Hey, today's show, we're going to be talking about parent transitions and how do you reconnect with your partner after you dropped that last kid off at school?

We're going to be talking about how to support your wife or your husband when your in-laws just aren't coming through. We're going to have an awesome segment talking about grandparents, how to support and love your grandparents as they get older and how grandparents can love and support and even surprise their grandkids. Stay tuned.

One is up good folks, I'm John and this is the Dr. John Delonas show a show for you about you and VIU, where we take your live calls. We talk to real people with real challenges about relationships, relational I.Q., mental health, ADHD, depression, anxiety, relationships, being a good girlfriend or boyfriend.

Sometimes we talk about people who say the words, I'm a cat, mom or yeah, I don't have kids, but I'm a cat mom.

What I like there's a couple of people at work talking about their kids and then they're like, Oh yeah, exactly. I'm a I'm a dead a dog dad. And it's so the same thing. Here's here's a spoiler alert, everybody. It's super not super not cat. Mom's not a real thing. That's not a thing. It's super not a real thing. Dog parents know you have a pet that you can put in a cage in the side of your house.

That's just a thing. So here's the deal. We talk about that. That's a whole other thing. If you're looking for honesty in a world where truth doesn't exist anymore, if you want a first opinion, a second opinion, if you just disagree with your neighbor and you want a mediator, give me a call. I'm here to walk with you. My number is one eight four four six nine three thirty two ninety one. That's one eight four four six nine three three two nine one.

Again, keep the emails coming it ask John at Ramsey Solutions. Dotcom, leave your name, your number and we will get back in touch with you and God help you.

Dude, if you're a cat mom, probably this is at the shelter. This is a show for you. All right. Hey, let's go straight to the phones. Let's go let's go to Cindy in Austin, Texas, first. Cindy, good morning. How are we doing?

The five one two doing awesome. Thank you. So how can I help this morning?

So I have been a stay at home mom for a long time and I hope my kids are my entire life. The last twenty five years I've dreamt of being a mom, sit down with a girl. Once I had them, I put everything I had into them and very popular as they are today. Our last house was graduating college this year and so as to be expected. My husband. I will be empty nesters soon and I honestly, looking back and looking forward, I've done a disservice to him because I've asked him second to the kids, because I want to do the best I could with them and now I want to make it up now through the emptiness years.

And I was kind of if you give me advice on how to do this best and how we can reconnect, what a beautiful question.

So real quick, how old are you? Sound like you're about nineteen.

I'm forty nine. Thank you for it's not even how you look anymore. It's like, oh I sound young. I'll take that. That's cool. Sunny, that's fantastic. So forty nine.

How long have you and your husband been married for. Thirty years. Thirty years. OK, so give, give me the State of the Union of your marriage. How are things. Are they good. Does he love you. Is he seeing somebody else on the side. Are you like give me the State of the Union.

We're really good. Like we're, we're, we've done a really good job of balancing out parents and stuff. But, you know, for the first hour in our 20s and 30s and 40s, we're just grinding, trying to do the best we could, raise our family, know homework and stuff like that.

So when you say, look at him, when you say you put him second, what does that mean?

I'm just like as always, the girls always worried about what they were doing. If they're doing good, making sure I spent time with them, making sure I was invested in what they were involved in doing up with them at night to talk. And then they were Caucasian late at night. That's only a you think we do have some super cell phones in the room. So I make sure I was up until they went to bed. They get the cell phones and then and, you know, he's just doing the dad thing and worked really hard.

And so I was always putting the girls first, making sure that they were good because I wanted to make sure that when they left the house, I could say I did my best with them.

So that's honorable. And I want a high five. You there all the way from Nashville. What are ways that you show your husband that you desire him, that he is loved, that you think he's a person of value?

So I've come to realize that those personality traits like how you look for love and affection, I'm very much a service oriented person and they show this to him and other people. They're doing things for them. And I hope that they interpret that as my love for them. So I figured that's right for him. And he says, you know why meals and clothes last and clean house and Awesome Castle like that. And and he's he's very much in a words.

