
• 31:07
  Jean Dubois: what I've found, like, I've been playing music since I was a kid.
• 31:11
  Jean Dubois: And I've sung many songs, I've heard many songs.
• 31:15
  Jean Dubois: But since she's passed, I just find,
• 31:19
  Jean Dubois: Emotionally, maybe? I'm… I'm a different person.
• 31:23
  Jean Dubois: Because I asked Shelly, I mean, I could be listening to a song, and all of a sudden, boom, it just hits me. Like, I put the line in a song, and before, I said, oh, that's a nice, that's a really good line.
• 31:34
  Jean Dubois: But it does way more than that. It's, like, punches me in the head, like… Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes… it almost happened when I was… in fact, we were just, some time ago, we were just playing music in our studio downstairs, and…
• 31:49
  Jean Dubois: I just got… singing a song, I just got emotional. It's not that it reminded me of anything, it just… It just… you know, it's…
• 31:57
  Marcy Larson: It just brings out emotion, doesn't it? Yeah. It just so does.
• 32:00
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:03
  Marcy Larson: And I think the memories, I… I don't know, there's just so much to it. There are times, even in church now, there'll be…
• 32:10
  Marcy Larson: there'll be a song that… that we'll sing, and… and I may cry. I may be crying, like, crying, in front of the church.
• 32:18
  Marcy Larson: Still singing, and I will tell… they know, you know.
• 32:21
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 32:21
  Marcy Larson: People in the band know.
• 32:23
  Marcy Larson: But, like, occasionally, I've had a solo part where I said, I really want to sing this, because this means
• 32:30
  Marcy Larson: Something more to me than…
• 32:33
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 32:33
  Marcy Larson: anybody else to sing it, but…
• 32:35
  Marcy Larson: if I stop in the middle, someone has to take over, right? And I've never had to have someone take over, actually, but…
• 32:42
  Jean Dubois: I always feel like I have to be…
• 32:45
  Marcy Larson: Ready for that.
• 32:46
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 32:48
  Marcy Larson: But it was just in the last year, I was singing something, I don't know what, and I started crying.
• 32:52
  Marcy Larson: And then someone from the congregation
• 32:55
  Marcy Larson: Came up to me after the service was over, and he said.
• 33:00
  Marcy Larson: But he had lost his son, too, and that it had meant a lot.
• 33:04
  Marcy Larson: You know, that he understood, and…
• 33:07
  Marcy Larson: So, it's nice, it's nice when you can kind of impact other people that way.
• 33:12
  Jean Dubois: Right? For sure, for sure. Yes. Yeah.
• 33:15
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, and I think that's the… one of the biggest,
• 33:20
  Jean Dubois: the biggest thing that helped with Shelly's healing is her music. And you can explain that. Yeah, I've had…
• 33:26
  Jean Dubois: when I had quit music, like, because I actually go out and, perform, like, as a solo artist, and I've recorded lots of… written and recorded lots of songs, so,
• 33:40
  Jean Dubois: a few years after Chantelle passed, like.
• 33:43
  Jean Dubois: all my friends, all our friends were, you know, like, they would maybe see us out in town or something, and they'd go, are you gonna get back to music? And I'd be like, no, I'm never singing again. And they'd go, you have to. I had so many friends tell me, you have to. You can't…
• 34:01
  Jean Dubois: This is… it's the one thing you have, you know, like, you need to sing. So, I babysit.
• 34:08
  Marcy Larson: It is you, right?
• 34:09
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, yeah, I… I remember.
• 34:10
  Marcy Larson: having somebody say to me, it was another pediatrician. He wasn't in my practice, he was an older pediatrician from a practice across town, and I said, I can't…
• 34:20
  Marcy Larson: do that anymore.
• 34:22
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 34:23
  Marcy Larson: be a pediatrician anymore, and he… he took both sides of my face.
• 34:28
  Marcy Larson: He looked at me, and he said, that's what you are.
• 34:32
  Marcy Larson: That's what you are. And he said, you WILL get back there.
• 34:37
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. But in that moment…
• 34:39
  Marcy Larson: I hear you saying, I hear your friends not maybe grasping you.
• 34:42
  Jean Dubois: I'm a cheat.
• 34:43
  Marcy Larson: and holding your head, but saying, but Shelly.
• 34:47
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 34:47
  Marcy Larson: That's what you are.
• 34:48
  Jean Dubois: Right.
• 34:50
  Marcy Larson: You're a musician.
• 34:52
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, you have to do this. So, I baby stepped back into it, and I'm sure you did that with your practice. You baby stepped back, you kind of take little steps, and, you know, like, do what you can handle, and then gradually, it just starts to…
• 35:07
  Jean Dubois: come back. And people start noticing, and they're encouraging you, and happy to see you back out there, performing. Yeah, so you get that encouragement as well, right? So, yeah, so, but it took…
• 35:21
  Jean Dubois: I got… I felt getting better and better because of the hypnotherapy as well, and then, we ended up moving back to Alberta.
