The Silent Why: finding hope in grief and loss

Loss 40/101: Loss of dreams: Sheridan Voysey

January 10, 2023 Claire Sandys, Chris Sandys, Sheridan Voysey Episode 62
The Silent Why: finding hope in grief and loss
Loss 40/101: Loss of dreams: Sheridan Voysey
Show Notes Transcript

#062. Ever felt the pain of a broken dream? Those great expectations which turned into even greater disappointment? Hopefully this episode will restore some hope that new beginnings can be found, whatever the dream you lost. 

This is The Silent Why, a podcast on a mission to open up conversations around loss and grief and to see if hope can be found in 101 different types of permanent loss.

Loss #40 of 101 - Loss of dreams

Meet Sheridan Voysey, a writer, speaker and broadcaster who moved from Australia to England just over a decade ago, pursuing a new beginning with his wife, Merryn, after finally accepting their dream of having children was not to be. 

Their decision to move across the world and start again was to be the making of Merryn and her career, but for Sheridan it also meant the crushing end of a dream career he'd been cultivating and pursuing for many years. 

In 1995, Sheridan conceived the idea of the Open House show, a talk radio show that interviewed guests from around the world on issues of life and faith. It was a further 10 years of work before that dream became a reality and even longer before Sheridan got to host it. And it was this dream career and blossoming reputation that he had to give up to start again on a new continent where he was unknown.

Sheridan speaks openly and honestly about his experience of childlessness, identity shifts he had to come to terms with, grieving broken dreams, facing new beginnings (even when they involve sad endings), and the unexpected blessings that he's unearthed along the way.

For more about Sheridan visit: https://sheridanvoysey.com

For his books and projects:
Resurrection Year: Turning Broken Dreams Into New Beginnings - https://sheridanvoysey.com/resurrectionyear/
The Making of Us: Who We Can Become When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned -  https://sheridanvoysey.com/themakingofus
The Creed: https://sheridanvoysey.com/thecreed
Friendship Lab (new project in development): http://www.friendshiplab.org

Merryn's acceptance speech: https://sheridanvoysey.com/an-invitation-to-buckingham-palace

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Thank you for listening.

Sheridan:

I'm Sheridan Voysey, I'm here to talk about the loss of dreams. And for us that was the loss of the dream of having a family, and in for me, later on, the loss of a radio show. I got one, I didn't get the other, ended up losing both.

Claire :

Welcome to The Silent Why podcast and our first loss episode of 2023. We're a podcast on a mission to find stories of hope through all kinds of permanent loss. I'm Claire Sandys.

Chris:

And I'm Chris Sands, and we've reached another milestone, this is loss 40 in our search to explore 101.

Claire :

And we have the perfect guest to kick off a new year, especially at a time when many of us will be thinking about dreams, achievements and goals. This conversation is with someone we've met personally a couple of times, and happened to be having dinner with this weekend by pure coincidence, because we recorded this chat a few months ago.

Chris:

Sheridan lives in the beautiful neighbouring county of Oxfordshire, here in England, where he and his wife Merryn settled after immigrating from Australia 11 years ago. We first met them in 2016, at a conference for couples facing infertility where Sheridan was one of the keynote speakers and their story of trying everything to start a family before finally coming to terms with life continuing as a 'two' inspired and encouraged us in our infertility.

Claire :

It was the first time we'd really heard from a couple who had decided to accept life as a 'two' and spoke publicly about that decision and choosing to build new dreams is not often you hear that mentioned as an option. When you're struggling to have children, it's more kind of viewed as a sort of a failure or a last resort.

Chris:

In Episode 3 and on the website where we talk about infertility and childless experiences, you might remember that we refer to someone at a conference in 2017, asking us'if we drawn a line in the sand of not having children? Because it's hard to move forward without that moment'. Well, the person who asked that question was - surprise surprise - Sheridan. And a year later, we drew a physical line in the sand on a quiet beach in Lanzarote, and crossed over it accepting we were moving forward as a two.

Claire :

But for Sheridan, not having children after trying everything, was the first of a few major losses. When they both decided to begin a new life in a new country, there were some big things they had to leave behind. And one of those with a long awaited dream career and radio show that Sheridan hosted.

Sheridan:

I recognise your voice! Turned out this family were from Australia, they were here on holiday and one of them recognised my voice from the show. And it was a lovely thing. And immediately it just hit me -'I don't have that anymore. I'm nobody. That's gone'. Because the opportunities of having a show like that, where can we launch it? Who can we launch it with? That is so far away from the even the British context, it's gone.

Claire :

This huge choice to relocate continents ended a dream that he'd held for over 10 years before finally making it a reality.

Sheridan:

There were, I would say, around about five years of me feeling the loss of that maybe even every day. Feeling the loss of identity, influence(some of these were healthy, some of these weren't, by the way), feeling the loss of some sense of defined role, feeling that I wouldn't have that again. And I would now, looking back, help people to understand that actually even that career has to be kind of acknowledged as a grief, to allow yourself to go through that and all the questions that it raises.

Chris:

Sheridan is a writer, a speaker, and broadcaster on faith and spirituality and his journey of loss, grief and resurrection has led him to truths and lessons is passionate about sharing with others.

Sheridan:

The mountain itself actually has gold in it. And what you are going through now has incredible life lessons within it. And incredible things that once processed, and once tested out, and once offered as a gift to other people can actually be great gifts for helping people move on themselves. There is something in which what you're going through now is so profoundly deep it can't be learned through books, it can only be learned from you going through this experience and mining it for all it's worth.

Chris:

He has gone on to write seven books, regularly appearing as a presenter of Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2 and contributes to media across the UK, US, Europe and Australia.

Claire :

And he begins this conversation by describing what the average week looks like for him now.

