135 Amy Shaw
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Welcome and Upcoming Events
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[00:00:00] Emily: Hey, hey, and welcome back to episode number 135 of the brave widow show.
If you're watching or listening to this pretty much in real time, we have a lot of exciting things that are happening in the world. In the Brave Widow community, we are almost to February and February is the month of love. It can also be one of the hardest months for widows to go through.
I just met with A very full group of widows in, our kickoff session for the grief recovery method. And many of them mentioned how February particularly was difficult for them and especially Valentine's day and what that has meant for them and their person. So whether you are
missing your person extra hard during February, or maybe you're ready to start thinking about dating again, to start thinking about love after loss. Valentine's Day can just really be hard for people who have so much love in their hearts and so much love that they want to give. So I want to share with you a couple of things that are going on on Tuesday, February 11th, I am hosting a public webinar, meaning anyone can come on the top five dating mistakes that you might be making as a widow.
I would love to see you there. If you hear this before February 11th, just go to BraveWidow. com. You'll see a big banner across the top where you can click on that and sign up for this live event. During that webinar, I'm going to cover the top five mistakes that widows tend to make in dating. So, if you're tired of dealing with time wasters, with pen pals, with people who aren't serious, with all of the emotional drama.
You don't want to miss that. I also will be opening the doors to the love after loss mastermind. So I talked about this a little bit in our episode of the podcast last week, but the love after loss mastermind is a 90 day
mastermind full of group coaching, full of educational content, it is designed to help you
date without the drama, to find the next person that you want to be with, to get off the emotional roller coaster that comes with trying to put yourself back out there and wondering what everyone's going to think. I'm going to give you the keys to, Moving past your insecurities to hanging on to all of the fears that swirl in your mind and the core belief that somehow now you deserve less.
That somehow an experience that could be waiting for you in the future isn't going to be as good or as fulfilling as the experience you had in the past. We are going to tackle all of that.
So if you're hearing this before Tuesday, February 11th of 2025, then you can go to BraveWidow. com up for the live event that's happening on the 11th. And if you're hearing or seeing this after the 11th, then you can go to brave widow. com slash love L O V E and sign up for the wait list for our next love after loss mastermind.
We are also going to have a special event on Valentine's Day for all of our Brave Widow members and all of our Brave Widow family. So if you've been thinking about joining Brave Widow and you haven't, then this is the perfect time to do it. We're going to have a special event on Valentine's Day where we get to honor the love that we have for our person.
honor the emotional relationship that we get to continue with them, and just learn about expanding our hearts and our capacity for love and what that looks like. It's going to be a really special time and I would love to see you there.
Welcome to the Brave Widow Show, where we help widows find hope, heal their heart, and dream again for the future. I'm your host, Emily Tanner. After losing my husband of 20 years, I didn't know how I could ever experience true joy and excitement again for the future. I eventually learned how to create a life I love, and I've made it my mission to help other widows do the same.
Join me and the Brave Widow membership community and get started today. Learn more at BraveWidow. com
All right.
Introducing Amy Shaw
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[00:04:44] Emily: Let me introduce you to Amy.
Amy Shaw is a contemporary impressionist living in the upstate of South Carolina. She is the widow of the late Brian Shaw and mother of 10 children with two grandsons and a grand girl on the way. Six of her children still live at home. Five are in elementary, junior high and high school. Amy is a John Maxwell certified speaker who delights in painting while delivering keynote addresses to her audiences.
She also has a new calling she's uncovering now and is excited to share about it with us today. All right, let's dive in.
Amy, welcome. And thank you for coming. Yeah, I'm excited to be here with you. Yeah. So I know our audience would love to know more about you, more about, your story and your background.
So do you mind to introduce yourself and then we can start wherever you want.
[00:05:45] Amy: Sure. Yeah.
Amy's Family and Faith Journey
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[00:05:46] Amy: I am a widow. It's been three and a half years since my husband went home to Jesus. And I am a mother of ten children. And that is Whoa. Ten children? Yes. That is a Yeah, it does stop people. They usually like I must have heard you wrong.