• 35:30
  Jean Dubois: We had to, financially. Jan took a job where, you know, I was paid really good money, and we had to do what we had to do, because otherwise we would have been, like, bankrupt because of everything, right? So,
• 35:47
  Jean Dubois: just coming back to Alberta, I still continued with my hypnotherapy over Zoom. I didn't need it as much at that point, but… Yeah, I started teaching, like, music, guitar… privately, guitar and voice.
• 36:02
  Jean Dubois: And then there was one day where I just went, hmm…
• 36:07
  Jean Dubois: And it was about 5 years after she passed. I went, Hmm.
• 36:11
  Jean Dubois: There I am. Here I am. I'm back.
• 36:15
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, I really felt that I was… Me, again.
• 36:22
  Jean Dubois: And and then it just kind of… then I really went back into things. Yeah. Yeah, full force and stuff, but yeah, it took at least 5 years to get to that point, yeah.
• 36:36
  Jean Dubois: And for me, it wasn't…
• 36:37
  Marcy Larson: That's funny that you had that kind of revelation.
• 36:39
  Jean Dubois: I did, yeah, and I think it was because of the hypnotherapy. Like, Jean and our other daughter, Alita, that they did hypnotherapy as well, because they were saying how much it worked for me, right? They're helping… so I said to them, you guys, you gotta do this too, right? So, yeah, and it was because of those tools that I learned through hypnotherapy that that's why I was able to recognize that revelation.
• 37:04
  Jean Dubois: relation, I think.
• 37:06
  Jean Dubois: That, that, oh, there it is. Yeah, because she… she would talk about it a lot in our sessions.
• 37:13
  Jean Dubois: That, you know, one day you're going to… you're gonna be you again. You will. And she kept promising me that.
• 37:20
  Jean Dubois: And so I… but at first, I was like, yeah, you're… you're nuts, lady, right? But… but it did, it happened, and so for Jean… Yeah, for me, it was a… maybe not quite as long as for Shelly. I did take 3 months…
• 37:35
  Jean Dubois: off of work.
• 37:37
  Jean Dubois: And, of course, I couldn't stay off work forever, but I did manage to go back, and I had so much good support from my coworkers. You know, as soon as I walked in the door that first day, they come over and shook my hand, gave me hugs and stuff, they were happy to see me back, so that kind of helps, you know.
• 37:56
  Jean Dubois: take the pain away a little bit, you know, but in the meantime, I think maybe I delayed my grief a little bit, because I was more worried about Shelly and my daughter. Yes. I think it's just a natural thing for a dad, right? Yeah. Being the protector, and stuff, and
• 38:12
  Jean Dubois: I think it started to hit me a little bit even after I started working again. Another… one thing that kind of triggered a little bit is one of my coworkers, he also lost a son.
• 38:22
  Jean Dubois: Shortly after.
• 38:24
  Jean Dubois: So he was asking me questions about how I was dealing with stuff.
• 38:28
  Jean Dubois: And I started to think to myself, well, I'm no expert on this, really, because I'm experiencing it myself, and everybody experiences in a different way.
• 38:37
  Jean Dubois: But, and I think it was right at that point where,
• 38:41
  Jean Dubois: it was right about then when Shelly started saying, you gotta go see, Barb, right? Yeah. And, so that, that did make a huge difference. It kind of helped… it kind of,
• 38:53
  Jean Dubois: she picked out right away that I was trying to be the protector, and when you're protecting, you don't have time to take care of yourself, right?
• 39:01
  Jean Dubois: So, for me, that was the game changer there. So, I started to take care of myself a bit more, keeping an eye on things at the same time, but not 100% focused on just everybody else and nothing on me, right? So…
• 39:17
  Marcy Larson: that when you go on an airplane, you have to put on your own oxygen mask before helping somebody else, right?
• 39:22
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, exactly.
• 39:22
  Marcy Larson: And you weren't doing that. You were very worried about getting the oxygen mask on your wife and daughter, but your own, not so much, right?
• 39:31
  Jean Dubois: Exactly, that's right, that's right, yeah.
• 39:33
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 39:36
  Marcy Larson: But then you feel like you had a point where things started to turn around and get a little bit better, too, then.
• 39:42
  Jean Dubois: Yes, for sure, and I mean, I think… Just going back to work.
• 39:47
  Jean Dubois: it kind of helped to keep my mind off of things, and once I knew Shelly was feeling better, and our daughter, our other daughter, Alita, was feeling much better too, it kind of took a bit of a load off, so I was able to take care of myself a bit more. And eventually,
• 40:05
  Jean Dubois: It got easier. I think it just got easier over time.
• 40:09
  Jean Dubois: We… I think even to this day, we still have moments. We honor Chantel… Every birthday, and the anniversary of her passing. One of her favorite things to do was to have a Caesar. It's kind of like a…
• 40:25
  Jean Dubois: It's, american Bloody Mary. Yeah. But we have what's called Clamato juice. Yeah, it's a different ingredient, but it's a certain kind of drink that she used to love.
