A Conversation with the Courageous Parents Network
On Monday, April 1st on the eve of Fifty-seven Fridays’ release, E-Motion Founder Myra Sack was “In the Room” with Blyth Lord, Founder of the Courageous Parents Network to discuss the memoir. Fifty-Seven Fridays: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way honors Myra’s daughter Havi and chronicles their journey to life and love fully during the 57 weeks between her diagnosis with Tay-Sachs disease and her death on January 20, 2021.
Watch the full conversation or reflect on the excerpts below:
On being afraid
“I’ve given a lot of thought to the emotion of fear. I think that ultimately fear is an emotion with an energy that promotes stagnancy, and when human energy is stagnant it’s hard to experience vitality and growth. In contrast, what I felt compelled to lean into was this emotion of yearning. It’s definition is rooted in eagerness and craving. And that, I think, is all we can ask for ourselves and for others, is how we can bring and promote vitality in moments that feel so scary.”
On E-Motion’s pillars
“E-Motion is an organization that really grew out of Havi’s life and death. It came from this idea that there were really three elements to healing, and I use healing not as a way to say that there is an endpoint but healing as a way to say that there can be some sense of coherence in my world in a way that feels okay. Those three elements were movement, community, and ritual.”
On Grief literacy
“One concept that is pretty important is this concept of dis versus re. Dis the prefix, means to exclude or cut off. Re the prefix means again. When we dismember someone we are cutting them off from membership of community and that is really painful. Every time we don’t name a person who has died, every time we don’t invite a person into spaces where their parents might want them to be named or honored we are unintentionally dismembering them and that is incredibly painful. In contrast when we remember, we are actively participating in the process of bringing them into spaces again and again, into community again and again. This same concept applies to disconnecting versus reconnecting.”
On the before and after
“My before and after has three parts. Part one is before Havi. That, for me, was all about possibility, and some performance anxiety. And purpose, like “what’s my purpose'“ and it was all sort of future-oriented. And then havi came to be and that was the motherhood phase, the beginning of motherhood and that was perspective-shifting in ways I wouldn’t have appreciated. Then part three was motherhood reimagined when Havi was diagnosed. That was about and is about what Jon Kabat Zinn calls “rotation in consciousness.” In the moment of Havi’s diagnosis I was flipped upside down, my whole way of being. No longer was it about what is the next thing to do to achieve. It’s about how to be present. Everything that was being measured in was either about presence or eternity. That’s kind of the space that I’m living in in this phase three. Sometimes it’s okay and I get it right and other times I spin back. It’s always in rotation.”
On ways of being
“The first is about staying close to pain. We have to be able to access our own pain so that we can connect with someone else’s pain even if we don’t share the same experience. For me, it’s so important to find companions, whether that’s in the form of text or human, where that intimacy barrier is resolved and we can be really close. The second is to be gentle with ourselves when engaging in the land of the living actually feels good. Giving ourselves grace when that happens. A third is setting an intention when moving into spaces. Intention comes from the Latin tendere which means to stretch. When we engage in physical activity we know we need to stretch in order to perform. The same is true for emotional work.”