The Day Sean Stephenson Died

My Heart is Not Broken

Transcript:

Six years ago, my husband, Sean Stephenson, had a traumatic brain injury from a wheelchair accident and it took him months to recover. Sometime after that, we were in the car driving down Highway 101 in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we lived. I said to him, “Babe, I want you to know that when it’s time for you to go, you can go. I know this life hasn’t been easy for you. And you’ve been an absolute warrior, but don’t feel like you need to stay for me.”

I was holding his hand across the center console and he looked at me with tears in his eyes. He said, “Really?”

I said, “Really. I don’t want you to stay on my behalf.”

Over the course of the 10 years that Sean and I were together, I always had a strong knowing, you could call it intuition or just a sense of it, that he wasn’t going to make it into old age. I knew that with every cell of my being. For one, even though he was super strong, his condition physically was getting worse over time and not just physically in terms of his body, but also in terms of his enjoyment of life. For instance, he had lost all of his chewing surfaces. His various molars had had to be pulled over the years and he wasn’t fully able to chew.

Of course, he made the best of it. He put on a super positive face for the public and did his best to kind of mash up food, to still eat the things that he wanted to eat. But even things like his absolute favorite, chips and salsa, became difficult because he wasn’t able to chew. And you know, that sucks when you can’t chew and enjoy just normal foods. And in many ways, Sean was fascinated with his own death. When I logged into his Amazon account, after he died last year, I found that he had added an anti-choking device to his cart. He hadn’t bought it yet, but I remember him saying something about that just a few days prior. He was like, “Well, I might need this someday so I may as well have it on hand.” Or something like that. And he constantly was looking at things like Life Alert and just all kinds of different things for his physical safety. He had such fear around that.

So on August 28th, 2019, it was a day like any other day. It was a Wednesday and Wednesdays we took as free days. So we didn’t work and we were spending the day together. Around four o’clock that afternoon, we were getting in the car to go to a gym that our friend Steve had told us about. It was a gym that was specifically for people with different types of disabilities so they had all kinds of accessible equipment and different opportunities. So we were going to go check that out. As was normal, we were getting in the car. Sean didn’t drive so I had gone ahead of him out of the door from our house into the garage and I was putting my things down in the driver’s seat. And Sean had said, “Can you help me?” What he meant was, can you help me get over the threshold?

We were just in the process of buying this particular house that we were at, we had been renting it as a secondary office space. And we were literally in the midst of selling our old house and buying this new house. So we hadn’t yet made any changes to the house in terms of accessibility or anything like that. So there was a big lip over the threshold from the door, from inside the house, into the garage. And he said, “Can you help me?”

I said, “Just a sec,” because I was putting my bag and whatever else I had in my hands down in the driver’s seat. The next thing I heard was “Fuck!” And I go racing back around the car and I see Sean, his wheelchair had tipped backward. I’m guessing that he had started to bump up the front wheels of his wheelchair over that threshold. And for whatever reason, the physics did not work out that day, but his wheelchair, which had a small bar at the back which was designed to catch when things like this happen, it didn’t hold. This wheelchair was not designed for him. It was a wheelchair that he really, really wanted because he thought it was cool. It looked cooler and less medical than his old wheelchair and against the wishes of myself and many of our dearest friends, he kept using it because he thought it looked cool. And that was the thing, you know, for me. I guess the only way I can relate to it is when people have children and they know what’s best and safest and right for that kid. But yet you have to let that kid be independent. You have to let them make their own choices. Sometimes those choices end in pain. So that’s how I kind of feel about this wheelchair. He really wanted to use it. And so who am I to tell a 40-year-old man what wheelchair he can and cannot use? I wasn’t going to do that. So Sean’s on his back. And immediately I go to him, I put my hands under his arms and I help him set up. Right away I can see that he already has this huge goose egg on the back of his head where it hit the floor.

