Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 449: Loss is Inevitable. Here’s How to Handle It. | Kathryn Schulz

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

There is an unstoppable flow of gain and loss within our lives. Processing this flow helps us to develop equanimity. In this conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz discusses her new book Lost and Found: A Memoir, in which she explores experiencing both a huge loss anda huge gain, and how to live in a world where both happiness and pain commingle. In this episode we talk about: How humans experience griefA gift you can give to the grievingWhy she loves the clichés that remind us to enjoy the momentHer broad understanding of the term “loss”Why the key word in ‘lost and found’ is “and” What she’s learned about compromising in relationshipsFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kathryn-schulz-449See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, I've always been really intrigued by the Buddhist notion of the eight worldly wins. They include praise and blame, success and failure, joy and sorrow and most relevant for this conversation, gain and loss. The idea is that if we learn to relate to these various two-sided coins as being like the wind or part of nature, we can develop more equanimity vis-a-vis life's inevitable ups and downs, vexations and vicissitudes, the full

catastrophe. Today, we're going to talk specifically about the unstoppable flow of gain and loss, the upside and downside of impermanence, and how to deal with this process more effectively. My guest is not actually a Dharma teacher, but instead a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who I've actually been a fan of for a very long time. She really is, in my opinion, one of the best writers drawing breath on the planet currently. So it was very cool to meet her. Catherine Schultz is a staff writer at the New Yorker who has a new book called Lost and Found, a memoir, which is really about her processing a huge loss in her personal life and then a huge gain and and then also amusing in a very compelling way about

how to live in a world where this happiness and pain inevitably commingle. In other words, how to live with contradiction. In this conversation, we talk about how humans experience grief, a gift that you can give to anybody who's grieving, why she loves the cliches that remind us to enjoy the moment, even though they are cliches. Her broad understanding of the term loss, a category that as she points out can include both loved ones and your car keys. How the key word in lost and found is and, and why she says life is a perpetual and machine. And we also talk about some of the insights she has gained

from being in a long-term romantic relationship, specifically what she has learned about compromise. Also just to say this is the first episode of a two-parter this week on the subject of loss. On Wednesday, we're gonna talk to a scientist and practicing Buddhist who's been studying what grief does to your brain. And I should also say that the two-parter this week is part of a four-week series.

We're doing on the show that we're calling the Mental Health Reboot. It's the longest and most ambitious series we've ever done on the show. Each week on Monday, we bring you a series of brand new interviews with mental health memoirists, who have personal stories on everything from sleep to shame, to grief, to trauma. And then on Wednesdays, we bring on a top notch scientist to help you contextualize the story you've just heard and to provide some evidence-based advice.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos

To access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's time for my space? Listen to Baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Katherine Chalts, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a longtime fan, jealous of your writing ability. I guess the technical term is envious. I learned recently, but yes, you do great work, so really happy to have you on the show. Oh gosh, that's so nice of you. Thanks. I am also a long time fan of yours. I mean, not of myself. I mean, I'm a piece of myself, but I wouldn't exactly describe as an auto fan. So we're laughing now, but we're going to start by talking about something sad. It's interesting because the inciting event for your book was actually the second thing that happens in the book. The inciting event was the loss of your father,

but that was actually predated by the discovery of your future life partner. All of us inevitably lose people. But for you, it really sparked an exploration of loss. And I'd be curious to get a sense of why and how that process started. Yeah, it's an interesting question. So it's funny. You just observed correctly that the book does not quite operate in chronological order in real life. I met my partner and then lost my father. But the book, as you said, opens with the death of my father and

then I move on to meeting my partner. Funnily enough, the writing of the book sort of didn't exactly happen in the chronological order you might expect either, which is to say that it was not actually that I lost my father and started thinking about the strangeness of the category of loss in general. I'd actually already been thinking about that

for a long time. I think I'm kind of drawn to these abstract categories of human experience. My previous book was about error and all the different kinds of ways that were wrong. So I had been thinking about, boy, it's really weird that we have this category that, you know, somehow we can put our car keys in it, but also our religious faith, our elections, the people we love, like, what a weird and capacious category. And how do we make sense of this? So it had actually been on my mind before my father died. And I had thought about writing it, but

never kind of got around to it. It was one of those ideas that just, it's like perpetually on the back burner. And it was only when my father died that I realized right away why I couldn't write it before. It didn't have the emotional anchor. It didn't have the kind of gravitas and the real feeling that it immediately did after my father died. So yes, the inciting event for the book, in a sense, is the death of my father. But these ideas had been kicking around for quite a while for me. I want to read you back to you because there are a number of really striking passages in the book, but this one pertains to the loss of your father. I remember the way my mind absented itself immediately so that the few cool syllables to which I had access seemed almost to have formed outside of me. So this

is it. I remember feeling simultaneously heavy and empty like a steel safe with nothing inside. I remember seeing my little niece place a letter she had written to her grandpa on his chest, where for all the long moments that I looked at it, it failed to move. But what I remember most from those first hours after my father died is watching my mother cradle the top of his bald head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for and returned. Just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time, it was the purest act of love

I'd ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me right before everything else struck me much harder that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them. It beautifully captures the scene and also just how hard it is for the mind to grok this kind of subtraction. So as you explain and is clear in that passage, that is really, it's not quite the moment of my father's death because he died in the very small hours of the night and we got a phone call,

but it's the moment we all came to be around him as soon as that happened. And it was an interesting passage to write. I think in some ways it was a very clear distillation of the challenge of writing, which is to summon back on the page for other readers with as much precision as possible, what an experience is actually like and what the emotions of that experience were like.

And it's a strange and in some ways harrowing and in some ways very honorable and moving thing to witness death and to witness the dead. And in modern life, it actually doesn't happen that often for most of us. So it felt to me like a very important moment to sit with and to let it unfold, kind of almost in real time, with the sort of, I almost had glacial pace, but in a funny way, in that first moment of shock after a death, there kind of is no time.