He likes sports. And that hasn't been my forte. And I'm trying to change that now. He's a good, good guy. I mean, he's amazing enough and they just honestly put him for the last twenty five years.

Well, number one, I want to applaud you for recognizing that. I want to applaud you for being a mom who kept the house together for twenty five years. And you really. Doubled down and dedicated her life to her daughters, to her husband, to just being the CEO of your house, and that's that's a noble calling. And I also want to honor the fact that you're recognizing that you're changing stations here in life and that you want to make changes yourself and you want to reconnect with your husband.

That's a big, big deal. And that puts you ahead of so many other people I've worked with. I can't even tell you how many families who are dropping kids off of college over the years and then they just get home. I mean, they're driving home and they look at each other and it's like, who are you? And that reverberates through their kids. It reverberates through the parents. So high five to you. So here's a couple of things I want you to think through.

And I wish I had a better analogy than the one I'm going to give you. It's just the one pops in my head here. And so for the vegan's in the audience or the PETA folks, this isn't going to be a great example, but it's the best one I got.

So any time there is a transition in a marriage right from a new kid, the aftermath of an affair moving to a new town after a cancer diagnosis, after the loss of a parent or empty nest or any sort of transition, there's a temptation and for good reason. Right. There's a temptation to try to reclaim the past, to try to go back and get what was right.

Remember when we were young and we just made out all the time and I look super good and you look like. Right, there's this this temptation to go back and get what was and bring it into our new place or our new season. And what was was beautiful. They're great memories, beautiful love and joy, peace, wild fun, great sex, all that stuff. Right. But when you try to drag the past into the present, it often arrives dead or not quite as awesome as we remember it.

And it's covered in leaves and sticks. And again, I apologize. The only analogy I can think of is deer hunting. When you just shoot a deer in the woods and you've got to drag it all the way to where your car is or to where the Polaris is, it just isn't this majestic, beautiful thing that you saw on the mountain top, right. It's a dead animal. And so Esther Perel, she's a relationship expert. She's somebody that is is really elevated in the relationship space.

She's a brilliant, brilliant thinker and writer. She talks about this beautiful notion. And tell me how this fits in your soul, Cindy, how this resonates with you. She says adults will often have three or four deep loves in their lifetime, in their adult life. And the lucky ones are the ones who work really hard, experience those loves with the same person. And so you've got this smoking hot husband of yours, right, this lovely, lovely husband, and you met him and that was love No.

One, then you got to be in love and experience life for twenty five years with this hardworking provider who also loved you deeply, but love look differently.

And now you're at relationship number three with the same guy. Right. How does that sound? Does that sound right? That sounds right. Yes. OK, so here's what I want you to reconsider. I want you to reconsider not recreating the past, not trying to get back once what was. But I want you to try to build something new. And building something new means you get the excitement of being an architect. You get the excitement of being an engineer.

You don't have to be an archaeologist. You don't have to go back and try to drag something that was you get to paint an entirely new picture. And so to do this, you've got to be honest with who each other is right now, who you've become and where you guys want to go, which is so rad. So when's the last time you guys went out on what I would call and again, this is going to be different for everybody on a smokin hot date.

When's the last time you went out?

It's looking like just me and him, just you and him, like he looked like for real. For real. Texas good. You looked good.

You are winking at him the whole night. You set it up for a couple of days. Like, when's the last time you went and did that? We do know one of those overnight dates last year for his birthday.

So you threw in the overnight date. Well played on Madeleine and the birthday date. Right. So so what I want you to begin to think of is a world where you all can have a life, a romantic life, a rebuilt life, a life that is a completely new picture that is beyond the birthday, overnight date and the anniversary overnight. Right. Overnight date, the obligatory dates there. But the ones where you can set out to date again and now you've been married for 25 years, you can even hook up on the first date.

