Suzanne Falter on Being the Woman Her Daughter Wanted Her to Be

Suzanne: 00:00

I knew my life didn't work. And the other thing is that when she collapsed, she was in a coma for six days because she had been oxygen deprived but revived by EMT T. So she was in a coma in the hospital for six days before we had to take her off of life support and end her life because her brain was so severely damaged and they couldn't figure it out for a week. So there she was. And I walked into her hospital room the very first night, and I immediately knew she'd die. And I knew that I would have to change and become the person that she would have wanted me to be. I knew that I was not happy. I knew that I was overworking. I knew that my life had somehow scrambled out of control in the way that lives do when we don't really know what to do to change things. We think we can't change things. We think we're terribly stuck. And in fact, all we are is fixed in place by our own beliefs.

Danny: 01:10

This week, I'm chatting with Suzanne Falter, host of Selfcare for Extremely Busy Women, a show that looks to help busy women find happiness through self care. Suzanne, thank you for joining us today. How about you tell the listeners about yourself and your podcast?

Suzanne: 01:25

Hi, Danny. Thank you for having me. Well, it's a crazy thing. Just to give you a little background, I started an earnest pursuit of self care back in 2012 when I was a workaholic, and my business had actually imploded because it was too busy and I was burning out. And not long after that, my 22 year old daughter dropped dead from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest. And that experience of losing my business, a romantic breakup, had come along with it. Those things were so intense that her death actually completely undidney as well. And I just found that I didn't really know where to start or what to do. I was just completely laid out by it. And for two years, I didn't actually work. And I found myself grieving, of course. But I also discovered some real fundamentals to selfcare in that experience that showed me how important it was to really focus on ourselves, to take care of ourselves. I had never really done that. I'd been externally focused all my life. I had been here for other people. I had worked very hard and been super diligent, usually without a lot of support. I hadn't asked for help, but now I had to ask for help. So the self care story really comes from a crisis, a really bad crisis in which I was forced to stop and reassess. And now my work for the last several years has been around selfcare and helping busy women like myself just learn how to stop taking responsibility for everybody else's stuff and to slow down and to go with him, which is really what my daughter was doing in her life before her very sudden and unexpected death.

Danny: 03:39

And you mentioned and obviously we'll talk about that more throughout the episode. You'd mentioned that helped you shift your mindset. And now with the podcast and also the books that you've written as well, because you're published offer it's very much about understanding why it's important for self care and how to, you know, the different things that you can do around self care. And with the podcast that launched in March 2020. So I'm curious because obviously it had a gestation period beforehand because of the event that happened in 2012. And I'm wondering what your goals were for the podcast at the time and how it may be evolved since then.

Suzanne: 04:20

You know, it's really interesting because the podcast actually started in 2018. And I called it the Self Care Southern in the beginning. And I really didn't know how I was going to do it. I had done a podcast back in 20 03, 20 05. I'd been a very early podcaster, but I had stopped because I had gotten too busy. And back then I was doing marketing consulting. So now getting into the show, the Selfcare for Extremely Busy Women show, I always knew I wanted a format where I would talk to people who covered all kinds of self care. And I mean, Danny, we're talking about people who talk about nutrition and exercise and how to treat your back correctly and yoga and breathing. But we're also talking about people who talk about verbal abuse and how to set boundaries and why support groups are useful. And I mean, I really try to cover a very broad range of what selfcare is. And over the years that I've done this show, I've done almost 170 episodes. As we record this, I've learned so much about self care. I mean, that's the great thing. I'm sure, you know, that you get these shows going and all kinds of people show up. And I have met so many inspiring people. And at the same time, every third show, I record my own ideas about various things. And I always include a little essay in the very beginning. I'm a writer. I've been a writer, professional writer for 40 years. I've published like 1415 books, something like that, in nonfiction and fiction. And in these essays, I read their blogs from my blog post, their posts from my blog. And they're always about these little journeys I've gone on regarding some kind of experience. And after Teal died, I wrote hundreds of essays. It was really one of the ways that I coped with my grief because I was learning so much. I was surrendering to the crisis, and I was learning how to surrender to the crisis. And I was letting the crisis teach me what it had to teach me and what I needed to learn. And I was also going through my daughter's journals, and she had written so many profound things she was a very, very wise person. And I've learned a lot about how to live a more balanced, kind and compassionate and self compassionate life as a result. And I think those little truths have built as I've continued to record the show. And it will continue to evolve as my own interests evolve, because I have no intention of stopping it anytime soon. I want to be one of those 500 episode podcasters. I think that would be cool.