Time has been ushered out of the room, and you're just in there with this person you love truly for the last time, and in there with the reality of death, and in there with the reality of grief, including everyone else's grief. I'm not a devout person in the conventional sense, but it felt like a quite sacred moment. How did the grieving unfold for you from there? I know a little bit from having interviewed people about the grief process that it doesn't actually unfold in some orderly fashion, even though

we talk about the stages of grief. How did it go for you? Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. Unfold sounds so neat, and grief is more like, you know, crumple it up, throw it against the wall, smooth it out again. I mean, it does not resemble a process when folding very much. It felt chaotic to me. You know, and I'm not a chaotic person, and I'm inclined

toward order and a little bit inclined towards control. And of course, grief, I actually think in some very important ways, upends that for everyone, any illusions you might have about being in control are, you know, summarily undone by death in general, and then undone all over again by grief. So I often think of grief not as a timeline steadily unfolding, but as a kind of topography, a landscape you walk through and you don't exactly know where you're going or how long you'll be there. But you certainly know that it's incredibly changeable. I mean, this to me, people talk about the stages of grief, which isn't wrong, you know, and I think can be emotionally useful for some people some of the time. But it seems to me that there's just different experiences of grief and they kind of lurch forth in one moment and then recede and

then come back up, you know, the way that when you're moving through a landscape, you know, there's a river to cross and then you walk a mile, but the river has bent and you're crossing the same river again or you're climbing a mountain and whoops, there's another mountain when you get to the top. And I guess I would say that's what it was like. It's certainly not unremitting bleakness or unremitting sorrow. One of the things I really try to emphasize a lot in this book is that I don't really believe any state of being to be quite as constant as we think it is. I mean, the same is true of love, right? A falling in love of joy, certainly of marriage. You know, these are not static, monochromatic states. They're very busy and very different. So in the moment, I think probably what I would have said above all is that I'm folded slowly,

you know, it just feels like it's going to go on forever and ever. But in fact, it doesn't go on per se, it changes all the time. And that's still true today. It's not like I don't have moments now in my life when grief comes circling back and finds me. What was helpful for you? Love, I suppose. First and foremost, although of course it was the memory of my father that was so painful and not having him in my life. It was also an incredible bomb and a lot of what helped me move through this crazy topography of grief. My dad was an incredibly joyful person,

just a bullion with a large and generous personality. And of course, I knew first and foremost about my dad that he was not one ever to deny pain or look away from it or be unable to tolerate it, including in the people he loved. But I knew that all he ever wanted for his daughters was for us to be happy. And that was a kind of anchor for me to remember that my dad sometimes in the face of incredibly challenging circumstances just consistently took the face of incredibly challenging circumstances just consistently took the side of joy and humanity and happiness. So I tried to remember to do that too, but also, and this is, of course,

the central feature of the book, as you know, I had fallen in love not long before my father sick and not very long before he died. And so I had this kind of countervailing force in my life that was delightful in many ways. And certainly, while my father was dying, and after he died, incredibly stabilizing. It's a curious fact of my life that I lost this absolute anchor of my family of origin right at the moment that I was making a family of my own, although in some ways, and I write about this in the book, that was a complicated and contradictory set of feelings. I'm also so grateful every day that I had this kind of steadfast love of my partner during that time.

We're going to talk a lot about that process of finding, which is the second part of the book, but just staying in the losing part. It sounds like love was helpful in at least two ways. One was finding this life partner, the first thing you referenced, but just sort of having a lens or a filter over the lens through which you view the world of love or happiness or joy. And that was a bomb. Do I have that right? Yeah, you know, I mean, in general, I find in hard moments that it is helpful sometimes

to look beyond the self. It's not always possible. You know, we all sometimes wallow and that's a kind of negative word, but actually it's good to sit with your pain and your sadness and your suffering and whatever, maybe you're whining for that matter sometimes. Sometimes it's important to indulge those things, but I do find that it's helpful to look up and look out and regard the rest of the world and remember that it's rare and precious and beautiful and we're here and we get to experience it and that's quite amazing and that there are others who need us,

to be present, to be compassionate and to kind of heal ourselves that we may help heal others in various ways. So yes, I think it sounds simple and probably a little trite, but yes, I think love of my father and also love of those around me and commitment to sort of taking the side of love in the world. It's not that it diminishes grief.

I tend to think of grief as a very pure reflection of love. We grieve people in sort of the exact proportion and in some ways, in the exact ways that we love them. So, it feels to me quite natural that love would be the thing that would rescue us from grief and help ground us and remind us of why we're sad and that there's a joy behind that and also an inevitability behind that and part of learning to live and to be a grown-up is learning to accept that we are finite. We do not go on forever and ever in order to the people we love. Were there practical things that helped like a grief counselor, for example?

So it's interesting. I did not talk to any professionals while I was grieving, although I have in the past about other things and been very, very grateful for that. But that's not to say that there weren't counselors in my life in the sense of very wise people and various practical things that did help. My mother was tremendous, to be honest. Every time I talked to my mother, I was like borderline ashamed of my own grief,

not because she wasn't grieving, but because she was just this tower of fortitude, which for anyone who knew my mom, it's not normally how you would think to describe her, you know, she was and is incredibly sweet, incredibly thoughtful, very patient, but it was interesting to me after my dad died to see that, you know, she had lost her beloved of 52 years, her husband of 49 years, and she was just tremendous, and I learned a lot, sort of watching how she navigated her own grief. And my partner, as I said, was wonderful.

And you know, it's interesting. A lot of people in my life, I feel really rose to the occasion of being with me in grief, which is a hard thing. I really admire people who, in the face of someone else's grief, do not look away and do not try to change the subject. My father-in-law was, remains really just wonderful. He says my father's name quite often, which is a real gift. I think you can give to people who are grieving, or just say, I thought of your father on X-Day for a Y reason, or he would often tell me how much

he still misses his own father. There's a kind of comfort and solidarity in that. To the extent is that practical? It's practical in that I didn't hide my grief, which I don't mean to suggest I was blubbering in the grocery store or in professional meetings or whatever, but I was open with those I loved and I think that if you can be that that's helpful. It enables other people to see you and to help you and to realize what you need. And I think a lot of people, given the chance, are very compassionate in those moments. A great. I do wanna read you one more passage from you if you're okay with it.