Sheridan:

Well, I'm Sheridan Voysey and I have had 25 years of three things; writing, speaking, broadcasting, so quite a few years in radio, and then writing books, and then speaking out of those books. And average week is just so interesting for me because it's so very, very different. For the last 10 or 11 years my work has predominantly taken place right here in this office. It's a home office. So I'm surrounded by all these books, which are incredibly distracting because there are so many books that I haven't read and I want to read them. But I'm surrounded by ideas. And I do some spots for BBC Radio 2 right from this office. I write books right from this office. And indeed, during the pandemic, I was speaking at conferences right from this office. So any week can be very different. It could be writing articles, it could be working on a big project. It could be having wonderful conversations like this. It's very, very different these days.

Chris:

Well, we're delighted to speak to you about dreams, because we've met you before, we've heard you speak a couple times before. And what you say just speaks so well into the loss of dreams and a couple of different areas, certainly main areas that we want to focus on. But we'll see where the conversation goes. One of those dreams for you in particular, in terms of the work context started way back when you were living in Australia, in terms of media work. So let's talk a bit about that for a few moments. What what did that look like? How did it start? And what was that dream?

Sheridan:

Yeah, I had a really interesting entrance into radio, I, unlike other people, I did not have any great dream to go into radio. In fact, my late teenage years were spent in nightclubs, and behind a couple of decks, mixing records, I thought radio was boring. And then for me, the big turning point in my life was coming to faith, having a Christian experience of faith, and then kind of asking God, what do you want to do with my life? Two years of asking, by the way, I didn't get any answer until finally I had this fairly dramatic moment of direction, to go into radio of all things. And I started off at a tiny little station in Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. It didn't even have a full time licence. It was renting a couple of hours in the morning, and a couple of hours in the afternoon from another very small community radio station. I reckon we probably had 12 listeners at our peak in the afternoon. And so I started doing the afternoon show on a Thursday afternoon, and just learning the ropes and making a lot of mistakes. And I would have to say that probably most Thursday afternoons, I would walk out of that studio saying 'Never again.'

Chris:

Why?

Sheridan:

Because I was so so bad. And I knew it. And you know what, you know what kept me going the next week, a little lady in our church named Judy Barry, and she listened every Thursday afternoon. And she would come up to me on a Sunday morning, and she would say, 'oh, Sheridan, I listened to you on Thursday, you've got such a future, you keep on going.' And that's what kept me going, then around about probably around 1995, I was sitting by the Brisbane River. And I just had this dream of a particular kind of radio programme that would explore life, faith and culture that would kind of engage Australia's spiritual but not religious crowd, as we often hear that phrase. And we would have live music, we would have talk back it would be a syndicated show across a variety of different cities, that would be a big conversation. It took 10 years to come to fruition, but it did come to fruition in a programme called Open House, which really, there hasn't been anything really quite like it ever since. I was able to host it for a few years, then it kept on going with a couple of other hosts, I think it lasted probably all up maybe 11 or 12 years. And it was a thoroughly interesting show, about half of their audience had Christian faith, half of them didn't, we had Muslims calling in, Scientologist calling in, secular people of all kinds calling in - all having a big conversation about life, faith and culture. It was a big dream and I got to see it fulfilled.

Chris:

Brilliant. But I want to acknowledge the 12 years. Yeah, 12 years is a long time to spend. The 10 years for that dream to come to fruition, the two years before that getting into radio, I mean, can you summarise what 12 years of wondering and waiting, and anticipating felt like or looked like?

Sheridan:

Yeah, and keep in mind, I never got to host the show for that amount of time, I only got to host it for five years, it was such a big dream, there was almost a sense in What was happening then in your personal life? Had you faced which it couldn't come true. Because at that stage, there was no syndicated show in Christian radio in Australia. And I should actually just mention about Christian radio in Australia, it's very different to what you'll hear in the United Kingdom, or indeed, for anybody listening in the United States incredibly different. If you can imagine, like a local top 40 station, but every third song turns out to be a Christian song and it's bright, and it's full of life and it kind of gets you thinking about bigger things. And in between that you've got little 60 second spots where somebody pops up and starts talking about something in a really relevant and interesting way. And then you've got these kind of engaging announcers that are there to kind of befriend you. And they'll drop in something about God every now and then but it's not preachy. That's the kind of thing that has been pioneered in Australia, to the point where in some capital cities that actually rates alongside commercial counterparts. So by the time I came along, that model had already kind of been developed. And then by the time we actually finally started the Open House show, it had been around for some time, and I was able to just, you know, kind of scoop up all that audience that somebody other people before me had had developed. So it was almost too big, even though we had some very established successful radio stations of that nature in capital city cities around Australia, nobody had done a syndicated show before that was live. And there was a sense in which it was going to be too religious for the secular folks and to secular for the religious folks, there was really going to be a quite a few barriers behind it, that I guess it would have to kind of face and jump over. But it wouldn't leave me. And so this is a sense in which I think I've come to realise sometimes when it's just a good idea from your own mind and heart, or maybe whether it's actually an idea that's been dropped into your soul by God, is that it doesn't leave you, it hangs around, and it can be tested, and you just can't seem to outrun it. And that's what it felt like for me. But yeah, there were some years where, you know, I was just working in music, radio, kind of learning how to do a really good 60 second break between songs, and then I moved to Perth and Western Australia, one of the kind of major stations that had pioneered this format. And then I introduced some talk elements into that morning programme and we did more and more interviews got to host some really interesting people, including people like Olivia Newton John, who, you know, just recently, we've lost. Those kinds of conversations, but it wouldn't leave m and yet there wasn't yet a place for it to happen. And finally, though, conversations came about for that to happen and there was other people who were fired up with the same kind of vision and ended up moving to Sydney, and we launched it between Sydney and Melbourne stations, and then it grew to about 10 other cities after that. So it was it's a funny, it's a good question, Chris. It's one of those things where I almost, I wasn't expecting it to come true, but I couldn't get away from it. Well, here's the interesting thing is that while I certainly much loss in that area? Because it's easier to wait for those hadn't experienced any great loss in terms of I hadn't lost dreams, if everything's going great on the other side of life. any parents, or any siblings, or even anybody close to me, during What was what was that looking like? that same 10 years that it was taking for the Open House dream to come about, pretty much overlapping that 10 years was another 10 year dream of us having a family. And that was the hard one, because that no matter what we tried, it was almost the opposite. No matter what we tried, nothing was working at all. And you know, you name it, almost we tried it, you know, via surrogacy or something like that. We tried it. We tried the special diets. We tried the healing prayer numerous times, we tried adaption, we tried IVF, many, many times. And nothing seemed to work at all. And we had this pendulum swing of, over the years thinking 'oh, well, maybe we'll just be a childless couple, and we'll just get on with life like that', and other times, then the maternal paternal drive would kick in, and then we'd be up the other side of the pendulum swing, and'let's go and have this baby let's go and do whatever it takes to have that child'. And that was the dream that wasn't to be fulfilled. Although at one stage, it looked like it was. We, at the end of that 10 years, we had already had that decision, following a big conversation about okay, how long do we keep on going with this. And we had kind of come to the point where you know, what, we have done everything that we feel comfortable doing ethically and, and personally. We've got one embryo left in the fridge, it's going to be transferred next week. And you know, if this works out, wonderful, we've had our 11th our miracle, and if it doesn't, then we're going to move on as a childless couple, we had made that decision, the embryo was transferred. We were by this stage spiritually very low, we didn't have really much faith left. Merryn was not on talking grounds with God by this stage. We were both just exhausted from the journey. And anyway, we then received the phone call that we never expected to receive, from Emily her name was at the IVF clinic, and she said to Merryn, all the hormone levels are exactly where we'd expect them to be right now for a pregnancy. And there was jubilation amongst our family and friends. We were finally pregnant. Everybody erupted in applause. Amazing 11th hour, it's been a miracle. And then on Christmas Eve, we had another call from Emily saying, 'I'm so sorry, but you're not pregnant'. Because all of the IVF drugs had created a gestational sack. But there was no baby in the sack. It was basically a mirage, and even the doctors had been fooled. So with that, yeah, we found ourselves with the first deep loss. And it's very hard

