Life After Loss: A Survivor's Story Ep 124 | Guest: Kim Cantin

 Kim Cantin, a survivor of the 2018 Montecito mudslide, shares her story of loss and resilience on the Evolving Humans podcast.

The mudslide, which destroyed her home and took the lives of her husband and son, led to a three-year search for her son's remains.

Cantin's book, "Where the Yellow Flowers Bloom," details her journey through grief and her determination to find her son. She advises others going through similar experiences to be open and vulnerable to any help they need, and to keep moving forward despite the sadness.

Cantin's book is available on Amazon, and an audible version, featuring her daughter recounting her own experience of being buried alive during the mudslide, was recently released.

Deepest thanks to Pixabay's artists for the music beds for this episode:
Ambient Piano produced by Balance Bay 109400 and Music by William King Ambient Classical Guitar 144998
RESOURCES:

Kim Cantin's Website

Thank you for listening to Evolving Humans!

For consultations or classes, please visit my website: www.JuliaMarie.us

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You can find my book, Signals from My Soul: A Spiritual Memoir of Awakening here:

https://tinyurl.com/Book-Signals-from-My-Soul

Transcript

This transcript was produced using ai and therefore may contain some errors.

Julia Marie (00:00):
Awakenings come in many ways in the early hours of January 9th 20. Welcome to Evolving Humans, 30 foot wave of mud podcast for awakening songs. Crash down on Kim Canton's Home her family inside, settle in Life, and get ready for another conversation.
(00:50):
Before the tragedy, Kim Canton had it all. Both she and her husband had successful careers with Fortune 500 companies. In fact, she met her loving husband, Dave at Johnson and Johnson. Kim and Dave created a loving family with two perfect kids and their beautiful dog, Chester. They moved to Montecito, California in 2010. Kim is here today to share her story of incredible loss, the struggles that followed, and
how she and her daughter Lauren made it through together. Her book is Where the Yellow Flowers Bloom, available on Amazon. Welcome, Kim, to Evolving Humans. I know your story's going to help a lot of people today.
Kim Cantin (01:38):
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Julia Marie (01:41):
How would you describe your general view about life and maybe life after life as a young adult? Prior to 2018?
Kim Cantin (01:51):
Gosh, I was so busy. I really wanted to do well in my career, and I got a lot of satisfaction from my career. So life was about playing in the game, I guess, and just working hard and getting different opportunities from that different learning opportunities and family was a big focus when I got married and had kids, but I really wanted both, right? I got satisfaction from my career and I wanted to be very present and engaged for my family, my husband and my kids. So we were very involved in the community, so I
was kind of on a treadmill. I would say our weekends were packed with scout functions or charity league functions or going to church, whatever. It was packed, and then the work week was very packed, so it was kind of a treadmill was kind of a grind.
Julia Marie (03:02):
Overall though, life was pretty good for you and your family.
Kim Cantin (03:05):
It was a really fulfilling life, right?
Julia Marie (03:08):
Yeah, I read that it was the fires that came through there that basically stripped all the growth of vegetation off the hillsides.
Kim Cantin (03:22):
So at the time, it was California's largest wildfire, and I think it denatured over 300,000 acres of stuff in the mountains, the trees and the fery and everything. And so yeah, it had roared through and we had evacuated, I think three or four times during that because a fire can move tremendously fast. You just really get a sense of it, and so you just got to get at a dodge because when the winds change their direction and the winds are blowing. I think it was, I heard a really startling statistic like it was going a
mile a second. It was flying as it was roaring with the Santa Ana winds.
Julia Marie (04:08):
The rains came, and I read that you and your family, you were packed and ready to evacuate, but because you were technically outside the evacuation zone, you chose to stay and be watchful. Is that correct?
Kim Cantin (04:24):
Right. We were watching the news. We had these apps on our phone, so we were monitoring it. I had a hotel set up actually and said, if it feels dangerous, we're just going to go. We had a car stage, we had sandbags up, and unfortunately I went to bed first. Then my husband did. He wanted to just stay up a little while longer, and we woke at about three in the morning, I think hearing rain on the roof. So we got up, I