Sure. This kind of goes back to something I asked before that I'm still curious about, which is how hard it is to process the removal of something that was right there. In particular, somebody like your father, as he was to you, how you in some way saw your own world through his eyes at times, you do a better job of

describing this than I do so I'll revert to you here. What I had been missing about my father was life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. But the most important thing that had vanished when he died, I realized in that instant, is wholly unavailable to me. Life as it looked to him, life as we all live it from the inside out. All of my memories can't add up to a single moment of what it was like to be him and all of my lost pales beside his own. I guess it's the first part of that that is interesting to me. I heard this phrase once, a writer described somebody else as the theater for my actions. I think about this a little bit with my parents, they're so alive, but my dad has had some

cognitive decline, so he's not my dad in the way he used to be. It's almost like things that happened to me didn't really happen until I told him that it had happened. I wonder if that resonates with you. It does, for sure. I think it's natural for children to feel like their parents are in some sense their audience and their affirmation. And it's funny, I have a little eight-month-old daughter now, and it's true.

She does a thing, and then she looks at us like did you see that? And I think that's a pretty natural parent-child relationship. And I think often about how I found my partner not long before I lost my father. And I'm incredibly grateful for that because I had, and still have, this feeling, if my father had died before I met the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with, I would in some sense be a little bit unknown to that person. You know, that somehow you had to meet my father to fully understand me.

I wanna be clear that I don't actually think this is a rational feeling. Meaning, I think, of course, I had it not worked out that way. My partner's incredible. I'm sure she would have inferred all the right things. And also, I think we are all to the extent that we're knowable, and to one another, we're knowable as ourselves.

And we express where we came from and how we were raised in a million ways every day as we move through the world. So it's not that I really believe like, oh, you know, any other relationship after he died would be doomed to fail. Or I would somehow be like not fully seen. I absolutely completely trust that my partner

would fully see me. But the feeling is so potent that somehow you had to meet my dad to really understand me. And I think that is a part of what you're describing, this kind of, you know, theater for our actions, which is somehow both such a damning commentary on each of us as sort of fundamentally

solosistic individuals, but also really psychologically accurate about how the world often works. So, yeah, and I think that's part of why I had that very strong corrective moment in the middle of my grief that was basically like, you know, actually, this is like deeply not about you, sholes. You know, I mean, of course it is all of our grief is our grief and losing someone we love is very hard,

but like who suffered the real loss here, right? My dad, who absolutely delighted in existence, you know, delighted in his family, but also delighted in strangers, you know, delighted in just like getting a delusant, which the world was joyful to him and what a tremendous loss, you know, I lost him, but he lost everything. And in some ways that was kind of saliitary to remember like, oh, okay, I'm actually the lucky one.

I get to still be here like having my deli sandwich. A friend of mine, Darmatt teacher, Jay Michelson, one of his little expressions when he's talking about the fleeting nature of life is enjoy every sandwich. Yeah, I mean, exactly. And it's so funny. We are told that countless times, and countless ways, including via many cliches, and I absolutely love and appreciate all of them because the fact is there kind of is no deeper and more

useful truths than that one. It's interesting looking at your work. You do a better job of this than I do, hence the envy, but it strikes me that one of the projects that we have both taken on is to try to come up with fresh language for truisms, for incredibly obvious stuff that has lapsed into the realm of cliche. And what you've done here, I think, is really re-skin ancient wisdom to talk about in a very personal, but also with a lot of fresh language. So I commend you for that. That's very nice of you to say, because I absolutely could not agree more. It's both kind of wonderful, meaning humanity, you know,

over the centuries, over the millennia. Like, we all just do arrive at the same truths and they are in our Google and they are deep and it's annoying that they're captured in these now kind of glimpsing cliches, but they're just right, you know. And I do think it's the obligation of the writer in some sense to remind people of why they're right or give them some kind of new little suit to wear out into the world. So they look fresh and dapper, but I absolutely agree. You mentioned earlier that grief sometimes finds you. Would you say, though, that you're done with the grieving process? Do you get a letter in the mail? Can you officially declare the end of a process like that?

You know, no, I'd, of course, you can't, although it would be nice. It's a funny thing. I mean, on the one hand, of course, you can't. On the other hand, of course, you kind of do. And I think that's important, meaning, yes, grief is wildly unpredictable. It finds us in unexpected moments, and sometimes very long after the loss that we're grieving, and sometimes after a very, very long time of not experiencing that loss in any kind of acute way. So declaring it done is, of course, chronically premature and also a little unnecessary. On the other hand, I would never want to suggest that grief is never over because of course it is in the sense that the acute and painful stages of it pass and subside and days get easier, they get far more full of joy. I feel like grief is kind of a scrim, you know, it's like a little bit of a dimmer switch on the world and addition to everything else it is. And at some point, you know, the light goes back to full wattage and yes, they're hard moments. I mentioned this baby daughter of mine and I have certainly had

moments of just acutely feeling the pain that she will never meet my father and he will never meet her. And those were as shocking and as forceful as many early moments of grief. On the other hand, would I say that I'm still grieving? No, absolutely not. I would say that I'm happy and whole and very much a piece with my father's death. And sometimes it still really hurts anyway. And that's actually just life. I'm glad to hear that. We've been talking specifically about how you've processed the loss of your dad. But as mentioned earlier, you use that experience to examine loss generally. As you point out, we're always losing things large and small from the car keys to people we love.