What? Ten? Yes. Um, yeah, so I have six living here with us with me now, and, so five are in high school, junior high and elementary.
[00:06:18] Emily: That is amazing. I normally get the side eye when I tell people I have four. Well, now five, I have a bonus son now. But yeah, how you have managed to maintain sanity and, run a house with that many teenagers is amazing.
So kudos to you.
[00:06:35] Amy: That is the Lord's strength. Truly. I could not do it on my own. A long time ago, I had prayed that I wanted a life that was. fully dependent on the Holy Spirit, that it was evident that I wasn't able to do it myself. And I think God took me quite seriously and really did write a story in my life that I would not be able to do this on my own.
I
[00:07:01] Emily: love that because so many people will say, Oh God, won't give you more than you can handle. And I'm like, literally that is the opposite of what it says in the Bible. So
[00:07:11] Amy: it absolutely is not true. And I think that that's been part of my journey and part of the walk that I've had. Even before my husband, Brian got sick, that we were doing Dealing with more than what we could handle, but that caused us to lean into him and to him being the Lord and then him flooding us with more strength and more creative ideas of how to parent, how to come up with all that needed to happen.
[00:07:40] Emily: Oh, that's wonderful.
Meeting Brian and Starting a Family
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[00:07:42] Emily: So how did you and Brian meet?
[00:07:45] Amy: Well, we, we were introduced by our parents who knew one another from church a long time before, and that was in high school and I was a year or two ahead of him, I was two years ahead of him in school and. I, we went to a pretty big high school and so later I would see that blonde, toe headed kid and think, oh, I'm supposed to know him, but I didn't really.
And he was really introverted and I was really extroverted. And so we really didn't cross paths again until We were both in college and, I was away for a summer trip in Haiti. And when I returned, my family announced that we were now attending a new church. And so at that new church was Brian Shaw and his family.
And so I went to the college and career group and he was in there. And I remember thinking, I think we went to high school together. So we were friends for about three years in that group. I never thought anything. I really didn't. And so the Lord truly surprised me with an amazing man that really was nearby most of my life.
We probably, we figured it out later. We probably went to the same library, the same grocery store. We were definitely in junior high together. We didn't know it.
[00:09:03] Emily: Oh, it's really funny how those things work out. And especially in the beginning where you're like, Oh, you don't really think much about it. What were some of his qualities that you just really loved about him or that you appreciated him even while you guys were married?
[00:09:19] Amy: We had,, he was the love of my life. I'll tell you that he swept me off my feet. And I think it was just, he had such a creative. Side to him. I'm an artist. And , although back then I didn't know I was an artist. But I have been ever since I was created. I just took a long time, a couple decades to get into it.
The first date that he asked me for, it wasn't really a date. We were supposed to go out for coffee and he insisted on picking me up. And when he picked me up, he said,, actually there's an art festival in town. And so I thought maybe we'd go to this art festival. And I was like, oh my goodness.
I had been going out with a guy who was really into sports and every time we went out and did anything, it always had to deal with a ball. And, that's fine once or twice, but like, I was really over it. So, when Brian Shaw invited me out and we went to this art festival, and it was really interesting because at that art festival, we paid attention to a certain, certain things in, in common.
We both loved art. Photography, specifically photography of international, children. And all three of those came back around in our lives. We ended up having a photography business for a short while, and we both had a passion for missions and we served overseas together. And then of course we adopted all these children from around the world.
Wow,
[00:10:46] Emily: that's amazing. And how you're able to look back at what you saw and experienced at the art festival and tie that into how your life is now.
[00:10:55] Amy: So
Brian
was very funny, very introverted, but just loved people. He really cherished people and he would remember all these things about people. And he would always ask after I was the one going out and spending time with people, he would ask, so how is this part of their lives?
And how, cause he would remember all of those things., So yeah, I miss him terribly. He really, truly was the love of my life.
[00:11:19] Emily: Sounds incredibly thoughtful as a person. How long were the two of you married? And at what point did you decide to adopt children and to have a large family?
