JR Ridinger
speaker
234 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
JR Ridinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
My sugars are normal. I'm a girl whose mom died at 42, massive heart attack. My dad died of complications of diabetes, type 1. I should have everything wrong with me. I should be the one gone, not JR, because his family lived till 99 and 98. His grandmother lived till 104. You had his life extended. And one wrong decision took his life from me.
And, you know, you came in and said, I'm not going to let it happen to you.
And that was like two weeks into me losing JR.
You came to Connecticut. You took care of me. And here I am just celebrated, unfortunately, two years, which I don't say celebrated, but JR's two-year anniversary of his death. And I'm the healthiest I've ever been because of you, thank God. Still going through the grief, still struggling through that, but mentally getting stronger all the time.
Oh, you blew everybody's mind that day when you talked about your own pain. And I think it was something nobody had ever heard before, that story. But it inspired me to turn my own pain into the purpose. And, you know, I think about... You know, my whole life, I never had anybody talk to me and say, this is what grief is going to feel like.
Nobody ever said to me, you'll lose people one day and the pain will be so great that it'll be hard to keep moving.
It has been a journey. You know, I've lost my mom. I lost my dad. I know grief. I'm familiar with it. I was very close to my parents. I've never felt the pain I feel losing a guy I knew longer than my own family. It's been a challenge, but I finally decided that I can take this pain, as you say, and turn it into a purpose. You know, I went to so many counselors after Jared died.
And by the end of four weeks, I had fired them. And the reason I fired them is they were good counselors. I wasn't good. I wasn't good. If I were honest, I wasn't right in the head. But as soon as somebody says, well, you know, you could date again. I was like, you're fired. You know, you're fired. And I wasn't ready at the time and I'm still not ready. But here's the funny thing.
Serena Williams had sent me a message one morning. She did every day after Jared passed away. And in that message was a little ad. And I clicked on the ad and it was a group counseling class here in Miami. And she said, I think you should go. It may change your life to hear what other people are going through and other wives who have lost their husbands.
And when you're going through grief, Gary, you know, I don't know how familiar you are with it, but when you go through it, you think you're the worst. Your pain is the worst. Okay. And nobody knows what it's like to feel like you feel. So I was like, well, I didn't just lose my husband. I lost my best friend. I lost my coach. I lost my mentor. I lost my partner.
The guy who coached me, the guy who trained me, everything. I've never lived alone. So mine's got to feel worse than theirs, but I went. And when I got there, I sat in a room with 10 other women and all of them went around the room. Some loved their husband more than others. You can expect that. Others loved them just as much as I did. Most of them didn't have them as a husband.
I mean, they had a husband, but not a coach, a mentor, whatever. But they lost something I didn't. And that was their lifestyle, their life, their way to put their kids through school. A home. They couldn't afford to keep the home over their head. They couldn't afford to pay their light bills, you know, the tuition. And it was an eye-opener for me.
And I realized that, you know, even though we started with nothing, Jared didn't leave us with nothing. And then I would turn that pain and spend the rest of my life helping other people achieve that type of financial freedom where they wouldn't have to worry again.
I love to hear you say that.
I hear you and I'm listening to you like he's saying it to me. And I feel that. And it took me a moment to feel that. It did. I think when you're going through grief, you don't know how you're supposed to feel or react. And, you know, I think it also depends on who you ask. You ask your children, your grandchildren. They're like, if you ever date again, you're dead.
You know, have you ever seen anybody do that? But what you realize is that you do things in your own time. And you take a lot of grace for yourself. And there's a new Lauren that's emerged from this. No question. And I'm doing the best I can. And this is our first big week again that we've had volume in the company like we had when J.R. was still here.
Which I'm really happy about. Because J.R. used to say to me, don't ever count dollars, Lauren. Just keep working hard. And I would do that and he'd say, your work will never pay off till years later. I never understood that till now. Now two years in, it's the first week that we've had that's been ultra successful.
And I'm like, okay, this is what he was talking about, how it took two years of hard work. You're not, this is the best of me now.
Yes. Oh yeah, captain's gone. Our general's gone. Our sergeant's gone. And how is this girl going to fill his shoes? You know how big those shoes are.
And the funny thing is I would go back and I would listen to messages he would leave me. Like, you know that you can do whatever I do, right? Better. And then all my friends and my family would come to me and say, you know, every time we'd ask Darrell, what should we do about a problem? He said, well, what did Lauren say?
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