Jodi: Hi, I’m Jodi Cohen, your host and I’m so honored and privileged to be joined by one of my personal favorite people and mentors, JJ Virgin, who is a triple board certified nutrition expert and Fitness Hall of Famer. She’s also a passionate advocate of eating and exercising smarter. And the author of four… four New York Times bestsellers, including The Virgin Diet, The Virgin Diet Cookbook, JJ Virgin Sugar Impact Diet, and JJ Virgin Sugar Impact Diet Cookbook.
Her latest book, Warrior Mom: 7 Secrets to Bold, Brave Resilience, shows caregivers everywhere how to be strong, positive leaders for their families, while exploring the inspirational lessons that you learned as you fought for your son, Grant’s life and we’re going to dive into that a little bit. Before we kick off, I’d love to get your definition of resilience.
JJ: You’d think I’d have this by now because I get asked that so much and I’m like going, “Ooh, let’s see, resilience.” But I think of that song, you know that song and I’m a terrible singer. So like to start an interview off with terrible singing, probably a no go, but I’m going to do it. But you know that song, “I get knocked down, but I get up again,”?
Jodi: Yes.
JJ: That, to me is resilience. And the reality is, if you’re going through life, and you’re stirring it up, and you’re making a ruckus, as Seth Godin says, you’re going to get knocked down, right? I mean, even if you’re just trying to go through life, kind of being quiet, life is going to throw you challenges. And it’s not the falling down that’s the thing, it’s how you get back up.
Jodi: Yes. And I mean, you keep reinventing yourself and doing amazing things.
JJ: As I say, I keep falling down. Everyone was like, “What’s your secret to success?” I go, “Skinned knees.”
Jodi: That’s true, the blessing of the skinned knee. And you’ve kind of had to experience what no one would ever want to with your son, Grant, when he was 16. Do you want to share that story?
Jj: Yes. And the craziest part about that time, so I’m a single mom, my kids were 15 and 16. My two boys, Bryce was 15, Grant 16. And it was a couple weeks before the launch of my first New York Times bestseller and I’ve gone all in. They say if you want to take the island you’ve got to burn all the boats. Like, the boats were burnt, sunk. I was taking it. I had invested my advance into doing this book launch. I was all in and I really felt like this was going to be my chance to make that impact out in the world and also, support my family better than I had been.
So a couple weeks out, my son, Grant, comes home, and he goes out at dusk to go to a friend’s house. And the next thing I know, Bryce comes running in the house with Grant and Bryce’s dad, John and they say Grants been hit and airlifted to the local hospital. Now, airlifted, you know is not a broken leg, right? So we jump in the car, race to the hospital, they won’t tell us anything because technically, Grant was a John Doe. The only reason we knew it was Grant was, the accident scene was a couple blocks from the house.
One of the reasons I had to move out of Palm Desert is you can’t drive down an accident street to get your house every day, like that’s just PTSD on steroids. But when they drove past it, they knew Grant had been out walking and they saw this accident. Grant had already been taken to the hospital. And when they asked the policeman what had happened, the policeman said, “A boy got hit and he looked just like you,” because Bryce and Grant were a year apart. They looked alike, right?
So we get there, they won’t give us any information on the phone. We get to the hospital, they take us into a conference room. I mean, this was possibly the example of how not to behave as a doctor, is what I would say about Palm Springs. In fact, when I did the documentary, I did a documentary called You’re Stronger than you Think. We tried to interview this doctor, it was almost like 60 Minutes, “No comment!” because he just… I was like, “Boy, you need some bedside manners.”
So the first thing they do is usher us into the room, still giving us no information and asking us, “What happened?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. You tell me what happened.” So they say, “Your son, Grant, has been hit and he is hanging on right now. He has a torn aorta and that kills 90% of people right on the scene.” That’s what killed Princess Diana. They said, “It is hanging on. It’s an onion skin. And if it’s not repaired sometime in the next 24 hours, it is going to rupture. Every hour, the chance of it rupturing goes up by 10%.”
He says, “But we can’t repair it here because it’s a very specialized surgery that requires us doing it without blood thinners, which we don’t do here.” And the reason we had to do it without blood thinners is because he was in a deep coma.
He had diffuse axonal injuries. He was in a deep, deep coma, multiple brain bleeds. And along with that he also had 13 fractures, which, when they took us to see him, he was on a ventilator, central line, tube coming out of his brain, managing the pressure.