You can recreate what you want to do, where you want to be. Here's here's the big thing. Paint a new picture together. And you said something earlier that I wrote down, and it's this idea of this hope. I hope that my husband has received my love language, my love language of service of man. Every time you come home, you've got food. Here's the deal. He has received that. No question about it. But I want you to move past this word of hope.

I want you to move past this word of. I hope so. I think so into. I know so. And the way you do that is to have a direct probably several direct conversations, several direct. We're going to take another out of town date and we're going to revision life. What do we want to do in five years?

Because we don't have any looney tune kids in the house that you mom, you're going to have to probably go see a counselor, get a couple of older women in your life that you trust because you're going to have to unhinge your identity from the ever present super on top of everything, mom to woman who is madly, wildly in love with this knuckleheaded husband that I married a quarter of a century ago.

And you're going to have to re create a new identity in yourself, right?

So I can do that.

That's so I can hear in your voice and you're making me smile right now because you're so rare. You are rare, rare, rare, Cindy, and God bless you. So here's here's a couple of things. Build something new together, dream, dream together, start to date one another. And not just perfunctory, like, hey, it's Taco Tuesday at Roses. Let's just go. I mean, make it a thing once or twice a week.

And I sound like I'm over sexualizing this. I'm not. But what I'm trying to do is to let you guys know that you're going to have to be intentional about sparking this thing. You're going have to be intentional about recognizing, oh, we can just walk around the house naked cause there's no kids here. And then you can be intentional about we could just both decide to lose a bunch of weight together. We could both decide to start, I don't know, turn our living room into a gym.

We can decide that we're going to paint the house. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. Right.

And that starts with being honest about what you want, honest about what and who your husband is, honest about who you are, honest about your financial situation, your kids, all that stuff. Right. And as you move forward together and recreate this new adventure, it starts with a conversation that says, honey, I love you. I recognize that. I think I've put you second over the years, I've loved you as hard as I can. Right.

I provided for you. I made sure you were taken care of. But I'm ready to move back into being your girlfriend. I'm ready to move into creating relationship number three or number four where we can dream. We're now got some financial security. We got three kids that we sent to college so that they can put us in a nice home someday. We can live recklessly in love with one another. And then you just have to decide and go build it.

And it's going to be a beautiful transition. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to call me Cindy after you have this conversation or two or three. And I want you to let me know what your what your plan is. You're going to get out of Texas. Maybe you're going to build a new house. Maybe I'm just going to start riding bikes together. Maybe you're just going to have to not date a week. Whatever the thing is, I want you to call me back and let me know.

And I spend a little extra time on this. I love this call and I love you, Cindy. I think you're incredible. All right. Let's go to let's go to Conner in Philadelphia. Conner, what's up, brother? How are we doing? Oh, I'm doing all right.

Thank you so much for taking my call, Dr. John. Hey, brother. Thanks for calling in. How can I help? So I'm a little hard subjects in my family, but my wife and my mother in law, they have a really shaky relationship that we haven't talked in about four years after our first daughter was born. I have two children and her mother has been addicted to prescription pain medications and spent all morphine for over 15 years. And I just see my life struggling every day with the relationship and not talking to our mother, but we don't know what to do.

OK, so mom's been an addict for fifteen years. Is is there any movement there, any desire to not do that anymore or is it just is what it is what it is.

So about four years ago, what prompted her to stop talking or is her? I said we can't just ignore the problem, right? Right, let's sit down and talk to her. And we sat down, we talked to her mother, completely exploded, you know, adamantly denies I'm not addicted. I'm prescribed this medication. But she takes more than she's prescribed. She she uses multiple pain patches at the time. She's definitely abusing it. And she's lost everything physically.

She's deteriorating financially, emotionally. She'll she'll pass out in the middle of conversations that we're having to pass out while our children are there. It's just it's a mess. And she exploded at us, kicked us out. And pretty much that was the end of the last time we spoke to her. And that was in twenty sixteen. Yeah.

So I'm going to give you some hard truth, brother. You probably know what I'm going to say, but I know it helps to hear it from an outside source. You cannot have a functioning relationship with an addict.