My first thought was, okay, this is exactly what happened five years ago. Let’s go to the hospital. We made a lot of trips to the emergency room over the years. It was, thankfully, just about five minutes away. We had done this so many times for different injuries, different kidney stones that he had had. I felt like we were there at least a couple of times every year. So in a lot of ways, this didn’t feel different. I was thinking he had a very similar accident five years before he made it through that one.

So I got him in the car, put his wheelchair, his other wheelchair, the one that was better in the car. And honestly, I wasn’t even in a huge rush. Thinking back, I’ve asked myself so many times, could it have made any difference if we had gotten there faster or if anything that happened at the hospital had happened faster. Of course, I don’t know. You can’t dwell on that.

But like I said, we had done this so many other times. It just felt like, okay, here we go again. So I grabbed a few more things from the house, knowing that who knows how long we would be at the hospital. And we headed out.

On the drive over, Sean was still very lucid, very conscious. And he said that he didn’t think that he had blacked out. But he did see stars when he hit. So the whole way over to the hospital, he’s texting friends and his mentor, Joe Polish. We get to the emergency room and by the time that we were even signing in at the main office, our friends, Billy and Kenzie were already there, just coming in right behind us, which was awesome.

What was interesting about that day is typically when we had gone to this same emergency room, they were able to get him in really fast, everything happened quite efficiently. But for whatever reason on this day, it took a while. We were in the waiting room for a while and then getting checked in took a while. Once he was back into a room in the emergency room, they were trying to get him in to have a CT scan pretty quickly and also get him some pain medication to just ease the pain.

The first sense that I got that this was something really different was Sean started vomiting. I was holding this trashcan up to his mouth so he could vomit in there. And then they brought over the little things that hospitals have that you can vomit into. And he was vomiting what looked like blood. And so even right away, my mind is not recognizing what this could be. I’m thinking, well, did he eat something red earlier? What is that? But also recognizing it may not be something he ate. This could be blood. And to this day, I don’t know what that was, but just the fact that he was vomiting was a clear sign that something was really, really wrong. The bump on his head just kept swelling. And what ended up happening was over the course of getting the CT scan, recognizing that this was a huge hematoma.

They were like, we’re going to have to do surgery. There’s no way that he can go through, make it through without getting this pressure relieved. Now five years before, he did not have to have surgery, it had initially started to recede on its own, which was awesome. And in this case, that was not happening. It was only getting worse. So they make the decision that there was not enough time to put him in an ambulance and drive him down to the other hospital in Scottsdale where the trauma unit is. So they’re going to get him there by flight, by helicopter. And what was crazy is I think just that whole scenario took longer than it would have taken just to jump in an ambulance and drive down there. But again, we can’t look at the time backward and say, oh, we should have done this or should have done this, because we didn’t know.

So I would say the hardest part of all of this was he was getting ever more groggy and just out of it, he was still alert enough that when the time came to get him into the helicopter, they said, we’re going to have to intubate him so that if anything happens in flight, he’s already set. And I’m thinking, okay, because of Osteogenesis Imperfecta, his condition, Sean had a very large tongue and even doing simple dental procedures or anything was always just this extreme kind of traumatic experience. He would be gagging and choking just because there wasn’t room in his mouth. And I was like, okay, there is no way they’re going to be able to intubate him without putting him out. But the doctor’s like, no, we’ll try it. And I’m like, it’s not going to work. So at that point, they made us all get out of the room. And what was amazing was by that time, there were a bunch of friends there. They had all come because Sean had texted them on the way there. So we’re all in the hallway and what I remember so distinctly is just hearing him struggle. And he had even said, when they were talking about intubating him, he was moving his hand like, no, I don’t want that. No, I don’t want that. The problem was there wasn’t really any other way to do it. So as I suspected, they ended up putting him out, intubated him. And then he was in this supposedly stable condition to be able to fly down to the other hospital.

I was concerned that if anything happened in flight, that there wouldn’t be anybody with him to make a decision or to make any choice that had to be made. And to their credit, the pilots were absolutely awesome. They showed me all the equipment that they had and assured me that there was nothing essentially that could happen at that point. He was already unconscious. He was hooked up to a machine that was checking all the vitals and he would be that way until they delivered him to the operating room. So we said our goodbyes to him. I climbed up on the stretcher to kiss him goodbye and wish him a safe flight.