But that vision, Jodi, that you never forget, like, looking at your child on a stretcher, with road rash. I mean, he had all this glass, like the shimmering of the glass, and then the bones coming through his shins. I was just looking and when you’re looking at that, it is like your brain says, “I must protect you.” My brain was like, “This could not be real,” right? So, the doctor is saying, “We can’t do the surgery here and he’s never going to survive the airlift to the other hospital.”
“Even if he were to survive the airlift to the other hospital, he’s never going to survive this surgery. And even if he were to survive both of those, he’d be so brain damaged, it wouldn’t be worth it.” Now, here’s the thing, I was in Palm Springs at Desert Hospital. Palm Springs, the average age is 80. If an 80 year old is in this type of a situation, it’s a very different situation than a 16 year old, but this doctor was used to 80 year olds. He had a different lens.
So we’re all looking at him. Now, my ex-husband is a medical malpractice trial attorney, so that was helpful for the appropriate language we were about to use. And my son Bryce, is a math guy, he’s getting his doctorate in math now. My son Bryce looks at this doctor and here’s the other interesting thing, all my friends are doctors, John’s whole family are doctors.
And so Bryce does not have this, like doctors on pedestal thing, he just looks at this doctor and he says, “Huh, well, it sounds like there’s about 0.25% chance he’d make it.” And the doctor says, “Yeah, that sounds about right, son,” in this very sad… like obviously, this isn’t going to work. And Bryce is like, “It’s not zero. We’ll take those odds.”
Jodi: I love that line.
JJ: And John’s kind of, now throwing the, like, “I will sue you if you don’t get this done,” language out at him. And I’m like, “Doesn’t time matter here? Get on it.” It was like, Get on it!” So they airlifted him to the next hospital and he survived the airlift. We didn’t know that. We’re driving there, like leave at two in the morning. We’re driving to LA to go to Harbor-UCLA, number two Trauma Center in the country. No clue what we’re walking into.
What we walked into was kind of like, you walk in there and a whole lot of homeless people go in there at night because it’s cold, so the whole waiting area smells like a bathroom. We went into the ER, they had five surgical teams getting Grant prepped for surgery. This one doctor had taken the fax at midnight, agreed to the case, assembled all the other surgical teams. Gotten a hold of a stent that he’d been using in a study that supposedly was not here anymore.
He got a hold of one that was supposed to be used for adults. He said, “I figured I’d ask for permission or forgiveness, rather.” And I walk in, he goes, “Are you the mom?” and I am like, frazzled. And he goes, “Come here, let me show you where we’re going to do this. Listen, I do this all the time. I had someone turn off an overpass last week, totally fixed him. I can fix him. Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” I’m like, “Okay.” I mean, what a difference. He was just trying to get me out of the situation, right? He got me out of the situation, showed me the OR and said, “It’s all gonna be fine. You go wait over here.”
I went and sat in the waiting room and literally, I was doing a Discovery TV show at the time and had blogs to do, and I was writing blogs, because I had to do something to get my head off of this. And then he walked in, like I think, eight o’clock in the morning, and he said, “Alright, I’m done. He’s totally fine. Stent is in, perfect, everything looks great. But I don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. That’s not my job. I’m just the plumber.”
So we go and meet the neurosurgeons and the neurosurgeons are like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah. We don’t know, blah, blah, blah,” and I’m just thinking, “I’m just not gonna listen to this.” So I went in to see him and at the time he was first in the adult ICU at Harbor, which Harbor is kind of a high crime area, so a lot of the gunshot wounds and everything are in there. So literally, there are police, there’s people handcuffed to their beds, and in the corner, by the window is my son. And the machine is going on that’s monitoring his blood pressure, the pressure to his brain, and he’s got the ventilator.
He’s got like literally this finger that’s out but everything else is in casts, the 13 fractures. He had two orthopedic teams working on him. There’s the finger. So I walk over there and the nurse is kind of looking at me with major sympathy, and I’m holding on to the finger. And I said, “Grant, I love you so much.” And she’s like, “Honey, he’s in a coma.”
