Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Presenting Heavyweight: Etta

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

I'm excited to share an episode from another podcast, Heavyweight, a new addition to the Pushkin slate of shows. Heavyweight, hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, creates space for difficult conversations and resolving long-standing regrets and unanswered questions. Balancing humor and empathy, host Jonathan Goldstein helps his subjects pinpoint the moment things went wrong and joins them on a quest to make them right. This episode features Gregor, whose parents are pushing 90. Gregor wants to move them out of their big Victorian home—but they refuse. So, he's come up with a bold plan to get them out. Find Heavyweight (00:35) wherever you get your podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of the blunders we talk about here on cautionary tales deal with regret and what we can learn from it. And most of us have ruminated over a moment where things went wrong, leaving us to ponder about how we could have made it right. If that resonates with you, there is a podcast I think you'll enjoy. It's a new addition to Pushkin's slate of podcasts. It's called Heavyweight. And it's all about creating space for difficult conversations and resolving long-standing regrets and unanswered questions. It balances humour and empathy.

Host Jonathan Goldstein sits down with people to revisit a defining regret, a lost connection or an unsolved mystery from their lives. And he tries to help them make it right. In this episode, you will hear from Gregor. His parents are pushing 90, and Gregor wants to move them out of their big Victorian home, but they refuse. So he's come up with a bold plan to get them out. It is a beautiful story about learning to let go, and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. If you do, find heavyweight wherever you get podcasts.

New episodes are released on Thursdays. Thanks for listening. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart.

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I'd like to welcome to the show, Jackie Cohen. Bye-bye. Jackie? It's a new season. I'm with a new company, Pushkin Industries. and I thought it might be nice for you to, you know, tell everyone how much the show is meant to you. Can you see the look on my face right now? We're on the telephone.

Can you imagine what kind of look I have on my face right now? Ecstasy. Disgust. Heavyweight is back, Mamala. They thought we were down for the count. Can I hang up now? But what's this? Oh, oh, huh, mm-hmm, with the right and the left.

Heavyweight's back. Pushing it with Pushkin, Mamala. Pushkin Industries. Okay, I got it. I got it. Okay, you go with that. Bye-bye. From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is heavyweight.

Today's episode, Edda. Right after the break. You ready? You're rolling? You got levels? Me, me, ma, mo, moo. Okay, go. This is Gregor. You might know him from such previous episodes as Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends, and today he's coming to me with a problem. I'll take it from the top. Okay, so I have two parents, Milton and Edda. Edda and Milton are both pushing 90, and Gregor's problem is that they refuse to move out of their house.

It's the same three-story Victorian Gregor grew up in. He was 12 when the family first moved in. He still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the moving truck, or moving trucks. You know, normal people move with like a big giant 18-wheeler moving truck. I believe when we moved, we had six moving trucks. One for the family's belongings. The other five?

For the collections. Some people collect homes. Some people collect comic books. Gregor's mother Edda collects collections. She has like maybe 200 egg beaters, antique egg beaters. She has, you know what a bisque nodder is? No. In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the head would wobble back and forth.

Like a bobble-headed doll? Something like that. Anyway, she probably has 2,000 bisque-nodders. Then there are the 19th century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythe's. Edda Erlick is an artist, and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Edda sees beauty in everything,

and in her hands everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter of dried bird poop. My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for like the last 35 years, to a degree where now the living room is like full to the brim with a million pieces of art, and every week she probably makes

five or ten more pieces of art. None of this would be a problem, except that a large cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents. I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother falling down a flight of stairs, or my father.

I mean, there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in a house full of staircases. And so, Gregor wants to move his parents into a smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan. Yeah, that's his plan. But that's not my plan.

This is Eda. The practical thing is we can't be in the house too much longer. I'm 88. Yeah. But to move out of the house isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's my God. What do we do with all this? All this, all the collections, is what's keeping Eda in the house.

And of all or many collections, of all, her milking stools and antique rolling pins. It's her collection of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Edda has thousands, wine bottles, perfume bottles, old decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Edda is a Buddhist, and her bottles are not just bottles, but a series of meditations, because on each of the bottles in fancy fonts and careful calligraphy, Eda places a message in the form of a Zen-like riddle. I turn my noose to titro puce and madly dance upon it.

Isn't that gorgeous? That's very nice. But how's about this one? It's a black bottle with gold calligraphy, and it has the first letter shows somebody blowing a breath. Do you see it? It really does look like a breath, blowing. That's by design?