had my son sleep in the living room that night because it was going to be a little windy, and there was a tree limb over his bedroom roof that needed to be trimmed, but the arborist wouldn't come for another week. So I said, with the wind tonight to sleep in the living room on the couch just to be safe. And so we were all up, we're all getting our clothes on to get out, and Dave's checking on the house, seeing that water's starting to come into the garage and everything, and we're trying to get out.
(05:17):
But all of a sudden, what we didn't know what was happening is a 30 foot wave crashed down on our house working to obliterate it, and we were all in it. My husband had run outside out back, and he was telling me to come, but my hand got stuck in the door, so it was a glass door, and I could see him on the other side until he washed away. So it was Jack, my daughter, and I, and the dog in the house. As the house was falling apart and the smells were awful, I'd mud up to my waist. I fell and succumb into it. The
book that I wrote tells all the play Byplay details of the slide, and when we were in it, I think the house as it broke was slowing our movement down. I was found two football fields away in a debris pile, severely injured, needing a couple surgeries after, once I was rescued, and I was in the hospital about three weeks, my daughter, 14 at the time, was swept away about one football field distance, and she was buried alive
under 20 feet of mud, a car, I think it was a truck, a transformer part of a roof, and she had a pocket of air in front of her mouth and nose the size of about a volleyball, and it had a tiny hole out to the outside, and she was fully conscious.
(06:36):
And the book, she tells her story about what it was like being buried alive and how she kept herself sane.
Julia Marie (06:44):
That part of the story, I'm sorry, that part of the story is something that kind of touched me because she's 14 years old, and then to read about how she handled her situation, number one, let's just say, it was pretty much miraculous how she survived that anyway, with an open space in front of her face and an air tube to the outside that allowed her to continue to breathe until she could be rescued. Can you talk a little bit about how she coped with that?
Kim Cantin (07:19):
Well, she liked musical theater and was in musical theater, and she liked to sing, and she was going to be the lead role in the play musical. Les Mis named Miserable and Fanta, and so Fan Sings a song I Dreamed A Dream of Days gone by. It's a pretty poignant song. And so she started to sing, and she said that's because everything had changed so suddenly that was the only thing that felt familiar that she could do.
So part of what she did to keep her sanity was to sing in that time, which I'm really grateful she did. So that happened. And then the dog, he was by my feet and I washed him, wash away, have mud cover him and envelop him. And then Jack had been in his room, I think, trying to get his clothes on and his computer, and both my husband and son were killed. They found Dave. They told me in the hospital, I had two surgeries the first night, I think it was the next day or the day after, they told me that they had
found Dave and that he had perished, and that 23 people died that night, two of whom were missing. One was my 17-year-old son Jack, and another was a 2-year-old baby girl. Lydia,
Julia Marie (08:30):
Before we get to the story about the search for Jack, I'm just curious how long you were, where you were until you were found and you had some pretty severe injuries.
Kim Cantin (08:43):
Yeah, yeah, I would guess. Look, it happened at around three 30 in the morning, and I know I was wheeled into the emergency room at eight 30, so between three 30 and probably eight o'clock in the morning I was there. They're trying to get all the mud off me, and it probably had been two hours, and they're prepping me for surgery, and the door opened and I couldn't see because my eyes wouldn't open.
They had so much corneal scratches. But you heard the door, a hospital open and a nurse say, or a director say, do you have a daughter named Lauren? I said, yes. They said, she's just been rescued.
Julia Marie (09:24):
There was another intelligence, or call it what you will. That was in play throughout this whole thing.
Kim Cantin (09:33):
Oh, I believe that there was angels there helping. There was angels there helping us.
Julia Marie (09:37):
You said in the book. Then I took my last breath as I drew the sludge into my lungs instead of air, a stifling, jerking peace came over me, then everything went blank. Now that sounds like a near death experience to me, but you don't have any memory of anything that happened during that.
Kim Cantin (10:00):