I’ve been fascinated with comas. Haven’t you always, like…? Like, I’ve always been fascinated with comas. And you always hear that they could hear you, so I was going with that because Grant and I have always been super-duper connected. I actually knew the morning I was pregnant. Like, I remember waking up that morning and telling my husband, “I’m pregnant. It’s a boy.” He’s like, “Yeah, right.”
Jodi: Me too. I know what you mean.
Jj: I just knew. We’ve always been so, so, so connected. It was one of the things that worried me, because as I was driving to the hospital, I felt like I’d lost him. And they’re like, “No, no, no,” one of my friends was like, “We’re gonna see, we’re just gonna see him healed.” So it’s so much of putting yourself in that future place. So I’m holding his finger and I said, “Bryce loves you so much,” and I felt the littlest squeeze.
They told me he can’t hear, he can’t, blah, blah but I feel the squeeze, and I’m thinking, “I’m so tired. I must just be delirious.” And then I said, “Your grammy loves you,” and nothing, and then I said, “Your girlfriend, Mackenzie, loves you so much,” and I felt like him trying to pick my fingers off the bed. And I don’t know where it came from but I just said, “Grant, you are going to be 110%. Your name means warrior,” which isn’t that crazy, his name means warrior. And I said, “But I need you to fight. I will bring all of the resources but you’ve got to fight.”
And that became my whole vision, as I so clearly held that vision of him completely healed, as an adult, better than before the accident. I just kept that vision in place. It’s been eight and a half years and he is better now than before the accident but that’s just happened in the last six months, and there’s still things that I’m working on. But prior to that there were so many times along the way that there was zero indication that he was going to be better than the accident.
In fact, plenty of times along the way, where it didn’t look like he was going to make it through the night. But it’s like, I could not let any of that doubt come in. I was so afraid of any of that doubt, if I let the littlest doubt in, then that would be it. That would end it. So I just kept that picture in and I just always made sure, and we were talking about this before, that I had the next step. Whatever it was, even if it was the smallest thing like giving him fish oil, doing essential oils. You know we did essential oils in the hospital with him. Doing essential oils.
I started to try to wake up all of his senses, anything I did, I just was like, as long as I had the next thing, I had some semblance of control. Something, right? And I had no idea, as I was going through this, whether he would make it. I don’t know, today if he’s going to make it. We don’t know if we’re going to make it, right? But I knew that I had to do everything within my power to help him. To have peace with all of this, I have to do everything I possibly can. And then it’s like, “Let go, let God.”
So that was that, four and a half months in the hospital, although we took him out. We took him out before they wanted us to because I felt like he should be home. Then it’s quite a long recovery from a coma, it’s not what it looks like in the movies at all. They don’t wake up and go, “Hi. Hi, I love you.” They don’t. They wake up and stare off into space. It took him months to even be able to remember his name. He had to learn everything all over again. He had to learn how to eat. He had to learn how to tie shoes, everything.
Jodi: You’ve said so many things that are so powerful. I want to move back to kind of clearly held vision. It’s interesting, with Max, there were four boys in the car and the one that survived, the mom did the same thing. She kind of created this bubble in the hospital and she was like, “I can’t bring anything negative in.”
JJ: Yes, that’s what I did. He had a crushed heel. It’s interesting, like, you go through the series of degrees. So first, torn aorta, that’s the emergent. Once he got through that then of course, it was the brain injury and waking up. The longer you stay in a coma, the more likely you are to never come out of it and to die. So once he comes out of that, now we’ve got 13 fractures.
It’s so interesting, the old me, it was like, “Nah, it’s a fracture, it’s a heel.” But I what I found out is we had this one crushed heel and at first, you think, “It’s a heel.” Then you find out, these orthopedic surgeons are coming in because they’re trying to figure out what to do with it. They’re hanging it, there’s pins sticking out of it. And they’re like, “This is a life changing injury. We’re just trying to get him to be able to walk again.”
And first of all, I was like, “Out of the room, he cannot hear any of this.” And I go, “Listen, if Kobe Bryant were in this room, I’m betting you, you would be doing anything you could possibly do to get him to be able to play again. And that’s what we need, if you can hold that vision, then we’re on the same team. But if you can’t, I need to find other people.”
Jodi: Wow.
JJ: Well, but it’s true. Think about it. And this is such an important thing for anyone you’re working with, whether it’s a business coach, whether it’s your doctor. If they can’t hold the vision of you in perfect health, how the hell are they going to help you get there? They’re not. Fire them.
