Dr. Tina Fornwald connects with author Danny Lesslie to discuss widowhood, faith, and healing through the lens of profound personal loss. They discuss the raw reality of losing a spouse to terminal illness and how to navigate the overwhelming isolation that follows. Danny shares how he and his late wife co-authored a unique memoir, Thank You, Cancer, that captures both of their voices during a five-year cancer battle. Together, they explain why friends need to sit in the mud with grieving spouses rather than trying to fix unfixable pain. You’ll learn practical ways to involve children in family healing and honor your late partner while building a renewed life.
I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.
Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.
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Finding Faith And Healing In Widowhood With Danny Lesslie
Thank You, Cancer is a powerful memoir about love, loss, resilience, and faith, co-authored by Danny and his late wife, Raffi. It tells the story of their journey through Raffi’s five-year battle with stage four cancer and the life they built together in the face of it all. Let us get into this conversation now with Danny as we talk about Thank You, Cancer.
Overcoming Awkwardness To Connect Through Grief
Danny. Welcome to the Widowhood.
How are you? Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. When you first heard widower, were you thinking, thank you so much?
Absolutely not. I can tell you that it feels wildly alone. Hearing someone say welcome is nice, right? A lot of people just tend to run away from the conversation. They tend to run away from all of it, and we cannot run away from it. That gets weird. That was why I was like, “Thank you.”
That is probably one of the things that I try to work on the most with my nonprofit. When you said it is wildly alone, I do not think that people around us realize how much we need connection more so than maybe before. We need to get over being awkward and lean in.
The awkwardness I have found is not due to someone not caring. It is due to lack of experience and tools, and they just do not know how to connect. I always tell people that the way it felt to me when this first started was that after the initial period when your person passes, and family is around, and people are checking on you, it feels like you are sitting on an island and it is just drifting further from the mainland. You have no control over it. Life is going on as it is. You are just watching it. There is so much distance that people really avoid it because they do not want to make you sad, or then eventually they do not even know. We live in a new city now, so no one knew her here. It is this huge separation. That is so real, and it is so invisible.
I have thought about the idea of people relocating, and now do I tell people when I introduce myself, or do they just get to know this version of me, and we do not make that part of the original introduction? How have you navigated that?
Honoring Your Late Spouse In New Surroundings
There is beauty in both. We moved six months before we lost my wife.
Her name is?
Raffaella.
Say that again. Look at that smile.
Go on. We moved here, and she was very ill. Her out-of-the-house time was very minimal. There is no one here that knows her. That is really nice in some regards because you do not bump into people that want to do the emotional. That is nice because if I were in my hometown where everyone knows me and I knew people all over, that would be a constant hurdle where I would want to stay at home. I would not want to go out because I keep running into people.
It has been a real gift in that regard. There are people that I meet that are genuine relationships, and I feel like I am lying to not tell them about her because she is the heart of our family. She is the mother of my children. She is the love of my life. How do I meet someone and not talk about her? Rarely does that conversation find someone who can hold space for it without either emotions or trying to get out of it or feeling awkward or apologizing to me. I can solve them, and that is weird. There are just so many things.
I can totally relate to that. My husband and I spent 32 years together. I cannot talk about my life and not talk about him. No part of that exists. I have learned just to share past that being uncomfortable because he is a part of my life. My children, we had together. That is part of it.
People really care. It is not that they do not care. They just do not have the tools to have that conversation. I was that person. I was the one. I did not know how to deal with grief or what to say. I was the platitude guy or whatever. It is just that awkwardness. You just have to get through it.
I love that you said that you were that guy. When my husband passed, I had this Rolodex going in my mind of all the people I knew that had passed. It is like, “Did I say that to them?” It was just like all of these things, wondering if I said those.
It is not malicious on their end. They just do not. It is like another language. You just do not understand. That is okay. It just really is hard when you are hurting.
That is the duality of the issue. I appreciate you saying it is not malicious. People need to understand one of the things that I talk to people often about is that we think these people that love us, they do not want to see us in pain, are telepathic, and they know how to show up. What they want is to fix the problem, but this is an unfixable situation. The most that they can do sometimes is something we as humans are not good at. Just being a witness, being there, supporting. There is no expectation for you to come with the right statement. It is just to be with me through this process. What would you say to that for you?
Shifting From Fixing Problems To Holding Space
That it is exactly on point. There is a man by the name of Simon Sinek who is very popular, very well spoken. He says this in a really interesting way, not necessarily about grief, but about friendship. He says that a true friend will sit in the mud with you. That is it. It is true because that was one of the hardest things for me in our journey with my wife.
I could not fix it because I have a garage full of tools. I build things. I can fix things. I want to fix things. It feels like it is a part of the fibers of my being to fix things. We could not fix this, and that broke me. That is something that, on the journey, you find a way to deal with. Our way of dealing with that was just giving that to God. It is outside of our bounds.