I remember being under the mud and just saying, God, if you want me to die, I'll die and just I want to see the white light. If I see the white light, I'm not going to be out of this pain that I was in. And I just kind of surrendered, and I'm a type A person. So for me to just ragdoll and surrender was pretty stunning.
Julia Marie (10:19):
You lost both your husband and your son, Jack, and your husband was found, but it took a lot of time to locate Jack, and the title of your book comes from that search. So can you share the part of this story about the signs, the synchronicities and the spiritual guidance that led to the place where the yellow flowers grew?
Kim Cantin (10:41):
Sure. In the book, it gives all many more of the details, but I'll give a couple of the highlights. So Jack was deemed missing, as was Lydia, and they had done some early work with dogs trying to find the missing victims. But then basically it happened January 9th and by Super Bowl Sunday, a month later, they'd stopped. They thought they'd done everything. But then when I got out of the hospital and realized
they weren't really doing anything, I was told they were still looking every week, not every day. And I found out that that was incorrect. I knew I had to step in and be really part of this search. And so I got a core team of people I didn't know before, a search and rescue handler with his canine search dog, Rick, a general contractor, Ann, who had an excavator. There was piles. It was a 30 square mile area, big piles.
(11:32):
And when some of these houses went down, you heard the search and rescue people say, we didn't check that pile. It was too muddy and wet. It would've been dangerous for the dogs. We didn't check that area. It was too dangerous for the dogs. So I knew for sure there was areas that weren't checked, and we found there are many areas that weren't checked. We found out properties where 18 to 30 truckloads of mud and
debris was hauled off without checking. And so it was just heart wrenching, heart wrenching that two missing children are there, and there was no coordinated effort was beyond appalling to me. The property owners said, I want it off. And you know what? The property owners, they're not front and foremost probably that there's missing kids. It should been the city should have had coordinated effort, and there's a
lot of learnings.
(12:20):
I hope I should probably write a white paper of all the learnings through my three year search of what could have been done. That's not idea even more effective in a future. So we went and I had assembled a core team, and I really just wanted, it was about five or six of us that had the search and rescue. It had a general contractor. She had the excavator. Another woman, Sherry had lost her home in the slide and had
grabbed her boys when she saw coming through him on her bedroom mattress and said, hold on for your life. And they wrote the mattress to the roof of another house that they survived and then an intuitive. And what happened is I came from, my career had been in medical device sales and marketing working with in mostly western medicine with surgeons. So it was a lot of science and clinical proof and that kind of mental rigor.
(13:13):
And I wasn't familiar. I didn't not understand mediums. I did not understand intuitives. I didn't have much exposure to it. I was a busy career woman raising my two kids, and I didn't have time. I didn't read much about the afterlife or anything because I really hadn't had much death in my life. I had a grandparent die and they were elderly. So I really just didn't have that exposure. And what we found during the search,
there are times that really magical things happened that either gave us the boost to keep going. There was a quilt. I made my husband and it had a silhouette that I applicate on it of my husband and my son during their first scuba dive. And my husband liked that quilt so much. When we evacuated for the Thomas fires, he packed that in the trunk of the car as well as our wedding portrait of things that couldn't be replaced
when one day we were feeling pretty dejected.
(14:09):
And Anne starts ding out this 50 pound clump, and in this 50 pound clump, she goes, it's a quilt. Well, it wasn't just any quilt. It was that quilt and that gave us the bolster. The intuitives had clues, right? And different intuitives who didn't talk to one another had the same clue. One was Superman's important to the search. Superman's important, something about a superhero. We found Jack's superman figurine and then
jutting up the sidewall of the creek. We found his Halloween costume, which was a Superman outfit, and that was pretty stunning, right? That different intuitives had the same clue that they wouldn't have known Superman was any part of Jack's life. They didn't talk to one another. And then we found that, and then there was pretty miraculous. It was on a Valentine's Day, 404 days after the tragedy. I'm in a car going to