Claire :

With these two losses being so close together and still, I think to put words to that moment - it was such a crushing phone call. overlapping like that, can you pinpoint a time when you realised you're going to lose one or the other? Is there a moment or is it just all so mixed together?

Sheridan:

Yeah, there did come a point when I realised that I was going to lose one over the other, and it happened a few weeks after that phone call. Merryn and I went to ground, and we started licking our wounds. And because, you know, we had sent the email out to all the family and friends, saying,'Look, this is what we've been told'. And we then had to send the follow up email at some stage saying, 'actually, it's not happening'. And there was almost a sense of embarrassment about that, by the way, you know, everybody had gotten excited on our behalf, you know, we had people in tears all around the country. And then we had another conversation, and we were just down the road from where we lived in Sydney by the stage. And Merryn said, 'If this is now our life, if we're moving on as a childless couple, the thought of life continuing as normal me going to work, you're doing your work, just staying here us doing everything as we've always done it, that just fills me with absolute dread'. And I remember putting my arm around her and you know, husband to the rescue, 'what would you like love?' You know, 'what change to our life would you like?' And she said, 'I would like to move overseas. I would like to live and work overseas, I would like to have an adventure'. And that, Claire, is when I realised, 'oh, my goodness, that does not bode well, for what is the fulfilled dream, the radio show, that has taken all this time to get up and running with all the barriers that have faced, and I only get to host it what by that stage, not even five years, and I'm gonna have to let that go'. That was the time.

Chris:

Was there a negotiation in yourself? Or in your marriage? Was there much time spent bartering or trying to think well, maybe we could do this instead? Or do it this way? Or maybe six months abroad? And six months back? What was that like?

Sheridan:

Yeah, really good question. There was, because I knew that if we were going to do that, all the things that I was involved with, would certainly end. And it may well be that they wouldn't come back. I wouldn't be able to just simply pick up a radio job in another country, especially when at that stage, Merryn was looking at us going to Switzerland. Merryn's skill set is as a statistician, and she was moving very much into medical statistics by that stage. And the country that actually has so many of the pharmaceutical companies in it, actually turns out to be Switzerland. I didn't speak Swiss, we would have to learn the language, I'm terrible at learning languages! I don't know if you guys have done much travel overseas. I certainly know you've been to America. But that's slightly different, right? But when you go to India, when you go to Bangladesh, when you go to the Philippines, Indonesia, those kinds of places that I have been in, I can be there for two weeks, and still, I can't remember the word for'thank yout, or 'toilet', or'dinner'. And we were going to Switzerland, really?! Switzerland! And there's no way I was going to be able to then pick up a job in radio in Switzerland, just no way. I also knew that the opportunities with writing would probably at least be interrupted, if not ended, because you know, going into another country and again, how you're going to get published in a country where you're not known, let alone in that case, didn't know the language? Speaking at conferences, that wasn't going to happen, either. So I was looking at 'okay, what am I actually going to do with my life?' So we pursued that. The other part of the answer to that question is the fact that I felt intensely guilty that I was the cause of my wife not getting the one big dream that she had. Because in our case, it was male factor infertility, I've got very little sperm count. What there is, is not kind of very active.

Claire :

Oh, you can join the club!

Sheridan:

Right? Yep, we'll start a special club, Chris, you and me. It's only you, me and maybe two other guys around, but we'll have a good time down the pub one day.

Chris:

Fun times!