Danny: 07:22

And you're not far off that you've got, as you mentioned, 100 and 4160 episodes in the back so far.

Suzanne: 07:28

68 I just recorded this week so far.

Danny: 07:31

That's awesome. Kudos. And you mentioned that the show, it does cover a lot of different topics, August or 20, I guess, with the overarching theme. But you do cover a lot of topics. And one of the episodes one of your earlier ones from May 2020, you were talking with Cheryl Jones about you mentioned grief, obviously.

Suzanne: 07:51

About grief. Yes.

Danny: 07:52

About grief and importance. I liked this particular episode because they spoke about the grief of living through the pandemic that we're still in almost two years down the line and how we need to use grief to navigate the pandemic and recognize why we feel the way we do. And I'm wondering because that was an episode, I guess, at the earlier stages of the pandemic and where it is today, do you feel that we still struggle to recognize that we are gravy for the way of life? We've lost the way of life. It's probably changed forever now. And the things that we can't do that we used to.

Suzanne: 08:30

Well, I'll tell you, the Omacron variant has thrown such a right turn into this whole experience, because we really thought we were at least here in California. We really thought we turned the corner. We were feeling pretty smug. It's like, oh, we got this. I'm going back to the gym. I'm swimming in the pool. I'm going to live choir rehearsals. I'm doing all these things I thought I wouldn't get to do for years. And now it's all shut down again. I mean, it's not literally shut down, but I've shut my own participation down because I don't want to get sick. And, you know, there is a certain level of denial about how much toll this has taken, because I think it is very hard for us to see what we've lost. Almost nearly a million people have died in the United States. That's 3% of a percent of the US population. Doesn't seem like much, but it's a million people. Okay. It's 887,000 or something like that, but roughly right. I don't really think my brain can process it. So what I've been doing and you may find this a little strange. I don't know. I'm a big jigsaw puzzler, and I talk about that in my work because I think jigsaw puzzles and puzzles of that type really help us get into the Alpha State and restore our brains when we have been working hard. And they also help us create something called the default mode in our brain, which is our ability to Daydream and have inspirations and receive messages and get insights while doing something else like gardening or jigsaw puzzles. So I've been working on Peter Bruegel The Elders 16th century painting of the Black Death, which is a very fantastical and graphic and very spiritual painting of people dying during a plague. And I've been doing this to help myself really understand what we're going through because I can't wrap my head around it. It's too big. Most people can't. I mean, we're really focused on will the Donut store be open today? Will I have to go to work? Where are my kids going to go if I have to go into the office and they don't have school? Come on. These are bigger issues than can I possibly grasp the seismic nature of the shift in our entire world? But, for instance, I live here in Oakland, California, and Brown Sugar Kitchen, which was one of our most famous restaurants, a fantastic soul food restaurant, just went out of business completely. I never, ever would have expected that. That's the kind of stuff that is happening right alongside of the deaths. My gospel choir that I love to sing with, we have had a season, but pretty held back. I mean, I think the main choir does 60, 70 performances a year, and I think they've done 15 or 20 this year. And it's just like these are the little signposts of a life that may not return to normal anytime soon. Very long answer to your good question.

Danny: 12:16

No, that's an awesome answer. Thank you. I can't remember when I saw the graphic. There was a graphic shared on one of the main news stations, and they were trying to point they were trying to make people connect to what's happening, because sometimes it does seem disconnected, because it's not impacting my city as opposed to that city or this town as opposed to that or this school. And they superimposed the graphic of the day that you'd mentioned in different countries and what that would mean if you place that in cities, in States, et cetera. So you can think, let's say, New York City. I'm not sure how many people live in New York. If it's 5 million, for argument's sake. And if there was 1 million Americans that died, you put that that's obviously 20% of New York. That includes all the businesses, all the school kids, all the people in this little section. And I think that helped. Sometimes that helps you understand. Holy crap. This is why I feel this is why I'm tired all the time. This is why I'm worried about putting my kids back into school and the stress that comes with and everything. So it's weird to think what life was like. I can't remember what life was like pre March 2020, I guess, you know.

