by Lena Morgan
Dayle Spencer
Laughs as we begin our conversation.
She is trying to unglue her fingers from the float she and her husband are building for the Electric Light Parade, Catch the Glow, that is happening in their Colorado mountain town. Dayle describes the float:
It’s a rendition of the planet that will be covered in light. It has a toothy grin that stretches across the expansion of the Southern Hemisphere. The float is meant to illuminate the mission of our non-profit, Loving Spirit. It shines light on the possibility of peace; peace for the Earth, peace for the animals; a bridge for all people, be it emotional, spiritual, or spatial.
Dayle Spencer
I knew I was about to be inspired.
Dayle grew up in a small town in Alabama, the eighth of ten children. She was “hungry” but not in the way you might think. She hungered for life experience, education, evolution. Dayle met an attorney in her 7th grade year. He was affluent, well dressed, put together. Their meeting put her on the path to becoming an attorney.
Dayle is the first of her family to graduate college. Following graduation, she began work at an insurance agency in Alabama. She hired on alongside a young man. She graduated with honors, he a C student. The two worked together for some time before she learned he earned considerably more for the same work with less to recommend him. Dayle became a feminist. She filed a claim with her local EEOC chapter on the matter of “gender discrimination”. At the time, on the cusp of the movement for equality, such a claim was unheard of in small town Alabama. Yet, six months later, she won her claim. Her employer was found liable for back pay plus interest. Oh, the gifts of adversity … the money she received paid her tuition for law school.
As a federal prosecuting attorney in the 70’s, Dayle became the first woman to continue trying cases through her pregnancy. Again, she had to navigate the cloudy waters of sexism. The ‘good ol’ boys club’ argued that she should cease her practice until after her pregnancy. Dayle did not stop. Her conviction record was nearly 100%.
In 1984, President Jimmy Carter interrupted Dayle’s dream to become a federal district court judge. Employing his patented southern charm mixed with relentless but polite pressure, President Carter wooed Dayle away from the court system. He hired her as director of his now famous conflict resolution program. One of her first assignments included working with the extremely divisive opponents in the smokeless tobacco debate that was raging at that time. The Team proposed an experimental route to resolution; mediation, not court battles. Surprisingly, for those who did not know the force that is Jimmy Carter, the Team persevered. They forged a solution that later became the Smokeless Tobacco Act of 1986.
The success of the process was an eye opener. What President Carter had told her was true. Mediation can work lasting miracles. “Oh, and on a personal note,” says Dayle, “I was introduced to an extraordinarily talented mediator, Will Spencer, who is now my husband. “
During her years with President Carter, Dayle traveled to 50 different countries to resolve among other things 12 brutal civil wars. She traveled to dangerous places. She put her life on the line. She was part of the advance team charged with finding a chink in the armor of conflict, and an avenue for President Carter to do his magic. She advanced pathways to resolution, installed forward thinking routes to peace, and learned that trust is crucial.
This latter realization emerged from the $25 million construction budget for the Carter Center. President Carter wanted only a handshake agreement with his main contractor, not the standard 25-page contract Dayle had drafted. She quotes her famous mentor: “Trust is essential in relationship; no contract will create it.”
These are but a very few of Dayle’s professional life stories. I sense there are more, although on reflection, I think Dayle led me to that sensation. I have to pry, but only a little.
Along with being a prosecuting attorney, a part of feminist history, and the trusted colleague of President Carter, Dayle is mother to two sons, Geoff and Matt, and one daughter, Allie. Motherhood did not slow down her career, but “it changes a person,” says Dayle, taking a long breath. She continues, “Suddenly, a piece of your heart is on the outside of your body, looking back at you. It is a gift. It is the absolute lesson in vulnerability.”
I hear Dayle breathe in and hear her breath catch, as if a strong breeze has taken her voice for a moment. As I write this, my own does the same. In 2010, when Allie was 28 she contracted the flu, a seemingly innocuous illness. But this flu went straight to Allie’s heart. Within 36 hours, Allie died. Dayle and Will were devastated. Lost. Broken. Defeated. “For three years,” she told me, “life was hell.” Three years in the abyss. Three years in the spirals of grief. And then, Dayle began to write.
Dayle penned two books about traversing grief and trauma as far back as birth. Writing became ascension from the abyss; the pilgrimage to a new normal; the catharsis that could save her. Loving Allie, Transforming the Journey of Loss, and Loving Spirit, Self-help for the Journey of Loss are the endearing, raw, honest products of Dayle’s brave and insightful climb out of the abyss.
