Pictured: Fred in his garden with our dog, Charlie · Fred and Santa Charlie · Fred and Charlie beside a creek in the Ozarks, Missouri.

By Daphne, Founder, Expansive Healing

Fellow Seeker, a gentle note before you read on: this piece speaks honestly about grief and loss — and even more about love and joy. Take it at whatever pace serves you today. And if it stirs more than this moment can hold, support is close by: text HOME to 741741, or call or text 988.

Every night, my husband Fred ended our bedtime gratitude ritual with the same words: "...and I am grateful for another day of life."

He said it through stage IV cancer. He said it on the hardest days. He meant it every single time.

This online learning hub is named for what Fred asked of me on the last night of his life. But it was built on that joy.

If you are reading this, you are standing at the doorway of something I built in his honor. You probably don't know Fred yet. By the time you finish this post, I hope you will — because Fred is why Showing Up Matters exists, why it carries its name, and, in many ways, why I am still here, building it with a full heart.

Showing Up Matters is the name of my online learning hub here at Expansive Healing — the home of Meet Your TEAM, the Challenges, the Seeker's Circle Membership, and, coming soon, Quest I and Quest II.

The Man and the Dates

Fred was my soulmate. We met on September 23, 2006. We married on December 28, 2007. He was born on October 11, 1956. And he died on February 6, 2016.

Those four dates are some of the most important numbers of my life. The first three gave me a kind of love I wasn't sure existed before I met him. The last one broke me open in ways I am still integrating more than a decade later.

And yet — and yet — everything you will find here, every tool I teach, every Seeker I welcome, every word I write, exists because of what Fred asked me to do on his last night.

I want to tell you about it.

The Ritual

Fred and I had a ritual. Every night, before we fell asleep, we held each other and said what we were grateful for that day.

Not in a formal way. Not in a "now we are doing our gratitude practice" way. Just two people who loved each other, making sure love was the last thing spoken before the lights went out.

From the day Fred was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic cancer, he began ending his gratitude the same way every night. Whatever else he named — the sunlight, a good meal, a visit from a friend, a moment of peace — he would finish with:

"...and I am grateful for another day of life."

Every single night. No matter how hard the day had been. No matter what the disease had taken from him that week. No matter what was waiting at the next appointment.

Another day of life.

Here is what I hope every Seeker carries away from Fred's story: Fred lived in joy. Not performative joy. Not the thin, bright-eyed joy people wear when they're afraid to admit how hard things are. Real joy. The kind that comes from a man who had decided, with clarity, that his remaining days were his to live — and that he was going to live them as fully as he was able.

The cancer did not get his joy. Not once. Not even at the end.

How People Showed Up

Fred and I had been planning a book together about our experience — his as the patient, mine as the caregiver — and about something we had both noticed during his illness: people show up in very different ways when someone they love is very ill or dying.

So many people showed up beautifully. Family, friends, colleagues, and even strangers felt the love and light Fred and I shared, and they answered it with a reciprocity of spirit that held us, especially near the end. They met our joy with their own. They trusted that we knew exactly what we were facing and had chosen, eyes wide open, to live the days we had in joy rather than despair. They showed up in a thousand ordinary and extraordinary ways, and the love in those moments was real.

Some people couldn't meet us there. They projected their own fear onto our choice to live fully, and seemed to need Fred to be sicker and sadder than he was, because his joy made them uncomfortable.

I want to be clear: Fred and I faced reality with our eyes wide open. We knew the gravity of what we were facing from the beginning. Fred was not formally declared terminal until he chose hospice — after kidney and liver failure from the treatment had put him in mortal pain, and he decided, with clarity and courage, that it was time to let go. Until that moment, we fought for his life alongside joy. We held both truths at once. We were not pretending. We were choosing.

And here is the belief that turned all of it — the beautiful and the painful — into purpose: we believed that most people who show up in hurtful ways are repeating patterns they learned long ago, often passed down through generations. And the beautiful news is that patterns can change. People can learn to show up better, once someone shows them how. And we believed the world would be gentler, braver, and more alive if people understood how much it matters how we show up in each other's lives.

What Fred Asked of Me

On the last night of his life — the night he went to sleep and did not wake up — Fred said two things to me that I have carried every day since.

The first was a commissioning:

"Don't let my journey go in vain. Tell our story. Let people know it matters how we show up in each other's lives."

That is the commissioning I received. That is the work I have been building ever since.

Showing Up Matters is named for that sentence. Every course I teach, every post I write, every Seeker I welcome — all of it exists because a man I loved asked me to make sure what we had learned together did not disappear when he did.

The Last Gratitude

The second thing I carry forward is what Fred did next. He said he wanted to do our gratitude ritual one last time — and this time, it had a different ending.

After he named the things he was grateful for that day, he paused. Something in the room changed. And instead of ending with "another day of life," the way he had every night since his diagnosis, he said this:

"And I am grateful for another day of life with you. You completed me. You loved me the way I always wanted to be loved. You are my hero. I am a better person because of your presence in my life."

