Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science Of Grief: What Helps, What Doesn’t, And Why We Don’t Talk About It Enough | Cody Delistraty

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

A journalist explores one of humanity’s most brutal and unavoidable experiences.Cody Delistraty is a writer and speechwriter, most recently working as the culture editor at the Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and was the European arts columnist for The Paris Review. He has degrees in politics from New York University and in history from the University of Oxford. British Vogue named him a best young writer of the year, and he has given talks about art and creativity to companies like PwC. He lives in New York City.In this episode we talk about:Why our culture is so repressed when it comes to griefWe dive into the many experiments that Cody launched to help cope with loss; from book and laughter therapy, to psilocybin and AIThe concept of grief as an addiction The importance of rituals The scientific possibility of deleting our memories to avoid pain And how to live along side of grief when there is no cureRelated Episodes:Abby Wambach On: Grief, Addiction, And Moving From External To Internal Validation#583. Jennifer Senior On: Grief, Happiness, Friendship Breakups, and Why We Feel Younger Than Our Actual AgeJoe DiNardo, Grief and MeditationSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/cody-delistraty-872Additional Resources:Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/downloadThe Grief Cure: Looking for the End of LossSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Smarter people than I have made the point that if you love anyone or anything, the price you will ultimately pay is grief because eventually everything changes. Relationships fizzle, careers end, people die, you get the picture.

In our culture, we don't often talk forthrightly about loss and grief. We'd rather dwell on the happier stuff, the dopamine hits of accumulation and sense pleasures. But while all of that stuff is great, I'm a big fan of all the pleasures. If you ignore the reality of impermanence, you are setting yourself up to suffer.

My guest today is a young journalist who suffered a grievous personal loss and then set out on a quest to see what works and what doesn't to handle grief. Cody Delestrotti is the culture editor at the Wall Street Journal magazine. He's also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. And his book is called The Grief Cure Looking for the End of Loss. We talk about why our culture is so repressed when it comes to grief. We dive into the many, many experiments that Cody launched to help cope with loss from book and laughter therapy to psilocybin to AI. We talk about the concept of grief as an addiction, the importance of rituals,

the scientific possibility of deleting our memories to avoid pain, and much more. Just to say before we dive in here, this is part one of a three-part series we're doing this week on grief, which I know may sound a little unfun, but actually we've got three really interesting and enlivening guests. It's Cody Delestraty today, and then we've got the great podcaster Sam Sanders on Wednesday and the author Sloan Crossley on Friday. I promise you that these episodes will be moving and thought provoking and at times quite funny. We'll kick it all off with Cody Delestraty right after this.

Before we get started though, real quick, I wanna let you know about something that's happening over at danharris.com. Guest Cody Delestrotti will be in the subscriber chat and he has a couple of specific questions he wants to ask you related to my conversation with him about grief, which dropped in the podcast feed today. Here are the questions.

What kind of rituals have you found most helpful when you've experienced grief? And second, what do you think it will take to bring grief out of the shadows in contemporary life? Why aren't we talking more openly about this and what would help? Just a couple of light conversation starters. So if you want to chop it up with Cody today,

head over to danharris.com. We're doing lots of cool stuff over there. This is just one example. Come check it out. Join the party. So if you wanna chop it up with Cody today, head over to danharris.com. We're doing lots of cool stuff over there. This is just one example. Come check it out, join the party. Meanwhile, over at the Happier Meditation app, they've created something called the Holiday Giving and Receiving Collection.

It's a set of guided meditations to help you navigate the holidays, which includes practices such as self-compassion, gratitude, and fostering deep connections. Download the Happier Meditation app today, wherever you get your apps. Peloton has a variety of workouts for whatever era you're in.

