Losing 7 Family Members in 6 Years Made Me a Better CEO

Sean Weisbrot: Before I talk about today's guest, I just wanted to share something really fast, kind of a personal update. I didn't post, uh, an episode last week because I've been focusing on three things. The first one is raising money for my company.

Sean Weisbrot: It's taken a lot of energy and hopefully we will have a result soon, and when we do, I'll be happy to announce it. The second thing is I've been working on my Visa application for Portugal, and actually as of the posting of this episode, I have officially submitted my Visa application to the Portuguese government where.

Sean Weisbrot: Once they approve it, I'll be able to finally leave America after what's now been eight and a half, nine months here, and then I'll move to Portugal and become a resident of Portugal. So it's a special visa, a special program, and I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully I'll get a result in March, um, in about 15 to 20 days, and I'll let you guys know when I know for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: The third thing I've been working on is moving my grandmother to an assisted living facility. Mentally, she's fine. Physically, she needs a walker. She's just bored being at home by herself and she wants to be around other people. So I've embarked on, uh, moving her there. Unfortunately, a lot of my family hasn't been willing to help me at all, so I've been, uh, doing a lot of her work, which has kind of gotten into the, the way of Portugal and my company a little bit as well as my health, but.

Sean Weisbrot: Suffice it to say things are coming to a head. Portugal's coming soon. My grandma's moving in the next two weeks and my company's raising funds, so everything is looking up and 2022 is gonna be fantastic. So our guest today is Paige Arnov Fen. She is the founder and CEO of Mavens and moguls. She's been running this company for 20 years.

Sean Weisbrot: They provide marketing, branding, pr, market research and communications. They're based in Massachusetts. She's a fantastic human being, and what she went through is probably something that I can never imagine. I can definitely sympathize with. But it's difficult to empathize because of, uh, the difficulty of what she's endured.

Sean Weisbrot: She'll tell you more about what happened, but essentially the topic of today is how to deal with or, or what she learned from death and illness in her family and how it improved her business. And I also shared, uh, some stories as well from things that I experienced, uh, with death and illness in my family.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I think it's really important for all of you to listen to this entire episode and try to understand the pain and suffering we've endured. Because even if you haven't, you almost certainly will one day. And it's not that I want you to experience that, but hopefully what we talk about will help make it easier for you to endure and to to go through when the time comes.