Suzanne: 13:34

More people have died in the United States than the populations of San Francisco and San Jose combined, two big cities here, as many as the entire population of the state of Vermont in the US. It's just extraordinary. And that's not even the people who have long haul probate or whose children were impacted because parents got sick or people have really been seriously disabled by.

Danny: 14:05

The long term care. That's the worry as well. Even if you have my old symptoms, that the long term effect of that. You'd mentioned earlier. You'd mention about one of the topics on your show was about verbal abuse. And also your guest, Patricia Evans, spoke about that and the different dynamic, I guess, from physical abuse, which tends to wrongly have a sort of more visible kind of abuse, more visible status when it comes to that. And I'm wondering, do you feel like verbal abuse gets the same attention, or do you feel there's, like, still a lot of unhelpful silence on the topic because it's not recognized as much as the physical abuse?

Suzanne: 14:53

You know, I think it's an interesting question because so much has been the lights are shining on so many things that have not been exposed in our culture. And I'm speaking us. I know you're recording out of Canada. I'm really speaking about the United States specifically, but for instance, the MeToo movement, which is really about sexual abuse and sexual harassment. I think that opened the door for a lot more people to say, I don't like how you're treating me in a number of capacities, sexual or otherwise. And the thing that has done it is all these people coming forth, these women who have a hashtag and have been wronged, just as in other social justice movements that have really come through in the last few years. We're living in a world where people are sick and tired and they're not going to take it anymore. And that is what happens during a pandemic. I've been reading about the bubonic plague and the number of people who are no longer available to work in manual labor jobs that they didn't like, apprentices and serfs and such. Suddenly there weren't as many of them because 50% of the entire world population died during the bubonic plague or the recorded population at least. And that meant that 50% of the labor force disappeared. And here we are having the great resignation because people are sick of their dysfunctional work situations. They're tired of being harassed by their bosses. That's transformation at the highest level that's people standing up and saying, I will not tolerate this. And one of my real tenants of selfcare is to set boundaries and to say no and to say, I'm sorry, that's actually not okay with me, which can be done in a polite and straightforward way. We don't have to become shrill and obnoxious about it. We can just say it like it is. And when you do, you can get some surprising results. That's what I'm really loving about this era that we're living in in general, is because the honesty with which people are beginning to conduct themselves and the recognition that that is the right thing to do when we are feeling harassed and we set a limit, that's a good thing.

Danny: 17:23

And I know you've mentioned before that you feel sometimes boundaries can be hard for women to set. And this is what your show and your books help with is to overcome these boundaries and how to not be set by them. That's a terrible way of word flow there. I'm glad someone did. And I'm wondering, do you feel that it's because prior to obviously, the Me Too movement and more people and more women, especially having the courage to speak up, do you feel that often it's hard for boundaries to be overcome because it's almost like there's a predetermined outcome. It doesn't matter what I say. As a woman. People are going to judge me and not listen to me and have a decision already made.

Suzanne: 18:13

I think that's well put. Yeah. Because we do think there's some people call it always already listening. I always already know what you're going to say right there's. That but there's also a huge amount of guilt. Women who are, well, just kind of average women. The women in my Facebook group, for instance, often talk about how they're just sick of doing all the laundry or they're sick of doing all the housework in addition to their job, or they're sick of their boss expecting them to work late every night. They're just tired of it. And then they're encouraged by the other members of the group to put their foot down and say no, or ask for help or say, hey, why don't you make dinner three nights a week or whatever the solution is? And often they're talking about how they feel so guilty thinking about themselves before everyone else. And that is cultural conditioning. It isn't just that you think it's hopeless. It's that you don't even think you're allowed. Right. And this is something that goes on between men and women. It's in the culture. It's handed down to us by our parents generations. And it's pernicious. And studies have been done about housework in which it has been uncovered. I think the last study was actually done in maybe 2018. It's not super current with the pandemic, but the number of hours of housework and home care and child care that husbands are doing relative to their wives has increased by one half hour in the last ten years.

