Listen to my story of loosing my wife, how it effected me, how God recovered me, and what He taught me about how to grieve in a healthy way.

<p>Listen to my story of loosing my wife, how it effected me, how God recovered me, and what He taught me about how to grieve in a healthy way.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Freedom Health Ministries

Gabriel Arruda

My Journey of Loss and Recovering from Grief

And I am excited to share my journey with you.

And you pretty much all know my name, you know who I am, but perhaps I could share a little bit of background information about myself.

I also have a nonprofit organization called Freedom Health Ministries and I travel around the country speaking, doing lots of seminars.

I like setting up and running seminars like this.

I've run these in a lot of different places.

Also, kind of what I'm more well known for is a website and YouTube channel called Reverse Autoimmune, where I have shared how to help autoimmune conditions naturally, because this is something that I had to deal with.

And my wife and I co-wrote a book together about it.

And yeah, this is something that I've done as a side business for a long time.

But what I'm here to talk to you about tonight is not about how to reverse autoimmune diseases, it's about how I dealt with my loss and to share with you my journey of recovering from grief.

I was in the city of San Francisco and I was going to art school.

And while I was there in art school, I had an encounter with God.

And I decided to give my life to God and I found a church there that I liked which I started attending.

And after the church service I used to go up to the piano after everyone was gone and kind of dink around on the piano and practice a little bit.

I'm not a pianist at all, but I'm musical and I was kind of teaching myself.

And as I was up there dinking around the piano, this girl who I'd made friends with, Heidi, she comes in the sanctuary with this big smile on her face and she says, Gabe, I have someone to introduce you to.

And behind her, trailing behind her, was this tall, beautiful, blonde girl with this big smile on her face.

And at that time, actually, I was already in another relationship.

But hey, we're just going to be friends because I'm already in a committed relationship.

And that relationship that I was in dissolved.

And 3 months after I broke up with that girl, Jennifer and I became a couple.

And let's just say, you know, when it's right, it's right.

If you know what I mean, it just the chemistry was there immediately.

And we were on the same page with our values.

And you could just say it was kind of 1 of those matches that were made in heaven.

And not too long after that, we got married and we got married in Half Moon Bay, California, just south of San Francisco.

Yeah, and that began our 15 year, wonderful marriage and relationship.

And we had, we were what I call an unusually close couple.

With a lot of couples, you know, they kind of like their space a little bit here and there.

They like a little bit of reprieve from each other.

We literally spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week together.

From the time we started dating, even before we were married, from the time we started dating till the day she passed, we never, how should I say this, we never not had a job together.

I never had a job and she had a different job.

So we were literally together every single moment of the day and the last 10 years we traveled in our RV doing seminars and things like this all over the country and we would work right across from each other.

My computer was there and her computer was right on the other side of our little kitchenette area in our RV.

We eventually came up to Tahoe and we started living in Truckee just for the summer, so then we'd leave for the winter, and then we decided to stay 1 winter and then we just kept on staying and that's where our our life was.

But we would come down here every once in a while and we always loved Southlake, but we We lived in Truckee.

Well, fast forward a little bit, life was really good for a while.

Then in 2013, my first tragedy struck, lost my beloved mother, April 23rd, 2013, to autoimmune hepatitis.

That's when your immune system starts attacking your liver.

And we did everything we could, but by the time we found out that the liver was under attack it was already pretty far gone.

I was a bit of a mom's boy, if you know what I mean.

We actually share the same birthday and we have pictures of me when I'm 1 years old sitting on her lap in front of our little cake together with a candle all the way through to my adult life.

Losing mom was tough, but having Jen there made a big difference.

And she really did buffer that challenge of losing my mother.

Also, 6 months later after my mom passed away, I found out I had the same disease that killed her, which is autoimmune hepatitis.

I caught it early, thank God, because of what I saw happen to my mom.

And that's how we ended up on the journey of learning how to reverse my autoimmune condition, writing a book, and putting up a YouTube channel, and so forth.

But losing mom was tough, but it was honestly nothing compared to what would happen about 7 years later.

In October 22nd, 2019, my very healthy, strong wife, Jennifer, was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer.

And this was a shock to everyone because we have been into health for a very long time.

And she was running half marathons, super, super picky eaters, you know, no GMOs, no, you know, mostly organic produce, whole food plant-based, We made most of our food at home with this in a package.

It was very rare for us to eat packaged food.

So we were kind of like a model health couple to a lot of people.

So when Jen got cancer, everyone was like, what's gonna happen to me?

Everybody was terrified, you know, because this health lady, we'd actually travel and do seminars like this on health to different communities.

And so everyone was just floored, including myself.

And at first we put on our soldier helmets and we said, you know what, we're going to fight this thing.

We're plugged into a lot of different health professionals, both conventional and alternative.

Hey, we had reversed my autoimmune condition.

Why not tackle this thing and let's see what's gonna happen?

And you know, also what we said to ourselves is, also we got God on our side.

But as the weeks and the months rolled on, the disease just kept progressing and all of our efforts, no matter what we threw at it, it just would not relent.

And this is, we actually went to an alternative cancer institute in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I don't know if you guys know, but Scottsdale, Arizona is like a hub, it's like the only place in the United States where you could go to alternative cancer treatment centers without getting in trouble.

But she made a little bit of progress there, but as you can see, the disease, it's such a terrible disease.

And I remember shortly after this experience, I woke up 1 morning, actually just before this, and I don't know why it was this 1 morning, but the realization just hit me.

It just hit me as I sat up, you might lose her.

Before that, I was like, no, we're gonna beat this.

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My Journey of Loss and Recovering from Grief

Transcript

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