Yeah, you can't. She needs connections, she needs loves, he needs people to keep showing up and showing up and showing up. That may not be you guys right now, small kids. And that's especially painful for a guy like you who desperately loves his wife and his wife, desperately wants her mom to be involved in the raising of the two small kids, having a grandmother that's around. Right. This whole Norman Rockwell fantasy picture is gone because somebody is an addict.

And I'm not in the business of blaming addicts. I can't imagine the story that your grandma has experienced and the the numbing and the ability to distance herself from those that pain that that fentanyl and some of that nonsense can provide. But the reality is your job is taking care of your kids and loving your wife the best that you can. And you can't do that in relationship with a functioning addict. What hurts the most, and I wish my wife, thank God she she works in the medical field and she she knows that stuff, I think that the challenge for us, you know, I see her hurting and I want to help my wife.

I know this is a good day for her, but is there anything I could do for my wife to try to help her cope with it?

Yeah, there's a there's a a couple of things. One is you can know this intellectually as a helping professional. Right. I know a lot of things, but it doesn't mean it doesn't really hurt when my wife says something right. Or when I call home and my parents are working on something right, it still hurts. And that idea of knowing intellectually and your frontal lobe versus feeling and your amygdala is not sending off signals that you're disconnected, you're disconnected, you're disconnected.

So a couple of things. One is I'm going to recommend that you this is just this is just husband, a husband, dad, the dad that you yourself set an example, not through advice, not through, hey, you know what you should be doing, but that you go see a counselor.

And when your wife asks you what you're doing, why you're doing it, tell her I love you and I love our kids. And I'm really haunted by the situation that they're going to grow up without a grandma. And I want to know how to love you better. And I want to know how to love these kids better. And that's going to be a signal to her that you are deeply tethered in and that you're invested. And at the end of the day, all you can control is you.

Right. That's it. And so you're going to get some tools and some relationship ideas and some new strategies on how to love better.

But you're also going to signal to your wife that we've got to put the fantasy to bed. It's over. The second thing is, is I want you to be somebody who offers strong boundaries, meaning you've got to sit down with your wife and say, all right, let's this is 15 year addiction.

This is a four years. We're not talking. At the end of the day, there's not a lot we can do here. Maybe there's brothers and sisters you can help with intervention. Maybe there's your your father in law is willing to help and go all in with the Army. That's that's one option. But it sounds like you need to sit down with your wife and you need to paint a new picture of what Thanksgiving is going to look like without grandma forever.

You're going to need to paint a picture of kids growing up not knowing who the grandma was or only seeing them every once in a while because grandma checked out. Right. For whatever reason, knowing that when your wife is frustrated or she breaks down in tears, that she doesn't need advice from you. She just needs a hug from you to say I love you and this sucks. It's not supposed to be that way. Moms are supposed to be connected with their daughters.

Moms are supposed to be invested in the grandkids life and y'all aren't going to get that. And it's less about trying to fix it. Your wife knows what's up. She's smart. She's brilliant.

She married a wise guy like you, man. It just sucks. It's just a matter of being with her. When I tell you you've got to put the fantasy down. My guess is after four years I've had this conversation. How is it going? So it's exactly what you said, you know, there are times where we've we've we've said it and we've said this isn't this is not a safe place for our children to be, though. The way that she behaves and acts now being it is is not it's unsafe for our children.

And we can't I can't bring a one year old and a four year old around her. That's right. And say, hey, listen, that's a big deal that you just said that good for you.

There's too many people who are trying to live out a fantasy, live out a I wish it was. I wish you were.

And they are trying to cram a triangle through a square hole and they're trying to take a round peg and smash it through a triangle hole, brother.

And you've done some hard things by saying, my kids aren't safe. I'm not doing it. Good for you. Good for you.

I appreciate that. And, you know, it's hard. And what makes it even more challenging, I think, is my my wife has memories, prediction and how great her mother and my mother passed away from cancer when I before I even met my wife. So, you know, our children don't have a grandmother. My mother in law is divorced from from my father in law from this. So it's just it's almost like a death of a family member.