When you say given it to God, what does that mean for someone that is wrestling with the idea of God, their person dying and now what, how does that work for someone who does not understand that concept?
In the simplest way to explain it, there are two ways of being. There is a horizontal way of being, which is to call it the domain of self. It is things that are in my control, things that I can do, things that I can control. We like to think that we can control outcomes, but we cannot. We can put forth effort, we can have knowledge, we can have intention, we can do all the things, but the outcomes we are not in control of. In that mindset, that orientation in life is a framed mindset. I would tell you that that frame is not that large for any of us, even though we would like to think that it is.
Now, what we discovered in our path was that if we could try the best we could, be unified in our approach, but surrender this story to him, open ourselves to a vertical orientation, one that could fall in line, in alignment with God, solutions began to appear. They were not in our control nor of our doing. They showed up only for that reason. That is evidenced in our story so many times. It is wildly out of our capabilities.
That is why, in retrospect, in looking back, I can see why these things showed up. It was that transition. It was saying, “I cannot do this.” There are lots of things in your way. There is ego, there is money, there are roles, there is status, there are identities. There are all these things that we have that we deal with. Those things got stripped away from us. They are just flat out gone. Money, jobs, house, all the things just gone. When that happens, it becomes easier to look for something else.
That does baseline us.
Man, it does. People say, someone says, people say whatever, not to build your emotional home in someone. I hear that. I will say that I did that and it was the best thing I ever did. I built my emotional home for my wife. Because of that, what I realized was a depth of love and a depth of joy and a relationship that I never would have seen if I had not done that. Now I lost her, and they exposed me to this thing, this floor. Like, “Now what? Your heart, everything is gone. Now what do you do?” That starts to beg the question of, “There is a bigger story at play here.” That is when the God conversation shows up.
I cannot imagine a marriage for me. If my spouse was not my emotional home, what is there then? It sounds like somebody who was hurt or has trust issues or could not be so transparent or vulnerable in a relationship.
The only conversation that seems to make sense in all of that is to build intimacy with God first and then understand that your mate, your person, is a gift. It is a gift from God. As I think back to my life without her, I am like, “I would not even consider that.” Our time was twelve years that we spent together, and that is a lavish blessing in a lifetime. To think of who I would be if I had not had that, there is nothing that would make me turn a different path in my life. It is like, “If that intimacy with God is in place, maybe you are not as exposed, and you can still love someone. That is a lot.
I know. I am like, I’ll pin and then come back to that.
I know. Sorry.
That is okay. When you talk about sharing your story.
That is it.
On this book cover, is this you two?
Yes, that is our wedding day.
Why is this thing moving so much?
It is trying to get your face.
I know, and I am like, “You have like no hair here, sir.” Where are we at?
I have been through phases. I spent most of my life like that. When we met in Los Angeles in 2011, I think it was, at that point I grew a beard, which I was like, “I like this. I am going to keep it.” Later on in this cancer chapter of our lives, I grew my hair out. I started watching Viking shows.
Say less. I want to build this conversation around portions of the book that I have identified. I feel that the author does a better job of reading their book than other people.
You are trying to make me cry. It is okay.
You asked for this, but the book says that it is from you and your wife. Can you explain that part, how that has been?
She was diagnosed on August, August 3rd of 2020. In that journey, we decided that we were going to speak about what we were going through, just in a very matter-of-fact way. Just on social media, we were just going to talk about it. In doing that, we both started to journal in our own way. She was journaling. I was journaling, not together, just journaling. At some point in 2021, I remember having a conversation with her, and we were like, “We should write a book together about this experience.” We were having this conversation, and I was like, “Sure.”
We were toying with a podcast, and then it was always a thing. Now, nothing happened in regard to the book. Her health turned. Our life was crazy. What we both did was we both kept writing, because for both of us, it was important. It was a way for us to kind of gain clarity and just get the mess out. Fast forward, my wife passed away in 12/12/’24. In the aftermath of that, as you know, the following months are just a blur. Nothing makes sense. I knew that writing was a thing that would help me just to get the mess out, not to feel like I was going to explode all the time.
I started to write, and it came out in poetry, which is weird, but it did. I remembered that we wanted to write this book, and I was like, “I wonder if I could do that.” What I did was I went back to her journals, and I looked to see what I could find. I found a very sparse narration of the journey, missing a lot of pieces because it was very focused on the moment of what she was going through in that moment. They are her words, or her original words. There are spelling errors. I did not spell-check it. I did not do anything. All I did was format it a little so you could read it a little better.
I took that, and I laid it into a timeline. I went back to my journal, and I filled in the gaps more or less. I took my in-the-moment journal and filled in the gaps. I had a much closer version of a story that someone could understand from the outside, but there were still big changes needed. I went through as a narrator in the present day and added some context here, filled a little bit in there, and tied some things together. What you have is you have our story told from two points of view, which is what we originally wanted. It is very informal.