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. I'm here today with Paige, and we're gonna be talking about what it was like dealing with the death of a loved one. I believe in your story. There's multiple deaths in a short period of time, unfortunately, and the importance of what you learned through that journey and what people can learn if they have to go through that as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Paige, why don't you tell everyone about yourself.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Thanks, Sean. I appreciate you inviting me here. So, yeah, it was a very sad chapter in, uh, my entrepreneurial journey. So I started a, uh, marketing company about 20 years ago. I called Mavens and moguls, and for the first five years, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was just working all the time, every day.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Scared to take any time off at all. You know, you hear the statistics, you read about all the startups that fail in the first few years. And I wanted to be a success story, so I was just working, working, working a, after having been an employee for decades. When it's your business, there's always more you can be doing and you just, you know, you think, oh, I'll do one more proposal, or let me just update my website, and so you're smiling, you, you know what I'm talking about.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: So for about five years, I just literally worked nonstop and about five years into the business. A really good friend of mine was getting married at a kind of destination wedding, and I really wanted to take time off to go be part of her celebration. So I took my first vacation and I was worried that like the whole company would unravel if I took a week off.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But you know what it. Did fine. The company survived. I came back and I got back to work, and then I started taking maybe a weekend off or a long weekend. I didn't take any big vacations, almost a decade into the business. It wasn't even a decade. It was maybe like six or seven years. My husband and I were in the situation where my parents, his parents, my stepfather, my great aunt, one of his siblings, all of a sudden.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: People started to get sick and decline, and it was a really tough period because. He and I had been very fortunate until that point, you know, maybe when we were young we had grandparents die, but we had gone through a, a really good stretch of decades with people being vibrant and healthy and kind of living a great life.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And this was coinciding basically with the Great Recession. If you remember that 2000 8, 9, 10 period, that's when it started. Watching these loved ones starting to get sick was really hard. And my husband and I live on the East Coast. My mom lived in the deep South with her husband. My father and his parents lived on the West coast 3000 miles away.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: His sister was on the West coast. So as these people started to decline, we were thousands of miles away. The good news is they all had excellent care. My husband and I, we had both started our companies, so we had flexibility. We could get on airplanes and go. Spend time with 'em. But when you're an entrepreneur and when you're kind of type A neurotic, you like fixing problems and you feel very energized by kind of charging the mountain and fixing the problem and attacking the next mountain and solving the next problem.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But it was pretty obvious that most of these problems were things that we couldn't fix. You know, it was advanced stage cancer and. Heart disease and depression, like these were really big problems that were not likely to get solved. Um, my husband and I both have siblings, but we were the only ones without children and we were the only ones that worked for ourselves.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: So we had the most flexibility of anybody, and we also had the best relationship with our families. So it was easiest for us to get on a plane and go help and work from anywhere, 'cause that even before COVID and hybrid and virtual, we were very comfortable with our cell phones and our laptops just working from wherever we, we were in a six year window.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: We lost seven people who were very, very dear to us. So if you remember as a kid that game of Whack-a-Mole where the, they keep popping up and you keep hitting and they keep popping up. That's kind of what it felt like. It was a really tough period where we were able, luckily to spend a lot of time and to help them, um, in ways that we couldn't have maybe if we were employees or if we had had.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Our own families that we were trying to juggle. And then because my husband and I are also the most business-minded of all the siblings, we became the executor and executor of a lot of those estates. And that's like having a, another full-time job. You know, he and I didn't go to law school. That was not something we were trained to do.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: We learned and we kept relearning and learning better as more and more people left us that responsibility. So it was a very challenging time and I learned so much about priorities and time management, gratitude. It was, it was tough, but having gotten through it, thank goodness and feeling really. Proud and at peace that we were able to be there for the family members.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You really do have closure when you get to say everything you ever wanted to say to a loved one. There's nothing left unsaid. It made me feel a lot of empathy and compassion for people who lose loved ones in an accident or immediate heart attack or something where it was a surprise and you never got to say goodbye, or maybe you left on bad terms, you had just had a fight or something.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: It was not like that at all. I mean, we had. The warning shot was fired in, in many cases, we had years of decline, which was hard for the person in decline, but it gives you a runway to say and do everything you have ever wanted to. So for that, I'm eternally grateful.

Sean Weisbrot: My father and mother both lost their parents as teenagers.

Sean Weisbrot: Their parents were both very, very young, and I mentioned this in the. In an episode that came out earlier, my mother's mom was 32 and my dad's dad was 42, and they were very sudden for both of them, absolutely no question.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: My mom died in her sixties. My dad died in his seventies. My great aunt died in her nineties.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: My stepfather died in his eighties. They were all premature, believe it or not. Even my great aunt who was 97, I think her parents didn't die until 98 or 99. She thought she still had at least a few more birthdays in her, and she was one of the most active people, kind of like Betty White, just dying at almost a hundred.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: That was kind of my great aunt. She had friends in every generation and she was very active socially. So I felt like I lost all of 'em too young, but I am absolutely certain, I'm so sorry for your parents, no question that affected who they are and who they became. No question.

Sean Weisbrot: So not only that, but then my mom had to deal with my grandfather dying over.

Sean Weisbrot: Like he, he died slowly over like an eight year period.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Yep.

Sean Weisbrot: And the last like four or five years he was in bed and couldn't really stand.

