Cindy McCain Remembers Pressing Pause amid COVID and Her 'Soul-Searching' About Life After John

Dominic Valente/Getty Images Cindy McCain

In the years since Sen. John McCain's August 2018 death from brain cancer, widow Cindy McCain has grappled with both grief and the challenges she says she faced when she crossed party lines to endorse Democrat Joe Biden for president in 2020.

In an interview this week on Amy Jo Martin's Why Not Now? podcast, Cindy, 67, said many of her most recent hardships were made easier by gaining the confidence to step out of her "comfort zone."

"If you're not going to stand up for what's right right now, then when are you going to do it?" Cindy said, referencing her endorsement of Biden, who recently announced he would nominate her to be the U.S. representative to the United Nations' agencies for food and agriculture with the title of ambassador.

"It was a huge leap for me and it was something way out of my comfort zone ... I knew someone had to say something," she told Martin.

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Also a stretch for her, emotionally, was confronting the loss of her husband head-on by writing a book about her life with the late politician in her memoir, Stronger, released in April.

Writing the book, Cindy told Martin, allowed her the time "to really grieve for my husband."

"As soon as we finished the funeral, a week or two later, I went straight back to work ... I hadn't really sat down or gone on an inward search of me and the change in my life," Cindy said.

While spending time alone at the couple's Arizona ranch, she decided to put pen to paper.

"It was very cathartic to me and something that I look back on now that I think was necessary to go through that," she said.

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Cindy elaborated on her special bond with John in the memoir, writing, that he "had occupied such a huge space in my life that I would never stop missing him. All I could do was learn to live with the heartbreak of loss and take comfort that as I suffered through fewer impossibly bad days, I could make the rest of the time richer and more meaningful."

Speaking on Martin's podcast, Cindy talked about pressing pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The entire process was somewhat assuaged, she added, by the fact that she had been able to have many important heart-to-hearts with her husband prior to his death.

"We all pressed pause — we had to stay home, we had to find new ways to entertain ourselves and keep ourselves busy," she said. "John and I at least had time during the period that he was suffering from this to really talk about our life, our marriage, our children — all the things that you sometimes leave unsaid or don't say enough."

Cindy continued: "What I didn't have time to do, because I felt like John would want time to get back to work ... so I went back to work. But with COVID, that had to come to a screeching halt. And that was when I really spent a good amount of time soul-searching and really grieving him. And that's a very important part of the process, and this book came out of it."

As she told PEOPLE earlier this year: "It seemed the perfect time to not only be able to reflect, but also to be able to understand myself and where I'm going."