Clouds Far Behind Me (eBook)

A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Path to Resilience

Lori LoCicero (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
368 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8430-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Lori LoCicero had the life she always dreamed of-until her husband's devastating cancer diagnosis turned everything upside down. Thrust into widowhood and struggling to find her footing, she faced relentless waves of grief, identity loss, and the challenge of rebuilding her life. Clouds Far Behind Me is a heartfelt and unexpectedly humorous memoir about resilience, love, and the surprising lessons that helped her rediscover strength, hope, and new possibilities.

Lori LoCicero is a Los Angeles-based writer and director with a diverse portfolio that spans television pilots, celebrated short films, and books, including Mind Savvy: The Art of Clear Thinking for Business Success. Her work includes contributions to numerous productions for Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Disney, and the Food Network.

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At age forty-one, Lori LoCicero had everything she ever dreamed of-two young children, a loving husband, and a flourishing business. Then, a shocking pancreatic cancer diagnosis changed everything. After a year-long battle, her husband, Joe, died, abruptly thrusting her into a strange world with a devastating new title: Widow. Losing her identity as a wife, parenting partner, and business collaborator left her adrift in a sea of numbness as the harsh realities of widowhood took hold. Each day was a challenge as she navigated relentless waves of grief while learning how to survive on her own. Reluctantly at first, she began to trust her intuition, gradually accepting and appreciating the valuable lessons around her. With the help of a surfboard, signs from beyond, and some rather persistent spiders, she ultimately found inner strength and a renewed appreciation for life and its possibilities. Told with heart-wrenching honesty and unexpected humor, Clouds Far Behind Me is a vibrant and uplifting memoir that follows one woman's journey from unimaginable tragedy to emotional triumph.

Textauszug

1

The Call

I knew the call was coming. We had been waiting all week, waiting for our doctor to share the results of a test no one wants to take. Every minute, torturous. Every moment, anguishing. My heart and breath pausing every time the phone rang. The longer the wait, the more opportunity for my mind to wander. A wrestling match in my head where negative thoughts tackled and overtook the positive ones. It began adding up, especially in my hands from all the wringing and shaking in a desperate attempt to release the pent-up nervous energy they held. Unable to fathom the “what-ifs” when the worst-case scenario started creeping in, I fought it, refusing to let it settle in my brain as a possible reality. A tumor had been found. This phone call would bring some answers.

Everything will be OK. Joe will be OK.

To distract myself from my internal drama, I started thinking about what might be going on “out there” in the medical world where the call would come from, and what it might feel like on the other side. I envisioned a dimly lit, sterile office with the pungent smell of sanitizer filling the air where a team of radiologists packed tightly into the space worked through stacks of scans piled high upon their desks. Somewhere in one of those stacks, under all the other patients’ scans, sitting next to a cold cup of coffee and a half-eaten scone, were my husband Joe’s CAT scan results. To us, the results contained the catapulting direction of our future. To the technician, it was just a day’s work along with his unfinished breakfast. Somebody, somewhere, who made a comfortable living determining fate with his educated eye, was about to make or break apart our world. The fate of the radiologist’s future was not on the line. Nothing was emotionally invested for him about the impending results. Rather, scan after scan, he was doing a job, routinely jotting down notes as if compiling a mundane shopping list. Apples and oranges—tumors and metastasis. Malignant or benign. Words on a page. I imagined the wide array of brutal remarks our radiologist might toss around in his head: “Lung cancer—Idiot smoker,” “Benign—Lucky bastard,” or “That thing is huge!—Bucket-lister soon to exit this world stage left.” I know medical technicians are neither insensitive nor cruel but rather merely human in knowing firsthand that the unfathomably bad news their findings delivered could completely shatter a life. Waiting for the news, I sent out this positive, hopeful plea to that someone out there, the technician who would read Joe’s scans:

Please say, “Lucky bastard, lucky bastard.”

Once the results were in, they would be handed off like a relay baton from radiologist to lab assistant to the final runner in this race—our doctor, the person who would have to make an either extremely uncomfortable or joyously relieving phone call.

And so . . . we waited. With both of us working together from home but unable to focus on anything but the phone ringing, I suggested we distract ourselves with a movie. To avoid a tearjerker, or perhaps selecting a bit unconsciously to seek out some superhero advice to fix our personal world if it should rapidly go askew, we decided on The Fantastic Four.