What kind of insights did you arrive at about loss? I think you used the word before, one of my favorite words, in a more capacious sense of that word. Part of the impetus for writing this book and before that, the essay that it grew out of was, as I said, a kind of attraction to this weird category. And that attraction really took the form of a question, which is, well, is it arbitrary that we put our car keys and our dead parents and countless other things, ourselves, you know, our minds? Is it arbitrary that we put these things in the same category? Is it a weird

artifact of language? Like, do we use the word lost, but actually they're completely unrelated and we shouldn't make too much of it? I was curious about that. And ultimately, I don't think it's arbitrary at all. I think it's meaningful that we use the same language for all of these things. Which, of course, is not to suggest that me misplacing my cell phone for 45 minutes

and, like, wandering around the house and circles as anything in common with grieving my dad. Or, I guess I should say, has much in common with grieving my dad. But I do think they all share a really important property, which is that they remind us about this kind of fundamental femoralness to life, right? You have a thing, and then you don't have a thing. You noted earlier, this is actually one of the strangest and hardest things in the world to wrap our minds around. Like, something was here and now it isn't. And what's funny is we actually experienced

that strangeness in that bathroom and at every level. I mean, I once lost a hat in I swear to you, like, it happened to be my favorite winter hat, right? In what had to have been like a 300 square foot apartment where I had been, I was there while traveling, I was in it for like four days and it absolutely vanished. And on some level, the deep bafflement around that,

you turn the place upside down, you're like, this is like literally impossible, right? It was here, I know it was here. So here when I walked in the door, I said it in this place, now it's gone. The emotion of that is very different from the emotion of how is it possible that my father who's always been here is no longer here.

But the bafflement is actually kind of similar and the sense of like the universe is mysterious and capricious. And obviously I don't think my hat like died and went somewhere weird. But something about the experience of losing like that does bring you in touch with these forces that feel really beyond us. It's why in a kind of comic way when we lose things, we do start invokingoking if we truly can't find that and it seems actually impossible. You know, it's perfectly sane. People will start talking about things like wormholes, you know, and ether. Like, how did these things manage? Like, goblins took it away. And that is a gesture toward this kind of feeling about ourselves with respect to the universe, which is that we aren't

in control and things that we're here one day are gone the next. And sometimes we don't get them back. And that's true of minor things and it's true of the most important things in life. Do you think that kind of humbling, which can sometimes produce a sense of awe, is healthy? Oh, absolutely. And humbling is the right word for it. I mean, in general, I think a little humbling here and there is good for the soul and very

healthy. Obviously, not for everyone and not an extremist. There are people who live chronically in a posture of humility when what they actually deserve is a sense of rightness and a sense that they do deserve what they have and they deserve far more than they have. So it's not a universal prescription, but, you know, in my case, do I think being humbled by the universe from time to time is a verbiant? Yes, completely. I think it's good for us. I think it's easy in our everyday lives to forget about this, about the lack of control, but also about kind of the grand mystery of it. You know, I think it's good to have to step back for one second and marvel at like, boy,

like, it's not just that like, oh, that was here and now it's gone. It's like, wow, I'm here. You know, someday I will be gone, but for now I'm here and that is quite amazing. So I do think you're right. I think it's very closely connected to awe. And I think these kinds of feelings that put us in our place in the cosmic sense remind us of the great scale of things are really important. Coming up, Catherine talks about whether her exploration of loss important. Coming up, Catherine talks about whether her exploration of loss has made her more at peace with her own inevitable demise. We're also going to talk about two relationship tips that she's found very useful in her marriage. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never

know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices

taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. Did this work you've done on the page in your life exploring the concept of loss, grace or fortify you for future losses, including the loss of your own life? I mean, I wish.

It's a really good question. I don't let us say eagerly anticipate the loss of my own life. I have always been one of these rage, rage people. I'm not at peace with mortality. My own or anyone else's. I do not have the great gift of faith that some part of me will endure as me after death. So life feels very finite and very precious to me.

And given my choice, I would gladly live forever. I fear I would probably take some horrible fowstie in bargain. It would give me a mortality. And I'll pay the price or whatever. So has it made me more at peace with my own death? No, I don't think so, but I do have like a kind of very faint glimmer of the possibility that perhaps that is a large part of what wisdom is. And I think there's a reason we associate wisdom with age. And I can just very faintly imagine getting old enough and hopefully a little bit wiser, you know, with every passing year or decade that someday it would not seem so horrible to contemplate the end of things,

including my own end of things. But no, I mean, this was a very sincere exercise. And I think it's really important to think about loss. But I would be lying if I said I felt like I sort of overnight enlightened myself. I think it's a very long road. Yeah, I would agree with that for most of us, at least. But it's interesting in my unscientific polling on this subject, having spent a little bit of time in hospice and just knowing a lot of older people, including my parents, I have observed in the main that the fear of death appears to go down remarkably as people get older. I don't know if I can explain it. Maybe it's that the ego has jumped its banks a little bit and

as one elderly gentleman I was talking to once in a hospice said as he was closer to dying kind of felt part of something larger and That's the kind of thing you can say or hear but you need a molecular understanding for the fear to actually go down. But it's just an interesting phenomenon I've observed. Well, I hope that that's true not only for myself, but for all of us. You know, what a great gift that would be actually if in some strange mysterious kind of structural way, the closer we got to death, the less alarming it was. I mean, that would be a beautiful fact. I would wish it on everyone as they get closer and closer to death. I do know some number of people on my partner included who are kind of at peace with it all along, but I think it's relatively rare quality.

So you mentioned your partner. Let's talk about that. So the first part of the book, lost second part of the book, found. Can you tell us the story of meeting your partner? Yeah, absolutely. So how did I meet my partner? We have a mutual friend who was a somewhat distant friend to both of us at the time, but she shot us an email at some point and just said, you know, you guys should really meet up sometime. I want to introduce the two of you. I think you'd really adore each other. She absolutely was not trying to set us up. It was a kind of authentic thought of hers.