The helicopter took off. And we, I don’t even know, somebody drove me down to the other hospital. And so we arrived there. And of course, it’s just this waiting game. The staff at that hospital were awesome. The operating team literally met the helicopter and took him right in. We got there and just had to wait. Now here’s the crazy thing. While Sean was in the operating room, the weather was absolutely crazy. It was thundering and lightning like it doesn’t normally happen in Arizona, even with the craziest of monsoons. It’s not generally that extreme. And I just remember hearing it pouring and the lightning and the crazy amounts of thunder. And I mentioned it to somebody who was there with me, I’m like, “Wow, Sean is really fucking some shit up up there because this! This is not normal.”

The head neurosurgeon came out to see us and he was describing Sean’s condition. And he said, “We’re going to do everything possible to help.”

And I asked him, I wanted to know the timeline. I said, “Well, how long do you think it will be until he’s awake?”

He looked at me and he said, “If he wakes up, it will still be a number of hours.”

It was at that point that I was like, Oh shit, this is not just some standard procedure to relieve the pressure of the hematoma. If this neurosurgeon is saying that he may not wake up, that’s a whole different deal than what I was expecting. So the doctor leaves and over the course of time, more friends show up, which was just awesome. And the pilots of the helicopter, like I said, they were so thoughtful and great. They had gone, I think, to the vending machines or somewhere, and they brought us all these random snacks. They said, “Hey, we know that you could be here for a while tonight. And the cafeteria is closed. It doesn’t open again until 10. So we wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”

They had brought us ice cream and granola bars and just all kinds of random stuff. And I just thought, how awesome that they’re just doing their job flying this guy over to the other hospital, but they took the time to make sure that we were okay too.

So time goes by and I’m not sure what time this was at. It must’ve been after nine o’clock that evening, but the doctor and the whole team of surgeons come in and I could tell right away that the news was not good because, one, I thought, why would everybody be coming in? And two, just the energy that they came in with, you could just tell.

The head doctor, he sat right across from me and he said, “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Sean didn’t make it. We did everything that we could possibly do, but he died.”

He said that as we even got in there to open up the wound, too much pressure had built up in his head. And that when we even opened him up, it actually burst out. There was just so much pressure built up. And when that happened, obviously he would have immediately lost so much blood and all his vitals dropped. And we started CPR and did everything that we could, but there was going to be no bringing him back.

My first thought at that time was it was almost as if Sean had too much energy stored up in that little body. He was less than three feet tall and he had so much passion, so much courage, so much energy. It’s almost like it was too much to be contained. And in that last bit of life that he had, it was like an explosion. It just couldn’t be contained. The doctor said that he had never seen anything like that. And he also had never lost a patient on his operating table. So they were very shaken as well. And we were all quite shaken. I didn’t say a word. I just remember that when he said “He died,” I grabbed a Kleenex from the box that was right next to me and I just held it to my mouth and I listened to what he was saying, but I didn’t say anything. And I don’t think that I was crying at that time. It was like I was immediately just numb. And my friend, Sheila, who was just sitting next to me, when that doctor said he had died, she was just like, “No!”

I don’t think anybody said anything after that. So they told us that they were going to clean him up and then we could come in and say our final goodbyes. And I remember getting up and going out, opening up a door that must’ve been onto some courtyard or something, standing out there and noticing that the weather that had been so insane a couple of hours earlier was so peaceful. It wasn’t raining anymore. I could see the clouds had moved on. I could see the stars. It was so peaceful. And I’ve heard stories of people making that transition from life to death. And I’ve heard, sometimes people have just such, almost a violent reaction to that process. And I felt like because Sean was already unconscious that, he himself, his physical body couldn’t have that violent response other than what happened with his head. But it’s like the whole weather was having that violent response on his behalf or something. I don’t know. It was so crazy because it was so intense and then it was done and it was peaceful and it was calm.

