KELLY CERVANTES is an award-winning writer, speaker, and advocate best known for her blog Inchstones, where she shared the stress, love, and joy that came with parenting her medically complex daughter, Adelaide. Since Adelaide's passing, Kelly has continued to write candidly about her arduous and, at times, contradictory grief journey.
She has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Cosmopolitan, as well as quoted in the New York Times, CNN, and People. She is the current board chair for the nonprofit CURE Epilepsy and also hosts their biweekly podcast, Seizing Life, where she interviews scientists, doctors, and individuals affected by epilepsy. Kelly resides in Maplewood, NJ, with her husband, Miguel Cervantes currently starring in Hamilton on Broadway, their children, and their dogs, Tabasco and Sriracha.
Main quote:
I think change and grief and resilience, these words kind of get clustered together, but I think it's just so important to recognize that resilience isn't just moving forward. It isn't just pushing through. It's doing the work so that you can continue to be resilient down the road.
Additional Quotes:
On one end of the spectrum, grief is just pure love. It is the love that you can't physically express. And then on the other side grief is just change. It is the resistance to change.
Leaving well means moving forward while remembering. Because I think that we have this idea of leaving, and that somehow that gets synonymous with forgetting. We're leaving, and so we have to leave something in the past, and we have to move forward. But that's not what leaving well means. Leaving well, to me, means that yes, you are moving forward. Because we don't have a choice. Time trudges forward whether we want it to or not, right? But when you leave well... You're remembering what happened in the past, and you're carrying that forward with you.
I'm not trying to deny my grief. I will never get over my grief, whatever that means. It will always carry with me. Those experiences will carry forward with me. They just get folded into this new version of me. I'll never be the same Kelly that I was 10 years ago. I am a new Kelly. Hopefully a better Kelly.
To purchase Kelly's book on Amazon <https://amzn.to/472pH97> or Bookshop <https://bookshop.org/a/7803/9781637743829>
To connect with Kelly on Instagram: <https://www.instagram.com/kellygc411/>
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Click here to learn more about Leaving Well.
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