[00:11:30] Amy: Yeah, we, we were married in total for 24 and a half years.
And when we left our wedding, when we walked back up the aisle from, the place where you're married, we said, let's be married for 50 years. We want to make it to 50. I remember saying that. Um, and it was so heartbreaking that we didn't even make it to 25, but, we milked those 24 years.
For all they were worth, I really think that we did, in the, I remember being engaged him and we were in a Kroger parking lot and we were talking about how many kids we wanted to have. And I said 10 and he said four. And so we decided on six. And in reality, when we started having children, first of all, it was a struggle to have children.
And that kind of surprised me. Our first pregnancy. We had a wonderful, beautiful baby girl who is now 24 years old and she's knocking the socks off the world right now. Shout out to Gen Z. My second pregnancy, I didn't, I never knew that something could go wrong. And so that was a real surprise when I was super, super, I had wanted to have twins my whole life.
And the Lord gave me a set of twins, that second pregnancy. And it was about five months along that I went in for a, an ultrasound. And we discovered that one of the twins had passed away. And so it was just a devastating thing. And yet the most interesting thing was that I carried the other twin to term and she was born on their due date.
And she is my healthy baby girl. Who is now 22 and then following that, we had another, and then we went to, we went overseas to China and we, we worked there for two years. We had another, pregnancy. After a loss, we had another loss, early on, when I, when we were living in China.
And then,, Came back to the United States and we were headed to India. That was our plan. We were gonna be career missionaries to India, in fact, and I got pregnant again. And it was so exciting and I knew that I just had to get past that point that I had lost the twin because that was the furthest point along.
That was about 22 weeks. And so once we passed that 22 week mark, I thought I'm golden. And of course, I had just had our son Oliver, but very, very shockingly at the 39 week mark, I didn't feel any movement and we went in and heard the devastating news that we had lost this child. And so I delivered our perfect, healthy baby boy who just wasn't ready.
Breathing
[00:14:10] Emily: at 39 weeks. I can't even imagine what that must've been like. Yeah.
[00:14:17] Amy: The, the loss of that in the horror and the feeling of no, we've already done this. We know., And that devastating moment of driving away from the hospital with an empty baby carrier. That was just so unbelievable., Following that incident, the death of our son, after we buried him, very soon after Brian's work asked us to go to the Northwest corner of Ohio and work there, and since we weren't able to go directly to the mission field, reeling from that shock.
We said yes and really didn't even know what we were saying yes to, but we ended up living in Northwest Ohio for the remainder of my husband's life for the next 17 years actually. And I ended up having another, a final baby. My daughter, Dara Kate, was born in Toledo. And it was after she was born that the Lord began to speak to my husband.
And so we finally, it took all that time to get to four kids. We had set this intention of six children and it was so exhausting and heart rendering to even get to four. And so it was, I knew, I knew that I knew when I had Derekate that I couldn't do this again. It was just so. Brought with fear and anxiety. And so I thought, I guess we're done.
Adoption and Expanding the Family
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[00:15:52] Amy: And then one day my husband called me from work and he said, have you ever considered international adoption? And he had been listening to a podcast back then about the crisis in Africa, the AIDS,, leaving this devastated generation really of, of children without parents.
And so we moved forward on that immediately, and the, in 2011, we brought our first child home from overseas, and that was our son Zareb, Zeb, from Uganda. And from there, it was like serial adopting. We brought home five more children in the next four years.
[00:16:35] Emily: Now, your family and friends had to have thought that you guys were just, going crazy.
[00:16:41] Amy: Yeah,
they
may have thought that. I don't know. I think you'd have to ask them. You know, I was in a group, we called ourselves the Water Girls. And we were reading a book, called The Hole in Our Gospel. And that book really was part of preparing my story. My heart for what the Lord was about to do. And so God was working on Brian's heart separately.
And I was meeting with these friends and we were reading this book and just realizing, wow, we really need to put our feet where our faith is. And so. That was really part of preparing my heart for adoption. So following Zareb's, adoption, we brought home our son Toby in 2013, and he had arthrogryposis and I'd never heard of that.