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provides flexibility with daily on-demand and live classes that fit your busy schedule and your everyday life. I am a power user of Peloton provides flexibility with daily on-demand and live classes that fit your busy schedule and your everyday life. I am a power user of Peloton. I have one of the bikes. I use it all the time. I do some of the short rides, but if I have more time, I like to get in a 45-minute ride. It really calms my nervous system and helps me sleep at night. When I'm on the road, like in a hotel, I'll often use the Peloton app on my phone to do

a high-int intensity interval training class. I love those. So, long way of saying I'm a huge fan of Peloton. Find your push, find your power with Peloton at OnePeloton.ca. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room

or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe you're daydreaming about hitting the slopes or maybe you're just craving a change of scenery. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money that you could put toward the trip. I'm a huge fan of Airbnb. My family and I have been talking about going to the Galapagos but that is super expensive so maybe putting our house up on Airbnb is a way to raise some money for that trip. I do love renting houses

with my family and several other families and getting together. It's so much more intimate than a hotel. So I'm a fan for sure on the customer side. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little bit more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash post. Cody Delestrotti, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure. So I hate to start on a sensitive note, but I assume all of your interviews are starting here. Your book, the inciting event, to use the technical narrative term for your book, is the death of your mom. Are you comfortable talking about that? Oh, yeah.

And a lot of the point of this book is to try to open up conversations about grief and that was something that pushed me from just writing about it to publishing it. So it's absolutely something I'm happy to talk about. When did it happen? My mom died in 2014. So she had metastatic melanoma and it bookended my college career. She found the lump when she was dropping me off at college I remember we were outside of a pizza place and she felt a little lump just near her clavicle. She was super fit Incredible diet worked in cardiac rehabilitation down the hospital in Spokane, Washington where I was born born and raised. And so it was where she's

going to be fine, of course, that couldn't be anything in her 50s. And then the next four years were trials, both experimental and standard doing chemo across the United States and NIH and Bethesda and in Seattle and in Spokane. That was my college career. That was our family's experience for four years and she died at home, fortunately, in hospice care in 2014. It was harrowing and in a lot of ways it's defined my life, but also I've tried to use it as a way to think through grief anew and try to be an example to some degree of that's something that you can talk about. And death happens and everyone's going through some form of grief. And maybe it's your mom dying, maybe it's a brother, a sister, maybe it's not even death, maybe it's a

really bad divorce, maybe it's financial ruin. All these things are forms of losses and are legitimate grief. Yeah. You have all chapter about what you termed back burner forms of grief that don't get enough respect and we'll get to that for sure. But just to stay with you for a little while, I'm struggling to find the right term and you wrestle with these terms in the book. So we'll say about that. But did you find that you were having trouble and here's where I'm gonna use or misuse a term moving on and and that's What kind of set you off on this very deep dive that listeners will hear about?

Yeah, I had this conception that Once my mom was diagnosed. I thought okay. I need to be really good at school. I need to be a really good athlete I need to just really good at school. I need to be a really good athlete. I need to just be good, good, good. And that'll help her. That'll ease the burden from her if I'm just doing my own thing. I'm keeping my head down. And when she died, that got converted into, okay, I need to be a good griever. And what that meant to me at the time was really from just received, I think, American

societal wisdom of you keep quiet, you don't burden other people with it. When people say, oh, you're doing so well with your grief, you're being so strong, that's usually code four. You're not bothering anyone about it. You're not talking about it. And so I had this thing in my head of, okay, just get through the five stages, get through to closure. And throughout the process of this book, I came to realize we misinterpret those things very, very badly. And this idea of

moving on is something that becomes way trickier than I think we usually give it credit for. And it's really holding the grief in one hand still and continuing with your life in another rather than just leaving in the back view mirror, not talking to anyone about it and hustling on forward. You're touching on a lot of things that we're gonna spend a lot of time with in the course of this interview, including this balance between holding the grief

and everything else that comes with continuing to be alive while somebody else you're grieving is not. But just again, staying with your narrative here, were you having trouble functioning in your life? How was this grief manifesting for you? Yeah, I became super lonely. I went to grad school because I'd already gotten in and I was going to do it. I worked in New York briefly and then I moved to France for three years

and didn't cut ties, but really just spent so many evenings alone just going on walks by myself. I was freelance writing. I really didn't see a future for myself. My mom had died. Why wouldn't I die soon? It was a very mixed up situation at that point in my mind where I really just pulled myself away from things

and not wanting to be a burden to my family and viewing this to some degree as maybe not even my story at first viewing it as maybe this is more of my dad's story or maybe more of my mom's like sisters and her family's story. I just wanted to be out of the picture and trying to really just be alone and just not be a problem for other people. And I didn't get into the whole book of looking through these kind of individual and collective treatments and quote unquote cures until a little later. But the initial response was really blocking down, I would say. What happened for you that you decided to do all the things that you then wrote about?