Crafting A Shared Story Through Painful Loss
I say in the very beginning of the book that I want this book to feel like the three of us are sitting around a campfire and we are just telling you our story. Never in the book do I say he said, she said. It is always just her, and her voice is in bold print. My voice is in normal print. There are all of these moments that we call Jesus moments that are in there. There is a shaded background to them, and all of those have a Bible verse at the end. Really, you have three voices telling a story. You have Raffi’s voice, you have my voice, and you have God’s voice, all telling one story. That is how the book is arranged.
Thank you for that third person on the campfire listening to your story. What is your hope for them, their takeaway?
I hope that our book and the vulnerability of our story puts such an imbalance in their life, in vulnerability, that they feel inspired to go love on their people and live inside their moments. I hope that it just grabs them and just throttles them and makes them be like, “Man, I need to cherish my time with my people.”
The title, how did you come to that?
I am not going to tell you, but it is in the book. It is very important. There is a reason for it. It is in the book. It is meant to be polarizing, I will tell you.
You do not have to validate. It draws the reader in. We cannot give everything away. In their words, you start the story with two young ladies. How did you come to the conclusion to start here?
Those are our daughters. They needed to tell some of the story too, because it is their mama. I let them write what they wanted. I just said, “Do you want to write in the book too?” They said, “Yes.” I let them write, and they each wrote about a paragraph. It is our family’s book, and it is beautiful.
Can you read this for us, please?
The girls.
Yes.
Supporting Children Through Family Bereavement
I will read it. Hold on. Clouding me up. “I am Danny and Raffi’s oldest child. I am going to share a memory with you. My age is currently ten years. This year without my mama has been so hard, these last five years too. I hope this memory that I write makes you happy, sad, joyful, and more. Let us start with a memory. At the time, we got a puppy, and my mom was like, ‘I am never letting Lulu in my bed.’ Lulu was the puppy. Next thing you know, it is like 10:00 PM, and I wake up hearing my dad laughing. I got out of bed, and my mom was holding Lulu, the puppy, in bed. I thought that was a funny story. Thank you for reading. Bye. Hope you enjoy the book. Rue.”
What do you remember about that moment?
Lulu is a Great Pyrenees. I believe the picture is in the book somewhere. She is just fluffy, just a white fluffy dog. Raffi was like, “This dog will not be in the bed. There is no way.” The first night I came upstairs, she was lying in bed, and she had her there. She is holding her. I was like, “What are you doing?” I started laughing. “She is going to get in bed every night, and she is going to be 130 pounds. What are you doing?” I was cracking up, and we laughed a lot. Rue woke up and was laughing, and, man, that was so funny.
You came quickly.
It was the first day. We had only had a dog for six hours, and she got in bed.
Grieving spouses don't need you to fix their pain. They need you to lean in and sit with them. Share on XWas the dog in bed forever?
No. She ended up sleeping downstairs. Ace’s. “This story is about my mom. We have been through a lot, and it is really hard without a mom. She fought for so long, and she chose to fight because she knew that she wanted to stay with her kids and her husband a little longer. She went through so much. She has been in the hospital, and it hurts to not have her by my side, but she lives in my heart forever. Bye everyone, Ace.” The girls were 10 and 8 when they wrote that, and now they are 9 and 11.
How do you see your girls writing this and see in their story what they shared here?
It is interesting. They are always talking about it. I am sure they have some of my qualities by just the math of the thing, but they are like a Venn diagram of their mother. There are like twenty percent of them that are the exact same, and there are 80% of them that are completely different. The interesting thing, the real gift of the scenario, is that those are the things that I fell in love with their mom for, which is really weird. It is like their quality. Now I am raising them. It is really a beautiful thing. It is a real gift.
When you see your girls now, do they look like they are grieving or do they just look like kids to you?
There are kids. The emotional bandwidth of those girls is outrageous. All of us separately on separate occasions have said, “I am not afraid to die,” my kids included. They brought it up on their own, which is a profound thing for an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old to say unprovoked, not talking about it. They just brought it out. Now, they have their hard times. They wear it differently. We’ve been very open. Raffi and I chose not to hide anything from them. The thing they did not see was wound care. They did not see any blood, anything like that, but they knew everything.
They were here every day. We traveled together. We went to treatment together. They knew everything. Because of that, interestingly enough, I think kids deal with it better than adults do because kids are more connected than adults are. We have more armor that has come from our lives. They have really dealt with crazy things in just a swimming fashion. It is really beautiful to see. There are so many moments where they come to my rescue, and they come to support me instead of me being the dad supporting my kid. It is not how it goes. It has really been beautiful to have them in this process with me and with us. They are really doing well. We all miss Mom. It does not go away.
It does not. Were you originally welcoming to them supporting you?