• 40:34
  Jean Dubois: And pizza. So, we would…
• 40:38
  Jean Dubois: I don't know when we thought of doing that. It was shortly after, actually. Yeah, I think when we felt like it. Yeah. And then, so on her birthday, we would have a little special celebration for her birthday, and we'd have Caesars and pizza. Yeah. And, and in fact, to this day, all her friends still do that. Yeah.
• 40:57
  Jean Dubois: And they'll send us pictures, or at a restaurant, or at home. They made pizza, and
• 41:02
  Jean Dubois: and having Caesars and…
• 41:04
  Jean Dubois: Cheers to Chantal, and it's been, like, 18 years, and they're still doing it. Yeah, and some of our family members still do it, too.
• 41:11
  Jean Dubois: I love that. Yeah, it just keeps your memory alive, right? Yeah.
• 41:15
  Marcy Larson: Huh.
• 41:16
  Marcy Larson: That's funny, I had a friend on the episode last week, Kian's mom, and Kian could not really eat anything. She mainly was fed by just tubes, but she loved ice cream, and so, every year on Kian's birthday.
• 41:32
  Marcy Larson: all of us, I didn't even know Kian when she was alive. I still eat… Fremont Kian's birthday, yeah.
• 41:39
  Marcy Larson: Send them pictures, and so I… I just… that… that is such a cool thing, I think, when you can do that, and it can spread out to others.
• 41:48
  Jean Dubois: Just check.
• 41:49
  Marcy Larson: know that you're loved, right? She's loved, you're loved. Feel that support.
• 41:53
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It just keeps that, connection alive. Yeah. Yeah, right?
• 42:01
  Marcy Larson: Sure enough.
• 42:02
  Jean Dubois: Because that was one fear I had, that people are going to forget about her.
• 42:07
  Marcy Larson: Oh, yes.
• 42:08
  Jean Dubois: You know, that they're gonna forget.
• 42:10
  Marcy Larson: Right? Because… Our kids died before they had their own kids.
• 42:15
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 42:16
  Marcy Larson: I don't… Yeah, Andy was just 14, it's like…
• 42:21
  Marcy Larson: People will forget. People will forget, but it's nice when they don't.
• 42:24
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, exactly. I go, oh, they still remember, yeah.
• 42:29
  Marcy Larson: Don't remember.
• 42:30
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, I think her friends will do it till… yeah, they'll always do it, because she had that… such a connection with her friends. Like I say, they were such a tight-knit group of girlfriends, it was… Yeah, it's not something you see every day, actually. Yeah. Like, even myself, like, and you're… and you too, Shelly, when we were going, in high school, we all… we all had a pretty good group of friends, but it was never really
• 42:54
  Jean Dubois: lifelong, like you see, with these girls. Those girls, even though they're…
• 43:00
  Jean Dubois: Long graduated, have a life of their own.
• 43:03
  Jean Dubois: they still connect. Yeah. They're still connected, and I'm sure it would still be the same with Chantel there. They talk about it a lot, and stuff, and it's just… they came to visit her on Vancouver Island when she was not feeling well. I mean, that's just how close they were. Yeah. So it's kind of nice to see that kind of…
• 43:21
  Jean Dubois: friendship. Yeah, Chandel was quite a letter writer and some poetry as well, and she actually would write letters to her friends about how much they meant to her.
• 43:33
  Jean Dubois: You know, like, this is in high school, that she would do that. And they… they all loved, country music, and because, well, we were playing country music as well, right? And one of their favorite artists is a Canadian artist by the name of Paul Brandt.
• 43:50
  Jean Dubois: And he has a… had a song called, I'm Gonna Fly.
• 43:53
  Jean Dubois: And she had written that on,
• 43:56
  Jean Dubois: On a, on the… A notepad. On, on a, out, like, in the margin of a letter she wrote to one of her girlfriends. Right.
• 44:03
  Jean Dubois: So, after she passed, all her friends and our daughter Lita have that as a tattoo. We took her handwriting, and they all have, I'm Gonna Fly, as a tattoo. I didn't want a tattoo, but I have it… I have it as a necklace.
• 44:20
  Marcy Larson: Oh, very good.
• 44:21
  Jean Dubois: I have her handwriting.
• 44:22
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, as I got made into a necklace, so…
• 44:26
  Jean Dubois: So that, that, you know, that… we all have that, right, as well? So…
• 44:32
  Jean Dubois: You know, to, to have, to have her memory. So, yeah.
• 44:37
  Jean Dubois: You talked about a tattoo, but… I don't know, I checked it out. We're not much of tattoo people, so… Yeah.
• 44:46
  Marcy Larson: Eric definitely won't. I have one. I have Beastill on my arm.
• 44:50
  Marcy Larson: You know, I think he's forgiven me for it, but that's about as much as.
• 44:53
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. Well, our other guy…
• 44:55
  Marcy Larson: I'm going on a retreat here in May, and one of the activities that we're, like, voting on is to get tattoos. Like, Eric may leave me if I get.
• 45:04
  Jean Dubois: We're not, we're not champing that, so… Yeah.