And I thought, what in the world? And our intention the whole time was to see. field. And so at this point, we had been really trying to, to go and the Lord had really been closing the door. And we were very confused. We went through a lot of doubt. And I remember my husband saying, like, we just don't understand why, Lord, you would put us up on a shelf.
Like, why? We're so willing to be your servants. And we had been very careful not to buy a house ever because we had been told, I attended Wheaton college and that was just something that they told us frequently. If you're serious about missions, don't buy a house. Don't tie yourself to the United States.
And so we had taken that really seriously., and so it was this thought of, well, since the Lord is not opening the door for us to go to mission overseas, to missions, we will, Use the same time that we're going to live and we'll go ahead and We'll be parents to these children that don't have a family.
And that was, it was a really unique, a unique thing. And it took years for me to see. It didn't take years for other people to see because they would tell us all the time. Well, you were called to the nations, but God has brought the nations to you. I don't know how many times I heard that. But it really took a long time for me to settle in with that.
So after Toby, we brought home our son, our daughter, Esty, short for Esther. And, that's , a long story, but she,, is, is now 20 about to turn 21 years old. She was 10 when we brought her home and she had never been able to go to school. And we, Actually, we're there just in time. It was amazing.
The timing of the Lord. We got there on a Monday and by Thursday she had., an infection in her bladder and her kidneys really related to her spina bifida and she went septic
[00:19:24] Emily: and
[00:19:25] Amy: because we had a required, , medical visit for getting the American visa, we took her to that medical appointment and they were like, your daughter is very sick.
We knew that she wasn't talking to us. And when they. gave her to us. They also gave us some children's Tylenol, which I thought was a little weird, but had no idea that she was on death's door. And so because we were there, we were able to get her the medication that she needed. And the Lord used us to, to save her life.
I mean, God did it, but. Used to our hands and feet. And so, following that we brought home a son, Gable. And then after that, we brought two more daughters home and we did bundle them in the same trip and then we're, we're getting efficient. And so we brought home Windsor and Summerlin together. And, they are now 11 and 10.
So really make a big, big family.
[00:20:29] Emily: That's just amazing. And who knows where those kids are going to go and what they're going to do and how many people that they're going to be able to impact way beyond if they had remained, in their home country and with the limited options that they would have had, and certainly the limited love and guidance that, that you guys were able to give them.
That's amazing.
[00:20:52] Amy: It was a real honor to be. entrusted with their lives. So, and then after that, maybe we'll get to that in a second, but we did bring another son into our family.
Life with a Big Family
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[00:21:03] Emily: So as you have, these, these children that you're bringing in, you're incorporating your family and,, I assume that you guys are busy with home and work and that sort of thing.
Did life just rock along at that point? Were you in a routine? What was that like for you over those next several years?
[00:21:23] Amy: It was very intense. There was always people would say, you're never bored. Are you? No, I am never bored. There is never a moment when I'm bored. We lived in a, in a very rural location.
And so we were about an hour drive away from Toledo, which is where we had all, the children's specialists. So I guess I didn't mention that a lot of my, that my all my international adopted children had special needs and so they all had specialized doctors and therapies and I drove and drove and drove and drove and drove back and forth that hour, hour in, hour back.
So yeah, my husband worked and, we, We kept going and we ended up moving to a bigger house. Finally, we were, we were in a, I think, 1800 square feet. Maybe it was 2000 square feet with two bathrooms for the 12 of us. And it was, it was tight. We had, we had four bedrooms and so we, we had a lot of kids. In there, we had squeezed in there.
So, yeah, we ended up buying a place that had two acres and we ended up getting a cow. And so we were milking this guy.
Homesteading Adventures
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[00:22:30] Amy: Wasn't milking this cow. My husband and a couple of the kids were milking, milking the cow and making cheese and making butter and making ghee and making yogurt and all the fun things. My husband was a real homesteader at heart. I think I wasn't, but he was, And we ended up having sheep and chickens and ducks and a whole, a whole bunch of,, fun animals along with, of course, dogs and cats and rabbits. And, so yeah, we had a lot going on. We had a lot going on.