Sean Weisbrot: Getting up and laying down was really all he could do. It was a mess and I was here for parts of it, from what I could see. It was horrible.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Nah, it's, it's horrible. It really is.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But I will tell you, you know, earlier, if you had met me in my twenties or my thirties. I was such a hard charging type A, I wanted to conquer the world and be CEO and make a ton of money and be on the cover of all the magazines as like a superstar, CEO. And I think when you see someone, my dad and my stepdad were both CEOs of big companies.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: They were both very successful in their careers. You realize like nobody on their deathbed wishes that they made more money or wishes that they had more promotions, or that they won more awards, or that they were on more magazine covers. That's not important at all.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And you know, they wanna be with the people they love.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: They want them to know how much they meant to them. It really left a very strong impression on me, like. When it's all said and done, like who's gonna remember you? What are they gonna remember you for? How did you touch people's lives? I feel like it was such a privilege for my husband and me to be in a position I.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Where we could drop everything and get on a plane and spend a lot of quality time with them in these very intimate situations where you can talk about situations in their life that maybe were really happy or really sad or any regrets that they had. You know, my mom, she spent her whole life. Being very fit and active and eating super healthy.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: She didn't drink, she didn't smoke, she didn't eat butter. She would have a bite of dessert and that was it.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Like she was so healthy. And then she got a very terrible form of cancer that was very advanced, and the doctors told her she had four to six months. She lasted for another two and a half years.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Which was amazing, but she died. And on her deathbed, one of the last conversations I had with her, I said, you know, if you could do it again, is there anything like glaring that you would do differently? And without even any hesitation, she said, you need to drink the wine and eat the butter and have dessert.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Like she said, don't skimp. So I do.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, that kind of sounds like how I've gone with the way that I live is that I, I restrict a lot of these things, but I feel like. I've had my fun.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You should have fun every day. Don't postpone fun. Do something fun every day.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, I, I definitely do. For me, fun is more important than work, but what I mean is like, I don't go for alcohol.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't go for cigarettes. Like, I, I don't do those things that I believe are going to hurt me because I wanna minimize the damage I do to my body. But I've heard of other people, like I, my dad had a friend who was an infectious disease doctor, and this guy could run 30 flights up the stairs without. You know, getting tired, like crazy, strong athlete.

Sean Weisbrot: He got lung cancer and died in his fifties,

Paige Arnof-Fenn: right?

Sean Weisbrot: Super healthy.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: No guarantees.

Sean Weisbrot: So it seems like the people who do everything they can to mess up their bodies and their lives live forever. And the people who try to be healthy and good die young.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Well, it, there are examples of both extremes, I would say.

Sean Weisbrot: I heard of this guy who's like 105 and they're like, how do you do it?

Sean Weisbrot: He is like, well, I have my cigarette and I've got my glass of wine every day. And that's what I do. Like, he doesn't go for walks, he doesn't do anything. The guy's thin.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I mean, luck and genes play a big part of everything. I mean, I think, you know, don't make any unforced errors. I wouldn't be riding around on a motorcycle drunk with no helmet.That's kind of dumb.

Sean Weisbrot: What was the hardest thing about going through all of this with them that people might have to think about or go through?

Paige Arnof-Fenn: So my husband and I are seven years apart and our parents are like a decade or more apart, and yet we went through this during the exact same six year window.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: It happened really early for my parents and kind of actuarily about when it was supposed to for his, his parents died in their mid eighties, which I think is about. A normal life today. So what was really amazing, my husband and I had been married for more than a decade, and I thought we had a great marriage.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But I think when you're tested in that way, you really see what people are made of and you really, you know, you can talk a good game, you know, what did Mike Tyson used to say? Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the nose. Everyone can say they're close with their family and they value family and here are my priorities.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But then when it's life or death and things are on the line, how do they act? I was very fortunate that my husband and I both rose to the occasion and there were periods where we were kind of ships in the night, he would get on a plane and go. To see his family, and I'd be getting on a plane to see my family.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Like we, we had to kind of tag team because once the decline started, his dad died. Then a year later, my, my mom died. Then two years later, my stepfather died. Then his mother died. Then my father died. To have somebody to go through it with that you trust that has your back, that you can vent to, that can pump you up when you need support, that can give you a shoulder to cry on when you need.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: That, and that can be helpful and upbeat when you get little good news or periods where the person's turning a corner and doing a little better. Maybe you really know if you have a rock solid relationship, if you've gone through something like that, it's not a given. You know, I've seen a lot of friends and family dissolved during these stressful periods.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: The other thing is when people really are needing help, there's usually. One sibling who really bears the load. And there are a lot of siblings. Doesn't matter how many there are, who talk a good game, but don't really show up to help. They always have an excuse.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And like I said, my husband and I don't have children. When people have school age kids, it's hard to drop everything. And you know, they have vacation plans and they have exams, and they have recitals and tournaments, and I get it. But for us, we just. Put everything on on the back burner and jumped on an airplane and went an important lesson for me. So I, you know, the first, call it six, seven years of my company, I was a networking machine.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I would show up at breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, coffee meetings, cocktail parties. Evening events, lectures, I was out and about two, three times a day, shaking hands, giving speeches, swapping business cards, and I was running into a lot of people, constantly running into some of the same people, sometimes twice a day or three times a week.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And during that period, like I said, I had to get on a plane and be thousands of miles away for a week at a time, 10 days at a time. Then you're gearing up for a trip and then you come back and you have to get caught up from the trip. So instead of being everywhere all the time during that window, I was maybe going instead of 1, 2, 3 networking events a day, I might only go to five networking events a month.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And I had to be very selective and. Strategic about the events that I was gonna go to. It would have to work with the calendar of when I was gonna be in town, but I'd wanna go to the highest impact activities. And when I'd go, I'd run into people who I used to run into all the time and they'd say, oh my God, Paige, I haven't seen you in forever.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Where have you been? I feel like I'm not going to the right events anymore 'cause I used to see you. Where are you going that I'm not going. So it's funny, like people, they don't ask me how I'm doing, where you know, are you okay? They, it's all about them. Like, where should I be networking? Where are you networking?