• 45:09
  Marcy Larson: So, I want you to spend some time talking about your two different books, because you each wrote a book quite different, but… and I don't know who did it first, I don't know anything about that, but please talk about that a little bit.
• 45:22
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, I just…
• 45:25
  Jean Dubois: 10 years ago, I just felt that, I needed to write a book, like, to let know… let people know what took place, and if I could help somebody else that's going through the same thing, or has gone through the same thing. That was…
• 45:39
  Jean Dubois: my main reason why. And so, this is… this is my book.
• 45:45
  Jean Dubois: Hello.
• 45:46
  Marcy Larson: Very good.
• 45:46
  Jean Dubois: Cancer, and .
• 45:49
  Marcy Larson: So what was the title of it again?
• 45:51
  Jean Dubois: I lost my child to cancer, a mother story from diagnosis to healing after loss.
• 45:58
  Jean Dubois: So… That's beautiful.
• 46:01
  Jean Dubois: So, I just started writing it, kind of, you know, getting my thoughts out, and then I was talking to some other girlfriends, and one of my girlfriends said, you know, you should just…
• 46:12
  Jean Dubois: Go away, and just…
• 46:14
  Jean Dubois: go right somewhere. Either she suggested it, or I thought of it, or it was… yeah, I can't remember how it came about, and she goes… and she goes, I went to this beautiful B&B, she said, on Vancouver Island. She said the owners are just the sweetest people.
• 46:30
  Jean Dubois: So, I… I booked a room there, I explained to the lady.
• 46:36
  Jean Dubois: I said, I'm gonna buy a whole bunch of snacks and stuff to drink. I'm just gonna lock myself up in the room. I might come out once in a while. I said, but I'm writing a book, and I just need to
• 46:48
  Jean Dubois: Right.
• 46:49
  Jean Dubois: And that's what I did. I wrote without any editing or whatever, because I knew as a songwriter that you don't edit as you go along. You just… you're more creative if you just keep writing. There's always an editor after the fact.
• 47:05
  Jean Dubois: So that you can clean up stuff, or whatever. So, yeah, that's what I did, was I just went, took it from the, the day I… we got that phone call until afterwards, right? So…
• 47:19
  Jean Dubois: I,
• 47:21
  Jean Dubois: I got a publisher, and, it was from a publisher that's on Vancouver Island, in Victoria, and so it was… wasn't,
• 47:32
  Jean Dubois: cheap to, you know… at that time, there wasn't Amazon where you could, you know, just upload it yourself and stuff, so, to have an editor and everything, so I did go with this publisher.
• 47:44
  Jean Dubois: So, what I did was I did an Indiegogo campaign, and anybody who pre-purchased a book
• 47:52
  Jean Dubois: depending on how many books you bought, if you got it autographed, it would be, like, say, $50 for a paperback, if you got it autographed. So then I just kept track of all my pre-orders, so that when it was all done, then I just… then I mailed out all these…
• 48:09
  Jean Dubois: these books, but I raised at least half the money I needed to publish my book, right? So, yeah, and then I did a book tour. You did, yeah.
• 48:19
  Jean Dubois: And and I went to places mostly where I knew a lot of people, right? So, yeah, so… and then book signings were a little bit tougher, like, in bookstores, because I had a great big banner behind me that said this, right?
• 48:37
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 48:37
  Jean Dubois: So nobody was coming up to me, and I could see them in the distance. I'm a pretty good read of people, and I could see them kind of whispering, like.
• 48:47
  Jean Dubois: And they…
• 48:48
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, right.
• 48:49
  Jean Dubois: They didn't know how to approach me. They didn't know what to say. Unless it was somebody who did lose a child, or knew somebody that did, then they came and talked to me. So…
• 49:01
  Jean Dubois: But, other than that, just all the people that bought the book, they were just, like, lots of them said, I started reading it, I had to put it down. I couldn't… I couldn't read it. They said it was just too hard.
• 49:14
  Jean Dubois: Lots of other people said that, like, it's not a very big book, so it's, you can sit down and read it in a couple hours or so.
• 49:22
  Jean Dubois: And others read right through it and went, like, just, oh my god. Like, the cards, the emails, and the texts that I got that… from people saying.
• 49:34
  Jean Dubois: I don't know how you did that, but thank you for doing it, right? So, you know, because it was just…
• 49:41
  Jean Dubois: They didn't know everything that went on. Yeah, they didn't understand what we went through. Yeah, so it gave people an understanding. There was other people that went, oh, well, this will let me enable me to go help a relative who lost a child to help them out a little bit, right?
• 50:03
  Jean Dubois: That felt really good, that.
• 50:05
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, for sure.
• 50:06
  Jean Dubois: that it was helping people that way. What's the word I'm trying to think of when you write
• 50:13
  Jean Dubois: something… He's not coming to me right now.
• 50:17
  Marcy Larson: verdict?
• 50:18
  Jean Dubois: Cathartic. Cathartic, yes. That was very cathartic for me. And, shortly after I wrote the book, I should have brought my necklace down, but anyways, I really believe in,
• 50:30
  Jean Dubois: butterflies, and to dragonflies, I mean, you know, the transformation that happens with a dragonfly. And so, right after I wrote my book, I had time, I don't know, about 6 hours before I had to catch my plane back to Alberta.