It's exactly like a death of a family member. And except it's worse because you're right, they're still alive. You can't properly grieve it and move on. And so what you and your wife have got to do, brother, you have got to grieve it, maybe even have a small ceremony. And I don't mean that tongue in cheek. I mean a true ceremony that you and your wife go somewhere. You celebrate a memory she had of mom before addiction, when mom was whole and mom was safe and mom was warm.

And you you mourn the passing of that. You grieve it and you cry like you haven't cried. I'd recommend that your wife. Right.

A couple of letters that she's never going to give her her mom but her mom. A letter of anger. Here's what you're missing. Here's the beautiful babies you're missing. Here's the here's the narrative's you're missing. And I want to write a second letter, which is here's who I'm going to be. I'm going to be incredible, Mom. I'm never going to be an addict. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to go to counseling. I'm going to double down on my husband.

I'm going to be an extraordinary woman and let those things rest and then you'll grieve. The loss of your mother in law sucks, brother. It sucks. Here's the thing. There is no way to avoid the pain of this because it's a living. Breathing. Hurt. It just is again, I want to commend you for being a great husband, for being an invested husband, for trying to love your wife the best you can grieve this thing, let go of the fantasy and then start building a new world.

That may mean finding some older ladies at church who become surrogate grandmothers. I've had two grandmothers living, and my son, when he was five and six, made best friends. It was like Reverse Dennis the Menace. He made best friends with an elderly woman who lived next door to us. She'd give him Fig Newtons and he would cut her little weeds with some some scissors that she gave him and they would chit chat for hours. It was just really beautiful together.

And we haven't lived in that town for several years. And we still write letters, we still get notes. And it's just a matter of finding somebody else to get invested in your kid's life. There's women out there who would love to do that, their surrogate granddads who love to be invested. But it's a matter of finding that. But don't go run find those things until you've grieve the loss. And I'll also put this out there. For folks who have addiction in their family, it's going to sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth.

But don't give up. Don't give up on people. Keep praying for folks. You can send cards. You can send letters that say, I love you. If you've got brothers and sisters who want to reach out and do an intervention, you can do that. But protect your hearts. Because the reality is, especially with with fentanyl and Kaleem, man, you know, prescription drugs, addictions, those things are demons that just drown family members, drown family members.

And to doctors who keep writing that nonsense, man, stop, stop. Quit doing that, man. You're destroying families. Help people get well. Don't just dope them up to the point that they become non-functional.

Unsafe grandparents stop. Man, All right, I'm going to take a deep breath, I'm going to exhale and we're going to go to a smile. We're going to get it back here. I'm going to go to Elizabeth in Reno, Nevada. Elizabeth, good morning.

How can I help? Hi, thanks so much for talking with me, Dr. John, how are you? I am doing outstanding this morning and it's a blessing to get to hang out with everybody. How about you? I'm doing well, thank you, Gudiel. So how can I help this morning? So my grandparents have been going through some really tough times and they're just such wonderful, generous people and I'm just having a really hard time knowing how to best love and support them in such hard times.

Hmm. Tell me about hard times. What a hard times mean.

So a little over a month ago, my grandfather was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Yeah, I'm so sorry.

And he's in his 70s. So he's you know, he's really healthy for his age. But, you know, it's it's just been really difficult for him. And then a couple of weeks ago, on their way to another biopsy, they ended up having to go to the E.R. because he turns out he had an infection, his hip that went septic and he was in stage three sepsis. And so they he he was he was there for two and a half weeks and they were just cleaning it out and trying to get him healthy.

And, you know, they called this last weekend and said they didn't know if he would make it. And so we went up there to go just be with my grandmother. Fast forward to kind of what's going on right now. He actually made it through the surgery really well, and he's at home recovering until he has to do another surgery to completely replace the hip and praise God they actually had on the biopsy. And it's completely negative, like the cancer went away while he was there.