Danny: 19:56

Wow.

Suzanne: 19:57

And women are working three to 4 hours a day in the home and men are working hour. And that's just consistent. It's changed a little bit. So there's a lot of lip service going on about how. Oh, yeah, I'm a really participatory husband and blah, blah, blah. And sometimes women overproduce. This is something I love to write about and blog about. Overproduction is a really pernicious thing because what that is, is we like to do more than the job requires. If our children don't like vegetables, we just think we have to make little fancy vegetable croquettes from organic hand grated squash and carrots that we have gone to the farmers market to buy. Why can't the kids just have a carrot? It's okay if it just comes from a grocery store. This is the level of detail that a lot of women really feel is important because it makes them feel like they're nurturing others. And it's certainly true at work. Ask yourself if you're the last one to leave the office, if everybody else won't stay on the weekends, but you will, et cetera, et cetera.

Danny: 21:10

It's sad to hear that, like the statistics that you shared about the extra half hour because I was hoping that would be more than that. When I speak to my kids, I've got a young boy and daughter, my son's eleven, my daughter's name. And we talk about what it was like when I was their age and growing up in Scotland and everything. And it was very much to your description of like the husband always went out to work. The wife was supposed to to be the homemaker and know her place for one of a bad description. I apologize for that phrase and that terminology. And even when I speak to friends back in Scotland, I can see that's changed so very much to your point, a cultural thing, but I'm surprised it's still only half an hour. That's increased. That just blows my mind as to how much work still needs to be done.

Suzanne: 21:58

Well, I know, and when the studies were originally done, it was way out of balance. That was 20 years ago. I forgot the name of the author who wrote a seminal book about how women were double shifting. They were working huge amounts of time at home on top of full time jobs, which really came out of the now movement in the 70s and 80s when women started really demanding and getting work that was much more equivalent to men's work. But the home situation did not change accordingly. And we're now in a period where I think the generations that are coming in are really not putting up with it and are really looking at all kinds of different flex arrangements. I have a good friend who wanted to have a child in her late 30s, didn't have a partner, so got pregnant with a friend, a good friend who said he would co parent with her in kind of a casual way. And they live in the same neighborhood and they flex share the child back and forth. And her mother lives with her and her mother helps do a lot of the child care. And her mother's retired and didn't have much to do. And it's kind of an ideal solution. So when you think about that, that's pretty cool because that's creative, it's flexible, it worked for them, and it's just really sweet.

Danny: 23:27

I'm tapping my desk. I think this is made of wood. I'm not sure I touch wood disapproves, because examples like that are few and far between, clearly. And I'm sure my wife listens back to this. She may be nodded. She may not be. I'm not sure. I'm hoping it's more on the positive side. Now, obviously, you've mentioned that back in 2012 you had that hugely life changing experience when your daughter passed and you shared that. One of the things that you do is you take from TEO's Journal that she had and you use that in your work, and that helps to keep tail's memory and legacy alive while you can bring your own ticket. And I'm wondering, was there ever a period where you might have felt that you were doing something without Deals permission going using the Journal? Is that something that just fell into place?

Suzanne: 24:25

Questions are really good, Danny. That's why you've got the following. You have. I see. Because nobody's ever asked me that. I've talked a lot about the journals. I feel very connected to Teal in the afterlife. I don't know. I mean, one day I was meditating and I've always been a big meditator, and I feel like I can feel her around me. And I said, hey, are you okay with this? And she said, I put them there for you, that they were really meant to be shared. And what's funny about this, Danny, is she was a big meditator as well before the end of her life. And she was receiving little phrases and things, maybe some would call it channeled messages or insights or inspirations. And she came to me and said, I'm getting all these little phrases when I meditate and I don't know what to do with them. And I said, oh, just put them in a notebook, honey. I wasn't paying attention for one thing, because I was so involved in my own little world, but I didn't think they'd be anything important. And okay, just fine, write them down. That's fine. And as a result, she left behind these beautiful journals. I've really used a lot of the quotes in my book, The Extremely Busy Woman's Guide to Self Care. And what's really funny about that, Danny, is that I had a dream where she handed me her notebook. And I really got that I was supposed to use the quotes in the manuscript after I'd already submitted it to the publisher. And I called them up and I said, I think I'm supposed to add this. And they said, oh, we love that. And they made beautiful little graphics through the book of her little quotes. And it's just such a nice thing.