• 50:46
  Jean Dubois: So I went walking around downtown Sydney, which is a, like,
• 50:51
  Jean Dubois: coastal town on the island, and it's really kind of cool, so they got really cool shops, and I walked into this one shop, and it had all, like, a variety of stuff. A little bit of clothes, and shoes, and scarves, a little bit of jewelry, you know, one of those places, and I walked past this curio cabinet, and I walked past it, and I just stopped dead in my tracks, and I went.
• 51:14
  Jean Dubois: there's something in there that I need to look at.
• 51:18
  Jean Dubois: It's like, somebody stop me. And I backed up, and there's this beautiful dragonfly.
• 51:26
  Jean Dubois: dependent.
• 51:27
  Jean Dubois: And it's like, think of Swarovski crystals.
• 51:32
  Jean Dubois: And it's a great big pendant, and it has, blue in it. It was blue and white, stones.
• 51:40
  Jean Dubois: And, the teal blue that is in there, that's why I picked this teal blue, is because it was Chantel's favorite color.
• 51:49
  Marcy Larson: Oh…
• 51:50
  Jean Dubois: So I had to buy that necklace.
• 51:53
  Marcy Larson: I'm not sure.
• 51:54
  Jean Dubois: I didn't look at the price, I went, that's mine, right?
• 51:57
  Marcy Larson: Oh.
• 51:58
  Jean Dubois: Like, a sign from her that, Mom, you did it, you wrote it, you know, like, you wrote the story.
• 52:04
  Marcy Larson: Right?
• 52:05
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so… Yeah, so it was.
• 52:11
  Marcy Larson: I love it.
• 52:12
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, it was healing in that sense as well, and being able to share that story. When I did my book tour, I would always read a chapter, you know, aloud to everybody that was in attendance.
• 52:27
  Jean Dubois: So, yeah, it was just having all that support as well, even, you know,
• 52:34
  Jean Dubois: That… that much time later, that people were, you know, embracing me, and just, you know, like, you just…
• 52:41
  Jean Dubois: complimenting me on my courage and everything, and… and, you know, like, I still… like, it was the hypnotherapy, it was my… my husband, you know, like, his love and support, even though he was going through his,
• 52:56
  Jean Dubois: his grief as well. But, yeah, so that's…
• 53:00
  Jean Dubois: it… so I don't have it in bookstores anymore, it, like, the sales really slowed down, and I didn't… it came to a point where I didn't want to promote it anymore, because…
• 53:12
  Jean Dubois: I kept reliving it, telling my story, and I didn't want to do that anymore. I was doing so good emotionally.
• 53:20
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 53:21
  Jean Dubois: and having a happy, full life again, that I was… I didn't want to do it anymore, yeah, not all the time, and I just… I couldn't find that strength in me, and I… like I said, I didn't want to go backwards.
• 53:35
  Marcy Larson: Oh, I totally.
• 53:35
  Jean Dubois: words so well, so I still have it, and when I talk about it, you know, and then people will say, oh, do you got a copy? So I have that at, you know, and some in the vehicle that I keep with me all the time, so that people can read it. So it's still there, and it still will continue to, you know, help other people.
• 53:54
  Jean Dubois: I was… we're part of an organization.
• 53:58
  Jean Dubois: Called.
• 53:59
  Marcy Larson: Do you still get it on Amazon, or no?
• 54:01
  Jean Dubois: Not mine. I thought we could, but no. No, yeah. So, we're part of an organization. We were part of one on Vancouver Island as well, but here in Alberta, we're part of an organization called Helping Families Handle Cancer, and what it does is provides financial support directly to the families.
• 54:20
  Jean Dubois: So, it's not for cancer research and everything, it's for people who are going through a tough time like we did, helping them financially pay their bills, and so on and so forth.
• 54:31
  Marcy Larson: Beautiful.
• 54:31
  Jean Dubois: Right? So I was a board member for quite some time, but then I had to let that go, because it's located 2 hours away from us, so to always go to board meetings and try to do fundraisers, it was starting to be a bit much.
• 54:44
  Marcy Larson: For me, because me even doing my music. I did do, like, a tour where I, perform music, but half of the money that I got from being paid at these shows, I gave to helping family handle cancer as well. So, we still contribute to that, charity.
• 55:03
  Jean Dubois: And we always will, yeah. And whenever we can give more, we give more.
• 55:08
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so… so yeah, so…
• 55:10
  Marcy Larson: Talk about your book a little bit, John.
• 55:11
  Jean Dubois: Yes. Sure. So, mine is, much newer, I just, it's called Dads Can't Fix Everything, and one man's quest to fix his world, and that of those around him.
• 55:24
  Marcy Larson: So…
• 55:25
  Jean Dubois: what inspired me for this one was… I just released it in November, but it was about 3 years ago, I read a story about a guy who was a dad, a younger dad, with a small family.