Wow. Very cool. Which is which is really amazing, but now that they're back home, I'm just kind of trying to figure out how to help them. They they don't like to ask or take help. They're really generous themselves, but they don't want to feel like a burden to others. And I know they've got a lot of medical bills and they're not really set up for their future. And so I guess I just was wondering. How I can.

Best support them and then also kind of how to start talking with them about hard things like, you know, do they have a will or like what's the next step? I don't feel like they like to talk about those things, but. You know, I just don't know. Like what role I can play? Yeah, so here's the deal. Yeah, your heart is gold and I can hear it through the phone and I just want to high five.

You from Nashville to Nevada? No, no, no. Not even high five. This is a pre covid era, two handed front hug.

I just want to tell you, I love you and I'm grateful for your heart here. Grandparents are precious and they are beautiful and especially ones that sound like yours, that are generous and giving and present. And there's nothing more challenging than watching loved ones going through pain and hurting both relationally. Your poor grandmothers just watching the man she loves on a table. Right. And the actual physical pain that you're crying that's going through. And then with that feeling of helplessness.

Right. We can't do anything about it. Yeah.

So there's a few things here that are swirling around in my head and I'll just lay them out in kind of a rapid fire, sideways crooked order here. OK, the first thing I want you to do, do you have brothers and sisters?

Yeah, OK, do they love your grandparents the same way you do? Yes. OK, I want you to connect with them and whether it is through a Zoome conference or an email chain or a text chain, my preference would be you all get together and hang out. But depending on where everybody lives and all that and everything is the travel is a mess now. But I want you all to have some fun times, remembering the fun things about grandma and granddad, the crazy things, the mean things when they were super hardcore disciplinarians, back when you were little and now they just laugh or whatever weird little peccadilloes your grandparents have.

I want you to spend some time remembering one of the things that stinks about when our loved ones hurt is that that becomes our picture of them and it overshadows it over ways like like a like a heavy anxiety blanket. It lays over the just treasure trove of years and years of beautiful memories, time together, laughter, silliness, all that stuff. Right. So I want you to spend some time proactively with your brothers, brothers and sisters or siblings remembering the awesome.

OK, that's for you. That's for your heart.

What's going what is going through your heart mind right now. Here's the deal. You've recognized that these pillars in your family that have held you all up for years, they're getting old. And the one sad, crummy part of this whole existence that we share is that we all passed away at the end. Right. And hopefully they've got 20 more years that are of awesome fun silliness. My dream is that to be a 90 year old grandparent, Hosein, my grandkids off in the yard, sneak in behind a tree and just blast in with the water.

That just sounds like fun to me. My hope is that you'll have that time, but you've got a crack in the armor now and now you've got a dose of reality. That's just never fun to have to take. The second thing is we often think people are more frail emotionally than they really are. Occasionally people refuse to talk about death. Occasionally they won't have hard conversations, but often they crave them. They just don't know how to start them.

And so one of the greatest gifts you can give to aging grandparents is presence is if you can't be in contact with them directly is handwritten letters make it a practice every week that you write them one funny story.

You remember one time they really surprised you with their generosity, one like, you know, deep track, a deep cut from one of the stories that your mom and dad told about him, about hate. One time they just showed up with the casserole and some money and helped us out when we were newlyweds. Those kind of old stories write them down and send it to them. There's something about for a grandparent is understanding that they are leaving a legacy.

They are leaving changed hearts, that they have a family tree that's going to go on and on. And the more you can reinforce that, either through your presence or through something tangible, they can reread and reread and reread.

I remember a conversation I had with my granddad before he passed, when I called him and just said, hey, listen, I want you to know you gave me your last name and I want you to do the best I can to honor that. You've been a good man. My granddad had a reputation for being really, really, really nice. Just the nicest guy. And I told him, I'm going to honor that. And even last night, my post on Instagram had something to do with kindness that's just become part of my DNA.