We went into the operating room and he still had the intubation piece in his mouth and his beautiful head, where they had gone in to do the operation, had been stapled. The skin was stapled back together.

I held his hand and I just said, “Oh babe. Oh babe.” And I still don’t think I had cried at that point. I was holding his hand. I had my other hand on his chest. He always liked me to put my hand on his heart. Oftentimes he would say that I was too much in my head, which I know to be true. That’s why I teach on the heart and heart intelligence. I know I can get very headstrong. So he would say, I can’t even hear you unless you speak from the heart. And I would put my hand on his chest and he would be able to hear me.

So I don’t even know how long we stayed there like that. After a while, I went and I just sat in the hallway while other people were saying their goodbyes. I just remember I was sitting on the floor, sitting cross-legged, and I had my head in my hands. Thankfully, I have amazing friends who said, “Do you want me to make the calls?” And I said, yeah, because I wouldn’t have been able to say anything. The first and only person that I called was my mom. And all I could say was “Mom, he didn’t make it. He didn’t make it through the surgery.”

And that’s the first time that I remember crying. And after a while, Billy, our friend, came and he said, “Do you mind if I call the brothers?” Sean had created this group called “the brotherhood” which was a group of guys that got together every now and again to hold each other accountable, to be better men. And Billy wanted to FaceTime them so they could say their goodbyes. Some of them were already on the road heading to Scottsdale to be there with us. And I was still sitting on the floor in the hall and I could hear them. I could hear them crying. And I just remember feeling very grateful that we were the only people in the whole operating suite at that time, and the staff was amazing just in terms of letting us be there and stay there and hang out for as long as we need it to hang out.

So it eventually occurred to me that there was nothing else that I could do there. And that there would be a whole lot of things to do over the next week or so. So I thought the best thing to do would be to go home and attempt to get some sleep before family showed up the next day and all the things that needed to happen started happening. So I had my friend, Sheila, drive me back to my car at the other hospital and while we were driving, she kept saying, “Do you hear that?”

It was like this little tinkling of metal, this little tinkling sound. And I was like, yeah, I hear that. And she was like, “Where is that coming from?” I was like, “Well, isn’t it your keys? Your keys jostling together in the ignition?”

She said, “No.” And she gripped her keys. She said, “It’s not that.” We could still hear it. What is this sound? Where is this sound coming from? So I’m looking around the car, she’s driving, I’m in the passenger seat. And I see this tiny, almost like a tiny wind chime that’s hanging from her rear-view mirror, and the different little pieces of metal are just tinkling together. And I was like, “Oh, it’s that.” And she kinda laughed. She’s like, “Of course.”

I’m like, “What do you mean?”

She’s said, “Look at it. It’s a heart.”

I said, “Well, right. Yeah. But doesn’t it always do that when you’re driving?”

She said, “I’ve never heard that sound before.”

So from that point on really interesting things started to happen. Almost mystical things that defy the explanation of physics or of normalcy. And maybe I’ll tell some of those stories in future episodes. But the point of this episode is I wanted to say that my heart is not broken. I don’t even believe in broken hearts. People don’t go to the gym and work out their bicep, and their bicep may be sore or in pain for the next few days if they did a really intense workout, but they don’t say my bicep is broken. No, they recognize it as the process of getting stronger, the process of growing bigger, the process of becoming more capable. And that’s what I believe our hearts do when we go through an experience like that.

My heart is not broken. My heart is so very full.

In regard to this podcast, my heart is full that we started it together before Sean passed. We had recorded 20 episodes with a variety of awesome guests. We were literally recording right up until the day that he died. The last ones we recorded were on that Monday. I think we did two or three episodes that day. Tuesday was when Sean’s assistant would usually come over to the house and work with him. So we didn’t record any of that day. And like I said, Wednesday was our free day and we actually had on our calendars more recordings the next day and then the next week. So we were really just beginning the whole process.