A Sudden Illness
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[00:23:02] Amy: And I, I wonder if some of that played into my husband becoming sick., I don't think anyone will ever know. There is, they don't have a determination for what, what brings about the type of cancer that he had.
[00:23:17] Emily: Do you mind to share some of that journey and when you learned that he started to be sick or when that cancer showed
[00:23:25] Amy: up?
The Diagnosis
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[00:23:26] Amy: It's very, very clear in my mind.
It was March 8th of 2018. And, he came home from work early. He never did that. He never did that. I don't think he was sick a day of our marriage., if he was, he, he would tough it out. He was just such a tough guy. Right., so he came home early, like 9 30 in the morning and took a nap. Which was really odd.
And we had preschoolers and the preschool bus would come and pick them up at 1230. So I thought, well, I'll let him sleep until the bus comes. And then once I got the kids on the bus, um, I went up and I woke him up and I was like, how are you doing? And he could not make a sentence that made sense. And he was trying, he was clearly trying.
And then he would grab his head and just say that his head hurt so badly. And it was just really odd behavior. And he kept trying to tell me something and the effort that he put in and he would, his words were all just out of order and mismatched. And I kept telling him like, look, if you don't knock it off, I'm going to need to call the squad.
And what was crazy is he would bend down and hold his head and he would pray and his prayer made sense. So that's where I thought, okay, why it's, I mean, it was so strange and he finally stood up and he put his hands on my shoulders and he called me our daughter's name and I thought, okay. And so they came and they did an assessment and they immediately took him to the hospital.
I followed in my own car. And by the time I got there, they had already done a scan and they said, your husband has a mass in his brain and we're transferring him. To a bigger hospital. And that was exactly my reaction. Just total shock. Like, what? Wait, what? I mean, there was no clue that any of this was going on at all.
We had no, no warning signs. And so, yeah, right away it was, we need to have an emergency surgery to remove this. It was the size of a green grape. It was over his left temporal lobe, sitting on his speech center, which is why he was struggling to make sentences that made sense. They were able to, to get a hundred percent of the tumor and.
We, we were just blindsided when we got the news that it was grade four glioblastoma. Like, what's glioblastoma? I don't know what that means. And it's the most aggressive brain cancer that you can have. Second only to pancreatic cancer in its viciousness.
Treatment and Hope
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[00:26:01] Amy: And, We were living our lives on March 7th and March 8th, that happened, and we got this news, with the pathology, it took a few weeks.
And it was official, and it was in black and white in front of us, that he had this aggressive brain cancer that was 100 percent terminal. And that less than 5 percent of cases live five years.
[00:26:27] Emily: Wow. And
[00:26:28] Amy: so the physicians were telling us that he had. Three to six months to live. If we did no treatment, if we chose to do treatment, he might have a year.
He was just like, wait, what? It was just unfathomable. And so I got to work and I started. networking and used Facebook a lot, really found out a ton of information on the opposite side. Like there's the doctor's side and then there's kind of the side of the patients and their experience. And so I did a lot of research that way.
And I researched clinical trials and I learned all about drugs that I'd never heard about before. And We made a decision to go to have our treatment at the Cleveland Clinic. So now we were driving two and a half hours for these visits and the amazing thing is that my husband had 37 months instead of 12 and We had people all around the world praying for him, and we had people praying for healing.
And I truly do believe that he did receive physical healing on this earth. Because from December of 2018, that was the last time he had any chemotherapy. He went all the way to May of 2020 with nothing. He was on zero treatment. He felt amazing. This man was still getting up at whatever hour in the morning to work out.
And the best thing was that he was on disability. So he was with us and we got to spend every day together, which we just adored one another. We worked really well together. So he did lots of woodworking projects and just, he started baking sourdough bread and Slathering it with butter and saying, here, try this, 20 pounds later.