• 55:37
  Jean Dubois: And he was having… he was really struggling. He didn't feel he was adequate as a dad. There was something… I can't even remember exactly.
• 55:46
  Jean Dubois: what,
• 55:48
  Jean Dubois: prompted him to tell his story. I think it was a news story. But, I thought to myself, you know, that struck a chord with me, because I've been there.
• 55:58
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. And, especially with, what happened with Chantel.
• 56:02
  Jean Dubois: And he felt totally alone, and I thought, you know what? You're not alone. There's plenty of other guys. It's not to diminish what was going on with him, it's just to… I was thinking, somebody needs to…
• 56:14
  Jean Dubois: maybe he needs, a way to be encouraged and show him, like, hey, you're not alone with this, we can help you out, there's tools out there for you. And I thought, man, that's something I wish I would have had.
• 56:26
  Jean Dubois: You know, even as a young dad, not just when Chantal was sick, but in general as a dad. And I did write about what happened with Chantal in one of the chapters, it's one of the chapters, but in essence, the book is…
• 56:38
  Jean Dubois: describing how I grew up as the son of a fixer, my dad, he could fix anything and everything, so he taught me that.
• 56:47
  Jean Dubois: And I, as I grew up, I did more and more on my own, and… so…
• 56:53
  Jean Dubois: where I was going with the book is…
• 56:56
  Jean Dubois: Sometimes something happens in your life where you can't fix it.
• 57:00
  Jean Dubois: You know, like, I could not fix Chantel, obviously. Nobody could, and that happens sometimes in life.
• 57:08
  Jean Dubois: And you do the best you can, and sometimes things go to a certain point, they cannot be fixed, but other times.
• 57:16
  Jean Dubois: They can be, but maybe not by you. Maybe somebody else can do it.
• 57:21
  Jean Dubois: Maybe you can… somebody can help you, or somebody can do it for you.
• 57:25
  Jean Dubois: So, that was… that's the whole gist of the book. It took me,
• 57:30
  Jean Dubois: the idea came to me about 3 years ago, when I read that article, and I was all gung-ho, I'm gonna write a book about this. I wrote about 3 or 4 chapters, and then in fairly quick, fairly quickly after that, but…
• 57:46
  Jean Dubois: And then I thought to myself, well, who the heck's gonna read this? I'm just some regular guy from Canada, and nobody's gonna ever read this.
• 57:54
  Jean Dubois: And then I read a book called, Be Seen by Jen Gottlieb. I'm not sure if you've heard of her, but, she wrote a very inspirational book, and in there, it's, one of her mantras is called HOPE, H-O-P-E, which is an acronym for Help One Person Every Day.
• 58:11
  Jean Dubois: And I thought, you know what, that's all I need to do is just help one person.
• 58:15
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 58:15
  Jean Dubois: So that kind of inspired me to continue writing, so I think a whole year had elapsed before I went back to writing, and I did a similar thing to shit with… that's… that Shelly did. I suggested to you. Yeah, you suggested… you just need to get away, because I was trying to write a little bit…
• 58:30
  Jean Dubois: after work, I work 10-hour days, and you're tired after… you're up early, you're stay… you're working late.
• 58:38
  Jean Dubois: I didn't have the creativity coming to me to write.
• 58:41
  Jean Dubois: So, should they take some time off.
• 58:43
  Jean Dubois: So I did. I took a week off.
• 58:46
  Jean Dubois: Went to a local lake that had a nice hotel.
• 58:52
  Jean Dubois: just locked myself in there, and I wrote. I wrote for, like, 3 or 4 days steady.
• 58:57
  Jean Dubois: And I finally got something that was more of a book.
• 59:01
  Jean Dubois: And then, beyond that, and I wrote a couple more chapters afterwards, I kept rereading it, there was more ideas that come to me, and this is how I ended up with my book. And,
• 59:14
  Jean Dubois: I think of all… I mean, I told Shelly, my goal here is just to even help one guy. I don't care, just one guy.
• 59:20
  Jean Dubois: And… I've already done that, because I was told that.
• 59:25
  Jean Dubois: I've had an impact, especially,
• 59:27
  Jean Dubois: Some of my coworkers heard… coworkers heard I wrote a book. I never advertised them, it was all kind of a fluke that they heard about me writing a book.
• 59:36
  Jean Dubois: So one of these young gentlemen, he's a young guy with a family.
• 59:40
  Jean Dubois: And he read the book, and he come and told me, he says, Jean, he says.
• 59:44
  Jean Dubois: I loved your book. It really, really struck a chord. He just… he was almost speechless.
• 59:50
  Jean Dubois: Which kind of made me feel good, in a way. And so, really, he really appreciated that I… that… what I wrote.
• 59:58
  Jean Dubois: And he said that that, you know, that's gonna help set me up a little bit, because it's things you don't think about, right? When you're younger, you don't think about the future that much.
• 1:00:07
  Jean Dubois: And then even just a few days ago, he come and see me again, just to reiterate how much of an impact the book had made.
• 1:00:14
  Jean Dubois: And that's all…
• 1:00:15
  Marcy Larson: Beautiful.