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Why am I not networking? Where you're networking and it has nothing to do with them. My mother's dying of cancer, you know, thousands of miles away. I haven't been here. That's why you haven't seen me, but they don't even think about it that way. But what's really interesting, you know, I used to be that consultant that would, you know, have a meeting, write a proposal, send them the proposal over email, and then the next day start emailing and calling, hi, did you get the proposal?

Paige Arnof-Fenn: What did you think? Do you have any questions? Let's set up a meeting, and the client's like, I got the proposal yesterday. Give me a time. Let me read it. Call me next week. Let's put this aside for a minute. Back off. But I'm like very excited because I thought, oh, this is a great new project. Well, when this was happening, I didn't have time to.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Kind of be pleasantly persistent or maybe stalking a little bit. You know, I would send a proposal, then I'd get on an airplane that day, and then I'd be back a week later and then it would take me a day or two to get caught up. So it's now been 10 days since I sent the proposal. So I reach out to the client and I'm like, oh Jim, I am so sorry. I sent you a proposal 10 days ago.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I've been so busy, I have not even checked in. Do you have any questions? Can you know? Does it make sense to set up a call and. In that 10 day period, Jim probably talked to a lot of consultants. They all sent him proposals and they've all been stalking him for 10 days.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And I've been radio silent. So Jim calls me back and he said, Paige, it's so good to hear from you. You know, you must be the only working marketing person in town. 'cause these people are on my phone in my email, they call, they hang up. They don't think I have caller id. They're making me crazy. You clearly are busy.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You clearly have a business. I'm gonna go with you 'cause you're so respectful. You're not stalking me, you, I loved your proposal. Let's wait a week. Call me in two weeks. If you haven't heard from me, I wanna get going, but we'll do it and we will start next month.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And that was it. And I'd send him an invoice. That didn't happen once. It didn't happen twice. It was happening all the time. So my hit rate was going up not down. It was not hurting my business. It was helping my business, and that was a real lesson to me, like flashing light like Paige. Relax back off. Less is more. You do not need to stalk people. You need to be busy.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You need to control your calendar. And so as the people started to die and we started to take on the estate administration, which you have a lot more control over your calendar, you don't have to be running around crazy like when people are in a hospital. I really made, made a note to myself, like, instead of replacing all that time and energy that I used to do with networking, which I had replaced with, you know, visiting family members at hospitals and traveling, I wanna add back to my calendar more white space, like I need to exercise.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I need to read. I need thinking time. I need strategy time. I don't need to go to these big networking events two, three times a day. I can go a few times a month, check in with the right people, in the right venue at the right time, that works for my calendar, and I can have a more productive and sustainable, profitable business.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And sure enough, if that's not the case. I think my business today is so much stronger and healthier than it was in that first decade because I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and now I have a much more strategic approach. I'm being much more thoughtful. I. I have time on my calendar for working out, for doing smaller networking events, kind of lesses more where it's quality over quantity.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I might go have coffee or lunch with one or two people, not go to a hotel ballroom with hundreds of people, which is not happening right now anyway with COVID. But I think we've learned a lot about virtual networking and coffee meetings and. Virtual cocktails with people that you wanna stay connected to, but you know, not having to like jump on the subway or drive 30 minutes to meet for some, somebody for a sandwich.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You could do a virtual lunch on Zoom and you know what? You can get a lot done that way. We've all figured it out over the last 22 months. I feel like I'm building a more, uh, sustainable business for the long term. And the clients that I've got now, I've got deeper relationships with. I'm doing more work.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: With fewer people. So it's a more profitable business model than it was when I started. So 20 years into it, I feel like I have a. A stronger, healthier, better business, more profitable business than I did when I was running around crazy in that first, you know, those first few years where I wasn't taking vacation.