the airport with my daughter, and one of the other survivors of the mudslide texted me and said, there's an ultrasound picture that was just posted on the Lost and Found site. They had made a lost and found website for things found because our stuff was fileted all over town. It was the ultrasound of my son, Jack as a baby in belly. It was found wedged between the rocks, wedged between the rocks at Butterfly Beach
and the elements for four days. And someone found it on Valentine's Day in perfect condition, and I gotit. So there was just these things you're like, I just can't make this stuff up.
Julia Marie (15:44):
You had a lot of different intuitives give you the same message. And for anybody who's listening, that's a thread you want to follow. If that same signal is coming to a whole lot of different people, even when they can't explain the why behind why they're getting something, that's a clue that you need to pay attention to.
You got this beautiful Valentine's Day present because that's almost what it feels like. It's a Valentine Valentine for mom from the other side, you're searching. But then what happened?
Kim Cantin (16:19):
So we brought in a lot of different modalities in our search. I was open to anything to find my son. So we brought in ground penetrating radar from Canada to search the ground. We had the canine search dogs.
We had historical search dogs, which are different from canine search dogs, historical search dogs looked for older remains. They're looking for. They went to look for Amelia Earhart in the South Pacific recently, and they went to look for Thomas Jefferson's deceased brother at Monticello. They brought those dogs out, came up from the northern California down to help. We also engaged the anthropology, the forensic anthropology folks at the local university. They have tools that can assess, is it human bone, is it not human bone? And these bones had growth plates. It was a growth plate of someone who was the age of Jack and the same size as Jack and all that stuff.
(17:14):
So we didn't find much, but we found enough to give me some closure that I could bury next to his dad and do the ceremonial thing that I realized was pretty important. Our culture has different ceremonies for when someone dies, right? Yes. One for some is a casket, right? And so when I saw that empty casket and we were going to put some of his remains in there, that was a big moment of acceptance and closure for
me that that was really needed. It wasn't okay for my beautiful baby boy to be left in debris with someone's garage paint thinner or a crumpled chain link fence and just left in debris. That wasn't okay for me.
Julia Marie (17:59):
Well, you're his mom and he was your baby boy. So it's good that you were, was my baby
Kim Cantin (18:04):
Boy
Julia Marie (18:05):
Able to have that, as you say, closure. Where did the title of the book come from?
Kim Cantin (18:13):
Oh, that's a great question. It came from my daughter, and she's such a wise soul. When the university team was out doing the soil samples, they realized that the soil was so bad, it had arsenic in it. I mean, it had stuff from people's garages. It had asbestos in it, it had e coli in it. It had everything in it from plumbing. And she said, it's like chemical soup and nothing's going to grow here. Nothing's going to grow in this terrible mud that's all. Got 62 houses mixed into it. And this pile where nothing should grow was
graced with beautiful yellow wild flowers. And so the pile where some of jack's remains were found, flowers grew where there should be none, and it was beautiful. So the students clipped some of the flowers and they put 'em in a vase and brought them to me, and they said, life found a way. I said, no, I think love found a way.
Julia Marie (19:15):
As any medium will tell you, it's the love that never dies. And love always does find a way, but what a beautiful way to mark that place too. So how did you learn to have the patience and more importantly, the persistence, and you didn't get discouraged while you were in the midst of all of this? How did you pull yourself through
Kim Cantin (19:38):
That? Yeah, that was hard. I think that was one of my biggest tests, because I'm a type A person. I'm an Aries, right? Aries like things yesterday, right? Im impulsive, right? And I had, it took three years. Three years. Patients wondering if today when we go out, are we going to find them? Patients? Patients? So how did I get through it when they told me Jack was missing and someone said, Hey, he might've gone to the