I did not know, when he said it, that it was the last thing he would ever say to me. I know it now. And I treasure it more than I can say.

I want to tell you something important, because some of you who find this work are still longing to be loved the way you've always wanted to be loved.

Fred's words are evidence that real love exists. Not fairytale love. Love that is built by two people deciding, over years, that they will keep showing up for each other with their whole selves — including in the places where showing up is hardest.

Real love is not just a story people tell to get through life. It is a practice. And it is available — to you, to anyone willing to learn how to show up in ways that nurture their own spirit and the spirit of another.

What Happened Next

Fred died the next afternoon. Within the following eleven months, I also lost my beloved elder daughter, Layla, and two months after that, my mother. The grief was enormous. The PTSD that followed was hard.

For several years, I was a woman broken open.

The full arc of that healing — from post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth, from collapse to expansion, from Chaos in Comfort City to the life I live today — lives elsewhere in this work.

But for today, I want you to know this: I rebuilt. Tool by tool, day by day, I found my way back to the kind of joy Fred lived in. The tools I rebuilt with are the tools I now teach. And the reason I teach them is the commissioning I received on Fred's last night.

What This Means for You

If you are reading this, you have just walked into a community built on a promise made to a man I loved.

That is not dramatic language. It is simply the truth.

Everything here — Meet Your TEAM, the Break the Dance Challenge and the Challenges to come, the Seeker's Circle Membership, the blog, the podcast, the children's content I am creating with my granddaughter — all of it is in service of teaching people how to show up in positive ways, in their own lives and in the lives of others. Because it matters. Honestly, I believe it may be the thing that matters most in this life.

How to show up for yourself. How to show up for others. How to recognize when someone isn't showing up for you — and how to respond with principle rather than reactivity. How to heal the places inside that make it hard to show up as your best self. And how to build a life that leaves behind the kind of legacy of love and joy Fred left for me.

Because here is the truth Fred taught me, and the truth I want to pass to you:

Every interaction is a chance to show up positively. Every day is another day of life. How we use them matters.

That is the whole teaching of Expansive Healing and Showing Up Matters. Everything else is simply the tools to help you live it.

An Invitation

If Fred's story landed in you somewhere — if something quiet in you said "yes, this" as you read — I want to invite you in.

Start with Meet Your TEAM. It's free, and it's the foundation. It introduces you to your TEAM: the four inner TEAM players you've carried your whole life, each with their own position on the TEAM. They are the Brilliant Strategist, the Fierce Protector, the Joy Generator, and the Wise Sage. You'll also learn the tools you'll use to start living more deliberately, more lovingly, and more joyfully.

After that, the door stays open. Break the Dance is a 21-day challenge, free for a limited time, for Seekers ready to recognize what has been draining them. The Seeker's Circle Membership, opening November 1, is where you learn to work with your TEAM. Each Sunday brings one practical healing lesson, following the arc of the 12 Chapters, one chapter a month. Small, steady practices become new habits, and over time your whole TEAM learns to play together.

And if you are a domestic violence survivor, someone in recovery, a person living with PTSD, or someone marginalized by systems that should have protected you — I see you. This work was built, in meaningful part, for you. If cost is a barrier, please reach out. Expansive Healing offers fellow Seekers a way to support one another, so no one who needs this work has to go without it.

Fred, if you are reading this somehow — and I believe you are — here is what I want you to know:

I did not let your journey go in vain, my love. Your story is being told. And the people who walk through this work are learning, every day, that how we show up in each other's lives matters.

I remember you. I love you. I am still working to be the hero you believed I was.

And my love, I am grateful for your presence in my life. I am grateful that you are still my hero. I am grateful that I am a better person because you are still present in my life. And I am grateful for another day of life.

Heal Yourself. Heal Your World.

— Daphne

This post is the foundation piece of Showing Up Matters, my online learning hub here at Expansive Healing. A companion piece about Layla — my elder daughter and the artist whose mandala drawing graces the cover of my memoir and the back of the Quest II card deck — is here: Layla's Legacy of Love and Light Lives On.

Expansive Healing is dedicated to the legacies of Fred and Layla — to their light, and to every Seeker who is learning to carry their own light forward.

A Note on This Work

I'm an instructor, educator, and certified neuroplasticity coach — not a licensed therapist, counselor, psychologist, psychiatrist, or medical professional of any kind. What I share here is inner companion work, meant to walk alongside the professional care you may need or already have, not replace it. Full disclaimer: expansivehealing.com/disclaimer

If anything in this post stirs grief, memory, or difficulty that feels heavier than this moment can hold, please reach for support: a therapist, a sponsor, a support group, or trusted people in your life. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line, or call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — both free, private, and available 24/7. You deserve both this work and that support.

More support: National Mental Health Resource Library · Southwest Montana Mental Health & Community Resource Library