There you go. There you go. You want me to give that away for nothing? Other inscriptions are, stop schlepping your old being into the future, or we cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few, I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet, Eta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring. or much of anything else. There is a little bit of a paradox, or there's something to kind of be struggling with here. Jonathan, you're very, very sharp.

That is exactly, exactly true. These works, which talk about being stuck with the grasping level, I suffer from that. I could leave tomorrow. This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up right now, you would jump in. I'm ready to go, yeah.

I'll stop you there. He's never taken a taxi in his life, but if I pulled up right now, you'd get it. Uber dober. I don't get attached to furniture and bottles and stuff. I'll just reinforce that point that, well, my father may posit that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything.

He is very much complicit, relentlessly bringing home the raw material through which my mother, you know, turns the art out. When was the last time you brought something, home, Milt. Yesterday. I'm always interested in what she's doing,

and I often find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere to find stuff. Her only requirement is if I find something, it has to have what she calls a charm. As for Milt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by,

is Edda. Milt is a poet, and after over 60 years of marriage, he still writes poems about her, rhapsodizing about her, rhapsodizing about the way she creates art or cooks or the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Edda dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings. I'm stuck, but I am not coming up with a solution that's any better, am I?

Yeah. You know? Except dying. That's not a solution. No, it's not a solution for Greg. he's left holding the whole thing. Of Milton Edda's three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most ready to serve. The child, his parents, hand a to-do list when he comes to visit. I mean, he talks mean, and that's because he has meanness in him.

I'm not saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous, loving person. Yes, he is, yeah. Yeah, don't tell him, I said so. Inaction is a choice. Not doing anything, something's bound to happen sooner or later. And to just sort of watch the secondhand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist. And it just feels like, you know, the Damoclean sword of mortality is coming.

And all we're going to do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off. And so, because Edda can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that will allow Edda to both keep her stuff and still move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her? What if you don't get rid of your possessions and we make a museum of your stuff? Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the 1960s, Edda and Milt bought a true. 200-year-old farmhouse, with no running water or indoor plumbing.

Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the Etta B. Erlick Museum. Convincing one's mother to downsize by way of a feral farmhouse museum, that, by Gregor's own admission, is probably a breeding ground for the haunt of virus, has all the makings of a classic cockamamie scheme. But this is just the beginning. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadband. broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hello, it's Tim Harford. If you're a movie lover, you need to listen to Unspool. Every week, actor and comedian Paul Shear and LA Times film critic Amy Nicholson take on some of the greatest films ever made. They go beyond the surface. Driving into why these movies became classics and sharing behind-the-scenes stories, iconic performances and pop culture impact, all with their hilarious and unfiltered commentary.

Whether you're a hardcore cinephile or just love a good story, unspooled makes every movie feel fresh and fascinating. The podcast covers everything from Hollywood classics such as Casablanca to modern hits such as Interstellar. And thanks to Paul and Amis Banta, every episode. episode is as fun as it is insightful. Check out Unspooled, available wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to listen to Unspool wherever you get your podcasts. For his plan to build a museum to work, Gregor will need his siblings on board. So as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his sister Lexi. Lexi is the level-headed one of the three, and I want to get her read on the plan.

Is it realistic that he'll be able to turn the barn into a museum like that? Perhaps this plan is a bit half-baked. But I figure I might have more luck getting Gregor's brother, Dimitri, on board. Dimitri's never been afraid of a scheme that runs a little pink on the inside. So I give him a call. We haven't spoken since I moved from New York where Dimitri lives, to Minnesota. I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call.

It makes me sad. Your business doesn't bring you to Minnesota, I'm guessing. It does sometimes. I interviewed Prince for a cover story. Everyone warned me to be very careful with Prince. He's very touchy. Dimitri is a personal trainer who's kickboxed his way across Thailand. He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities.

So I went there, waited all day for the interview. And a musician who had a song go platinum six times in Belgium. He was like, hey, you want to jam? And I was like, okay. So I went up actually jamming with Larry Grand and Prince for like 20 minutes. What? That was one sentence. Before Dimitri can launch into his next sentence, I jump in.

So your brother, Gregor. Yeah, I'm familiar with him. He has this plan, which maybe you're also familiar with. When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dimitri offers a laundry list of issues. There's a 99 to 100% chance of getting Lyme disease walking out of your car to the barn because it's high grass, a lot of deer, getting poison ivy.