ocean. I knew viscerally in a visceral level, he didn't. And I know the university team did a report saying, there's no way he went to the ocean. It just doesn't, the math doesn't work. But it was that. It was just this visceral knowing he's there. And then many of the mediums said that when Jack talked through them, Jack kept saying, I will be found. I will be found.
(20:32):
I don't know when. I don't know where God told me, I will be found. So kind of he was saying, mom, relax. And Jack was not a liar. And so when he said, I will be found, I had some peace with that. And then the nun at our church kept saying, all in God's time and God's time is the right time. And when she first said that, I was ready to scream at her going, no, I need him now. But I think she's right because I think it took three years and three years we're grueling. But I had tried so hard, and through that process I was
healing. And through that process, because Jack kept saying, it's just a shell. Mom, you don't need to find me. It's just a shell. I'm here. I'm here. And I'm like, no way, buddy. Right? But as time went on, I really got it more. It was a rented. We rent a shell when we're here on earth. He just rented a shell. I wanted that shell back. I birthed it, right? Yeah. But I got it more through that journey of the search for me and
looking and knowing that my son knows that I tried my best. I tried my best to find him.
Julia Marie (21:40):
What are some of the ways that your bond with yourself and Lauren that was no doubt deepened through this shared experience that you had? You basically lost half your family, both of you, you lost half your family. And how has that bond grown and flourished over the years?
Kim Cantin (22:09):
Well, she's the only one on this planet that has the shared history with our family and the shared history of the mudslide and the after effects of trying to move forward. She's the only one on this planet. And we do have a richer connection, a deeper connection. I think it's hard for her. She was really, really close to, sheadored her dad and adored her brother. I think we understand each other more as humans, not just me as
the mom and her as the daughter, as human souls. I think we understand each other more and we appreciate each other more. And there's a different kind of relationship as she's maturing. She's a college student now. I think I'm a different type of mom than I would've been with my husband there. We would've had more maybe strict rules on certain things, and I'm just more open to her needs as a human,
and I'm just more, I think, open with that. So it's changed. It's a journey for both of us.
Julia Marie (23:26):
Is it possible to find happiness again after such a devastating loss? Time can heal, but I don't believe that it ever, we never forget. We can only change our relationship to whatever the loss is for each of us. And a lot of people will say, I don't think I'll ever be happy again. So in your opinion, can time help you find happiness again? And maybe more importantly, if there's a gift in there, what would that gift be?
Kim Cantin (24:06):
Yeah. When I tell people, I have a friend of mine who lost a spouse, and when I tell 'em, I'm like, it just gets lighter somehow. It gets lighter over time. Can you find happiness again? Sure. I think you can. And I think interestingly enough, because of the depth of my grief and my loss and how bad it was, it gives you perspective When good things happen, you feel the joy more because you've had the contrast. You
feel the joy more. So my friends are telling me now they're hearing me belly laugh again, which they hadn't heard for a long time. I will always carry this with me, but it's an and conversation, A and d, and there's grief and there's moving forward. What I know for sure is my husband and son looking down from heaven, wouldn't want me in a fetal position crying. They want me to not just live, but to thrive in life. I
have more life ahead of me, and I know I would want it for them. I want them to go on and thrive, and I know they're around me. But yeah, so I think it's, yeah, because of the contrast, I think I recognize and feel joy more than I would've in the past. I certainly appreciate it more. And it gets lighter. Grief can get lighter. It doesn't go away.
Julia Marie (25:36):
We spoke earlier about your life perspective as an adult. How did your beliefs around life and more importantly, perhaps life after life change after the tragedy?
Kim Cantin (25:54):
Well, I'm much more read some books. I've had my own experience through this whole journey. I truly believe that we have a soul and the soul lives on. We have a shell when we're on earth and our loved ones live on their soul, lives on just at a frequency our eyes can't see. It's almost like they graduated and they're in pure joy. Understanding those things have helped me. They've helped me in my day to day. So I think that's how I would frame it. I would say I'm more open-minded spiritually, right? Listening to some of the