Sean Weisbrot: You definitely fit into this, this stereotype I've heard of where you need to run a business for a 10 years before you start to understand how the business works.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I've never heard that, but that's true in my case.

Sean Weisbrot: The other thing is that suffering leads to growth.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I am living proof, I have all the war wounds and scars to prove that.

Sean Weisbrot: It's sad, but interesting that such a tragedy taught you how to do your business better.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: I could not have learned these lessons any other way.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to go off kind of into a tangent. You were talking about knowing who you can really trust when. Tragedy strikes. And you also were talking about how your family members ran large companies.

Sean Weisbrot: So I imagine, maybe I'm wrong if I am. Correct me. I imagine that they had an estate to leave that was worth having someone they could trust to manage the execution of it. Did you find that? There were people who expected something but didn't get something and then made your life hell because of it, even though it had nothing to do with you.

Sean Weisbrot: Especially and pro, probably most likely the people who weren't really there towards the end.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Yeah, I mean, I think everybody who's been through this process probably has stories that would make your hair curl. You really do, um, see people's true motivations and you understand. Understand what people's values are.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: In a time like that, there, there are people that feel entitled. There are people that feel we could do a whole nother show on that. It's not, it's, it's kind of, you know, I always tell people, I'm sure, you know, I don't have children, but I'm sure for women that have gone through childbirth. Like at the end, you get this hopefully beautiful, healthy baby and you're so happy, but you forget when they're wheeling you into the, you know, room to deliver the kid.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You're gonna go through a lot of pain to get through to the thing that you want, which is a healthy baby. Um, like, oh God, I forgot about this part. This sucks. That's what I've heard from my sister and my girlfriends, at least at the end of the day. Everybody wants to have a tidy estate and they, everyone thinks they've done a great job estate planning.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: And I can tell you one died with no will and one died with a will that had 16 different amendments, one for each year that they updated their will in the last, you know, decade and a half of their life. So we saw the entire spectrum of people that like died with.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Nothing give to give anybody and thought they didn't even need a piece of paper to people who thought, you know, I'm gonna be really responsible and make sure every T is crossed and every I is dotted and everything in between.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: At the end of the day, whether you have an estate worth nothing or an estate that's substantial, it all comes down to a few pieces of paper that tells who's gonna get what. I think people should give a lot of thought. Into kind of their values and what they wanna leave people, not necessarily material things or financial things.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Tell the stories and share the, the reason. If you have like an expensive car, or an expensive vase, or an expensive house. That you're leaving somebody. If you don't have the story behind why that was important to you, why did you save that jewelry? Why did you save that money clip or those cuff links? Why did you want someone to get those ties or those shoes, um, or that bicycle?

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Take the time to share the stories and tell about your family and what they valued and how they got here, and the ups and the downs and the goods and the bads, because that's what sticks with people if they're gonna get a check at the end of the estate. Administration, there're gonna be people that just blow the check.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: It's really sad. This person, you know, worked really hard and then they left their deadbeat kids some money, and the kid's an idiot, and the money's gone. And so what? I mean, what was that all about? It would've been much better to leave it to a charity or some group that could do something good for the world.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But people have to make their own decisions and people have their own priorities. So I guess I would just. Encourage people to, whether they have a little bit or a lot, think about both the financial and material things, but also think about the people and the stories and the values that you wanna pass on to the next generation.

Sean Weisbrot: I had, uh, a lot to do with my great uncles passing in terms of my father was the executor and. He had a good bit of cash set aside and he was a hoarder, and I mean, you've probably never seen such a disgusting place in your life. I spent probably two weeks cleaning the house, top to bottom, opening garbage bags.

Sean Weisbrot: The, the. The garage was about six or seven feet high with just garbage bags with things inside of them that he saved. Not trash, not like garbage, but like things that he thought were important to save. You know, there was things all over the place and we didn't know what anything was. And he, he had a will, but it wasn't like a binder. Here's my will, here's, you know.

Sean Weisbrot: The credit card, like he didn't have his death prepared really? So you have to like go through all the bags. Well, is the, the card for this bank account here is key. You know, what's this key for? You know, like you have to just go through everything. I don't know what your experience was, but it was absolute hell.