This conversation with Dayle Spencer has changed my world. I began reading Loving Allie. It is a beautiful truth telling. The love and loss are palpable through Dayle’s written words. She begins the book with birth stories and tells them throughout:
Birth stories are important. They imprint us for life in small and large ways … My own birth story was simple, I was the eighth of ten children, born to a poor family … My conception was not planned. My parents had nine months to pick out a name for me but didn’t … The nurse named me.
Loving Allie is mostly a death story about the death of my only daughter … But more than a death story, it’s a life story, about her life and mine. The story of her life begins with her birth story.
Dayle Spencer
I am devouring this book, breaking only to dry my eyes, and to finish this project honoring Dayle. I hear Dayle tell her birth story. It occurs to me that a journey through grief can begin anywhere. Even at one’s own birth.
In our conversations, we focused a lot on the weight of words and the fact that our Western culture does not have a framework in place to assist people through grief or loss, or the words that can help, not hurt the process. This resonates with me and leaves me shaking. I tell her so and she responds by telling me, “Well, I am working on that.”
After publishing the books, Will and I created Loving Spirit to give grieving adults free workshops to teach them to process through grief, not to engage in grief denial. Grief does not have to defeat you, it can be navigated. People usually say the wrong things in times of grief, not intended, but hurtful. ‘She’s in a better place, or God won’t give you more than you can bear.’ These are counter-productive. Keep it simple. Never say I know how you feel. Listen, more than talk.
Dayle Spencer
This is the bridge to connect people with the other side of their grief. This is the path away from the slippery slope of victimization that is created when we hold our grief.
This, even more than her profound professional accomplishments, draws me in. I am familiar with grief. In March 2015, my sister and her husband lost their lives in a car accident while their young daughter was at school. Shortly after, my mother lost her life to cancer in August 2015. In January 2016, my father took his life. I understand the abyss of grief, the pain in the wrong words when there are no good words to say at all. I follow my own emotions as Dayle speaks of the loss of her beloved daughter. They led straight to my heart. Like a vacuum, her words empty the air from my lungs.
We speak of how the words we choose lead to ascension from the abyss, or our residence in it. “Catastrophize” is the word Dayle has chosen. She relates to me the story of a man who attended the Loving Spirit workshops. His son died in a car accident after high school graduation. He repeatedly said his son was “killed,” when, really, it was an accident.
Her work with him started here, in word choice. Framing his son’s death as a brutal crime, a killing, held him in the space of catastrophizing the loss. Those words keep him in a spiral of grief.
I am familiar. I labeled my losses as “unfair, endless crisis, a cheat.“ As Dayle worked with the man in her example, he began to understand the weight in words. He began to understand how he could chose to frame his grief with words that did not “rip the scab off the healing” every time. “We do ourselves as much disservice as those who try to comfort and placate us, with all those same wrong words.”
Dayle explains to me that human beings create an identity for themselves as victims of loss. Catastrophizing keeps people in victimhood shifting their identity from the experience of grief to helpless victims of a cruel universe:
Loving Spirit teaches humans tools to rise up out of victimhood. To use simple and self-soothing tools like tapping on your heart to wake up energy in your body through acupressure points, relieving stress immediately.
Dayle Spencer
This is truth. I tap my heart and feel the lifting of my blanket of grief.
Dayle’s ascension from grief is a testament to the possibility of healing. My husband and I are now raising my sister’s daughter. It is clear to me in this moment that my niece and I are teetering on the precipice of victimhood, even though this is not the path I want for us. I understand I must shift the framing of my own grief through the acceptance of what has occurred and the exploration of what to do hereafter.
After my interview with Dayle I took some time to research Loving Spirit, to read about her personal journey in Loving Allie. I took time to look at my own grief with empathy, with kind words, with an open heart being gently tapped.
As I make my ascension from the abyss of loss, I have continued to live, to learn, to love through the experience of losing half of my family. I decide victimhood will not be our response to loss. Dayle is right, it is a slippery slope that is not easy. Loss is part of the human experience and no one is spared. But grief does not have to rule you. Resilience, healing, transformation, ascension are available.
Loving Spirit will hold workshops in Utah in 2018. March 2018 will mark my third year since the loss of my sister and her husband. I am ready to embark on the journey of transformation that Dayle and her tribe offer. I am ready to take her up on her offer of resilience and healing, to see how her journey has shaped her, and learn how I can do the same for myself and for those I love.
This float she and her husband are building for the electric light parade is a manifestation of the mission of Loving Spirit, to cover the world in light. Peace through healing. As we heal, the world around us heals. Their parade, Catch the Glow, seems the personification of their mission, to be a part of the light, to spread the light, to make one’s mark through the vehicle of love through loss. Dayle Spencer’s mission of bringing people together across great divides, will illuminate the streets of her Colorado town as it is illuminates her daily life.
I am ready to catch the glow. I am tapping my heart.