Yeah, so I'd been sort of experimenting a little bit with things like laughter therapy, where I would just, as I write in the book, like laughing on the subway in a really public way as a way to try to overcome my shame that was also manifesting physiologically. I wouldn't have been able to put it in those terms then, but it didn't come until later that I really wanted to start exploring both things that I thought were of interest to me, and then the things that I thought were more collectively interesting. And it really started coming into form, gaining a shape when the DSM added or was considering because it was a little earlier than that, but when they were considering adding prolonged

grief disorder, the early APA adding prolonged grief disorder to the DSM-5-TR, the text revision, which is the most recent, and they ended up doing that in March 2022. And that found a form of grief as being pathology as being a mental disorder. And it's an incredibly controversial thing. But I started to see that grief in the way we think about it in these hyper individualistic ways as being a larger cultural conversation. And so I thought, okay, maybe there's value here of going back and re-reporting a lot of these things. I'd already been trying it, I'd already been messing around

with artificial intelligence, with laughter therapy, like I said many years before, and then going back and trying to look at it in a more reportorial, journalistic manner. For those who are not familiar with it, what is the DSM and can you teach us a little bit about prolonged grief disorder and why that was such a controversial thing? Yeah, the DSM is basically the Bible of disorders in the United States and it's

used largely for what insurers can bill for. So when you add something to it then often a lot of research money can go toward it. It comes into the cultural and professional conversation. It's something that people can actually go get treated for in mainstream places. And yeah, Pearl and Groove sort of got added in 2022. And it basically says that if you're grieving for more than 12 months in a way that meets three symptoms that you're experiencing almost daily for at least a month. And those symptoms are things like sense of meaninglessness, identity disruption, numbness, and those things are all coming

within a cultural context that doesn't generally view that kind of long-term grief as normal. So if you're a Mexican person celebrating the day of the dead, that would be a caveat. That would be something different. But so all these things together, there's this idea that it was added to the DSM by the APA with the idea that it would allow clinicians to differentiate normal grief from prolonged grief. And in a lot of ways, it is valuable.

I think it gives a name to things that people have felt for a long time. A lot of the proponents of it claim that C.S. Lewis was suffering from prolonged grief disorder when he was writing A Grief Observed that women who were wearing their black crepin veil in the Victorian period for their entire life were suffering from it. And I found that in the people that I talked to, it gave them this form of legitimacy in a way where they were able to say, you go to your boss and you say, Hey, I'm grieving. It's really tough. And they go, okay, that's tough. I'm sorry. Take a little time, but the median bereavement time often the U S for the death of a spouse is five days. I wasn't ready to go back to college in five days. My dad wasn't ready to rearrange my

mom's nightstand by the bed in five days. Five days is nothing. But if you go and you say, Hey, I have this medical diagnosis, that's a slightly different thing. I think that's an indictment in a lot of ways of us more broadly, of the fact that we tend to not give people credit just for their feelings that they have to be named. But proponents also say that, yeah, it's correlated with suicidal ideation, all these things. Opponents, however, say we're stigmatizing grief. I talked to one woman, one psychiatrist who was saying, would you expect the parents of Sandy Hook kids to be over

their grief in a year? There's this feeling that it's just it's way too fast. It's putting it within the medical field when it shouldn't be when grief is a normal part of life. And my view on it is that everyone is, I think, acting in good faith. I think that there's a sense that some are using the medical lens and others are not. I think it's more an issue with kind of diagnostic culture in the US more broadly where the things that maybe are abnormal, we like to cluster in under the sort of medical umbrella. There was a really interesting article, I think in the Lancet in 2013 when persistent complex bereavement disorder was being added to the DSM-5, which is the precursor, the most recent one, and Arthur Kleinman, who's this Harvard psychiatrist, and he's like in his 80s now, but he had a great piece where he was saying