Sheridan:

Fun times. And I felt just intensely responsible. The fact that I was the reason why Merryn couldn't have the child that she dreamt of. So there wasn't so much negotiation, as much as this is the one opportunity I can give my wife that she can have a fulfilled dream rather than an unfulfilled dream. Turned out we weren't to go to Switzerland, but it still meant that there was going to be some loss involved.

Claire :

I read the announcement that you put on your website about the Open House show ending. And then I read the comments underneath, and I just... I want to know how you were feeling when you were reading them because it was so much of 'oh may God's blessing follow you', 'hope the fresh start is amazing, 'what an exciting chapter you have ahead', 'I know there's gonna be great things for you, can't wait to hear what it is', and I think'oh, gosh, how did he feel when he was reading that?' Because that could be a real tricky one.

Sheridan:

I felt just deep grief. There are two memories that come to mind. One is the very next day after that final show, that happened on a Sunday night, the very next Monday morning, I met with a publisher, one of the big five publishers, and we were going up in the lift actually to go to his office to have this conversation. And as we were talking, somebody in the lift recognised my voice and I said, 'You're Sheridan Voysey, aren't you with the Open House group programme?' And I remember saying 'yes!' and then going,'Ah, no, no longer'. And then we got up into his office, we started talking about publishing, and he said, 'Ah so you've ended with a show? Huh.' Already, there were question marks and about my publishing career, already he was going,'you've got no show, okay, well, that means you're not gonna have an audience, well that means that maybe there won't be somebody book sales'. And so already, the very next day, there was already the signs that things are going to be looking very, very difficult to me, that that doors may will close. Another experience happened when we finally moved to the UK, for Merryn to take up a job that did open up for her in a different country, it wasn't Switzerland, it was going to be the UK. And we were walking just not far away from where we are now in Oxford. And we were passing, there's kind of these ruins from this really old monastery, I think it's eighth or ninth century monastery. And we didn't know what it was at that stage and we were walking around kind of wondering what it was. And then there was this other family walking down the hill, and they just kind of been to this place and went, 'Oh, do you happen to know what this is?' 'Oh, yeah, there's a sign around the corner. That says what it is, it's a monastery. I recognise your voice!' Turned out this family of work from Australia and they were here on holiday. And one of them recognised and the others recognise my voice from the show. And it was a lovely thing. And immediately, it just hit me. I don't have that anymore. I'm nobody. That's gone. Because the opportunities of having a show like that, where could we launch it? Who could we launch it with? That is so far away from the even the British context. It's gone.

Claire :

That's so difficult. I can imagine, I mean, I don't know, was it raining when you arrived in this country? I'd imagine it was quite a dark time just arriving!

Sheridan:

It was! [laughs] It was. I remember, we got onto the coach, the X90 from London Heathrow made our way to Oxford, and it was pouring with rain. We ended up speaking actually to a guy who was sitting behind us, he was a pilot. And we said,'well, I guess we're in for this the whole time'. He said, 'Don't you believe that we can have some lovely days. But today's not that day.'

Claire :

Yeah, he says that every day of the year! [laughs]

Sheridan:

That's right [laughs].

Chris:

There must have been so much again, these two major losses, the very private one with the infertility and the more public one, with the radio show as well. Were you able to identify sort of the deep impact or the knock-on effect in terms of health, outlook, mood, whatever it may be, were you able to identify 'oh this is because of that', or 'this is because I'm grieving the infertility' or 'this is affecting our marriage, because...' they must have been interwoven in that sense.

Sheridan:

Yeah, certainly, now that I look back, I realised that there were two journeys of grief to be had, the first one was over the loss of a child, or loss of parenthood would probably be a better way to put it - the fact that I couldn't become a dad, there had to be a separate grief journey for that. Now, we realise that we had kind of done much of that grief journey leading up to that final embryo, because we had had 10 years of expectation, followed by disappointment, every single month. Is this the month the embryo is going to take? Is this the month that the miracle is going to have happened and we find out that we're pregnant? Is this the month that the supplements I'm taking, have somehow worked? Is this the month? Expectation then 10 years of every month having that disappointment afterwards, we had a lot of grief by then. So by the time we got that phone call on Christmas Eve, it was a closing of that journey. And yes, we had two weeks where we just kind of collapsed and we we felt the fact that 'Okay, now this is it. We're moving on from this. And we're not going to have this thing that everybody else gets', and having to face then the questions that come from that, 'okay, if we're not going to have children, are we going to be lonely in our 40s?(because we're in our late 30s at the time this happened), are we going to be lonely in our 40s with everybody else having kids and us not? Are we going to be completely out of touch with everybody at church and in society, everybody else talking about kids and things? who's going to look after us when we're old? All of those kinds of questions. But we actually did make it through fairly quickly because we had done so much grief beforehand, and we'd had a definite end to our journey. Then I realised afterwards, I had to then grieve the Open House programme. And that's the bit that I hadn't looked at. That's a bit of that hadn't acknowledged. You kind of recognise you're going to you know, grieve this other loss but not so much the loss of a career, loss of a radio programme you'd dreamt off. That was a different, that took longer. That took years. There were I would say around about five years of me feeling the loss of that, maybe even every day, feeling the loss of identity, feeling the loss of influence, some of these were healthy, some of these weren't, by the way, feeling the loss of some sense of defined role, feeling that I wouldn't have that again. And I would now, looking back, help people to understand that actually, even that career has to be kind of acknowledged as a grief and to allow yourself to go through that and all the questions that

Claire :

We found with our childlessness, and trying to it raises. grieve that, it's incredibly tricky, because you're trying to grieve something that you never had, which is just so confusing. But you've sort of almost, well you have, grieved something you've never had, and you've grieved something that you did actually have, and you tasted, what are the differences in grieving those two sort of different types of griefs?