What’s interesting to me on this side of the equation is looking back at the way that Sean sometimes talked about the podcast. The way this whole podcast started, to give you a little behind the scenes, was I was always attempting to find things that we could do consistently together. And what I mean by that is both Sean and I had this not-so-great habit in business of doing something big and then not doing much at all. And while that made for a pretty fun lifestyle, it didn’t make for consistent cash flow in our business. We would essentially wait until either I was doing a launch for my coaching program or Sean got a speech somewhere, but a lot of the stuff we were doing wasn’t consistent. And we really wanted to develop our consistent cashflow. And I also knew that left to his own devices, Sean wasn’t going to do any of it. And really probably I wasn’t either. Both of us had started multiple podcasts in the past. I had also started various memberships, just a variety of different things that both of us had not stayed consistent on.

So I get it in my head that if we’re both involved with this, we will be consistent because we can keep each other accountable. If one person’s not feeling like doing it, the other one can encourage them. So that was the whole point of doing this thing together.

And I called it The Lucrative Society because my company that Sean ended up joining in 2018 was called Lucra. And it was all based on the concept of developing wealth, learning about money mindset, overcoming money blocks, because those have been big challenges for me. For those of you that know my backstory, I had every single thing of the worst possible situation financially that could have happened. Well, that did happen in my life. So I have a huge passion for this concept of building wealth consciousness. So it was all based around that.

And we started out the show, I was thinking as co-hosts, co-creators, but if you notice, in the episode that we did with Rock Thomas, Sean introduced me as, this is Mindie, “she’s the creator of this show.” And I remember thinking, well, that’s kind of funny because I thought we were doing this together, but looking back now, it’s just little things like that, that I wonder if some part of him knew and he was doing that, not consciously of course, but maybe unconsciously setting himself aside. On that show, we joked about him just being along for the ride and made it funny. That’s just a teensy little example, but there were so many examples that I’m like, Hmm… I wonder if, unconsciously, he knew that his time was near.

I want to tell you a little bit, not just about Sean’s death, but about his life. More specifically, about the love that we had. We had the most amazing relationship that either of us had ever seen, that either of us had ever come across. We used to think about other couples and we would think, wow, we have it so good. We are so grateful and also conscious of the fact that we put in the work, we put in the effort. And it was effort! Those of you that know us personally, it was hard. We had a very dynamic, very—at times—challenging relationship because we were two very passionate, very strong-willed people that also were both committed to it being a growth experience. We said in our wedding vows that should this cease to be a growth experience, that’s not what we signed up for. We need to be done at that point.

We always were like iron sharpens iron. And that hurts sometimes. We had many, many, many difficult conversations, but we had them. We were both so clear on what we wanted and sometimes when that didn’t align, it was hard to find the compromise or to find the middle ground. We both were feisty AF, but it was so worth it.

The 10 years that we were together was in many ways, the stuff of fairytales, it felt magic. And now that wasn’t every day, a lot of times it felt annoying and frustrating, but in the big picture, it really, really was such a powerful connection, a powerful partnership, a powerful friendship. I mean, that’s where our love began was in friendship. The reason Sean and I met in the first place was we were in the same industry.

He was doing personal growth as an author and a speaker. I was teaching personal growth as a coach and an author. My friend Francisco in Portland was the one that introduced us virtually, of course, this was through Facebook. And that’s initially how we met. The thing that we did have in common was a very strong worldview, a very strong sense of spirit. And that the way that things happen is exactly what we signed up for. The way that things happen is exactly as they needed to happen. And we truly believe the concept of “how do you know what was the best thing that could have happened?” It was what did happen.