Danny: 26:18

And I think that also would help readers understand a bit more about your daughter and the work you're continuing through your own books and shop. You'd also share at the start that prior to tails passing, you'd be like a workaholic. And then there'd been a huge obviously that the business employed had been a lot of changes from 2012 onwards. And I'm curious how easy it was because I know they've known a few people that have been workaholics and it's sometimes taken a personal event for them to change that mindset and maybe become more mindful and more attuned to what you need from a wellness point of view. I'm curious how hard because obviously you're dealing with the passing of you were dealing with the business and a whole lot of things going on.

Suzanne: 27:09

Yeah.

Danny: 27:09

How hard was it to actually recognize this is what I was doing that I shouldn't have been doing, I guess. And this is how I want to move on. This is who I want to be next year, five years.

Suzanne: 27:21

Well, you always think of these things, especially in the beginning of a year. Like this is the year I'm going to quit smoking or whatever, and you get these insights and it's all very clear. And I was waiting through mud up to my neck. I knew my life didn't work. And the other thing is that when she collapsed, she was in a coma for six days because she had been oxygen deprived but revived by EMTs. So she was in a coma in the hospital for six days before we had to take her off of life support and her life because her brain was so severely damaged and they couldn't figure it out for a week. So there she was. And I walked into her hospital room the very first night and I immediately knew she'd die. And I knew that I would have to change and become the person that she would have wanted me to be. I knew that I was not happy. I knew that I was overworking. I knew that my life had somehow scrambled out of control in the way that lives do when we don't really know what to do to change things. We think we can't change things. We think we're terribly stuck. And in fact, all we are is fixed in place by our own beliefs. When I stopped working, I stopped working for a month. I told myself, okay, take a month off and then get back to work. What's really funny is I was trying to launch a business and I couldn't launch it and I tried five times and it just wouldn't go. And there kept being people hacking the site and taking it down and failures in the program delivery and the cancellations. I mean, it just was like one problem after another. Meanwhile, I really wanted to not work. And finally a life coach I knew said to me, you need to not work. You need to just not work. And I said, well, okay, but only for three months. So three months became two years before I knew it. And at the end of two years, a really totally different opportunity came to me. And during that two year time, I was forced to admit that I really hated the work I was doing, that it was lucrative, but it was over in some very basic way that I was never going to do that work again, which was marketing consulting, and that I needed to rebuild my life to be what I wanted it to be. I needed to have a relationship that really worked. I didn't even have a place to live when Teal died, I had been in a relationship. We'd split up. I moved out, and I had my stuff in storage. And I was kind of driving around the Bay Area and my little car trying to figure out where did I want to live. And it was just absolutely not happening. I couldn't even figure out where I wanted to live. It was just the craziest thing.

Danny: 30:26

And obviously, that experience has helped you bring your life experiences to the books and the podcast and the guests that come on. You mentioned earlier that you learn a lot, that obviously you help guests and you help people and you help women improve their wellness and their self care, and you share that that's also been returned from your guests and people you've met that helped you understand self care. And I'm curious, there's a lot of people that have impacted your approach to life. Who do you feel is there someone that's been on your show, a guest on your show or someone that's written to your email or anything that's your favorite example of how you've impacted their life?