Sheridan:

Yeah, well, what I've now come to know is that there is no proper grieving without a death. You can't grieve something unless there is actually a death. And as you so well know and you have felt and you have lived and you have experienced is that within fertility, there is no formal death. And so you do have to actually bring some sort of formal death to it. And you have to define a time where you say,'Okay, now no longer, no further, we're going to draw this to an end, and we're going to move on into a new phase of life without kids'. If you've come to a point where you've tried everything, and it's now time to move on because you're just living in that state of limbo all the time, it's really important. I've spoken to so many couples who, some years afterwards, they're saying, 'oh, we just can't seem to move on from this'. And I say, did you ever do something formal, something concrete, something very specific and practical, that formally, with a date on it, brought that journey of infertility to an end? And generally, that's where the problem has happened. And so what's happened is that in the back of our minds, even in our deep subconscious, there is almost that possibility it could still happen today, could still happen tomorrow, at least until menopause hits or something. That is what keeps I think many of us then just kind of just trundling along and not being able to move on. So sometimes it can be a case of, as some people will, will very much know very much recognise - drawing a literal, you know, line in the ground and kind of stepping over it. Sometimes it's writing a letter, and actually posting that off and posting it even back to yourself and saying,'This is a marker, that now we have entered a new point'. Can be very helpful to do it with other people, so again, there can be other people around you who can say, we were there with you on that moment, that night, when you made that commitment to each other, to God, and to us that you're now moving in a new direction. Without those things, it can just be so hard to move on.

Claire :

Throughout that whole journey then, the beginning of the dream right through to that sort of drawing that line. Is there a stage do you think that sort of hurt the most, on either side of the losses?

Sheridan:

Stage that hurt the most? [pause] When we were going through infertility, and particularly, I'd say that second lot of five years, I would have been happy by the way to have ended the journey five years earlier, I kept on going for Merryn's sake. She wanted to keep on going. And so again, I felt responsible that I actually needed to keep on going with this. That's part of marriage, isn't it? That's part of the compromise that you make. There are some things that she said she never probably particularly wanted to move to Western Australia for me to take that radio job. But she did it. And that's what you do in marriage, you compromise. That second lot of five years were very difficult. There were so many questions and the questions seem to pile on top of each other. The first five years had some big ethical questions, which in the end, I couldn't quite completely answer. Questions about IVF - Is any life lost in the process of IVF? What about freezing eggs? What about the fact that only 70% of them survive the thawing process afterwards? Am I ethically responsible for the loss of that potential 30% of life? All those kinds of questions. Those are very big. Some people come to certain answers others to others, I wrestled with that and I found that very difficult. And it was very hard to find people at the time who could help me to work out some of those answers. The second lot of five years. I was really, really punishing myself for that. There were big questions for me, around my faith, Sheridan, if you were more faithful, if you were more filled with the power and love and spirit of God, maybe you wouldn't have this problem. Maybe you would have your miracle by now. Merryn says that when it comes to our faith, you know, she kind of shook her hands at God and said, you know,'why aren't you coming through?' Whereas I just thought, 'Well, God's way too holy and big and perfect to be giving us a bad thing. And this is must be my fault'. And so I actually turned it internally. I think that was the hardest bit. That was that was that was really difficult to actually beat yourself up like that, on top of the fact that you're already wrestling with a very big problem anyway, and then going and beating yourself up for it. We live in a fallen world, we don't live in a world as it's supposed to be, and to go and put all of that on myself, yeah, certainly wasn't helpful.

Chris:

I mean, much of what you say speaks into identity, I think knowing something of your experience in terms of working in radio, you know, a lot of it is about performance, is about bringing the sort of the best version of yourself to the table. Did you feel that conflict, much of the time, that you are you're performing, you're being the best Sheridan you can be for the listener, for the audience, for the team that you're working with, and then going home, shutting the door and just feeling like, 'what am I here for?' What was that conflict like?

Sheridan:

Yeah, I remember that, we would be having conversations, Merryn and I, you know, on a Sunday afternoon, and then you know, within an hour, I'd have to jump into the car and drive out to go and do this radio show. And we might have been dealing with some really big questions, or really big discussions, or maybe some big disagreements, actually, we were not on the same page a lot of the time. And suddenly, then I had to go and do the show. And there is some degree of, you know, being open and honest and vulnerable with your audience, there is a time for that. But also, there is a big time where you, you don't throw onto your audience, your own personal stuff, that can be very selfish. So there's a professional distance that needs to be had there. But it could be very difficult. You had to really switch off and switch over.'Okay, now I'm going to be radio host, and then when I get home, I've got to go and face everything that I'm facing'. So yeah, it can be very difficult.

Chris:

So two years of time spent getting into radio 10 years dreaming about the Open House programme, five years of that being a success before then having to pack it in and move to England. So you both arrived in England, Merryn with a an adventure beginning, it's pouring down with rain, I'm assuming you're feeling pretty shattered and pretty confused. You sometimes hear the phrase'dare to dream', when did you start allowing yourself to consider new dreams?

Sheridan:

Yeah. I remember when we first came to Oxford, because Merryn had gotten this offer at Oxford University, and how could you turn down an offer, you know, the one of the biggest, greatest, perhaps the greatest university in the world? And it has only led to her being in a place of great flourishing, she has gone on from strength to strength to strength, we made the right decision to leave Australia and come to the UK. But boy, it took a little while for me to get used to that. We didn't have any accommodation at the time, we had some holiday accommodation just while we then found ourselves a rental. And I sat down at this very small dining room table, held about you know, three chairs that was that small, pulled out my laptop and I did start to kind of work out 'okay, Sheridan. Now, what are you going to do? And I went back to first principles. Okay, what do you know that your gifts and talents are? What do you know, that you really longed to do and have a passion to do?' And I wrote all those things down. The result of that was ultimately something that looks very similar to what I've been doing in Australia. And so I thought, 'Okay, well, maybe I'm just to continue to pursue that, to kind of be somebody who brings Christian ideas into the mainstream world as much as I can'. That was part of the answer. The big revelation came after speaking to a guy named Adrian Plass. He's a British author, very famous for a book some years ago called 'The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4', which was a ripoff of the Sue Townsend book, The sacred diary of... ah, who was it?