So taking this experience of loss, of death, of grief… And grief, I’ll have to do a whole other episode on grief because it is something like I have never experienced ever, but the beautiful thing, in my case, and this goes back to the wealth conversation and doing what you are truly here to do, being on your purpose, here’s what happened after Sean died…

Because we had not yet purchased the house that we were moving into, I was technically still a renter. So I gave them 30 day’s notice and I said, I’ll be out of here by the end of September. In mid-September, we had Sean’s Celebration of Life, which to me, that was the only, the first and last of my responsibilities to anyone in the outside world, other than announcing his death on social media. So I was looking at that date, it was September 14th, which also happened to be our wedding anniversary, but I was really looking at that date as like, I just need to get through that day and then fuck it all. That’s what it felt like. Just get through that day. So up until that day, I had family in town, which was absolutely amazing. Between my mom, her partner, Rachel, and my sister, it was so great to be surrounded. And I will add into that category, my friends, Patty and Sheila, to be surrounded by strong women who could literally just step in and say, “Okay, what needs to be done?”

And quite honestly, a lot of times I didn’t even know what needed to be done because my brain was completely in the fog of grief. If I have ever thought in the past that come on, you can just get through it, get past it, turn your brain back on it. It doesn’t work like that. Grief brain is a real, real thing. Joan Didion, the writer, wrote about the feeling of neuroses or insanity, like literally having a mental disability during that time. And it’s true. You do. I remember going home from the hospital the night that he died and my first thought to myself was “Ok, Kniss, don’t go home and just throw everything out.”

Because I knew that part of me wanted to. I didn’t want to see anything that would remind me of him or that would remind me of our life together. And that was, of course, everything. Everything in our house, every piece of furniture, every everything, his clothing, whatever. And I reminded myself, do not throw everything away. Just give it some time.

And then the second thing I said to myself with any hint of clarity, there were only these two things that night was, I was thinking about Joan Didion. She had written a book called The Year of Magical Thinking about the year following the death of her husband. And that was written many years ago. And I just thought, you know what? If somebody can get through this experience, I can too. If other people have gone through the loss of a spouse and somehow continued with their life afterward, I can do that too.

Now, I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I don’t know how in the world I’m going to do that, but I know that it can be done and I need to hold onto that knowing. So after all the public stuff happened in September, from there, I went to Sedona which is a very healing place. It’s also where I hold my HeartPath retreats every year. So it’s just a great space for me. I went up to Sedona for a few days. It was over my birthday in early October. And I took Sean’s ashes to spread them at the place where we secretly had gotten married prior to our public wedding. So it was like I was done with the public stuff, I was done with the ashes. And from that point, I went to the desert. I went to the desert outside of the Palm Springs, California area.

I am so grateful to my best friend who said, “Hey, Mindie, we have this second desert house that we’re not even using. Nobody’s there. Why don’t you just go there and stay there as long as you need?” To me, that was the best thing that I could have done because I’m a huge introvert. I didn’t want to be around people. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to do anything other than be available to myself to feel every single moment of grief.

And those were some hard, hard moments, but here’s why I’m so grateful for having made the decisions that I have made along the way, even before I met Sean, when I decided to leave corporate America and become an entrepreneur, when I decided to pursue the studies of neurocardiology and heart intelligence, all the decisions… And then being with Sean, the things that we had put into place in business, in our life, in our finances, across the board, because this is what I was able to do. I was able to quite literally leave what was our life in Scottsdale, Arizona. Because I didn’t have a regular job that I would have needed to go back to. We didn’t have children that I would have needed to attend to. I could spend 100% of my energy, which was not that much back then, but I could spend it fully on working my way through the grieving process and just feeling all of it.

Two things that I’ve been really conscious of since the beginning is not once have I said that my heart is broken. Not once have I used that little emoji of the broken heart. I’ve used a lot of the sad emojis and the crying emojis because that is accurate, but my heart’s not broken.

And the second thing is I’ve been very conscious of not apologizing for my tears or for my feelings. When somebody is getting choked up, when they maybe start crying while they’re talking, they say, “I’m sorry.” And my thing is, I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry for my sadness. I’m not sorry for my tears. I’m not sorry that it might make other people uncomfortable to see me in my grief, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry for that. And I haven’t. I have not apologized for feeling those feelings. I may say something like, “Excuse me,” if I need to get a tissue or just not talk for a moment to collect myself, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry for that.