Jodi: No, that’s great. That’s really clear boundaries too. Either show up or get out.
JJ: Right? The doctor who helped us with this and he helped us multiple times, Dr. Carlos Donayre. And one of the other doctors at the hospital, she goes, “I’ve seen kids, like half their brain has been blown out and they’re totally fine.” She goes, “Your son is going to fine. Watch. He’s going to be perfect.” I’m like, “Alright.”
Now, what’s the most powerful thing? It’s that belief and seeing that, and having parents then treat as if. How are you going to behave around someone if you believe that they can be 110% fully recovered, versus you believing they’re probably going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of their life? It’s very different. What if my whole thing had been, “Gosh, I just hope he makes it.”
Jodi: No, I mean, it’s amazing. We haven’t even talked about like, how you kind of maintained your own self-care through all of this because you’re a mom, you prioritize your kid, you were probably caretaking for your younger one as well. What next steps did you pick for yourself?
JJ: And I was coming out with a book and my book launch was happening in three weeks.
Jodi: Oh, my God.
JJ: I launched a New York Times bestseller at bedside with my son in a coma.
Jodi: Did you do podcasts from the hospital?
JJ: Yeah. So UCLA was awesome and so was Children’s Hospital, they gave me one of their admin rooms to use. And I would run out and do some satellite TV stuff, because I was in LA, so that was helpful. I hadn’t finished my audio book recording, I had to go and do my audio book recording in the middle of all of this. My ex-husband came and sat with Grant and I went and ran and did the audio book recording.
Jodi: Which no one tells you is really hard.
JJ: It’s really hard but fortunately, I’ve done so much teleprompter reading that it paid off. But I also believe that authors should read their own books.
Jodi: Yes, you told me that and I did it. What I didn’t realize is I’m wiggly, and I did make a lot of noise.
JJ: I know. It’s amazing what you don’t know when you’re doing those things. You find out any weird stuff you do or words that you’ve always pronounced wrong.
Jodi: Oh, yes.
JJ: Like, ‘leg-oom’ is ‘leg-yoom’. Anyway, at one point reading this book, with ‘leg-yoom’, I kind of was like, “You know what, can we just call it beans?” I give up.” Anyway, so that night in the hospital, this happened on September 10 and I remember it so well, because I was thinking, “Oh, my God, he’s gonna die on September 11th.” It was September 10th, 2012. And finally, September 11th, afternoon, I took a little nap in the afternoon, for like two hours, then went back to the hospital.
I remember standing in the hospital and it’s like eight or nine o’clock at night. Now my other son, Bryce, is now at home by himself at 15. He has just seen his brother… so, he’s at home with our doggie. John is with me and I’m standing there and I’m thinking, “Alright, I need to be here.” The number one cause of death for children, by the way, is brain injury and number three cause of death overall for everybody is death by doctor. Meaning that you’re in a hospital and mistakes… there’s just… especially at a teaching hospital.
I’m not leaving, I mean, I’m going to go sleep but I’m staying put. I’d pretty much set my office up next to my son. I have pictures of me sitting next to my son with my laptop open, working.
And I’m thinking to myself, “I’m going to make sure he has whatever he needs to get through this. This is going to cost a lot of money.” So that was step one. Success is no longer optional on the book.
I remember one really sweet woman goes, “Don’t worry about your job. It will be there waiting for you.” I’m like, “I don’t know which alternate universe you live in but I don’t have a job. It won’t be there waiting for me. This is my big chance. It will be over.” Like, “That’s not the way it works here.” So I just looked at him and I went, “You know what? This has to be a lot bigger than it was. So I’ve got to clear out all distractions.”
First thing is, I’m going into a pediatric ICU every day. I’m wearing a gown, a mask, and gloves. If I have a sniffle I’m not going in, so I cannot get sick. I’m under the most stress I’ve ever been in my life. I’d better do something. I sent an SOS out and Dr. Hyla Cass shows up with a bag. I remember she had her purse full of like, supplements. She would make me this amazing organic chicken kale soup. So she was coming in.
Joan Rosenberg would just come in and calm me down. So I did a big SOS out. But I looked at it and I went, “What do I need to do to make sure that my health is totally dialed?” I got my sleep, sleep was key. I did not steal from my sleep. I would generally get back to the hotel some time between 9:00 and 9:30. I was staying about 15 minutes away at like, a little Residence Inn, and get to bed between 9:30 and 10:00.