Chris:

Adrian Mole!

Sheridan:

That's it. That's it.Yeah. Adrian has gone on to write many, many books that have done incredibly well and spoken to the hearts of many people. I've gotten to know him over the years through several interviews, and then he and his wife Bridget, invited Merryn and I up to their home in North Yorkshire to spend a weekend. And over that weekend, our whole story of that 10 years came out. And one night, Adrian and I were sitting in the lounge room having this conversation about my by then, you know, failed writing career, because by then I had knocked on some British publishers doors, and they had given me the answer I was expecting; 'Who are you Sheridan? Nobody in the UK knows who you are. Nobody's gonna buy a book from somebody they don't know.' In fact, one basically said 'Come back and talk to us when you're famous'. It's like okay, well, I'll try and work it out by next Thursday.

Chris:

Google 'Buy fans'!

Sheridan:

'How to be famous!' Here we are talking about my failed writing career and and out of the blue he says, 'Have you thought about writing your story into a book?' And you know, I actually said to him,'Adrian, what story is that?' it was so far off my radar. And Adrian said, 'everything you've told us this weekend, about having that conversation to start a family, about all the things that you went through during those 10 years, about that last embryo, about that phone call on Christmas Eve, all of that'. And I said, 'What do you mean like a memoir?' And he said, 'Yes'. And I said,'noooo'. Oh, no. For a start,'Adrian, I don't want to be the infertility guy'. And he said,'You know what your story is beyond infertility, your story is about broken dreams and starting again. And actually, that story, much beyond the details of your experience, is what will resonate with people. That's what I know, many people who need to hear about how do you start again, after a broken dream?' I really didn't think that Merryn was going to be up for going public about such a personal experience and story. But she went away, she prayed about it separately, she came back and she said, 'I think you're supposed to do this'. The long and the short of that was a book called Resurrection Year, which is all about us coming to the UK and starting our lives again. I was writing it in real time. Towards the end of the book, I did not know how the book was going to end because I was quite literally still writing it at the end of that first year. How was the resurrection year going to end for us? How were we going to come alive? The Merryn part of the story turned out to be answered fairly quickly coming to Oxford University turned out to be a great, great move. She left the wilderness of infertility and kind of came to the promised land of a new beginning. For me, it was very different because things weren't working out. But then just as the end as I was writing that book, after it being turned down by two British publishers, I thought 'you know what, I've got that email to that American publisher. You know what, I have got nothing to lose sending it off to him'. This is the biggest Christian publisher in the world, one of the top five publishers now, they've amalgamated into HarperCollins, one of the biggest publishers, secular publishers in the world. I've got nothing to lose. I sent it off to him. Took a couple of weeks to get a reply. And he said, 'Hi, Sheridan. I've read your proposal. And I've read your first couple of chapters'. And in my mind, I was thinking,' Yeah, I know what you're gonna say next - nobody knows who I am in America! I know! It's bad enough here in the UK. I know I got even less of a profile in America. I know you don't want the book'. 'Your writing is really, really good and very, very scintillating. And I found the the chapters compelling. We would be privileged to publish this book.'

Claire :

Wow, that must have been a moment! Where were you when you got that?

Sheridan:

I was in our rented accommodation on Abington Road in Oxford. And I remember just being stunned, because it was much more than just a publishing contract. It was actually the beginning of the real answer to that question of what do I do now? Resurrection Year was so different to what I had done before. And while I continued to do what I was doing back in Australia in different ways, I now do stuff on Radio 2 doing the Pause for Thought spot on there like I pop up on, you know, various TV programmes and radio programmes, being that kind of committed Christian trying to then bring Christian ideas into the public space. Still happens, but completely different to what it was to the Open House programme. And writing a in depth personal memoir about loss and unanswered prayer was never on my career plans. And yet the result of that book, even from the first weeks that it was released, was just the sheer amount of people that were helped far beyond infertile couples. People who were single, people had lost careers, people had lost family members who felt that they could start again after their own broken dreams. It was the big answer. And the very surprising answer, the one that I couldn't work out by, you know, sitting at that dining room table working out what my you know, gifts and talents and passions were, it was something it was such an L-turn that I can only put it down to God's direction.

Claire :

You mentioned word surprising there, is that, do you think one of the most surprising things about your journey if you look back, is that one of the things that surprised you the most actually, you ended up writing a memoir instead of having a radio show?

Sheridan:

Very much so, yep. I never would have chosen to do it. I never had a plan to do it. It turned out to be the best thing possible to do. So I think maybe the lesson is, what you're going through now has profound gold in them hills. It may feel like it's horrible mountain and you're you're pushing almost that Sisyphean experience of pushing the big boulder up the mountain that just keeps on rolling back at you. The mountain itself actually has gold in it. And what you're going through now has incredible life lessons within it and incredible things that once processed and once tested out, and once offered as a gift to other people can actually be great gifts for helping people move on themselves. There is something in which what you're going through now is so profoundly deep, it can't be learned through books. It can only be learned from you're going through this experience and mining it for all it's worth, to then learn yourself actually how to move forward through it, and then in the right time in the right context, in the right platform, being able to offer those lessons to other people.

Chris:

I've got a question, which might sound like quite a crude question, but it's one that I sort of often think myself, so almost, I'd be interested to hear your answer to help me. I think when you have a faith, like you've talked about, and when you've suffered and gone through so much loss over such a long period of time, it feels like the more you have lost, the more you're owed. And sometimes you might measure, you know, the blessing, let's say after the storm, you know, the rainbow after the storm, whatever metaphor you want to use. Do you feel like you have, since coming to the UK, since sort of getting into the publishing the writing, do you feel somewhat like you've you've received a blessing that you'd have hoped for or wanted? And is that even like a too dangerous a question to ask, because we should never expect reward, if we've been through trial?