Faith and Struggles
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[00:28:21] Emily: And it still had to be incredibly hard because I try to imagine being in that situation and thinking, okay, on one hand, we're supposed to have faith and we're supposed to pray and we're supposed to have hope. And on the other hand, there's a reality of. Maybe he's going to make it. Maybe he's not.
I don't really know. And if not, maybe we need to have conversations or come up with a plan for what we want to do afterwards. But I hear that that's a, a balance that a lot of, , caregivers struggle with is knowing how to lean which way and, and how that impacted their faith or their relationship or even how they viewed God after that.
What are your thoughts around that?
[00:29:05] Amy: That's an amazing question. I think because we had had our son who was born still, but I had in my arms and he was warm. I believed I had the faith that God would heal him. And when he grew cold and we buried him, I was devastated and I was really heartbroken. And I really.
I think I doubted that God, I knew that God healed. I knew that he did it in the Bible and I knew that there were people around that God healed, but he didn't do it for me. And so I struggled a lot and Brian too. We struggled a lot with believing that God would heal him. Now, if anyone had reason to keep her husband here, I feel like it was me because these kids, there were a lot of them.
And we, I mentioned earlier that we brought in another son and we did, he was 20 when he came to us and we did not officially adopt him, but he is definitely a part of our family. He lost his own mother to cancer. And. He moved in with our family during COVID actually, or maybe it was 2019. I think it was, but he lived with us and he really got an experience of family that he hadn't had before.
He moved across the country and he ended up meeting his future wife at our church. And they are now about to have their third baby. So it's very exciting. Exciting. Yes. so I, I think. We struggled with that, and yet, I had, I had heard a word from the Lord during worship,, that God was, God told me about a month after Brian's diagnosis, as I was worshiping, He said, I'm going to take Brian with, from glioblastoma, and I'm going to use you to encourage the church.
And I heard that and I was like, what, what, oh my goodness, multiple times in that same setting, that same church, that same corner where we worshiped, I would get a, a deep impression from the Lord that we had another child around the world waiting for us. So it wasn't a new venue for him to speak to me, but that was certainly a new message.
And really, I only heard the front part that he was going to take Brian home from glioblastoma. And I remember after church, when I heard that I went forward and I, I talked to my pastors and I said, please, this is what I heard from the Lord. Please pray for me not to be afraid. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to have courage.
I wanted to do it well. And I think having that knowledge impacted how we, how we looked at things. Also, you know, you have the doctors saying this is a hundred percent fatal. Of course the Lord can do anything, but this is a hundred percent fatal. There are no cases of people surviving this.
So then the Lord said that to me again, a month later, the identical sentence, I'm going to take Brian home from glioblastoma and. I'm going to raise you up to encourage the church. And. The second time around, I was like, yeah. You mentioned that. Thanks. Thanks for the reminder. Thanks for the reminder.
But I think that, that almost freed us to really like really be intentional with. The time that we had, of course, it's one thing to look back and say, we had 37 months. We did not know we had 37 months. We didn't know that we had the next day. So that caused us to really treasure every day.
But I will be very honest and say, we cried every day. I am very sure that every single day we had tears at some point in that day.
Legacy and Intentional Living
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[00:32:43] Amy: We were served by a wonderful organization called Inheritance of Hope, and their calling is to serve families that have children under age 18 in the home where one parent has a terminal diagnosis.
And during Our retreat with them. I had a woman come to me and she said, Amy, Brian is going to die and you are not okay. And that was a game changer for me because it helped me. And it helped me say, this is real because I think it's what we heard from the church and from our friends as we're praying for Brian, we're praying for Brian and they were, and it was critical that they were because we were empowered through the Holy Spirit.
power to, to make it all those days and to keep all those kids going and all those IEPs and all those appointments and therapies, plus all of Brian's treatment. And it was hard on our kids because we were gone and when he was gone for, I was six weeks for his, radiation. It was hard on them. But I think it was because, we were very intentional and they gave me that permission to say, okay, I'm not okay.