Like how you guys would get along, which was very sweet and all, but at the time I lived up in the Hudson Valley of New York and my future partner lived down on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. So it was like, well, that's all very lovely, but we're hundreds of miles and several states away from each other. But sure enough, you know,

some months after that email, my partner was headed up on a road trip to Vermont and my little Hudson Valley town happened to be kind of a perfect midpoint to grab lunch or something. So she emailed me and I said, yeah, sure, let's grab lunch. And I remember very vividly, I was on deadline that day. To be precise, I was actually horrifyingly behind on a deadline. It was actually ironically enough for the piece I'm probably best known for. It was for a piece about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. And I was wildly overdue on it. And I can

remember very clearly thinking, well, I mean, I have to have lunch, right? And it would be cruel to stand up this friend of a friend who's like stopping here. So, okay, I'm going to go have this lunch. But yeah, you know, 45 minutes tops, right? So I like walked down to Mieter. I'm on literal Main Street in this town, standing outside the cafe where we're gonna meet, and this stranger comes walking up to me, and I, in a kind of violation of the terms of modern life, like I hadn't googled her. I just had no idea who I was meeting up with. In fact, it's funny and retrospect, I don't even exactly know how I was so sure in that moment that this is the person I was gonna meet, but just strikingly beautiful and kind of strikingly. I almost want to say solemn looking like she had a kind of gravitas about her and some little part of me right away

kind of straightened up and took notice and we go into this cafe and we order our lunch and we sit in the back patio and I mean deadline, Shmedline, right? I mean, I have four hours later or something we emerged from this cafe. And it was one of these conversations that from moment one almost was just, it was not small talk. It just settled right away into a kind of depth and expansiveness that is so rare and so delightful. And even as you're having it happen, you're like, this is incredible that this is happening. So, yeah, that's how we met. Since your dad's not here to do it for you,

I'm just going to say that Katherine won a Pulitzer for that article. So... My father would be very grateful. That's quite sweet. A four hour delay in the middle of writing an epic piece. And to move on, so I don't embarrass you, I believe your second date lasted 19 days? As a matter of fact, it did. Yeah. So we have this lunch and we go our separate ways and she emailed me that night to say, you know, that was lovely. Thank you. I'd love to take you out to dinner sometime, which of course was logistically

challenging. See above, we lived in different states. So when she was coming down from that trip up to Vermont, we went on our first date, which was lovely. And then a couple of weeks after that, she had to be in New York City anyway. So she said, I'm coming up. Let's see each other. I said great. And she came up. And yes, somehow, boy, you said, my dad's not here to embarrass me now. I'm just going to embarrass myself. I can do it all on my own. Yeah. You know, I didn't really want to let her go. It was incredibly wonderful. And I say this in the book, but we talk a lot about finding love. But of course, even once you've found love, and I will tell you, I knew very early on that I had,

of course, all of falling in love is an ongoing process of finding. It's this delightful unfolding of another person and learning all about them and learning about their past and learning how their mind works and learning what they like to eat for dinner and learning all about them and learning about their past and learning how their mind works and learning what they like to eat for dinner and learning what they're doing for work and how they do it.

And it was so lovely to be getting to know each other. And I had waited a very long time to feel that way about someone. And we were both mindful that we did, in fact, live pretty far away from each other. And as it happens, she had a kind of whole series of work meetings in New York that month for which she was theoretically just going to go back and forth.

And at some point, very early on, I think I just looked at her and said, why don't you just stay? And she did. And here we are. Very happily married. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit if you're okay with it about this is a story, but you use the story to launch into an exploration about finding, which is the opposite of, but inextricably intertwined with losing.

Exactly. It's a similarly strange category, right? I mean, we do find love. We find God. We find meaning in our lives and jobs. We love for lucky and a place to live. But we also find the other half of the pair of socks that one of which went missing and we find those car keys that we lost and all kinds of trivial things as well. And I found it a very interesting category and a kind of overlooked one. Similarly, it was in tree, as I was with loss, by the kind of range of things that belong in it. It was really fun category to think about because actually finding is really fun. In some ways, that is the defining feature of the act of discovery, whether you are finding the fossils of a dinosaur somewhere

or a vaccine that's gonna work against COVID or frankly something totally trivial. And this, to me, is really encapsulated by the fact that pretty much like 80% of all children's games basically operate on the principle that it's fun to find something. It's why you can entertain five-year-old and an eight-year-old in the backseat of a car for an incredibly long time by just saying find a license plate from every state. That's a strange game, right? There's no intrinsic

rewards. You know one gets a laly pop at the end of it, you don't get paid to do it, there's no shiny trophy. All you get is like, you're the one who spots the South Dakota license plate, right? And yet it's incredibly fun. And that principle is the principle behind a lot of the things that we experience as joyful and pleasurable in life, including adults, right? It's why a lot of us love to like go to junk shops or secondhand stores. It's the sense of kind of a treasure hunt in everyday life. And of course, that delight does extend all the way up to these very grandfines, like finding someone you love. And you know, delight does extend all the way up to these very grand finds, like finding someone you love. And, you know, we talked about the kind of humbling nature of losing something. And in that sense too, finding is a sort of perfect mirror image because

it is also astonishing. And it also puts you in touch with the kind of strangeness and grandeur of the cosmos. But it's emotionally so different. It's like, oh my gosh, this thing landed in my lap. We met, how did this happen? I came across this wonderful discovery. So both feel, I think, very much about kind of our place in the universe, but while one can of course be quite painful and sobering, finding is pretty reliably delightful. And yet you write very honestly about the fact that finding love, well, it leads to a, as you said, a moment ago, a series of delightful discoveries. It's also pretty hard. And you find lots of things that don't please you.

I was particularly struck by your description of early fights that you were having with your now wife, where you realize that the anxiety undergirding the fight was fear of loss in the face of this fresh discovery. Yeah, that's exactly right. And thank you. That's a very astute reading of it. And it's why it belonged in the book, right? Because I do think if you're gonna write an extraordinarily

happy love story, you owe your readers the honesty of recognizing that even the happiest of relationships and marriages has friction and difficulty intention of various kinds in at various moments. But yes, I do think that the engine of our early fights was the fear of losing each other. And I think broadly speaking, it's almost always the case that the engine of fights is not whatever the fight is actually about, right? People are seldom. That worked up about you forgot to pick up X object at the grocery store, or you forgot to take the trash out, or it was my night to go hang out with my friends.