Sheridan:

Certainly not too dangerous, a question to ask because you'll be asking it for so many other people. I think there is a problem in mathematizing this, and to kind of put a quantity and a value on this loss, and then say, 'well, then I really should, to make up from that for that big debt, I should then have this great blessing that counteracts the loss', almost this kind of financial balancing sheet, I don't think we can do it. I think sometimes those losses are just so great, that they're not really down to being measured. And how do you measure it for a start? They probably have got way more dimensions and length and breadth, they've got different shapes. And so whatever blessing you have afterwards, may well not even match the length and breadth will have a completely different shape. And so it'll never actually be able to fit or replace it, or be kind of, in any way some sort of payment for that debt. What is probably a more helpful way of doing it is, you know, is to be able to draw a line and kind of bring that past grief, as much as you can, some people can't, those people who are going through chronic illnesses or something like that, but for those of us who have something that that can kind of be grieved, and then moved on from to the degree that we can, then to say, 'How can I invest the life that I have? The skills, the talents, the breath that I'm breathing into new directions? A passage of Scripture that has become so precious to me, and that has turned out to be very helpful for other people going through these kinds of things, may well be an answer to your question

Ephesians 5:

1-2 - "Follow God's example, as dearly loved children, and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God". In those first two verses, you have the three essential core elements of what our life is to be about, 'to follow God's example', in a context that talks about God's character that we are to grow in character to be people who are forgiving, and encouraging, and people who are people of truth and people of grace, and people of compassion. 'As dearly loved children', I had built my identity on being a writer, speaker and broadcaster, and then I had several years in which that died. And I had to work out well, who else am I what is my essential identity? Now I actually had a number of other identities that I completely ignored, or at least had become the secondary in my Western mindset, which is all about vocation; I'm a husband, that's a very important vocation, in and of itself. I'm a brother, I am a son, I am a friend. That has been the big discovery for me personally, is that really rich identity of being a friend to other people, the amount of life change that happens as a result of friends being there for friends. But more than that, 'follow God's example', as 'dearly loved children', I am God's dearly loved child. And that is an identity I had known in theory, but then going through this experience forced me to go through in a much greater depth. That can never be taken away from me, I could get hit by a car tomorrow, lose all my ability to produce or do anything, but I will never stop being God's child, God's beloved child. And then the third one,'live a life of love'. If I just help somebody on the street today, I am fulfilling my life purpose. If I help somebody by having this conversation with you, I have fulfilled that great life purpose. So rather than measuring the loss and trying to kind of somehow engineer some kind of blessing that makes up for it, perhaps we can move ahead and live out those first few verses to follow God's example, do that alone, and we'll be bringing profound change to other people around us as dearly loved children, and then living a life of love.

Claire :

One of the questions we ask all our guests is what their relationship has been like with the question 'why?' So has that factored in into all that where you're coming up with your identity, and looking through all those different aspects of who you are and what you are? Have you ever grappled with the question 'Why?'?

Sheridan:

Very much so. Yep. On probably a couple of levels. One was simply the 'why is this happening, am I responsible?' But the other side of the question from Merryn in particular, was, 'Why is God allowing this?' And so she had to really wrestle with some of the theology of what we might call as theodicy - 'why does God allow bad things to happen in this world?' And that can take you down all sorts of different paths? Is God not in control? Is God in control of any certain things and not others? How much human freedom is there? So for us, in some cases, that why question, gosh, I was gonna say, for us, I actually wonder whether the why question is inherently religious whether you're a religious person or not. I think whenever you are dealing with a question of why you're dealing with the question of meaning, and whenever you're dealing with meaning, you're on religious territory. Now, you might answer it with a secular approach to things that maybe the why is simply so that I can, you know, bring some sort of purpose out of it myself. Well, that's still, there's still a religiously answered question in terms of origins and purpose in terms of ultimate meaning in this world. And we had to wrestle with the big question'why?' We also had to come to the understanding that sometimes you cannot answer that question fully. And again, those people who are people of faith are listening, the book of Job is a profound meditation on this. Job's big question is 'why?' And when God finally, takes 38 chapters of conversations, when God finally drops himself into the conversation, He never answers the question. All He does is provide His own presence. And that's enough for job. He says, 'I'd heard of you. Now I've seen you. That's enough'. And we had to get to that point where we had to say,'okay, whether we actually have an answer to this or not, we're going to be walking with God through it.'

Claire :

In the book, The Making of Us, there was a bit where you said that someone at a train station said to you, 'what do you do?' And you said, 'Well, I guess I'm a writer, but I used to be in radio.' And then you were questioning, 'why do I always do that?' Why am I telling people what I used to be? Have you stopped doing that now? How do you answer that question?

Sheridan:

It's good, isn't it? Because that was during that time, where I wasn't any of those things. And yet I was. These, I had dedicated, you know, 15 odd years by that stage, into these career paths, they were part of me. And my, my, my heartbeat is to communicate. And so I was still a writer, wanting to play with words and for meaning out of sentences. And I was still a broadcaster, I put all of those years into interviewing skills and all of that. And I was still a speaker, I loved to speak publicly, and you didn't have the platforms for it. So it happened quite a long time. I kept on going well, I used to be, I used to be, I used to be. And then at some stage, I finally had to say, 'Well, my background has been...', and that helped me to answer that. And I probably actually, still still to this day, actually use it to some degree because I still do those same three things. And there's only certain conversations where you can say,'well, actually, really, I'm a child of God'. [laughs] Sometimes that's not the right common conversation to start with certain people and sometimes it can sound almost a bit pretentious to say, 'Well, I'm a husband and a friend first.'