So there's also like horrible black mold because as you know, the farmhouse burned down when my albino baker friend Theo stayed there and lit a fire and the roof and the whole house burned down. And along with his friend Theo's trouble, there was also his friend Sonam's trouble in that cursed place. My friend who spent 25 years as a Buddhist monk under the dollar lump, I had to use a broom to fight off a very large raccoon

that was in the house and was, like, growling at us. And, like, just horrifying. But for Dmitry, even more daunting than the rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter. Whenever he's trying to clear space in his parents' home, it refills overnight, suggesting Edda's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked

at its psychological root. She needs to learn how to let go. And for this, Dimitri has just the solution. Well, maybe hypnosis. It stopped her from smoking, which is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than collecting things. Edda was a pack-a-day smoker, a habit she hung on to for nearly 30 years. Our friend who was a hypnotist, said, oh, I can hypnotize you. And she went into the session thinking, this isn't going to work.

The whole time the hypnosis was going on, she was like, this isn't working, this isn't working. and then she walked out and never smoked again. He was an interesting person, too. His name was Saul Feltsin. He actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out of his head face and it was like a sort of early commune thing.

Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the 1970s, I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis. Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self-control to stop eating Brontosaurus burgers. It gave the fons, the confidence that jumped snake cancer, canyon on his motorcycle. One of his eyeballs.

As a boy, I always wondered what it would feel like to have my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts. He was very successful as a hypnotist. Wow. Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time, effort, nor those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you. fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems and that museums belong in a museum.

Dmitri and I say our goodbyes. We're slating in on part two. Johnny discusses post-talking to Dmitri. Here we go. I need to tell Gregor that I like Dmitri's idea much better than his, but I need to tread lightly. From Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin, I know how competitive brothers can be.

And unlike the Lord, or Alexander Ray Baldwin, Senior, I don't want to be seen playing favorites. Do you think your, like, hypnotism has a role in this? Well, I hear that, like, your voice went up an octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got excited about hypnotism. Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it could help. Okay, so the two of you should go see a movie together. Going to movies is Gregor and my thing.

Clearly, I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the merits of hypnotism. This whole barn thing as the symptom, but through hypnosis... Why are you saying it with like the weird accent on the word hypnosis? I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to offer here? My short answer would be, absolutely not. I think it's a waste of time.

Hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis. Hi, Johnny, how are you? Hey, Dimitri, hi. I've got your brother, Gregor, on the line with me. We've met. Hi, how are you? Can you make the case to your brother? Sure, I just think that, you know, there's no harm. There's certainly nothing to lose.

It takes 15 or 20 minutes, and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions, so why not try it? I agree with all those points. My main feeling is that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is much, much easier than getting someone to change their personality, which is harder to hypnotize someone out of. That may be true. I wouldn't disagree there. Swept up in a wave of brotherly Bonamy, I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing. And along the way, I could get hypnotized that as something, too. Yeah, a lot of stuff. Yeah.

And immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot of stuff? I mean, that smug smile they could work on. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're, like, super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Actually, you know, there is, all joking aside, there is a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome where they realize that a lot of men are sort of doing it on purpose. Why would someone do that on purpose?

Well, it turns out that hair loss is more of like an act of willful insulin often. And a cry for pity. I used to love my hair. Well, if you loved it so much, why did you get rid of it? First of all, I find it offensive. And Gregor, try him in here because I'm sure you're equally offended. No, Dimitri used to be bald as an egg, and then he wielded it back on. I think if you did it at the same time with my mother, we can get a two-for-one deal.

Packaged deal. I'm just saying, it's science if you read the New England Journal of Medicine. With Gregor and Dimitri aligned in friends again at my expense, I set out in search of the one-eyed hippie hypnotist. Saul Feldstein. But it turns out Saul died in 2019 at the age of 92.

So I reach out to other hypnotists, all of whom pretty much hang up on me once I explain the project. So hypnotism is out, the museum is out, I'm stuck with my crap personality, and Edda is stuck with her house full of crap, and Gregor is still at an impasse.

But things are about to change. Coming up after the break, at his big night. Hey, you know what that guy said to me? Just now this guy told me that I was beautiful. You are. What's going on here? Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com.

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and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's BUZZZI.Space. Gregor tells me that Eta has been offered a show at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Edda is an outsider artist, so the offer of her own solo exhibition feels like finally, at the age of 88, she's being invited inside. The show, with its formal invitations and coat check, feels like validation. It's the kind of opportunity Edda has

always hoped for, and for Gregor, it feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good homes, outside her home. The show opens on March 21st, 2019. Gregor and I make a plan to speak the morning after, so he can tell me how it went. When we speak, what Gregor tells me is that things that night took a wild turn. Do you want to explain? Sure. I flew into town from my mom's art opening. Okay, we're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good crowd. Everyone's eating wine and cheese.