As I said, we have spent years and years and years in the trenches of all of this. We spent almost five years in really triage mode with my wife. Every single day was crazy. They have lived more of their lives now with their mom either sick or not here than they have with her healthy. It is crazy. It is really a sad reality of the story.
We are going to page three, paragraph number three. “I saw her dance.”
Do you want to read that?
Yes, please.
“I saw her dance. It was as if the music was coming from her. It was as if her movement was creating the whole dance party. There was nothing else that mattered to me. Nothing else had any vibrance. She hypnotized me. From somewhere deep inside of me came all this ambition or confidence, or maybe it was just luck, but I made a choice, and it turned out to be the best thing I had ever done. As they say, with twenty seconds of insane courage, I gathered enough gumption to just lay one on her, a kiss. One random, but totally not random kiss sealed it. Soon we officially became an item. Within a few months, we were talking about children for the rest of our lives. There was no courting period. We knew we had flipped a switch that could not be flipped back.”
Where were you guys at? Where was she dancing?
I had a fitness program in Santa Monica, California. It is the most picturesque thing ever, teaching people how to move with barbells on a hundred-foot bluff over the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing. She came to that program and was a part of that for about a year before this happened. There was a serious affinity for each other during that time. This was at a sweatsuit dance party, which was a birthday party for one of our friends. The whole crew was there, all the people, and it was our program. There were lots of people. We knew everybody. She was dancing. I was wearing a yellow terry cloth onesie, if you can imagine.
Not trying.
I will tell you what. You got to own it. It was a bold move. I just might have had 1 or 17 beers. I was like, “Here we go.” Here is what happened. I knew she was the one. I knew it. There was no doubt. I did. It is that awkward, like, “What are we doing now? What is going on now?” Eventually we got that figured out. It was off to the races. We were on our first date talking about having kids.
You guys were just friends until this moment? Did you decide this is it?
Yes. Nothing had ever happened. In fact, when we originally met, we were both dating people. Those relationships were kind of fizzling, I would say. There was this definite affinity between the two of us. We figured that out over the course of the next, let us say, year. At that point we were both free. That was it.
Page 13, starting with she continued and onto page fourteen ending with core.
“She continued to go in and out of sleep during the one-hour car drive home. I dodged questions and continued to hold the bomb. When we got home, of course, her family had all kinds of questions too. I just kept holding the bomb because there was no way I was going to tell anyone before I told Raph. Finally, about 8:30 that night, it was clear to me that she was fully awake and mentally with it. Again, she asked, ‘What did the doctor say?’ The scene that follows is seared in my mind. I sat there knowing I had crushing news for the love of my life. It was torture.”
“I cannot put into words the weight of that moment. I do not ever want to hold onto something like that again. As I sat on the bed, I began to cry. I told her it was cancer. It killed me to tell her she was broken, and I was broken for her. Each millisecond knifed my soul. I will never forget the realness and heartbreak of that moment. Writing and reliving it literally turns my stomach. She was looking to me for hope. She was looking to me for safety, and she was looking to me for love.”
“What I had to deliver was a dagger. Just horrible. According to her surgeon, the growth on her vulva was originally 1.5 centimeters by 2 centimeters. However, she now had a hole nearly golf ball sized, a 4.5 centimeter by 2.5 centimeter by three centimeter. As the pain from surgery began to set in, profound heartache came with it. The recovery was long, both physically and emotionally. We had crossed into a whole new chapter of our lives, and everything was now different. Our lives were shaken to the core.”
When you read that now, what do you remember or see now compared to that moment?
I remember being there. I remember it. I remember doing it. I have only read it one other time. I have not read the book cover to cover yet as a reader. Of course, writing it and editing it I did, but that is not different. I have read about halfway through as a reader, and I have had some other things I have been doing that have gotten away. It is not that I do not know the story, but yes, it is just right back there.
I go right back to it, and it is horrible. You just do not want to tell someone that, and especially the person you love. It just logistically worked out like I was the one that had to tell her. I wanted the doctor to tell her, but he realized that she is recovering from surgery. We left the hospital at two o’clock, about 8:30 before. What is the doctor going to be in our house? It just did not lay out like I would have wanted it to. That was really a challenge.
When we started this conversation, you mentioned being the fixer, being the man that you have tools and you fix things. For other men that are tuning in to this conversation, they may be on the cusp of being a caretaker for their spouse, or maybe their spouse has passed, and they are struggling with their inability to fix this. What would you share with them?
This is probably the most profound shift in our marriage that has happened regarding this type of thing. This is later in the book, but we had a disagreement on the treatment path. After this whole thing happened, she had a tumor grow very large, and I wanted her to go get conventional care, and she did not want to. She wanted to go the natural route, and complete disagreement. We are sitting there on the living room floor of this house. This happened in the scene that I just read. She was adamantly against it.