Claire :

It's a good conversation ender! [laughs]

Sheridan:

Isn't it?!

Claire :

They're like - 'I don't know where to go with that.'

Sheridan:

Yeah, that's right.

Chris:

I think the obvious answer to the question that I'm the train platform is, well, how long have you got before your train arrives? I'll vary my answer accordingly.

Sheridan:

Yeah, I'll give you a story. Yeah.

Chris:

It'd be lovely just to say something about the honour that Merryn received earlier this year, tell us a bit about that.

Sheridan:

In many ways, it's the extra chapter of that first book, we've been talking about Resurrection Year, it's almost like if there's to be a 10 year edition, which next year, it will be in 10 years, I can hardly believe it myself. There almost needs to be an additional chapter to talk about this. Merryn ended up moving more and more into vaccines in her statistical work. Ended up working for the Oxford Vaccine Group, which ended up being the group that then worked with AstraZeneca to produce what became the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID 19. That one vaccine and we know that there were three or four major ones, that one vaccine alone has now been estimated to have saved 6 million lives and 10s of 1000s of hospitalizations. She was a statistician on that job. She was the first person in the world to know that it worked. She was the one who came up with the 70% success rate. She was the one who held it in her hand before she then rang her boss who then called Chris Whitty, who called the government, to let us know 'we actually have a working vaccine'. Profound. As a result of that she was named Australian of the Year in the UK, which was a great honour, resulted in us going down to Australia House in London, and being in a room of politicians and celebrities. And so we had Jamie Dornan, the actor, who was just two seats up from me just been in Belfast, the movie, Tom Hooper, who's the director of King's Speech, he was there as well. It was full, it was a room full of faces, where you look around going, 'Oh, my goodness, I know I should know who you are. I know I should. I can't think of your name. But I know I should know who you are'. Alexander Downer, the former foreign minister was in the room, all sorts of people like that. And there was this beautiful time where after Jamie got up because he was given an honorary award, same with Tom and some other people as well. Merryn got up and there was this lovely standing ovation, everybody, just all around, just all spontaneously stood up. And I got my phone out and I'm recording everything, proud husband moment. And she gave this absolutely stellar acceptance speech, which you can find on my website. And it's really, really beautiful. We were never expecting this and look at the role she ended up playing, so it's a fabulous kind of postscript to the story.

Chris:

And then to ask an unfair question to follow that,[laughs] because I think it conscious social media, there was also a reception at Buckingham Palace?

Sheridan:

There was.

Chris:

That Merryn went to, but you had to stay outside the gates.

Sheridan:

That's right [laughs]

Chris:

There was any sort of manly like hurt, 10 years prior thinking, 'here I am again!' Standing on the outside looking in as my wife has the joy.

Sheridan:

Oh, look, you know what? Hopefully, it's a good question. And hopefully the fact that I didn't shows that maybe I've grown a bit. I hope that's the answer. It was funny, because we took the train down to London got into the taxi, for the first time ever, Merryn's always wanted to say,'Buckingham Palace, please'.

Claire :

Yeah. What an honour! That's so cool!

Sheridan:

She got to say that. We went off there, and yes, I got out and all I could do is play photographer, take a few photos. And then she went in through security. I was not allowed in. There was no plus one. She was dining with the Prince while I go off to the park to play with the pigeons. That's basically what happened.

Chris:

Title of your 8th book![laughs]

Sheridan:

That's right -'playing with the pigeons: always left out.' [laughs]

Chris:

Well, final question is what's your Herman?

Sheridan:

My Herman, I guess I could put like this - is that the loss of an identity can be an opportunity for you to find out who you really are. And the adversity you despise, can actually be the very thing that releases your best gifts into the world. In the hands of God, and given enough time, the very thing that you hate can actually be the making of you.

Claire :

Not a lesson that sounds fun, but I'm sure we've all experienced the truth of it. The hard stuff we go through having the key to release our best gifts into the world. And those things we just don't want to have or do, actually becoming what makes us who we are.

Chris:

Thank you, Sheridan for your honesty, passion and your willingness to help others. If you'd like to find out more about him and his books, including Resurrection Year and The Making of Us, as well as a brand new project called The Friendship Lab, visit his website, which is simply www.sheridanvoysey.com. We'll put links to that in the shownotes. We'll also post a link to Merryn's acceptance speech, which you can watch online.

Claire :

And for more about us and our childless story, visit www.thesilentwhy.com or@thesilentwhypod on social media. And we'll put links to all that in the show notes, as well as how you can support the podcast financially to help us cover our costs. We're finishing this episode with The Creed something that Sheridan wrote and used to end his book The Making of Us, as he describes it'a creed of sorts that might guide me forward'. You can visit his website to find out how to get a free printable copy too. And it's being read by the author himself, over to Sheridan Voysey.

Sheridan:

"The hand that spins the galaxies brought me into being. The One who holds the stars has made me his own. I am God’s child. My life is rich, my days are sacred. I am held by a love that’s wider and higher than the farthest edges of this expanding universe. I am a pilgrim in this world, in search of wisdom and wonder. I will take new adventures. And follow God into the unknown. What I achieve is not as important as the person I become. So I will seek to imitate the Nail-Pierced One. I will step in the direction of my strengths and talents. They are Spirit-given tools for my God-given tasks. I will pay attention to my persistent aspirations. They could be the whispers of God. I will serve all I can and walk deeply with a few. I will aim for great things but leave my legacy to God. The path is long and the

terrain at times hard. Still:

I will not wish for another’s life. I will take my place, play my part. Something important will be missed if I don’t. For the hand that spins the galaxies wants me here." Adapted and abridged from 'The

Making of Us:

Who We Can Become When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned'

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