And they named something called anticipatory grief. And I was like, I've never heard of that. What is that? That's basically you're grieving ahead what you know you're going to lose, but you're grieving it today. And you're in this weird space. Because it hasn't happened yet, but it has happened, and you can't just forget about it and go back and live the way you were, and you're just in this space, and that space lasted a long time.
Three years is a long time, and I have dear friends that are in their 10th year with glioblastoma, and that space has lasted a long time. It ends up kind of pointing towards what the Lord has called me to do in the future.
A New Calling
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[00:34:40] Amy: And I didn't know this until just a couple of weeks ago, but, I do believe that God is asking me to come alongside other people that are living with terminal diagnoses, whether they were given an ALS diagnosis or whether their cancer maybe has come back and, they're, of course they're going to fight it.
They're going to do terminal or. Excuse me. They're gonna do treatment. That's the word I meant. They're gonna do treatment and do everything they can to stay healthy and , to fight this. But I feel this great calling to help people prepare for heaven, prepare for what this is, what we're in for.
I mean, this is what Jesus died for., it's to be able to live abundantly with this knowledge that we're going home. And so how do you do that when you know? When, we're all terminal. And that was also a real wake up call. I'm just as terminal as Brian is. It's just that he has a clock ticking and I guess I have a clock ticking too.
I just don't know it. Right. Yeah. But I think the nature and the way that we went through it, there was a, a time where I told our kids, I said, we have a great opportunity. We have the privilege to walk daddy to the door of heaven to, to walk, assist him walking that red carpet to heaven.
And help him get excited. And the number one thing he's going to worry about is how are we going to do? How will we do without him? So the best gift we can give him is to help him understand that we're going to be okay. And I really didn't know if I was going to be okay or not because it's so frightening.
, but I knew that God had been there for all of those stories in the past. And we actually have a rock that we have taken a magic or not a magic marker, a sharpie and written all of these little key words to remind us of the stories of the faithfulness of God. We have a huge history of watching God show up when we needed him.
And so I, I told the kids. God's gonna show up. I don't know how, but we'll see him. We'll see him show up. So we were able to help Brian walk excitedly towards heaven. And then we left, uh, Inheritance of Hope really helped us learn to leave a legacy. And so he created a legacy video, and we, we did something we called a wedding walk, where, really, it was because my daughter Jencie said, Oh, I wish dad could walk me down the aisle.
And we're like, well, let's do that. And so all six of our daughters dressed in wedding gowns, And our church decorated the church and they had a video team there. Someone made us a wedding cake and they catered it. It was amazing details that I couldn't have thought of myself. And he walked each daughter down the aisle and I met them at the base of the aisle and he prayed for their future spouses for their future marriages.
And then those are recorded so that when they do have their weddings, that can be played at the same time. So we just did some really intentional things like that. But at the same time we were absolutely praying for healing. And I think it took some time to recognize that he was healed those months before that cancer did come back.
And before we had a clinical trial that. Went totally amok and his cancer quadrupled and then they removed it and then it came back more viciously and it came back with a new, new type that only teenagers get this type of glioblastoma and it takes them in a matter of weeks. Just, just, just. What? , before all of that kicked off, you know, we really, we really had healing.
And so God did answer our prayers for healing. And then he did what he said he was going to do, which was take Brian home from glioblastoma. And one of the interesting things, Brian always said, I don't want to call it fighting cancer. Because it's not going to win. God is always going to be victorious.
And I loved that. So we, we tried not to use that verbiage. But Glioblastoma was just a tool in God's hand. And, it's a nasty tool,
[00:39:10] Emily: it is, and what a beautiful idea that they gave you of the wedding walk and really being intentional about creating a legacy.
Because I talked to many people on this show and many widows outside of that, that felt like they would be giving up hope or felt like maybe even their spouse refused to acknowledge. Yeah, or terminal and that this was going to be their reality. And so they feel that they missed that opportunity.
And even though I can't even imagine what your journey must have been like, I'm glad that you got to experience that part of it. And it's something for your children. They'll remember forever. Well, I know your story is going to inspire so many people and they're going to love it.