But I made sure I let him know this is going to be something that's going to carry on when you're gone. And then the thing about the will, there's no way to have that gently or compassionately or it's not weird. It's one of those conversations that you just put out there. Do you have parents? Are they involved in this or is it kind of skipped a generation where you're connected with your grandparents pretty closely? Yeah, my my mom and her sister are involved, like there's just some weird family dynamics there, too, so I know there's some.

OK, well, we'll save that for another call.

Here's I'll just tell you a funny story from my life. And it's funny because I come from a weird family who's lived and worked around death a lot. I had a close friend of mine, a really lovely one of my best friends in the world, and her dad died suddenly in a tragic car wreck. And he was a police officer. And I was on the phone with her and her husband. He's one of my oldest, best friends in the world when they were looking for this magic box.

And most police officers have a box that has all of their things in it, their will, their passwords, their bank accounts, because they know it any day at any time. I may not come home and they're trained out of the academy. You leave your home in a state of an in a state of neutrality. You let your family be able to grieve you and know where all your stuff is. And so police officers live with this understanding.

I might die today. And so I was on the phone with them when they found the box. And it was a hard crying hard. It was it was a deep, deeply tragic, but at the same time, a beautiful moment, because I remember thinking on the phone with my friends, what kind of awesome, dad, this is incredible, man.

He left it all there just in case. Just in case in just in case happened. So I call my dad, who's a homicide, was a homicide detective for years. He was a SWAT guy. He still was working in a police department. I called him and said, hey, did you need to get a box together?

Dude, of all the stuff, I need to know where your will is just in case something happens. And I'll never forget Elizabeth. He laughed and he was like, Dude, it's behind the thing. Behind the thing in my closet. And was like, You got a box? And he's like, Yes, John, everybody should have a box. And so it was this it was this moment. I'd built it up. I was nervous about wills it man.

It was just like I was asking him, hey, can I borrow 50 cents for a Coke? And it wasn't a weird thing at all for him. He told me how the stuff's going to work, who's going to do how and what.

And it just ended up being a relatively high level, stress free conversation. And that was all praise to my dad for for doing that. So I tell you that to tell you I would enter that conversation directionally. It's a math problem. It's not an emotional problem. It's they need to have a will and you need to know how you can best support their legacy, their honor, what they want to have done, how you and your brothers and sisters and whatever messy dynamics, how you can help navigate that and ask them directly.

They may tell you we're not talking about will. I don't we're not going to we're not there yet.

Stop bringing that nonsense into our hearts and heads. Hopefully they don't. They sound like generous, wonderful people and they just won't. But thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Elizabeth, for that call. Thanks for reminding me of how wonderful my granddad was. Just spending some time in those memories. Just sitting there on the radio talking to us is a beautiful moment. But at the end of the day, you've got to see a crack in the armor.

The strongest pillars of our families are strong. Dads are incredible strong moms, our grandparents who have always been. And it just feels like they're always going to be.

They pass away at the end. And it's heartbreaking and I hate that it's got to be that way, but it is. There's just some stuff on this side of the curtain we don't get to figure out and understand why, but it happens and so the best we can do is to honor their legacy, let them know that we are honoring them live lives that honor them, and then, wow, be direct about the math problem, where the forms where's this?

Who you want to have the car? How do you want us to divide stuff up? Those are the math problems of life that people often run around and avoid. And it takes somebody like you, Elizabeth, who cares about her family just to kind of head right into the middle of that conversation. And I hope that they respond like my old man did with directness, with a smile, with laughter, with, hey, I'm a grown up, I've got this figured out and I'll take care of you like I always have.

That's my prayer. And hope for you guys, Elizabeth.

Hey, I got an email. Normally we wrap up the show here, but I got an email that I just let's just we're here. We're talking about grandparents. This is an email from Sharon. Here's your email. My four grandkids are all teenagers. Now, this is the other side of this call. My four grandkids are all teenagers. Now, it used to be so easy to get silly and play with them. Now they are older and I feel like I've lost some of the connection.

How can I relate to teens sharing? God bless you.

You're awesome. What a great question. What a remarkable, wonderful, great question. All right, so here's the deal.