Sean Weisbrot: And nobody else wanted to do anything to help, and yet they were expecting my father to quickly give them what they were told they were gonna get.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Yeah, I get it. I understand.

Sean Weisbrot: That taught me a lot. I, I created my first will about few years ago just because I, I didn't want there to be any sort of question for anyone in case I were to die early.

Sean Weisbrot: But it's not something I like to think about. I don't think anybody likes to think about it, but.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: That's a responsible thing to do. That's good You did it.

Sean Weisbrot: I think my parents got lucky that I'm the kind of person that hates things, so nothing makes me happier than throwing things away.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Right. That's, that's a very good quality when it comes to cleaning up estates and not being a greedy person.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: 'cause every family has people that are very greedy, I'm afraid.

Sean Weisbrot: I wasn't given anything from the estate, but my parents got a third. So I was like, enjoy. I did it because I wanted to help them get the money as fast as possible. Sure. You know, it wasn't a small amount of money. It's like, who doesn't want that as fast as possible and nobody else was gonna help.

Sean Weisbrot: So, interestingly enough, I was here a few years ago. When, uh, my dad happened to be going through heart problems and we weren't sure if he was gonna make it or not, and I, I stayed 10 months and I took care of him. So I understand the caretaker role. I was there full-time for 10 months, taking care of him, cooking, cleaning, driving him to rehab.

Sean Weisbrot: When we were in the hospital, he was there for like. A week or two, he was there the first time for like three days. The second time for like five or six days. Um, he ended up have needing open heart surgery. They replaced his aorta and like nobody around me understood anything about what was going on. So I had to learn how to read, like, what's, what's so two, you know, what's saturated oxygen, what's, what is a normal blood pressure?

Sean Weisbrot: What's normal heart rate? Where is it abnormal? What pills does he need to be taking? Making sure the nurses actually feed him and, and take his measurements and give him his medications. And I was catching them all, making mistakes. Like I insisted on getting him moved to another hospital with another doctor and like I alone made all of that happen because everyone else was just like, they were all stuck.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: You have to have a patient advocate. My husband and I learned that with our parents and with our own situations that were not life or death, but you absolutely have to have somebody listening, watching, reading, connecting the dots, because all the nurses, oh my God, they're so overtaxed. And exhausted. And burned out.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But you're absolutely right, like you have to do that. It's not negotiable.

Sean Weisbrot: I think I was 31 then. Ever since then, I've kind of just felt like money doesn't matter, work doesn't matter, everything else can go to hell. All that matters is you make sure that your, your health,

Paige Arnof-Fenn: no, your health is your wealth. There is no question about that.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything else that you wanna share from your experience?

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Try and find the things every day to be happy and grateful for. And if people mean something to you for your loved ones, let them know how important they are. Don't leave anything unsaid. People squabble and have disagreements.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: But if it's someone you genuinely care about and you want in your life, make it a priority because life is short and jobs come and go and money comes and goes, but time only goes one direction and nobody gets out of this alive, you know? So make sure you don't waste your time and make sure you keep the people that you.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Love and trust and wanna be part of your world, hold them tight and keep them with you. And if people are sucking you dry or wasting your time and energy, you need to move on. You know, think about the people that have checked in on you and that you've checked in on that have been part of your bubble, that have helped you find a vaccine that have helped you get food when you needed it or whatever.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Some of them are family and some of them are friends that are maybe more your family than your actual blood relatives. Now, I think a lot of people have realized, you know, family is what you make it to be. It's like you can be born into a family, but there are a lot of families that have basically been made.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: By choice through this pandemic. The people that have really looked out for each other and had each other's backs and really cared and were there for each other when they needed it, who would come do a social distance visit and help you find toilet paper or anything that you know is outta stock. And I just feel like you wanna bring your humanity and compassion to every situation going forward and not let the things that don't matter knock you off your game like.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: Keep the big picture in mind. Keep the big priorities in mind, and if everything else is just a distraction, let it go. Don't worry about the the little gnats and irritations that you know, if they're like flies, just swat 'em away and focus on the people and the things that really matter. Um, we've all been through a lot this last.

Paige Arnof-Fenn: 22 months, and hopefully you've learned who and what is the most important, and that you will remember that in a post pandemic world. You know, stick to the things that really matter and just let the rest of it go.