Like, what is the best way if people want to connect with you, if they want to learn more about what you're doing or even help support you with your future project, what's, what's the best way for people to connect with you?
[00:40:08] Amy: If people want to connect with me they can Come to walkthered. com that's where I've got a place where you can read just a tiny little bit about myself and About walk the red and you can join my free community where I'm supporting not only people with Terminal illness, but also caregivers, spouses, and anyone,
you can join that community and connect with me. So that'd be great.
[00:40:36] Emily: Awesome.
Words of Encouragement
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[00:40:37] Emily: Lastly, I'll ask you what advice or words of encouragement would you give to widows who, maybe they're in anticipatory grief, maybe they're, just waiting on this clock to count down and they don't know when it's going to end, or maybe they're just in the aftermath and they're really struggling with their faith and with the reality of what's happening around them.
What words of advice or encouragement would you give them?
[00:41:02] Amy: I think understanding the heart of God has been a beautiful gift to me in the aftermath of my husband's death. I really got a, a genuine look at who Jesus is. And he surprised me. I remember thinking, you're like that, Oh, you're so much better than I thought. You're so much better than I thought. And so I think my encouragement would be, that God is allowing this.
In, in your life out of his deepest love for you. And that can really probably sound bristling, I think, but. If you can get to the heart of God who loves you and wants his very best for you, and he knows that his very best is himself and you have complete access to himself. I think I would also give you, give the advice or the encouragement that we are spiritual beings having in a physical experience and this world is not the whole story.
We tend to think that we tend to think, we get 80 years or, give or take sometimes decades, but, and that's it. And yeah, I know that Jesus died on the cross for my sins and I'm going to heaven. But that is a reality that I, I have walked. Through because I now have multiple people on the other side of that threshold, and I've really come to realize that we're just going to keep on going and going and going, and we can we can live for that.
We can live for that here. And that's what inspires me and gives me great joy. And it's really walking with Jesus out of my desperation, and it took the desperation Of so many losses and intense. Fire to get me to want that because when everything's going great, I don't really, I'm good, right? I mean, I I'm, I'm still willing to pray and I'm still willing to be grateful, but that desperation crying out to God, and that's where I think God meets us.
And so. That would be my encouragement is to understand and if, , to maybe just even hear it and to allow it to fall on you that God is allowing this horrible situation out of his deepest love for you and that your story's not over and that there's more of him for you.
[00:43:30] Emily: Beautifully said. Well, Amy, thank you so much for being willing to share your story and to help encourage and inspire other widows.
Hey guys.
Walk the Red
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[00:43:40] Emily: It's been a few weeks since we recorded and Amy's made some progress on what she's been working on and I can't wait for her to tell you more about that. So Amy, why don't you share with the audience more about what you've been doing?
[00:43:54] Amy: Sure. Yeah, I have, actually started a business and the name is Walk the Red, and that comes from that concept that we had with, that we were helping my husband walk the red carpet to the door of eternity, cheering him on, helping him know that we were going to be okay.
And I've. Establish this as a business and it's really the whole goal is to inspire and support and champion the terminally ill plus their caregivers to help them live with intention, leave a meaningful legacy and transition with joyful expectation into the arms of the Savior.
[00:44:32] Emily: I love that so much.
And where is the best place for people to go, again, just reiterate that and I'll put it in the show notes. Sure. But if they want to learn more, if they want to connect with you, what's the best place for them to go?
[00:44:48] Amy: Yeah, the best place for them to go is walkthered. com and they can connect with me there.
There's a free, community of not just, people who are diagnosed with something really serious or terminal, but also their caregivers. I love that. Thank you so much, Amy. Absolutely. So glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:45:10] Emily: Are you a widow who feels disconnected? Do you feel like you're stuck or even going backwards in your grief? Widowhood can be lonely and isolating, but it doesn't have to be. Join us in the Brave Widow membership community and connect. We teach widows how to find hope, heal their heart, and dream again for the future.