I mean, all kinds of things cause friction and relationships, but when they rise to the level of a fight, I think there usually is some kind of underlying, deeper problem or fear or anxiety beneath them. And yes, in the case of my partner, there's kind of two things going on in that fight that I dwell on. And one, as you say, is, it was early days, and I think we were both very afraid we were going to lose each other. And she responded to that by kind of girding herself for the possibility of being alone, and I responded to it by rushing toward her and holding on as

tightly as possible. And as that suggests, that's the other thing that's going on, which is a really interesting thing about relationships is you have to learn how to fight, right? I mean, people are very different and in moments stress or sorrow or worry, we need different things. You know, some people in that moment crave space, some people crave connection, some people crave logical solutions, some people don't want their problem solved, they just want, you know, a kind of sympathy and comfort and care in the moment. So one of the real tasks of building a healthy and functional relationship is figuring out

how you and your partner operate in the face of problems like that and learning to recognize it and be generous towards it, even if it's very different from your own impulse and figure out a way to work with the two sets of impulses you have. Interesting, though, because I believe you described in the book that the severity of the fights diminished markedly once you both realized neither of you was going to be leaving. Dramatically, yeah.

And that felt to me kind of like that conclusive proof of what we had actually been fighting about all along or what the fuel for the fight was, which was a kind of fear, you know, a sense that we found this incredible thing and does this little difference between us or this friction between us somehow mean we're going to lose it. Is it going to jeopardize the whole thing? And at a certain point, it became abundantly clear that like, this is crazy, right? Nobody's leaving anyone. We're very deeply in love and very committed to each other's happiness. And so these don't need to be the stakes, right? Because they aren't the real stakes. And once that became clear, it's true. A lot of the kind of oxygen went out of our fights. There was no fuel to burn

up because, you know, at a certain point, if you're lucky and happily married and have a partner who's committed to keeping things happy and knew yourself are committed to, at a certain point, a note of the kind of lovingly familiar enters almost any kind of conflict where you're like, that's you, being you. And I love you very much. And this is going to be fine. Or like I feel in myself, my own quirks and needs and difficulties.

And I register my own emotional reality as real, but also just mine and me being how I am and needing what I need or reacting how I need. And it just all kind of diffuses by several orders of magnitude where you're like, this is not an existential threat to our relationship, it's not even an existential threat to our day. I just need to step back here for a moment. And that's a great place to land.

And probably the best place you ever can get because it's not like life isn't going to present you with stressful moments or conflict or reasons to squabble anyway. But I do believe it is possible to find ways to do that that are loving and that do not, as I say, pose any kind of existential threat or need to ruin anyone's day. It reminds me of a wisdom bomb kindly dropped on me

and my wife by the couples counselor that we saw for a while a couple years ago. He talks about how he likes to recommend that couples enter into their second marriage with each other. And at that point, you've moved past the rom-com fantasy, the bridal magazines and you're in the humorous approach to each other's foibles stage, which is like in his view the highest level of achievement. You are not a couples counselor, but you did write a column about two little, I use this term with a wink, but two little hacks that you came up with after having found your now wife. Can you talk about those?

I would be happy to. I will double down on your caveat, which is I'm no marriage counselor, but it is true that my partner and I kind of stumbled on two little interventions that we found by accident speaking of finding, but have been very useful in our relationship. And the first one came about it was me being kind of an idiot, to be honest, we were reading on the couch one evening. And I should say, you know, we're both writers. And reading on the couch is a thing we do often. And usually from our perspective,

a very delightful way to spend an evening together. But I was just in one of those moods, right? I was just like, antsy. And I was reading something for work that I didn't particularly want to be reading. And it was not particularly engaging. And my head wasn't in it. And what did I really want? I wanted to procrastinate by talking to my partner.

My partner meanwhile was like utterly absorbed in her book and her book unfortunately was the first volume of a three volume like 1900 page history of the Spanish Empire and I would, you know, kept trying to kind of say things to capture her attention and she was like, mm-hmm, but like clearly just really into this book and I'm of course looking at this book was like, mm-hmm, but like clearly just really into this book. And I'm of course looking at this book thinking like she's gonna be reading that for the next nine years, you know. At some point in the course of this after trying and failing several times to successfully distract her, I just in this kind of burst of raw it said, pay attention to me! Which I mean, I should say like I do not in my everyday life normally conduct

myself like a toddler, but it was really incredible. But because she of course, like, put the book down and looked up at me and just cracked up, right? Just laughed. And, you know, and set the book aside. And it was like, what, yes, here I am. What's going on? And we proceeded to die. I don't even know whatever we did with our evening, you know, watch bad TV and talk. But it turned out to be, you know, pay attention to me as a really useful expression because it's often what we're saying anyway, right, or trying to convey, and sometimes we don't even realize it. But there are times in a relationship where you really do just want your partners undivided attention. And that's not how it always is. And it can't be. People have jobs and busy lives and babies and things to do.

And sometimes you're very contentily doing your own thing with your partner, which is its own kind of joy, hopefully. But yeah, sometimes you just want to be the center of attention. And there's something very useful about just saying it straightforwardly. And so now we do sometimes. I'm stuck deep inside my phone for no very good reason.

That's some stupid hour of the day or night and she says, you pay attention to me and it's a nice corrective, you know, it restores some balance. The second somewhat similar thing we occasionally say to each other comes from her actually. I say this in the book, but as it happens, my partner and I both kind of love housework, like we're very content to cook and clean and take out the trash and, you know, trash and just the daily stuff of making a household comfortable and livable. So we don't really almost ever have friction over that kind of thing, but one night quite early on in our relationship, we'd done the laundry, which again, we both loved it as laundry and we were upstairs making the bed, which were both

reliable bedmakers. But on that particular occasion, we had watched the Comfortor cover, which of course meant that we were obliged to put the Comfortor back into its cover, which is actually one of life's most annoying tasks if you ask me. And so there we are doing this. And it quickly becomes apparent that we have different strategies

for getting a Comfortor back into the Comfortor cover. So we're working at absolute cross purposes. And it's starting to get a little testy because I'm like, no, no, do this. And finally, she just like kind of flounce down her edge of the comforter and said, just do it my way. It was just like microsecond pause. And then we both just cracked up because it was a similar thing. It was like simultaneously a ridiculous and like arguably kind of childish outbursts. And then also, it was actually the most emotionally intelligent thing you could say in that moment

because the truth about putting a comforter into a comforter cover which is a truth about many things in life is that actually you cannot compromise. You cannot do it half her way and half my way and sometimes you just have to do it the other person's way or you just have to do it your way and that turns out to be very very useful very useful in the course of a relationship. Because as I said, there are many things where you can't split the difference. And sometimes it is better to just seed the point. And I found that one especially moving and helpful because the fact is all I ever want really is to make my partner happy. And so the great fortune of my marriage basically all she wants is to make me happy. So once you're kind of reminded of that, you're like, yeah, why wouldn't I just do it your way?