• 1:00:16
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so that's perfect. And then, just this past weekend, a good friend of mine, he also, read the book. He'd gone partway through. He hadn't gone into Chantel's story yet. So, he joked around about what I'd written before, and it was kind of… it's kind of light-hearted stuff.
• 1:00:33
  Jean Dubois: And then when he saw… I saw him again just this past weekend, just this past week at work.
• 1:00:39
  Jean Dubois: He says, I read the rest of your book.
• 1:00:41
  Jean Dubois: Then you got…
• 1:00:43
  Jean Dubois: pretty emotional, because he didn't understand what I'd gone through, or what we had gone through, and… Yeah.
• 1:00:50
  Jean Dubois: Huh. It was all we could do to, not get emotional? Yeah.
• 1:00:56
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 1:00:57
  Jean Dubois: we're standing in the lunchroom at work, and talking about this, and he said, okay, well, we gotta talk… we gotta talk about this in your office or something, because, you know, or talk about something else, because, yeah, I mean, it struck a chord. He doesn't even have any kids.
• 1:01:10
  Jean Dubois: But because he knows me, I think that makes a bit of a… And he highly respects you. Yeah, yeah. He's a young guy, and is…
• 1:01:16
  Jean Dubois: And, you know.
• 1:01:19
  Jean Dubois: I think is what it is, is a lot of times a young guy, even though he's not even a dad yet.
• 1:01:25
  Jean Dubois: And,
• 1:01:27
  Jean Dubois: it makes me feel good that it… that my book has an impact, and it's going to help somebody, and that was my goal, ultimately, is to help just one person, and now I'm getting feedback on how much it is, right? So, you know, that was my goal.
• 1:01:43
  Marcy Larson: Well, and, I mean… I told you, Eric's never, ever…
• 1:01:49
  Marcy Larson: It's given me a guess, brought me a guest.
• 1:01:53
  Marcy Larson: But he felt really strongly.
• 1:01:55
  Marcy Larson: After hearing you talk… that you needed to be on, that your story needed to be told. So…
• 1:02:04
  Marcy Larson: I think it's just beautiful.
• 1:02:06
  Jean Dubois: Thank you.
• 1:02:07
  Marcy Larson: And it is such an important thing, because I do… I think a lot about Eric with that, and about how, obviously, he couldn't fix Andy. He did attempt CPR by the side of the road, and…
• 1:02:19
  Marcy Larson: You know, he's an anesthesiologist, if anyone could have brought him back.
• 1:02:23
  Jean Dubois: He would have been Eric, but he couldn't. Yeah.
• 1:02:26
  Marcy Larson: And then I think what was even more difficult in some ways was that he couldn't fix me, and he couldn't fix my other kids. He couldn't fix any of it, right? And he just wanted to so badly.
• 1:02:37
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 1:02:38
  Marcy Larson: So…
• 1:02:38
  Jean Dubois: I just think it's…
• 1:02:40
  Marcy Larson: It's just, I think a beautiful book to kind of… Try to help.
• 1:02:46
  Marcy Larson: guys realize that you can't, because I think a lot of times, that's what you feel like you're supposed to do. You're supposed to take care of the family, you're.
• 1:02:56
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:02:56
  Marcy Larson: Make everything okay?
• 1:02:58
  Marcy Larson: And it's really hard when you can't.
• 1:03:00
  Jean Dubois: Right. I think that's the thing, dads, men in general, I guess, is just a instinctive thing, it's just we're hardwired that way. We are, yes.
• 1:03:10
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, and I think, you know, you started at the beginning by talking about how some marriages break apart, and
• 1:03:17
  Marcy Larson: How sometimes I think that can be because, you know, maybe one person or the other, oftentimes probably the dad, is trying to fix it.
• 1:03:27
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 1:03:28
  Marcy Larson: And when you're in… deep in the grief and really sad.
• 1:03:32
  Marcy Larson: So I'm like, I just need to be sad.
• 1:03:35
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, yeah, just, yeah, exactly, and that's very…
• 1:03:39
  Marcy Larson: I struggle with my own dad. My own dad so wants me to be okay and to be happy that it has put a strain.
• 1:03:47
  Jean Dubois: Hmm.
• 1:03:47
  Marcy Larson: Somewhat in our relationship, because… You just have to be sad, and you have to be kind of okay.
• 1:03:54
  Jean Dubois: Yes.
• 1:03:54
  Marcy Larson: Not being able to fix it.
• 1:03:56
  Jean Dubois: Right? Yeah. And another thing is, what we've heard before, maybe not directly to us, but kind of indirectly, is what somebody says, oh, it's been 3 years, get over it. Yeah. I can't believe people actually say that. It's because they've never, ever experienced it.
• 1:04:14
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, if they did, they wouldn't, you know?
• 1:04:16
  Jean Dubois: Exactly, yeah.
• 1:04:17
  Marcy Larson: Never say that.
• 1:04:18
  Jean Dubois: Yeah. I find that…
• 1:04:21
  Marcy Larson: say, Shelly, you saying that I felt like me again at 5 years, that's pretty good.