Suzanne: 31:13

Well, I just feel like many of the people who come on my show are really sharing their expertise about things that I want to learn more about. For instance, I have a beloved Yogini. She's been my yoga teacher for many years. And she came on my show and was able to say that in some ways I had been her teacher, even though she's been my teacher, because what she taught me to do is to slow down. I mean, it's funny because we all help each other, right? I have to say my greatest teacher, though, is Teal, because I have really thought long and hard about who Tail was in her life. And she was just bold soul. She was really a remarkable soul. And she would earn a little money as a waitress, and she would put the money in her pocket and pack up her little backpack and get her travel guitar and go to the airport and fly somewhere. And she'd just pick a place to go in the airport. And she would go we're talking international travel here with a passport. And she'd arrive and she'd hang out at the airport maybe for a day trying to figure out what the story was with this place. Or maybe she'd meet somebody on the airplane and she'd head off to, you know, she was invited into the homes of people all over the world doing this and having so much fun. And then she'd go out on the street. And she was the Blues singer. She performed in Dublin, on the streets. She performed in Copenhagen. She performed in France, in Belgium, Bangkok, all kinds of places. And she was always allowing the world to teach her what she needed to learn next. She was in flow, and she was a complete and total free spirit. I had to learn that from Teal and the other person. That's interesting. That's been on my show. And we ended up creating a podcast together briefly was the mother of the young woman who got Teal's heart and her kidney because we donated her organs after her death. Debbie Granger, who is the mother of Amara, who received the organs, has been a dear friend of mine. And she's one of the most resilient people I've ever met because not only did she nurse her daughter back from the jaws of death repeatedly for eight years while she dealt with congestive heart failure, she also raised her kids alone and recovered from losing her home in the Paradise Wildfires in California that gutted her entire city. And she's just a remarkable woman. And we have had a lot of fun talking about what we've learned from each other because we're very different. She's a country person. I'm a city person. We haven't always shared the same views on a number of things, but we have been able to really appreciate what we did for each other's lives. I kind of brought her into the world of podcasting, for one thing. And our decision to donate Tails, Oregon, saved her daughter's life, though, of course, we never knew who would get the organs, but it just turned out to be this great thing. And Amara carries on. And she is now in her 30s and working in a hospital and carrying on what we think of as Teals healing gift.

Danny: 34:59

And it always amazes me how a legacy can continue in multiple ways that we don't really realize. You mentioned that because of the donation process, you would never know or you would normally never know who would be the recipient. Yeah, it's awesome. You talk there about not being able to get your head around what's happening with Pandemic. Sometimes I look at things that I hear an example like that I just can't get my head around it. We're in this big, huge globe, and this was a connection here.

Suzanne: 35:36

I know. It's so true.

Danny: 35:39

I always feel that more people should speak to each other that have opposing views because that's how we can make this world just a little bit smaller and friendlier around. I think, you know.

Suzanne: 35:48

It was really we got all this mail. We got this wonderful letter from Amara thanking us for the donation of the organs came in a couple of years or maybe a year After Teal's death, which is they really hold back the information. The organ transplantation agency holds back the information because they don't want anybody getting in touch until they know it's a fit and everything's working, and it takes about a year to really get clear on that. So when we got the letter from Amara, It was just hard to believe that it really had saved her life. There was just something about it. It was like, how do we even know? And, you know, there were a number of people who received organs who we did not hear from. And I really understand that because it's like, how can you even believe that somebody saved your life? Or how can you even she said it took her months to write the letter because she couldn't figure out how to thank us. You know, it's too big. It's too big. And Debbie and I here we are, the mother of these two remarkable people. It's all just too big. It really is.

Danny: 37:08

I know I'll continue being busy. I can imagine the people that you've never heard from. I'm sure they would tell friends and maybe their own sons and daughters as they become parents say back in the day, this is what happened. Maybe that part of too is continuing to impact Even new lives that haven't yet been born. My head's not ready for a Wednesday afternoon. Suzanne, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing both your story and to your story and the legacy that continues with that for people that I know will want to connect with you and read more of your books and listen to your podcast and learn more about till and how she's impacted what you're doing now. Where's the best place for them to connect with you?

Suzanne: 38:00

Well, if you come on over to my website, which is Suzanne falter.com, Suzannefalter, you can Google it. It'll pop right up. There are links to my books and my blog and my podcast. And there's also a link to something called the selfcare group for extremely busy women on Facebook, which is 550 women who all support each other in the most wonderful, real and fresh ways.

Danny: 38:31

And I will be sure to leave that in the show notes. So if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, as usual, head on down to the show notes on the website. If you're on the website and all the links will be there. Back to Suzanne side, and I strongly encourage listening to I'm still going through the back catalog. I followed your show and I'm really enjoying getting to catch up with episodes that I've missed. So I strongly recommend learning Suzanne's story of the teal story and listen to the show again. Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Suzanne: 38:59

Thank you, Danny. Appreciate it being here.