Early on, I was talking to my best friend, Keith, and he was saying, “This kind of stuff hurts your soul.” And right away, I countered that. I was like no, my soul is fine. It’s this human part that’s painful. It’s this human aspect that hurts, and has been experiencing grief, and will continue to experience grief. It’s the human portion that is so vulnerable to those feelings. That’s the part that’s hurt, but my soul is good. My soul is extra good because I 100% believe that Sean did everything that he came here to do. And he was like, “Peace out, y’all, I’m done.”

And what a gift for him. I mean not just the gifts that he left with us all through his videos and programs and everything else that he did. I said this at his celebration, but he literally had a camera in his face almost every single day through the good, through the bad, through everything, he was recording it. So there is so much that he has left this world and I’m delighted by that.

But what a gift for him, too. He came into this world and was never able to walk, was never able to drive, was never able to ride a bike, or do a lot of other things that able-bodied people think are normal and probably take for granted. And at the soul level, I think he can fly.

Everybody online has been so absolutely wonderful from just checking in with me and saying, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you okay?” I’m like, yeah, I’m actually doing really well. It may seem weird, but life is good and that hasn’t changed just because someone was done living it. We, those of you listening to this, you and I, we’re still here. And life is good.

One of the things that I’ve found interesting over the many, many messages that I’ve received is when people say “thanks for sharing him with us.” And I want to be really clear about how I feel about that. He was never mine for sharing. The type of relationship that we had, I always, from day one encouraged his independence. I wanted him to be his own person early on. He was so used to having other people make decisions for him and on his behalf, that I would say, “What do you want?” He’d be like, “Well, I don’t even know what I want.”

And I would press him to figure it out. Okay, well, let’s figure out what you do want. Let’s go with that. I want you to learn to be independent. I want you to learn to think independently. And he was his own person. He was not mine ever to share. He shared himself so authentically. And so oftentimes vulnerably, but that was him. So you can give him a little nod wherever he’s at now. Thank him for sharing himself so openly because that’s, I think, really what you’re referring to.

I want to thank you for listening to this. This has been much longer than I intended it to be. I felt like he would have wanted that story of his last day to be shared. Like I said, he was very vulnerable. He was very open. Me, I’m a much more private person, but he would have enjoyed knowing that that story is out in the world. So again, thank you for listening.

This is the beginning of Season 2 of this podcast. I have so many great conversations coming up for you with some really interesting guests, really great people. And if you take anything from this episode, I hope that you recognize that even in your own heart, you’re okay. The heart is the source of courage and love and peace and all of this other good stuff.

As they say, wild hearts can’t be broken.

 

Post Script:

There are two other pieces to this story that I wanted to add in upon further reflection. First, is something that the doctor told me when he came in to say that Sean had died. He said, Mindie, I want you to know this as well. Judging by the pressure that had been on his brain from the injury and looking at his pupils and all the other ways that they take statistics like this, he said there probably is about a 90% chance that, if he would have survived the operation, he would have been in a vegetative state. And I remember thinking, there’s no way Sean would have stood for that. There’s no way that his soul would have been half-assing life. He was so alive and when he was done, he was done.

The second thing I want to add is a lot of people have said to me, Oh, Mindie, it’s so great that you’re keeping his legacy alive. And I want to speak to that because that’s not how I see it at all. Sean did a great job securing his own legacy. There’s nothing more that needs to happen to do that. His videos, his content, are all over the internet and have been watched by hundreds of millions of people. They’re still being watched by hundreds of millions of people. So his legacy is great. And he did that. What I’m doing is continuing the work that I’ve always been doing since 2007, when I started my business and wanted to help people wake up to possibility, wake up to potential, recognize how amazing their life can be with just a little bit of deliberate thought and powerful intention. And that’s what I’m doing.

And I had this beautiful, beautiful decade-long interaction with this amazing soul. And yes, that added to what I’m doing now, but Sean was responsible for his own legacy. And I believe I am responsible for my own and you are responsible for your own. So let’s get going with what we are here to do. That includes you.