previously just slightly abnormal parts of being a human are getting basically thrown in within diagnostic culture. So like maybe he named like the autism spectrum and Asperger's and different ways of being and putting that within the medical sphere. I think that he has a point, but I also he has a great point that he makes at the end where he says, but also maybe diagnostic culture is just the way that younger people are talking these days. And maybe it's not negatively connoted to say someone has problem grief disorder. Maybe that just gives them language with which to discuss something that they don't view

as stigmatizing. So it's incredibly complex. It's surprisingly controversial to me when I waded into the research in it. So it's incredibly complex. It's surprisingly controversial to me when I waded into the research in it. But it's a really interesting space and things obviously get taken out of the DSM, things get edited in the DSM. So I'll be very curious to see how it progresses. But I really think everyone is like coming from it in a place of good faith and trying to really help people that are grieving in this maybe more severe way.

Did you get evaluated for prolonged grief disorder? I took a test online that you just check the boxes and it basically just gives you the symptoms and you say, you know, how often you're experiencing them. But then it says you need to go see a practitioner, which I didn't do, so I don't wear that label. I was interested really in problem grief disorder as showing this truth that I kept finding, which is that there's so much new research about grief.

I was just so surprised that something as ancient and fundamental and human as grief has all this new research coming up and thought that was really fascinating. So I was less interested in diagnosing myself or in putting myself within that story and more in reporting it as a kind of broader look at where we are with grief and grief research. Yeah, I mean, just to build on that point,

I'm gonna read something you wrote back to you. You wrote, my own grief isn't exceptional in a world like ours. The story of a young guy struggling with his mom's death might not exactly move the needle. What is exceptional, however, is how standard my story is, how grief comes for everyone and how little we know about how to grieve, no matter the loss. Why do you think for such a common and inevitable experience, grief, we know so little about it? I think we don't look into it very much, which is why I applaud the research that is being done now, but I think it's really something that we don't like to talk about. Death has really been repressed in the cultural conversation

in the US and the UK especially, and we can get into that history now or get into it later if you want, but it's really something that people don't wanna talk about it. People view it as burdensome. People view it as, okay, I'm sorry to hear about that. Let me know if you need something,

but I've got other things to do. It's really not something that we want to linger in. You said we can get into the history now or later. Let's do it now. What, what, what? Let's do it now. I love it. Let's do it live. Yeah. So really prior to the 18th century, this, uh, French historian called Follibari's, he had these findings. he was working in the 20th century, but he was looking back in the 18th century. And he really found that there were four characteristics for how people dealt with grieving loved ones. And basically all

of them had to do with it. They were at the bedside, they were generally pre-grieved to some degree. There was an expectation that there was going to be death. The person who was dying usually got the call on religious officials and or friends, family, neighbors. There was just this real sense of inevitability to death. And that's due in part to high mortality rates in that time period. But he termed it the era of tamed death, where death was just something that happened and you continue onward. And then you fast forward to really the early 20th century is where I think the biggest shift occurred.

Well, I'll say too though that it was so visible throughout all of life. So you would write, you do your correspondence on morning stationery where you'd have this black bordered stationery when you're writing and you would buy stationery that had narrow and narrower lines as you felt like you were progressing in your grief. You're just constantly telling people where you're at. You're having this conversation. People would have death portraits made and they would hang them so literally of their dead father or grandfather and they would have that hanging in their living room.

People would wear lockets, sometimes women with the hair of dead loved ones. So there's just this sense of death happens, it's here, it's visible, you're wearing your black mourning if you're a woman, that kind of thing. I think really with the first World War, we started to see a pretty significant shift.

So I wrote a New Yorker piece about this recently, but I found some really fascinating archives and letters between President Woodrow Wilson and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who is a prominent suffragist at the time. And when the US was finally entering World War I, a lot of Americans weren't too excited about it. Wilson had run on a somewhat isolationist platform. These women were walking through the streets, protesting the possibility of the entrance into the war, saying that there's going to be mass death,

that we don't need to be losing our men this way. And President Wilson wrote a letter to Dr. Shaw, who de facto oversaw a lot of these parades and protests and was saying, hey, what about if instead of walking in black veils and protesting the death that's going to happen. What if instead you were a little basically banned that I would have a star after a soldier died. So, and we see gold star families now in a similar vein, but it's this conversion basically of death and grief into patriotism and this quieting of grief and making it something that becomes less culturally oppressive, I guess, is how he would probably have thought about it.