It's a comfort or like who cares, right? So those are my for for whatever they're worth, which is, you know, not not terribly much. Those are my two relationship tips. I disagree. I think they're great. Well, thank you. Feel free to try them and I hope they don't backfire gravely, but if they do, you know, come correct me on air or something. No, I'll see you in court if that happens. Coming up, Catherine will talk about why she has become so fixated on the word and and we will talk about some tools she uses to bring herself back into whatever's happening right now. Right after this. So the final section of the book, you start with lost, then we go found, and then the last section is called and very clever and meaningful. You say the very word and is existentially provocative.

Can you explain what you mean by that? There's an interesting thing about the word and there's many interesting things about the word and I know who it is at, right? It's like one syllable, three letters. We never think about it, but for one thing, you might remember from elementary school grammar lessons that and is a conjunction.

There's a lot of conjunctions, words that join two other words, but almost all of those, you know, if, then, because sense, those words tell you something about the relationship between the two things that are being connected. I'll email you after this program is over. It tells you a time order when something is gonna happen.

I'll email you because I have a follow-up question to ask you. It tells you why I'm doing a thing and does not work that way. I'll email you and we'll talk. Well, okay, that's all very well and good, but those two halves of the sentence don't have any necessary relationship to each other. And that's true about Andy and General.

It can connect anything in the known universe. You know, it can connect microphones and cumclats. You know, it can connect laptops and I don't know, chickadees. And that to me is a very interesting fact because it gets at a reality about the world, which is we would like to think that everything is connected in meaningful ways, that things happen because of other things, or they happen before or after other things, in some kind of meaningful order, and that they follow some kind of set of discernible rules that help us make sense to the universe.

But much of life is actually just connected for no discernible reason at all. I fell in love and my father died. I'm very anxious during the pandemic because my mother is elderly and has an autoimmune disorder. And I'm incredibly happy that I get to spend so much time with my child. I'm incredibly happy I get to spend so much time with my child. Like, I'm incredibly happy.

I get to spend so much time with my child, and I'm going insane because we can't have childcare and schooling is wildly disrupted and all this. These are unrelated experiences that happen past all the time. And life is really full of such moments. And when I say it's existential, provocative, it's because oddly for such a little and such an overlooked word, it does get it.

I think some deep truths about the universe, which is actually things are not always connected and orderly and causal and happening for discernible reasons. Maybe depending on your cosmology, those reasons exist and rules exist and order exist, but if so, it is not known unto us. And also, of course, very possible to believe it doesn't exist at all. And that there is a kind of randomness in the world and things that are connected only by chance, or they happen to be connected temporarily. Boy, I just delivered a very kind of sobering, sounding answer to your question, but there it is. That's what I wanted, because I do the answer having looked at sections of the book, and I think

it's really interesting. I believe you also use the term life is a perpetual and machine and we have to get used to that and if there a go again with and and if especially for those of us who don't have a cosmology that explains it all to get used to that is no small task. Yeah, it really isn't and on the one hand, I think we all live with this feeling, all the time in life. You love your brother, but he also drives you crazy, you know, or you love your children. And you can barely stand to be in the same room as their ex-husband, you know, your ex-husband without whom you wouldn't have those beloved children. We live with constant contradiction. We live with a kind of amalgamation of things all happening

to us at once. And it's simultaneously really defining feature of life And it is tough to deal with. I was talking to the wonderful writer and memoirist Anne Lamotte recently and she was this great Image I can't get out of my head. She was talking about the Anne section of the book too and she said I really like to keep my existential silverware drawer separated You know like she likes the knives and the little knives face and the spoons and the spoons face and the forks and the forks face and don't we all, right? But actually that is actually not at all how life works. You know, we do fall in love and grieve at the same time. We are tending to our parents when they're cognitive decline, which I'm very sorry to hear about it

at the same time that maybe you're watching your child's intellect blossom. I mean, we just, we don't get to separate these things, including in mundane ways. You're grieving, but like, whoops, you have to go to work and you have to run the meeting and you have to just do the laundry. We don't get to set aside these little separate spaces where we're just purely doing one thing and thinking one thing and feeling one thing every once in a while. We can do that briefly, but

it's not the fundamental texture of adult life the fundamental texture of adult life is this kind of and NIS this kind of constant conjunction of things crowding in on us in the face of this confusing Gumbo you land on what might be I don't know intentionally or not a pretty Buddhist answer Which is paying attention. Or I believe you used the word attentiveness, and paying attention to what John Kabin calls the full catastrophe. I want to read you back to you one last time, if you'll humor me. Time and carrying on will carry almost all of what we know of life away.

Nothing about that is strange or surprising. It is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in being here. Loss, which seems only to take away adds its own kind of necessary contribution. Disappearance reminds us to notice transience, to cherish fragility, to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.

Our crossing is a brief one. Best spent bearing witness to all that we see, honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep. Well done, by the way, playing the role of your dad again. Thank you. I'd love to hear you just say more about the foregoing. Well, you know, I have even less claim to being a Buddhist than I do to being a marriage counselor, but I'm certainly at admire of both categories, and especially of the Buddhist outlook on life.