Depending on when I got to bed, I would make sure I got at least seven hours, hopefully eight. But I would leave the hospital some time between 8:00 and 9:00, and I’d get to the hospital some time between 5:30 and 6:30, 7:00. And I’d just bring all my stuff for the day. And I just created a uniform, so I’d just wear workout pants and a workout top. And then I would bring a sweater that looked like it was something I could do if I was doing anything with that I needed a video on, I could pull it off.
And literally, I had like four of these sweaters, they were Athleta sweaters, like four pairs of Lulu Lemons, and workout tops and that was it. I found a gym like a quarter of a mile away. If I couldn’t get there, I would go up and down the hospital stairs. Once we finally got Grant to a point where we could put him into a wheelchair, then I would just roll him everywhere. So I was doing stuff for movement every single day. I was supplementing like crazy, for all the stress.
I was making sure I was eating well, which at a hospital is probably the most difficult part because the food is so disgusting. I couldn’t believe it. Like, you go downstairs to the cafeteria and I remember they had a big sign as I was walking in, ‘Farm to Table’, and I’m like, “Oh, this should be good.” ‘Farm to Table was a sign and below it were apples. That was it. So, basically anyone coming there, they were like, “What should we bring?” I’m like, “Food.” So everyone was bringing food.
I had a whole bunch of water I stashed there. And then I just found a Whole Foods real close by, and that’s what I did. I ate perfectly, I did not deviate, I exercised, I slept well, I took a load of supplements, and I reached out to friends. I prioritized that. That was like number one. Number two was making sure that I was there for Grant and that Bryce was taken care of. He would come on the weekends, up there. So Bryce and John came on the weekends.
Then I literally looked at everything on my plate and I think we all need to do this on a regular basis because if we don’t, really dumb, unimportant things sneak into your list. Like, I have a constant to-do list. I thought, “You know what, I’m not going to call it a to-do list. I’m going to call it a success list, because to do is awful.” I scanned the list and I go, “What on here does not really need to be here?” because when I looked at it, and I went, “Okay, I need to take care of myself, I need to take care of my two sons, and I need to make sure this book launch kicks it,” everything else is gone; everything.
My mom would be like, “I need you to call me every day.” I go, “Mom, I’m not going to call you. I’m going to post on Facebook every day, what’s going on, so you’re going to need to figure out how to get there and do that because that’s where every day, I’m going to do it,” because my phone was blowing up with texts and I was like, “I’m not responding to any of this stuff. I’m just gonna put it there and leverage it.” And that’s literally what I did. I cut every single thing that I didn’t have to have going on out of my life.
Jodi: That’s amazing. I was going to ask you about boundaries with others, because you mentioned a couple people, they project their own ideas onto you. And it’s when you’re navigating something like that you can’t carry other people’s stuff for them.
JJ: Well, here’s what was very interesting during that whole time. It’s really interesting when you go through something like this and you’ve experienced now, and when you’re on the other side, you realize that some people are really capable of being there for you during these times, but they aren’t necessarily the people who you thought would be there.
Jodi: Yes.
JJ: Like, some people who you really thought would be there for you, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they aren’t able to, like emotionally, they don’t have the capacity to pull it off. I’ve had people years later, go, “I am so sorry,” and I’m like, “I get it. I understand now.” At first I was pissed and then I went, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Well, I’m actually not upset about this. I’m upset about the situation and I’m projecting it.” So, people will surprise you, like Hyla Cass, Susanne Bennett, Joan Rosenberg, they just showed up and showed up, and showed up. And I hardly knew Joan at the time.
Jodi: Yeah, she’s lovely.
JJ: But this is her calling. I had people drive for two hours to see me who I didn’t know. It made me want to be a lot better person, I’ve got to tell you, because I was going, “Gosh, would I do this? I don’t know if I’d do this.” So it was pretty impressive. So that’s the first thing is like the people who are supposed to be there to support you are the right people for that. And it may not be the people who you expected, and don’t hold it against them. They’re doing the best they can do. What was the question? I don’t even remember.
Jodi: Oh, just boundaries, like kind of how you said to your mom, “I can’t call you every day.”