Grandparents, don't overthink this. Like I just said earlier, I want to be a 90 year old grandparent that when my grandkids are coming to visit, I'm hiding in the bushes with my 90 year old wife. And we are crooked and wrinkly old messes. And I'm sagging all over the place, barely able. I'm probably going to be wearing Grown-Up Spanx. Right. But we're going to hide in the bushes and we're going to have those super soakers. And when our grandkids get to the car, we're going to blast them.

I want to be those grandparents. So you ask how to be silly and play with them. Here's how to be silly and play with them, be silly and play with them. Get some kid at your church to teach you how to tick tock. If that's even still legal anymore. Get some kid at your at your church to teach you how to send Instagram message, write handwritten notes about crushes you used to have before you married that old granddad of theirs.

Right.

Ask him who they're dating. Ask him if they're kissing boys and give him a hard time about it and say, go over the line just a little bit, Sharon, like, are you kissing? Kissing? Are you using tongue?

Yeah. And you will freak out your grandkids, but they will tell that story for one hundred hundred years. Here's one story from my grandmother that was epic, my grandmother. It was every Tuesday the big shell came over her head. She got her hair done every day. No matter what the economy was doing, no matter what kind of work was going, that hair was getting done. And I'm telling you, I don't know what they've made these space age NFL football helmets, but my grandmother could have lined up against any professional NFL center and dropped him one because she was hardcore.

She grew up on a farm. She was a gangster ninja. But number two, because her shell hair was just as perfect, this perfect brick of aqua net and death in. Listen, she was a proper always done up, always perfect woman. She just incredible. So the first time my wife got to meet her, we met them at some fancy seafood restaurant in Houston. And my grandmother, perfectly proper, sits down. And as we sat down, they bring a trough of French fries to the table next to us.

And there were some people at that table. I mean, probably could have used some orange theory fitness in their life at some point, right. That may have wanted to check in with Jenny Craig once or twice. Right.

I mean, I'm just saying. So I don't think anything of it. They bring this giant trough. It's a platter of French fries, and they set it down in my grandmother about this loud leans over the table and goes to my wife, who's just meeting her for the first time. Well, the last thing that table needs is another plate of fries.

Right? And we started dying laughing. And to think this proper woman had a good old fashioned Deloney jab stuck up. And I was like, that's where I get my sarcasm and my goofiness. And that's that opened the gate to where we laughed more. In her last 15 years. We laughed and laughed and cut up and made fun of people and made fun of each other. And it just turned into this beautiful thing. So, Sharon, how do you get silly and play with them?

You get silly and play with them. You show up, you be goofy, you be silly. You let them know that you're a person. You let them know that you see them as people and you all get all getting old together. And it's a it's a beautiful, lovely transition. Mantra's calls make my heart feel good. I hope you're listening to this.

You're smile and thinking about your grandparents, thinking about the grandparents that you wish you had, thinking about new grandparents you could bring into your life, whether they're surrogate parents, whoever. I hope you're thinking about a beautiful tomorrow.

So as we wrap up the show, here's the deal, man. This is the greatest song ever written of all time by one of the greatest songwriters in the history of the world. And let's say one of the greatest. I mean, she came down from the heavens, actually, on day eight after he rested, God stood up and stretched and he went, oh, I'm going to make Natalie Merchant. And he dropped her down. In the US in the late 80s, early 90s, Natalie Merchant was the lead singer of a wonderful band called Ten Thousand Maniacs.

And in nineteen ninety two, the album Our Time in Eden produced this song, The Greatest Song Ever Written. It's called These are the Days. And it goes like this. These are the days you'll remember never before and never since, I promise. Well, the whole world be warm. Is this as you feel it? You'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky. It's true that you are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.

These are the days that will remember the days that might fill you with laughter until you break, you might feel a shaft of light make its way across your face. And when you do, you'll know how it was meant to be here, the signs and know they're speaking to you. These are the days. And this is the Dr. John Delonas show.