She was like, “I’m not doing it.” I was like, “You have to do it.” My basic premise was like, “Look at you,” which is not something you say to someone, nor is that what I said. This thing is out of control. We are losing. We need to get some more care. She said no. She was hard-headed, and so am I. I was trying to be the solution guy. I was trying to be the fixer guy. I was trying to take care of it. That is the very male trait, by the way. What I found out is she wanted to work together. At that moment, I thought either we work together, or the marriage ends. That was what it felt like at that moment.
Unifying Choices During Severe Health Crises
I chose to lay my sword down proverbially and move to the same side of the table as her and work on this together and be unified in our front and support my wife as opposed to direct her, because I chose to marry her to walk by her side, not to tell her what to do. It seems like you want to tell the person what to do, like you’ve got to get this fixed. I do not know if that is going to work anyway. At that moment, we decided to move from the same side of the table, and we did choose that treatment.
You can't fix grief with a garage full of tools. Healing begins when you surrender control and hold space. Share on XI will tell you that being unified on that front allowed us to weather a storm that was way beyond what either one of us expected, because after that moment, nothing could separate us. Nothing could break us apart because we knew we were a unified front. That required me to take this fixer thing, this solution guy, and let it go. Because of that, it saved my marriage, and it bought my girls three, three and a half more years of their mom and me three and a half more years of my wife that I do not think would have come to be if that conversation would not have gone that, I do not think it would have come to be.
For the husband, they are struggling because they feel like they should have been able to fix it, and their wife passed. What would you share with them?
Man, I battled hard with this. One of the hardest things to deal with for me was when your person passes away, the things that go through your head. It does not matter. Logic does not matter. The thoughts that come through your mind, they all hold weight, and that is so hard to deal with. In talking with people about the things that go through your head, it is so hard because it is hard to understand it in my shoes and for someone else to understand. I felt like I had failed her because she died.
I just could not save her. If it were not for two very close friends of hers who really went to bat for that conversation, they cited evidence. They sent me messages. They really proved me wrong. Because of those two people, I just believed them. I really battled with thinking that I failed her because she died. That is just not within our capabilities. There is not enough money. There is just not. It is not. That is one of the times I just say thank God for God, because if it was not for him, I do not know where I would be, probably in a ditch somewhere.
I know this is a hard conversation.
It is okay. I am happy to have it.
I can relate to that. My husband and I were on vacation, and we were in Delaware. We were nowhere near anything that we knew, and he had a major heart attack, and I am calling down to like, “Do I start CPR? Do I call the front desk? Which one do I do?” Because once you start CPR, you cannot stop. I cannot get to the phone if I start that and all this. I come to the bathroom and see him in this full-blown situation. We are on a military base, and I call downstairs medics, and everybody comes, military people. They are armed.
They are putting me in the hallway, and I am losing. My whole mind is screaming on the phone to my sister. After Mark passed, I was like, you never even prayed for it to stop. You never even thought about that. I was like, “Tina, everybody has a moment that they will no longer be in this world.” Not a fan of it, but it is the reality, and telling myself that was his moment to leave this world. I am grateful we were together, and he was not alone.
Those thoughts are things because, as you mentioned earlier, we think that we can control more than we actually can. That baseline that death leaves us leaves us putting life into perspective in a way that I never would have done had my husband not passed. The level of gratitude for the time that we had to get there is huge. I speak to the person that is struggling, and they are tuning in to this conversation, like, “If I would have done this or if I would have done that,” that we did the best that we knew to do and we showed up for them.
I just believe that when it is your time, it is your time. There is just nothing we can do about that. I think the scariest thing about it is not really scary. It is a reality, but if a marriage goes well, one of you will watch the other one go. You are either the one that goes or the one that stays. Now, no one talks about that, really. It is the truth. We tend to avoid scary things. Everyone is scared of dying. It is common for all of us. I will tell you, when we had that conversation the first time, my wife, I would say, we went around the, let us say like the tumor surge and then treatment track, like 3 or 4 times.
There was one time where we were pretty scared. We were at the end, early on. She came to terms with her own mortality, which is an incredible journey for someone. We had the talk, the death talk for the first time, but we did it multiple times. I will tell you that after that talk, which I was very intimidated by, I was sweaty. I was scared. Those are uncharted waters. There was a freedom that showed up for us. It was just time to be together. It was beautiful. It is really counterintuitive.
You are so scared of it. There is just a weird freedom that shows up, and it is really beautiful. It happened multiple times, and I never would have known it was there unless I got forced into it. We did. Those five years or so that we spent, we got to grieve together, and we did not know we were grieving together because we did not think she was going to go. Looking back, that was the time we got to spend it. It was immensely sad all the time, but we got to do it together. That is really a rich moment that, in retrospect, I can see that I realized not everyone has that opportunity. That was really a blessing that did not feel like it at the time.
When you speak about this journey, you seem to have such a gratefulness and appreciation underlying something that was horrific. When did that surface for you, that level of appreciation?