Because I do think in some sense, all we do have is the present moment, and it's incredibly difficult not to get distracted by the past or the future, and yet in a certain sense, it is the every sandwich, right? If you're eating the sandwich right now, like eat the sandwich, enjoy it and notice it. And I do think that loss, you know, when it happens to us, it's confusing. It seems to encourage us to turn around and face the past because that's where love loved one who's gone dwells. They don't exist in our presence anymore and they don't exist in the future, which is part of the real pain of it. And yet, at the same time, as I said, I think loss does deeply and fundamentally remind us that the time that we have

with those we love, the time that we have with everything we love, with the world around us. I'm a great lover of the natural world. I find great solace and pleasure and joy just from being in the world as it is. And frankly, a little bit like my dad, a great lover of people do. I love to be around people. I find them infinitely fascinating. And I do think loss sort of takes us by the shoulders and shakes us and says, you will not have this forever. You have got to make the most of it. Well, you can. And it's such a simple lesson. And it is so hard to remember. It just slips away from us every day. And all we can do is just try to remember to return to it and return to it and return to it. And you know, paradoxically, the same is true of love,

which is so joyful. And of course, all we want to do is dwell in it. And yet, first of all, anything you love smuggles in the long side, the fact that we will eventually lose it. That's the price of loving anyone or anything. And of course, you know, we get distracted even while in love, too, when we get distracted in our marriage.

And that's why we should say, pay attention to me. And I believe the world in all kinds of ways says to us, pay attention to me. And I do ultimately think that it is probably the best that we can do with our lives is to remember to notice and hopefully based on that noticing act. As I said in the passage, you just read to protect what needs our protection and to champion

what needs our championing. And most of all, to just cherish what we can cherish. Amen to all of that. It's reminding me in particular the part about taking care of things. It's reminding me of something that I bootest monk, brother Fab Young for loyal listeners who might want to go back and listen to that one, said recently on the show that he said something to the effect of everything comes into the world inanimate or animals, the purpose is to give. A tree gives shade, we take care of things

and other people, that's our job, whether we know it or not. And that we're happiest when we're connected to that purpose because we aren't here permanently. Nothing is permanent. So our job here is to be a temporary caretaker. We get to decide what that is as we are part of a continuum. Does this land for you? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I write at the end of the book about caretaking and how much I

and how aptly I think that summarizes our role here. At the time that I was writing that, we were about to have this little daughter of ours who's now eight months old and becoming a parent or contemplating, becoming a parent, I think makes it very clear in some sense that the job is caretaking, but of course it is not limited to our children. I believe us to be caretakers and stewards

of everything around us, of one another, of ideals we believe in, of the world itself. And certainly, I believe we live in a time that really calls on us to act on that caretaking impulse as much as possible. So yeah, I mean, I absolutely share that feeling. It's nicely put on, I often feel like, well, the whole point is kindness. What else are we doing here if we're not being kind to one another?

But I actually think that even more act of notion of our job is to give, we are trees that give shade in our own way. Whatever that may be, it's quite beautiful and a good kind of summons to our best selves. Let me ask you one last question. You said I have no claim to being a Buddhist. Some curious earlier you said the world distracts us all the time, even though you have a suspicion that our job is to pay attention given the chaos and cacophony and our lack of control over that. What do you do to remember to wake up?

It's interesting. I mean, for many, many, many, many years, my answer to that would have been that I run than to run our most of my adult life and I find in running that curious kind of attentiveness that actually comes for a lot of the world dropping away, there's a kind of attention that almost feels like not paying attention. You're just kind of purely in the world and of the world and it's a beautiful and restorative feeling and it does help but it sometimes kind of sustains me well beyond the daily run or whatever it may be. But I'll tell you having a baby is a great way to pay attention. A wonderful thing about babies is all they say is pay attention to me. You know, they need your focus all the time and they deserve it all the time. And best of all, they've

rewarded all the time. I mean, it's just so joyful and delightful. And I do find my daughter to be possibly the highest example of something I also get from my partner and from all those I love, which is the kind of reminder of whatever else may be going on in your life. It is actually this kind of pure, beautiful voluviveness of the humans around you that that merit our attention. I feel that every time I pick my daughter up from a nap or you know every time she just kind of gleefully looks up at me from two things she's banging together. So I find that very helpful. I'm beyond that. I guess I would say what I said earlier, which is the natural world. I'm very restored to attentiveness by this incredible place we live by streams, by rivers,

by mountains, by strange snapping turtle of enormous size that was making its way across my backyard in the rain before I hopped on this call. All of that, you just kind of suddenly sit up and you're like, ah, right, you know, the world. I should look at this. It's great. It's a great place to leave it. But you do owe me this. Can you please plug all of your books and anything else you've put out into the world that people might want to go find after having had the pleasure of listening to you for the last

little while? Oh, gosh, sure. I mean, once again, I wish I could summon my father, who would, you know, just kind of march all of you by the shoulder blades into your nearest wonderful bookstore and command your purchasing in the direction of my books. But I guess, most of all, I would just love it if people wanted to check out the new book. It's called Lost and Found. As you heard, it is partly a memoir about losing my father and falling in love, but also

very much a reflection on these categories of loss and discovery that all of us live with in so many complicated and interesting and wonderful ways. And I would say that, although it is partly a book about grief, I think of this as very much a book about love and happiness and happy families. And I hope it brings happiness to a bunch of readers. Do you. I'm going to be able to have a look at the community. I'm going to be able to have a look at the community.

I'm going to be able to have a lot of fun with the community. I'm going to be able to have a lot of fun with the community. I'm going to be able to have a lot of fun with the community. I'm going to be able to have a It was absolutely a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks again to Catherine, really great to meet her. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. They include Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir,

Justine Davy, Kim Baikamah, Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Pliant. Also our good friends over at Ultraviolet Audio, who do our audio engineering. Coming up on Wednesday, a brand new episode with Mary Frances O'Connor, a neuroscientist who explains how our minds make sense of loss and grief. O'Connor's interview is the scientific companion to today's conversation with Katherine Schultz. Both are part of our Mental Health Reboot series running throughout the month of May.

We'll see you on Wednesday for that. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell

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