And it's great, but it's so loud. It was almost like a cartoon version of my mom's success story in that, like, some stranger guy came up was like, you're a beautiful woman. You're beautiful. Thank you. That's very nice to hear of my age. Her ego was buffed from many sides. Everything going great.

Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having as good a time. He spent most of the evening in the corner, nibbling on crackers. At the end of the night, Gregor approached him. Well, father, what did you make it on? Oh, it's very nice.

It was a little bit exhausting. He seemed like, even though he sometimes talks in a quiet voice, he was especially quiet. Like, I could hardly hear him. I don't know. On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping,

but completely unconscious. Edda began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was driven to the hospital where the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke, but they couldn't say for sure. In the waiting room, Edda turned to Gregor and said, You might as well order the dumpsters right now, meaning you win, empty out the house.

Because of Milt isn't coming back to it, that's it. How do you know when the Democlean sword of mortality isn't just dangling above you, but actually falling? How do you know when it's time to pick up the remote, turn off Rachel Maddow, and finally act? The night, a milestone in Edda's career, was meant to symbolize a turning point, and it was, just not the kind she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from the hospital, but his collapse signaled a change for Gregor, too.

For so long, he'd been saying, maybe it's time, but maybe it was time to stop saying maybe. Hello? Hi, it's Gregor and Jonathan. Oh, and I thought this was a scam call. How do you like that? How are you? Well, I wouldn't be so sure it's not. We haven't finished the call yet.

Right. So what's the pitch? Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues. Oh, sure. Why now? The painful or the better. I want to talk with Edda about the night of the art opening and the way it affected her thinking about remaining in the house. I won't be able to stay here. either I will become ill

or milk will become ill and I need somebody to help me there is a new little piece in my head that says things are going to change In the aftermath of the art show opening as Edda's new reality sunk in another plan began to take shape one that Edda came up with

her idea is to pair each of her message on a bottles with the right person in this way each one will find the right home. I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that I'm now earmarking to give away. That's something that you've not normally done? No. I only gave very few things away, you know, to my best friend or to the kids or something like that. Very few. Very, very few. Do you think it's at the beginning of something? More of this to come? Yeah. Yeah, it has to be. It has to be.

I take it very seriously when I think of giving a person a bottle. I have to think, would it be good for that person? Okay. Now we're rolling. All right. A few weeks later, I call Gregor to see how Edda's bottle drive is coming along. So she called me this morning saying, I thought of the perfect person to give the perfect bottle to,

but I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings. Okay. She wants to give you a bottle. She wants to give Okay, well that, wow, that's really nice Why would that hurt my feelings? You know, if you give someone a bottle that says like I wish like I was present

Then it's sort of an implication that you're not present You know what I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as like a sort of a criticism So I don't know how you'll take it Well, did she tell you what my bottle says? That's as much as I can say at this point This is as much as I'm authorized to say Even though I should know better

know how Gregor will dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer my curiosity gets the better of me and so I keep asking Gregor what the bottle says which he uses as an opportunity to dissect my personality all I can say he says is that it addresses some of your deep-seated issues Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself in the position of, like, journalistic observer.

Uh-huh. When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights you bolt on at the end of things where you're like, maybe we all need someone to run to that hallmarky nonsense that you tend to spout at the end of these. What a jerk? You feel comfortable to saying something like that to someone? Telling me about my dynast. I knew you were going to take it the wrong way. What's the right way to take that?

I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant like, oh, I don't matter. I'm just the fly on the wall to watching the human condition as, you know, people live and die and suffer and babies are born and old people lowered into the ground. Oh, when the dirt hits the coffin, that reminds me of my sponsor. I think you just, you use this thing to remove yourself from what's actually going on. Okay, all right. You're like, you know what would really make this thing sing? Now let me just get a shot of you. Throwing your art off the bridge.

That's what we need to finish this. Maybe Gregor thinks I'm being too prying with his mom, and this is just an expression of his protectiveness. So I apologize to him and tell him I'll try to be more respectful. It turns out that Gregor has little respect for my respect. Yeah, hey, lady, I can be more respectful. I'll tell you to throw your stuff in the garbage.

I'll tell you to throw it in the recycling bin. That way it don't wind up in a landfill. You understand? Very respectful, like. We'll even separate out the green bottles from the clear glass. Very good, John. Why would you even let me speak to your mother? I don't know.