I saw my wife find gratitude amidst this nightmare. My wife had two daughters with a midwife, no drugs, just the highest pain threshold I have ever seen on a human. What we saw during these cancer years was far beyond that. She was still a loving wife, a loving mother. She would go places and people would not even know she was ill, and she was in horrific pain, and she was finding joy in her life, and it was mind-blowing. I watched it.
It puts things in perspective. I was thinking, it was interesting because it is so easy to become jaded or disenchanted or another word like that with your life when you lose someone. It is that question of would you, would you live a life without that blessing that they were? As I said before, there is not a chance. I guess we just count ourselves as blessed. When you do that, it changes how things are.
Thank you. Page 63, starting with the middle section and starting with there and ending with breath.
Discovering Healing Tools And Daily Gratitude
These are Raffi’s words. “There is a lot of talk about the immune system, but not the lymphatic system. One of our greatest weapons against infection that gets little attention is a system of highways that run alongside the circulatory system and the organs that it encompasses, making it up the immune system. The circulatory system has a pump called the heart, but the lymphatic system does not have a pump. The lymphatic system relies on muscle contractions and other functions of the body to pump fluid and clean up carbon dioxide, fats, proteins, and pathogens. One of the functions it relies on is breath.”
Now you were this exercise guy. Health. I am sure of all these things. How much did you learn about the body and cancer that you had no concept of before Raffi had cancer?
So much. This in particular, the lymphatic thing, was mind-blowing to both of us. She had a lot of scar tissue, and all of her tumor activity was around her hips. The easiest way to say it is if you sat on a saddle, every place touching the saddle was where the tumors were the worst, the worst places ever. After having radiation and chemo, the scar tissue was crazy, and her ability to move unobstructed was almost impossible. She was going back and forth to Tulsa. We are in Kansas City. She was having treatment in Tulsa.
She spent nine weeks there, going back and forth every weekend, about three and a half hours one way. She came back. Her mother was there with her for one week, and she could barely walk. She was walking like this, like her butt was out and just barely able to walk. She came back after that week, and she just got out of the car, and she was walking straight up and down. I was like, “What happened to you?” There was a lymphatic massage. That is what she did. It is very gentle, like what lymphatic massage is. It is just something that I did not even know about, but it changed her life in a big way.
That was mind-blowing. When you move your body, when you squat, or you do all these things, all these movements, your movement is moving the lymph around your body. For someone that lays in bed every day, they are not moving, and it gets stuck. That is an exit for gross stuff, so you need to move. If you are not moving, that lymphatic massage moves the things out. I am telling you, it is mind-blowing how much of a difference it made for her. I am so glad that I have her words to talk about because I do not think I could do justice to her, because she experienced it.
Last section. Page 217.
Come on. You went deep. No, it is fine.
Creating A Lasting Legacy
No. I am going to talk about this. When you take time to write a book, when you take time to put your story into words that have been the most horrific moment, season, journey of your life. You take the time to print it, all the money invested in doing this. You take the time to mail it to someone. They better appreciate and share your story, not just wave your book and go, “He wrote a book.” Your whole wife stopped breathing.
No, I love it. I think it is beautiful. I am so grateful that you are doing this because there is so much heart in this book.
I took out some of the Post-its. Have more. Was like, “Okay.”
Literally, it is my whole life. It is beautiful, too. It is just really interesting. When I write in it to send to someone, as I did to you. I really care what you think. I think that a lot of people, because a lot of people, and I am like this too, like you get a book and you just read it, you put it away and whatever. I really care. I really want to know. I ask people every time like, “Please tell me what you think.” It is more than a story. I appreciate it. It is beautiful.
You are welcome. I struggled with wanting to try to elevate a different part of the book to be able to part about the dance and the kiss to show that part of the love, the girls, and not to share everything, but enough for the reader, the audience, the person that shows to understand your heart and how this could impact them. I feel like we have been able to do that so far. Just this last one.
You did a great job.
The first paragraph on page 217.
Kids possess incredible emotional capacity when we include them transparently in family healing. Share on X“Our 10th anniversary was October 11th, 2024. We moved into our new house the week after. To be really honest, as this date drew closer, I was just praying that Raph would make it long enough for us to celebrate together. Years back, we talked about getting remarried on our tenth anniversary. It is crazy where life goes. We were both so exhausted just by the logistics of our life, and our so-called celebration ended up being a kiss and a hug. There was heartbreak all over in our story, but we really felt it when our reality was so far from where we thought it would be.”
Life does not have a way of going as we plan.
No, it does not.
There is beauty in it in a way that we would have never been able to understand.
This book has really just been gleaming proof of that. I hear from people who say, Raffi’s story changed their lives and they feel like they have a friend in her, and she would love that. For our girls, we have had people like their teachers who just love our girls. I get to give them a book, and they get to meet their mom. That is such a surreal experience. These women who are in their lives that are really in important roles get to know their mom. That is so beautiful.