JJ: Oh, so here’s the other part too, this was where a couple of crazy things happened. So everyone was giving me advice and sending things. I had every religion praying for me. There were Buddhists, and churches in France were lighting candles, and I got this holy water and I’m like, “Awesome, let’s go.” My mom didn’t come to visit until December and I was actually really glad for that.
When it first happened, I didn’t even call her first because i thought, “I’m not going to call her until I know something because she’s gonna go…” my mom is a glass half empty person. So then I call her and tell her, and she’s like, “Agh!” Then I said, “Well, this is where we are. This is where you can come.” She’s like, “I have a golf tournament,” and that is who my mom is, and this was not her capacity.
When she came in December, she got to the hospital and had forgotten her book, and wanted me to drive her back. I’m like, “I’m not driving you back, mom, you’re gonna come and sit and talk to Grant.” This was exactly how it should have happened. All these people wanted to help and 99% of them, it was just beautiful and altruistic.
And then there was this other woman who was doing this energy medicine work from afar. I don’t know what she was doing. I never talked to her. She started doing this. She told me about it and what it would have cost and how she was doing it, and she wanted me to get together a fund to keep going and have people pay for it. And I’m like, “Thank you so much but I’m good, we’re covered.”
Then she said, “Well, if you just promote everything, tell everybody about what I’m doing.” I’m like, “No.” So there will be those people. I was like, “That is so weird.” Then on Facebook, every day, I would say all the things I was doing. And I remember one woman on Facebook said, “You are such a horrible mother.”
Jodi: Oh my God.
JJ: “To be using your son in this way.” And I was like, “What has happened as I started to post this journey, and the things that I’ve been doing to help my son is people have been dm’ing me and emailing me, and sharing how this has helped them help their family. And so if I piss off a couple people by doing that, have it at ’em.”
Jodi: And I think it might be hard for people to be as vulnerable, and so it’s triggering.
JJ: I’m always noticing the people that write the mean stuff, if you go look at their page, they’re just mean people. Like, they’re just mean. But overall, I think that the big lesson from all of this is we don’t realize how much we get by helping other people and by giving. I noticed at first, I was feeling guilty about all these people and all they were doing for me. Then I thought, “Gosh, when I get the opportunity to support someone and do something for them, it’s like always one of the top moments for me. So don’t take that from them.”
Jodi: Yeah, and it’s very hard for me to ask for things. That’s one thing I love that you kind of talked about, like sending out the SOS and being open to support.
JJ: I had to, it was for my son’s life. That’s the thing, when it’s a life or death thing, you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to to do this.”
And I’m sad it took that because honestly, I think we need to do a lot more of that. We need to do a lot more of that. We need to ask for help more. It’s not a sign of weakness. What if that were a sign of strength? Because I think it really is, you have to be strong to ask for help.
Jodi: No, I agree. And everyone who’s listening to this, you’re just such a pillar of strength, and it’s so amazing. Is there anything that kind of surprised you, like things that you learned that that you didn’t really expect to learn or curveballs that kind of wound up being beneficial?
JJ: I’d say the whole thing has been really beneficial. The day before it happened, I was at a Brendon Burchard Experts Academy event. And one of the things they’ve been teaching, he has this hero’s journey story about his car accident, where everyone who’s been to an event knows the story. And he’s standing on the car, and the moon, and he’s got blood and he’s like, “Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?” And I was very close to him at the time, he was coaching me.
And I remember kind of saying, “I don’t have a hero’s journey, I’ve got nothing.” And I’m walking through the airport that afternoon, I go, “Gosh, my life is perfect. I cannot believe how lucky I am. My whole life is perfect.” Then I was just kind of dabbling with, “I’ve got no hero’s journey,” and the next day, like this, “Boom!” I was still wearing the bracelet from his event and I didn’t take it off for months. I felt like it was good luck. It was like, life’s golden ticket. I was pinging him, going, “I think I just got life’s golden ticket here.”
And it’s like, never ask for a hero’s journey, is what I would say, never ask for one. But kind of that commitment I made that night, the first night when everything was in an uproar at that hospital and we were working on getting them to airlift him to the next hospital, I went outside that night. I got super quiet because I don’t know how Grant got hit by the car. Grant, for months had been really, really troubled and he’d said to me multiple times, “Mom, I’m going to go get hit by a car. I’m going to go walk in front of a car.”