mediums and just kind of the understanding that they have from talking to people who've transitioned and what Jack says about what he's doing after he is transitioned and what he thinks what he's supposed to be doing. It's all just, I think it opens me up more as an individual to more expansive thinking.
Julia Marie (26:52):
In what ways have you noticed the presence of your husband and your son?
Kim Cantin (26:56):
Well, in my one kitchen, this one leg keeps s flickering all the time. And one gal was, she goes, that's so Jack messing with the lights something. With the lights with Jack, there's always a couple birds that seem to be either sitting on the wire outside my bedroom window. There's an electrical wire, or sometimes I'm walking and there's two kind of hawk like birds. I see them like that, like hawk, like birds. Yeah. I mean, and early on in the hospital, my phone would just blast on for no apparent reason, just blast on. So I think they're missing with electricity a bit.
Julia Marie (27:34):
You've experienced tremendous tragedy and there has been some time that has passed since 2018. But looking back on that time, from where you are now, what advice would you have for others who have unexpectedly lost their loved ones now that you have a little perspective,
Kim Cantin (28:01):
The open and vulnerable to any help you need? I was filet open. I hadn't, I'd kind of been living kind of the dream and all of a sudden I'm like, oh my gosh, I have nothing. I have no house. I have no identification. I've got nothing. I've got no toilet bowl plunger. I've got no needle and thread. I got nothing. And it's just being open and vulnerable to the help. So nice neighbors. The community made Lauren and I food for a while because I was so injured after my surgeries, and it just made it easier to have a meal cooked. I was so gracious. And being open to the different types of help, grief, counseling,
EMDR for trauma, trauma therapy, which is this tapping thing that's supposed to help with ptsd, somatic touch therapy, just being open to reiki therapy, being open and vulnerable to try different things to help and new people can come into your life interestingly. And some of them I think are angels that just are there because they're supposed to be there during that time. No, I think you just have to be open and
vulnerable to get the help you need. Don't think that I was corporate and never asked for help much. And I think one of the biggest things I learned is one of the bravest things you can do is ask for help. Right? Be vulnerable and ask for help. We're all human. We're all here to help one another.
Julia Marie (29:32):
Yes. That's beautifully said. And I just want to thank you for having the courage to share your story, and I know it's going to help a lot of people. Is there any final message that you'd like to give the listeners?
Kim Cantin (29:49):
It's what was told me when I was in the hospital, right when going through hell. If you're going through a tough time, just keep going, move forward. There's a lot of life ahead of you, and if you keep going, you'll start recognizing some of the growth and some of the silver linings despite the sadness that's still going to coexist for you.
Julia Marie (30:09):
I would like you to please take a moment to tell people where they can find out more about you, your book, and what your current project is all about.
Kim Cantin (30:21):
Sure. So you can find more information@kimcanton.com. It's K-I-M-C-A-N-T-I-N Canton, like a tin can kim canton.com. My book is called Where Yellow Flowers Bloom. A True Story of Hope through Unimaginable Loss, and it's found in Amazon and other bookstores like Barnes and Noble and such. Amazon is easy to find it. And the exciting news is we finished up an audible version, and what's unique
about it is people said, Hey, I really wish you'd read this book as an audible because of the nature of it. And my daughter says, why don't I read my part where I'm buried alive? And so you'll hear Lauren tell her story about what it was like being buried alive for six hours and how she kept her sanity.
Julia Marie (31:10):
I learned a lot from your story today, and I just want to thank you again for sharing.
Kim Cantin (31:18):
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Julia Marie (31:22):
Well, that's our time for today. To all you evolving humans, thank you for continuing to support this podcast with your downloads and shares for when you do together, we can make a difference in this world. If you want to read about my story of Awakening, you can find signals from my soul, a spiritual memoir of awakening on Amazon, and I'll put the link in the show notes. And now a quote for you to ponder as you go about your day:
When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure. Anonymous