As a single dad, it is really a hard moment. It is like I am very much a guy’s guy. I am not domestic. I am a guy’s guy, and they do not have a woman in the house. I am telling you, she was the one there. She is the quintessential mother. There was not one better than her. That is who they lost. It is like that is a huge hole in their hearts and their lives. To have women that show up, care about them, and let them meet their mom is it. It is like beauty. It transcends the word beauty. I do not even know what to call it.
Danny, you have not held back and shared. You mentioned earlier that people could find you on social media. Where do you hang out, and how can someone have a grief group for men and want you to come speak or share? How would they connect with you?
Probably the best place is just my website. It is my name. It is DannyLesslie.co, and that is probably the best place to do it. Now I am on Instagram, and I am on there all the time. My tag is Momentum With Danny, and I am always on there talking to people, but my website is probably the easiest place, or just send me an email from there. I respond to all my DMs. I tell people all the time because I know what it is like to try to hold all the weight.
Just send me a DM and tell me what is happening in your life. It is not to fix anything. It is just to have a space to unload. I am telling you, I get DMs that are like this long, and it is just people telling me their story. I know what it is like to tell someone your story because I have done it over and over again, and it is so helpful. If someone wants to reach out, please do not hesitate. I know what it is like to need someone to talk to, and I am happy to listen, and it happens all the time.
I slid into your DMs. That is how we are having this conversation.
That is right. You were on TikTok though. Huh?
Yes. TikTok, Facebook. IG. All of them. I searched your DMs somewhere. I am not sure where it was, but yes.
It is great. It is beautiful for that. That is why I do it. It is funny every time that I have a really hard day, those days. It is uncanny. I will get a message from someone. It is like Raffi takes care of me through people. I will get a message that is unquestionably something from our book, and it is just this really heartfelt, life-changing message, and it will show up on the hardest day. Man, it is a beauty that goes beyond explanation. I try to write things. I try hard to wordsmith things. There are so many times that I am like, “Do not have the words.” I will try, but I do not. I cannot find them.
It is. You mentioned earlier that you and Raffi thought about having a podcast. I am going to let you experiment. I like for my guests to be the show’s host and throw me some questions.
You want me to ask you questions?
Yes.
When did your husband pass away?
March 11th, 2017. Nine years now.
What was the hardest part?
The moment him dying or living thereafter?
What has been the hardest part? Yours is very different from mine because mine was a five-year time period where we did not know what was going to happen. We walked to the finish line. For you, it was sudden.
That part, people say, “I wish it was this. I wish it was that.” I never thought about that. You just get what you get with this.
I agree with you very much. That is a battle in my mind that this is not even worth trying to figure out because there is no answer for that. Having to tell my child.
How old were your kids? They were grown. Our son, Alexander, was nineteen. He was in the military. You have to send a Red Cross message. You have to do all these things. I was talking to our son on the phone in the last waiting room, and I do not know if I was on the phone with Alexander when the doctor came in and told me that Mark had passed, but very much up to that. We were out to dinner the night before. I had sent pictures of what we ate and what we were doing. Mark was living in Virginia.
I was in Pennsylvania trying to find a job in Virginia, and we had not seen each other for a while. We met in Delaware, Dover Air Force Base, and we were there. I am a retired Army officer, and the furthest thing from my mind. At the same time, I am beyond grateful that he died with me. I would not have wanted him to have died in this one-bedroom apartment we had for him until I got there. He deserved better than that. It would have been like he did not show up at work and then called and found him. That is not what I wanted for my husband. Even though it was the most horrifying moment of my life. He deserved to have his wife there.
There is really no greater honor than walking someone home, however long that takes, however long that lasts, but being there, and being the person that is there. It is horrible, but I would not have it any other way.
I would not. I was talking to our son. My daughter, a family friend, was bringing her to where I was in Delaware. Mark is now passed, and they are letting me see him. I am losing my home. I am beating the floor. I am on the table, lying next to his body, and I am rubbing his nose and just, and I touched his hand, and I was like, his hand was starting to get cold. I was like, this hand just was on me last night and just like this. I was like, “This is how our story is?”
Is not the grow old and double scooter version. The nurse comes to tell me that my daughter is in the hospital. I am grateful for that because, once again, as a retired army officer, my daughter has not seen her mom that way. I did not want how I was feeling to impact what she needed in her own space. They gave me enough time to gather myself together for her to come into that room.
That is very nice. When did you decide to do all of this?
Not my decision at all. Would not be doing this at all. Let me be 1000% clear. Not my decision. Let me make this disclaimer. Widowhood Real Talk with Tina is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with zero religious affiliation. There is nothing about this. We give a platform for people to share their story. We meet people no matter what faith or non-faith or whatever to let you know that you are not alone, that we will walk beside you on this journey, and provide different things to help. That is the organization. Sure. The question you asked me is about Tina as an individual.