He’d said this to me. This is not in the book because I didn’t know if it was mine to share until he really came through it, and now he’s okay to share it. So he said these things to me. And that night, the last thing he said was, “I’m just going to go get hit by car.” Now, I don’t believe he walked in front of the car but I absolutely know that he created that situation. He is a super powerful manifester.
So I’m standing outside that night. Bryce has said, “We’ll take those odds, the doctor’s working on it.” And I walk outside because I think, “What does Grant want? Like, what if this is all what he wanted to have happen? What do I do here?” So I stood outside, I got really, really quiet, and I said, “Grant, what do you want? What do you want?” I closed my eyes, I stood there, and I just heard, “Fight for me, mom.”
And I feel like that was the turning point in his whole life. I look at this whole thing and part of my commitment in that hospital was, “Grant is going to be 110% and we are going to be a better family because of it, and we are going to help other people become better because of this.” And we were sitting around the table a couple years ago, I mean, just still when we were in a lot of the thick of it, and there’s still stressful situations that happen, and Bryce has said we are so much better because of this, and we are.
We are all better. We’re better as a family. We are better personally, as you know, when you go through a really challenging time, you build your resilience muscle. These things are challenging, they’re tough. It’s not easy. It’s not like you go, “Oh good, I get to go through this, I’ll be so much stronger.” But when you start to look through it, you go, “I am so much better of a human because of what I’ve gone through here.”
And that is something that if you are going through a really tough time right now, there is the other side. It’s not like the end of the journey, like you were talking, it’s not like this is ever over. You’re peeling an onion of understanding but you will get to a place to realize that there are so many gifts from this that you never could have realized going through it. It’s still tragic to go through these things but make at least the pain somewhat worth it, if that makes sense.
Jodi: No, I agree. I think that there are certain lessons that no one would ever sign up to learn. Once you learn them, you’re glad you know them.
JJ: Exactly. I look at the people who I admire the most. And I wrote this in the front of the book, it’s the Elizabeth Gilbert quote, of the women who I admire are not these superheroes. So the women who’ve gone through crap, and they’ve gotten back up, they’ve dusted themselves off. And I look at the people who I really admire, and they are the people who just have gone through it. And they’re not bitter, and they’re not angry. They’ve forgiven.
And I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that I learned through this. Earlier in life, I was like a little grudge holder, and I was like, “I am not going to do that anymore. I am not going to be this grudgy person.” There’s a couple traits where I was just like, “Ew, I don’t want to be judgmental. I don’t want to be a grudgy holder person.” So I thought I’d gotten rid of it. And when Grant got hit by the car, I was so proud of us as a family, because no one was like, “Let’s go get that woman!”
A neighbor had seen her get out of the car, look back, and then get in the car and drive off. And here’s the thing, we don’t know what happened. What if he’d walked in front of the car? It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. And now she has her own thing to deal with that she’s going to be dealing with forever. But they thought they’d found her and thought I was totally at peace with this. My ex-husband calls and goes, “They found the woman,” and I was like, “Agh!!”
Then I went, “Where did that come from? I thought I was totally fine. I’ve got some work to do.” And I really went through a process to forgive this woman, because the reality was, I was so upset with myself for letting him walk out that night after he’d said this, but he’d said it so many times before. And I’m like, “Yeah, right.” So I was so upset with myself that I hadn’t just let him go to martial arts that day, and he wouldn’t have done this.
But the reality was, I feel like this was almost the thing that was supposed to be, and I had to forgive myself. I had to forgive him, forgive myself. She was kind of the last person I had to really forgive. But if you’ve got an emotional charge around something, check in, because you probably need to forgive around that. And in general, as we start to really go through that forgiveness process… and this is not calling up some person and going, “Hey, I forgive you.” It’s got nothing to do with that.
It’s going through the process to really become empathetic and understand their part, and truly forgive them. In the process, you’ll probably find out that you’ve got some forgiving of yourself to do.
Jodi: Yeah, that’s great. This has been so amazing and fabulous. Can you share more about where people can find you and find your products, and learn more about you, please?
JJ: Jjvirgin.com, easy peasy.
Jodi: Easy peasy.
JJ: It’s getting upgraded. I’m getting a remodel right now.
Jodi: And the book where you talk about this is Warrior Mom, if they want to read more of your story. Thank you so much for your time and just your vulnerability, and sharing your story.
JJ: Thank you.