I assumed my usual role as driver and we set out for the theatre. I always preferred driving while Joe appreciated being able to focus on anything other than the road. This drive, I found myself focusing on my steel-tight grip around the steering wheel, giving my anxious hands something constructive to do. Holding on made me feel a bit more in control of our situation, but my mind soon wandered again. Back to a much more pleasant yet somewhat similar scenario—the day we met to see a movie together, a setup date, seventeen years earlier. Anxious for totally different reasons, I remember being attracted to Joe’s charming personality, wavy brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and his delightful use of the word “y’all,” which I playfully mocked the entire evening. He kept up with the flirtatious coastal banter, commenting on my interesting fashion choice of wearing flip-flops at night. Within hours we both realized that this transplanted gentleman from Georgia had finally met his match in a laid-back Southern California girl.

We started dating and quickly discovered the many things we had in common: a love of writing, creating mixed-media art projects, and drinking freshly roasted single-origin coffees. Our favorite commonality was our shared birthday: July 26—same day, different year. We were also, in many ways, complete opposites. Joe had a passionate side and a flair for cooking, whereas I could barely navigate any kitchen appliance beyond the microwave. He introduced me to the fine art of cooking and entertaining—concepts previously foreign to me—and proved to me that people can and do make recipes from Bon Appétit and Martha Stewart Living magazines. I went from setting out a bag of tortilla chips and salsa in their original packaging as an acceptable, guest-worthy way to serve an appetizer to helping prepare casual dinners and artistically plated hors d’oeuvres that would follow a theme and be served at a well-dressed table. Joe’s jovial personality delighted others wherever we would go, and he derived great guilty pleasure from watching the not-so-subtle form of physical comedy: a good pratfall. While his boisterous laugh would cause a ripple effect while we watched an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, his laughing while witnessing a tumble in real life would sometimes draw disapproving stares. But that was Joe. He felt awful in the latter situation but sometimes just couldn’t contain himself. I was happier being the quiet observer with a drier and subtler sense of humor. Joe was the emotional type and led with his heart; I was more cerebral and led with my head. But somehow it all worked, and while our personality differences would occasionally cause turmoil and lead to heated arguments, overall our opposites balanced, complemented, and solidified our loving relationship.

After six years of dating we got married. I was the holdout, not Joe. It was another six more before we had our first child—this after five years of gentle reminders from him that “It’s never the right time but always the right time to have a baby.” Again, I was the holdout. I was busy directing film festival shorts and writing TV spec scripts trying to launch a sustainable career. He was right though. Especially with two parents in the entertainment industry. Timing would always be tricky and we both wanted to have kids. As soon as I lined up with his wise words, I got pregnant—twice! Our son arrived in 2002, and in 2005 I gave birth to our daughter. What we didn’t agree on were baby names, as his passion for television sitcoms would have given the world another Desi and Lucy. Our kids, I’m certain, will thank me someday that I fought for the family-derived names of Dalton and Garcy that we settled upon.

Joe came to every OB-GYN appointment and tightly held my hand through both births despite his squeamish disposition toward hospitals, the sight of blood, and basically anything medical. His empathy ran high. He hand-made all the baby announcements and joyfully took on the dreaded 2:00 a.m. nightly feedings. I would often find him walking around the house with an empty BabyBjörn carrier, front pouch open like a protective kangaroo, waiting for a little joey to scoop up and take with him wherever he might be going. I would playfully fight him on being able to use the carrier myself as he reminded me, “You got to carry them for the first nine months—now, it’s my turn.” What could I say? I felt I had won an earlier battle with naming our progeny.

Both of us creative types, we took pride in decorating the kids’ rooms: classic cowboys for one, and for the other, vintage dolls. Hours were spent together on eBay looking for just the right 1950s rodeo-themed glass ceiling light fixture and classic MIB (mint in box) fashion Barbie dolls. Unable to readily find the vintage-inspired baby products we desired, we searched the web for the perfect fabrics to fit the themes from which Joe hand-sewed blankets, curtains, pillow shams, and crib skirts. From this discovery, we decided to start our own company to fill the bill, and thus, our third “child,” Practical Whimsy, was born. I was the practical, balancing Joe’s colorful whimsy. Pooling our creative talents, we began designing and selling stylish and reversible products of groovy, hip, and retro-chic patterns for baby and home. We created a storefront website that included Joe’s signature “take two” family-pleasing recipes designed to provide two delicious meals from one set of ingredients and our own “hip tips” on parenting that we had learned along the way. We began writing a Practical Whimsy book of recipes and activities to bring families together at the supper table. Our business and family life were intermingling and growing together beautifully. Life was good. Really good.

To fund our growing bootstrap business, Joe continued taking on various writing assignments to add to his already impressive resume. Over the course of my pregnancies, he had acquired staff writer credits on Fox Family’s The All New Captain Kangaroo and Columbia TriStar Television’s Solo en America, penned six character reference guides for...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8430-9 / 9798350984309