I remarried, and my current husband had a cousin who passed and had some medical procedures, and I was not able to make it to the funeral. I saw that the widow posted on Facebook that it was her husband’s first birthday. I was like, I reached out and texted her, and I said, “Do you want to talk?” As you mentioned, there is so much power in being able to speak to someone else who understands your journey because they have had the same lived experience. Not a trauma-bonding way, but someone you do not have to validate or explain.
They understand because, “You took a bath in three months or one week.” That kind of conversation. Now, I am going to bed early, girl. By 9:00 PM. I am sliding. It is like whatever you told me, you may have to repeat that because I get up super early. I am going to bed early. I was on the phone with her maybe until 1:00. I knew what that was like. I wanted to extend that gift because there was a widow that extended that gift to me. When I got off the phone, I was like, “I am so tired.” I could hear God clearly say, “What are you going to do when the next person calls?”
It was like, “No one is calling my phone this late at night. No, I am not answering.” God was like, “No, what about the other person that needs to know they are not alone?” I was like, “I cannot talk to people that much. That just would not work.” My mom, who I want to say was 79 at that time, had a show speaking about her life, being a woman. She talked. It was called Endless Journey, and God dropped it in my spirit about a podcast and then the 501(c)(3) and these different things. I was like, “That sounds great. Who is paying for that?”
That sounds like a lot of money and God moment. I made a list of all the equipment and different stuff that I needed. I was like, “God, you have a bill because I am not sure how this is going because it is not my bill.” Not my idea, not my thing. I moved into a new home and had new appliances, and out of nowhere, my husband and I are sitting down watching TV, and the refrigerator just starts peeing. The water just starts coming out. I was like, “We are looking around.
Now we have this new house, and we have a bucket, because the water is dispensing randomly on its own.” I call, “You can come in. We were prepared. We knew you were coming.” I call about the warranty. I think I am on the phone with one person after another. Maybe like six people. They finally said, “We will just reimburse you for the full amount.” They tried to find a refrigerator that matched what we had. They could not. They gave me the full amount of the refrigerator. My refrigerator stopped doing what it stopped peeing.
No, what it is. I got off the phone, and I was like, “That was one bill I had to pay.” Something else, another part of this got together, and I was like, “This is more expensive than the other thing that I needed to do.” I was like, “Once again, not my idea.” I remarried, and I had called to put my current husband on my health insurance. They said, “Ma’am, your husband is already on your health insurance.” I was like, “This is weird.” Never took Mark off. They reimbursed me the difference from the moment Mark passed to the moment I played him. From the moment Mark passed, they reimbursed me everything back. That exact amount was the exact amount that I needed to pay to do.
Sounds like our book.
I was like, that is a little aggressive, but okay. I guess I am doing this. In the beauty of it, whose health insurance reimburses them?
Zebra. I am about to say, yeah.
I was like, I feel like that made Mark have a part of what I am doing in this.
It is beautiful.
We are starting a memorial garden, giving people a space. People will be able to pay verse if they can put their loved one’s name on benches, trees, gardens, however people want to. There is a part of this that is going to be a food-producing garden for the local area. We have a program called Children of Widowhood Secret Santa where we have an application period in June where people can apply. Unfortunately, one or both parents need to be deceased.
It was something I really wanted to do because I see people struggle economically. People can hardly take the conversations that our loved ones have passed, let alone financial stress on top of that. Your spouse passes, and you are struggling financially. Even if you do not want all the toys, it is whatever for Christmas. It is a little relief that we can provide. Each child gets to identify five gifts, and they make an Amazon anonymous list. We have two widows that lead the program. Last year we were able to ensure 29 children received Christmas gifts.
That’s great.
It is. In the first year, we had seven families. Last year we had eleven, and it will open up again in June. The two widows we work with, and we had one or two families that had both parents deceased, and the guardians were responsible. To be able to see their appreciation and just to be able to. We go out to businesses, we go out to organizations, other people to get them. Just pick a child or pick a family, and then they do not ever know who it was. You do not know. Those two widows came to me, and it was something I wanted to do, but I did not have the bandwidth, and then charging that up is just amazing.
That is amazing. That is really, really cool. It is really beautiful that your husband is a part of it. That is one thing about the things that I have done and am doing. She is a part of them. I want it to create a legacy for our kids. That is a really cool thing.
Final Thoughts: You Are Not Alone
Indeed. Danny, I appreciate you giving me your time for this conversation, and you are welcome. I would like for you to wrap up this conversation. Maybe there is something we did not cover that you wanted to, but I would like for your words to be the last words that our audiences hear by the campfire.
Just for all those people out there who are in it, I would just say you are not alone.
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About Danny Lesslie
Danny Lesslie is the award-winning co-author of Thank You, Cancer, a rare dual-perspective memoir written with his late wife, and the bestselling author of The Thank You Bridge. He is a devoted girldad and sought-after keynote speaker.