I mean, I thought maybe you could patch things up. I don't know. Over the next couple years, Edda continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in the past, Edda was only able to give away a few. Gregor estimates that she hands out about a hundred. During this time, Milt is in and out of the hospital with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood pressure to an actual heart attack.

But then, in the summer of 2022, it's Edda who received some bad news. Three years after Gregor and I first spoke, Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain. They went to three different hospitals in five days, and the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months, but of weeks. In what felt like only days,

Eda went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to be carried up the stairs herself. With Edda's illness, Gregor decides to move in, the whole family does, into the big, packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed is set up on the main floor in Edda's old office, and Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at Edda's bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable. He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay. And I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks, and sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly died.

In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over, Edda. In the years running up to her death, she would say things like, listen, there's a rolled-up rug in the attic. That's worth a lot of money. make sure that they don't, you know, cheat you out of that one. That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort of real thing. But when the actual room of death and dying was happening,

that stuff didn't really come up. It felt more like she was at peace with a lot of stuff. And a lot of the stuff she told me, she would be laying there with her eyes shut but smiling. And I'm like, you know, Mom, what are you thinking about? And she was just, just with her hand, she would indicate that she's, like, dancing by just flowing her hand in the air.

It felt like a great death. The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Edda could dance out of the world gracefully. No grasping. It's the living who are left to grasp. Since my mom died, it feels like it's hard to throw things out than I thought. This is Gregor's sister Lexi again.

Like Edda, Lexi is an artist. And like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after all the years trying to get her mom to let go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so hard to let go of that very same stuff. It just feels really hard to, like, her art, it's like a part of her. Yeah. But it's not her.

Yeah. I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day, who was, of course, really, you know, grief-stricken, and he was saying, why do people make art? And he thinks the reason people make art is so that they're not forgotten when they die. Like, you do something that remains in the world. I think of her a lot. Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do you feel it? I carry her with me. I mean, in the way that, you know, when I experience something,

I can't help but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something telling her about just some quotidian thing in the day. You know, this is a nice sense. But it would be nicer if that truck weren't backing up. And I can hear her being like, why are you so rotten? What is wrong with you? I mean, that type of thing. You can try to move your aging parents out of their house.

You can treat death like a to-do list with items to check off. But ultimately, you can't control how people live or die. Even after Edda's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dmitri and his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't have to be alone. And over the next few years, Gregor, in fits and starts

and with disregard for what anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only, it's become less about a full-fledged museum open to the public, and more of just a place to honor his mom. And then one day, Gregor texts saying he found a sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it, written in Edda's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel what seems like yards and yards of bubble wrap.

Edda had taken great care. The bottle is a beautiful blue, the blue of a childhood toy. It's crevacious and feels good in my hand. Upon it, Edda laid out her words to me. I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise. of its own unfolding. See what I mean? I do.

But how dare she? I'm kidding. Cue the outro music. Cue the dime story insight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go.

My feeling about what comes after death is constantly changing. I don't have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling. And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, just like colorful bottles are vessels, just like podcasts and houses packed with stuff, and all of art is. It's all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful. But it's there to help us get closer to the non-stuff.

Because, like the words Edda inscribed on one of her final bottles, All important matters are invisible. Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home. Now that the last month's rent is returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is scheming with This damage deposit Take this moment to decide If we meant it if we tried Or felt around for far too much

From things that accidentally tied This episode of heavyweight Was produced by Phoebe Flanagan And me, Jonathan Goldstein Our senior producer is Kalila Holt and our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Steve Marsh,

Amy Gaines McQuaid, and Sarah Nix. Our production council is Jake Flanagan. Emma Munger mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson, and Bobby Lord. Additional scoring by Boxwood Orchestra and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme song is by the Weaker Thans,

courtesy of Epitaph Records. Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast or email us at heavyweight at pushkin.fm. And if you'd like your very own Etta B. Ehrlich original, her bottles can be found on her Instagram at Eda B. Ehrlich.

We'll be back next week with a new episode. Can you believe it? Back in the saddle. Hiding behind that mic. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. So I wanted to go through the entire thing, just to make sure the fact and also make sure that...

The yacht that your mother made, she put bird poop with googly eyes. Is that correct? She spelled it with two Gs? Okay, how many times would you say you were rejected by girls? In the dozens, is that correct? That was an episode from the new season of heavyweight. Thank you for listening. You can hear new episodes on Thursdays. heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Busy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make work spaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, Busy Space has you covered. Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I-D-Space.

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