• 1:04:27
  Jean Dubois: He…
• 1:04:27
  Marcy Larson: To a lot of people, and a lot of people, it's not at fun.
• 1:04:30
  Jean Dubois: No, like I said.
• 1:04:32
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 1:04:32
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, I still…
• 1:04:33
  Marcy Larson: The very first support group I was in, the facilitator said it was 9 years before she felt like herself, and it freaked me out beyond…
• 1:04:41
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 1:04:41
  Marcy Larson: But it takes just varying amounts of time for people.
• 1:04:46
  Jean Dubois: It does, and like I say, without the hypnotherapy, it just… that did it for me, and it was a lot of hypnotherapy for a while.
• 1:04:57
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, I did EMBR with my thing.
• 1:04:59
  Jean Dubois: Okay, yeah. So, but, you know, it's interesting, because, I could never,
• 1:05:06
  Jean Dubois: say, my heart is full. You know when somebody feels really blessed about something, and they say, my heart feels full.
• 1:05:14
  Jean Dubois: I can never say that. I can't, because my heart is… there's always a piece of it that's… and I can never… I used to be able to wear, like, heavy pendants on my chest, like, big jewelry.
• 1:05:28
  Jean Dubois: I can't anymore.
• 1:05:30
  Jean Dubois: Because my heart is still hurting a bit, and as soon as I put something really big on it, it's just, like, it doesn't belong there.
• 1:05:39
  Jean Dubois: I wear smaller necklaces, and even when I'm out performing, I used to wear these great big chokers and stuff, and there's been times where I've, okay, I'm gonna put one on tonight, and I end up taking it off, because I just… I just can't.
• 1:05:55
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so there's… there's parts of me like that that I still carry on, but, yeah, so there's always… it's always gonna be there. And I was gonna add on, you know, like, it seems like our parents' generation, a lot of them,
• 1:06:10
  Jean Dubois: A lot of them will say, just get over it. There's a lot of men, because I think they feel they have to move on. They were never taught that you can actually grieve.
• 1:06:21
  Jean Dubois: And so they were telling their wives, like, move on! I had a cousin that said that directly to me. His wife was telling me how she lost a daughter, and it was a murder, so it was quite…
• 1:06:35
  Jean Dubois: awful, and…
• 1:06:36
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 1:06:37
  Jean Dubois: So she's telling me about it, and… but then he pipes up and says, well, you know what I told her? I've told her it's time to move on.
• 1:06:46
  Jean Dubois: Well, I got up really upset with him. I looked at him, and I said, don't you ever say that to anybody, and especially your wife.
• 1:06:54
  Jean Dubois: You know, like, you just… you don't. You don't. No, you don't.
• 1:06:59
  Marcy Larson: Yeah.
• 1:07:00
  Jean Dubois: No, it was… yeah, so for people to say that, yeah. And I actually wrote a song.
• 1:07:07
  Jean Dubois: It's called, Please Don't, and it's, like, saying… it's saying, don't say those, please don't, don't say those words.
• 1:07:15
  Jean Dubois: to me, so I wrote it with my… my… I have a duo partner. We've been together for quite a few years, and she wrote it with me. And so, when I put it out on social media.
• 1:07:27
  Jean Dubois: then people start saying, well, what do you say? Like, I don't… like, if you don't say those things, what do you say? So then we wrote another word… another song called Words to Say.
• 1:07:39
  Marcy Larson: Yeah, we've never… we've never, please don't, we did, we didn't professionally record it, but we did, and it's on our, the video is on our, YouTube channel, Sugar and Spice.
• 1:07:53
  Jean Dubois: You have to put Sugar and Spice Edmonton, because otherwise there's… there's lots of other sugar and spices out there. Yeah. So…
• 1:08:00
  Marcy Larson: Yay!
• 1:08:01
  Jean Dubois: Yeah, so it's on our YouTube channel, and so if somebody wants to watch that video, and the song is called Please Don't. Yeah.
• 1:08:11
  Jean Dubois: So…
• 1:08:11
  Marcy Larson: Thank you for that!
• 1:08:12
  Jean Dubois: Fair enough.
• 1:08:13
  Marcy Larson: Getting into that for sure!
• 1:08:14
  Jean Dubois: I'll send you the link, yeah.
• 1:08:16
  Marcy Larson: I would love that. I would love that.
• 1:08:19
  Jean Dubois: Yeah.
• 1:08:19
  Marcy Larson: Thank you so much to both of you for sharing your story and sharing Chantal with us. I appreciate it so, so much.
• 1:08:28
  Jean Dubois: Well, thank you, and thank you to Eric for, suggesting. Yeah. You know, it was our pleasure to be here. And we wish you, you know, like,
• 1:08:37
  Jean Dubois: I don't want to say wish you, but I hope that you have a healing journey that will take you forward in your life, and that one day you will feel yourself again.
• 1:08:48
  Marcy Larson: Yes, thank you so much.
• 1:08:50
  Jean Dubois: You're welcome, yeah.