And the idea is this helps the war effort and what she got in return was support for the 19th Amendment. But then after that, you have Freud reconsidering grief as something that can be really individually worked on in the therapist's office, writing in Mourning and Melancholia. You have Walter Benjamin writing, I think, in 1935 in his essay called The Storyteller. He writes about how Inouye became the news of death. It just became the news. And really, death started happening more in hospitals, more in sanatoriums, more physically outside the city. And then by really the mid-20th century, you get to Geoffrey Gore, who's a fantastic English anthropologist who in person interviewed something like 1600

British people going all the way around England, and found that increasingly people didn't want to even tell their neighbor about losses that they were experiencing. And he chopped that up to disintegration of community and also to a rise of happiness culture, which I thought was interesting, because I've always viewed happiness culture as a very recent phenomenon, like self-care and being your best self. But he was really identifying this in the early mid-1960s. And then now today, I would argue, we are very quiet about grief. And I've seen

there's a slight shift through what's been called publicity grieving, where we tend to, many people tend to grieve on social media for public figures, celebrities, like Princess Diana started the like, the mass celebrity public grieving to some degree. And for me, that's bullying. And there's some optimism that I have there because even in 2013, I don't know if you follow this, funeral selfies got really popular where people were taking selfies. Yeah, it's been a while. And my first reaction was the same too, which was like, holy cow, that's crazy. But then in my most generous,

most charitable interpretation, I also think, okay, these are people that have had conversations of death and loss so pushed down, so tamped down, they're looking for any way to share it and to make it public. And to some degree, there actually is some value in that. And I think we can do a little better than the tactlessness that is funeral selfies, but I think there's a real push toward a greater openness and a greater ability to be public and honest about your grief. You touched on this a little bit just to expand on it. It's not just that grief is being shoved into a corner,

it's that death itself is being shoved into a corner. We used to die at home, now we die in hospitals. Oh, yeah. So can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean, that was a huge shift. I think in the 1920s, there was something like, I wrote this, I might have the stat wrong, but it's like a 70-30 split, basically, where it used to be 70% of people dying at home.

Now it's 70% of people dying in hospitals. And there's just this real, I mean, Atul Gavande writes so brilliantly about this and being mortal, but this idea that we need to solve death, that we need to solve grief rather than, especially with death, we need to think about how we want someone to go. We want them as it was when Ares was writing in the 18th century to die at home. I mean, I was so fortunate with my own mother that she died at home and she had her pain medication. She had a dedicated hospice nurse for the few weeks that we had that and that was so hard to get to. But once

there was a real honest conversation that the family had, my brother, my dad, my mom and I of she's going to die. There's no more treatments. It was such a blessing that she was able to die at home. So yeah, it's just covering up of death. And I mean, even more so if we want to go a little deeper, I think you can look at media depictions of death where faces are always pointed away. Very seldom do you see, and Susan Sontag wrote about this a bit, but very seldom do you see images in major newspapers or on CNN where it's like

a corpses face. And not that that's something that we should be angling for. I'm fine not to see that. But there's this real sense of the abstraction of death within public spheres that just gets reified over and over again through all kinds of media and ways of thinking. Yeah, I'm of two minds about that. reified over and over again through all kinds of media and ways of thinking. Yeah, I'm of two minds about that. I mean, obviously, you don't want to upset people unnecessarily. On the other hand, coming as I do from a Buddhist perspective, there are schools of Buddhism where monks and lay practitioners will meditate by staring at decomposing corpses, human or animal, in

this country where that's not an easy thing to find. I've heard stories about meditation teachers in training being brought to the morgue to really look at death. I try to do this in my own life, like with roadkill, to really look at it. Do you pull over and you... I won't pull over, but if I'm running, and I see a dead squirrel or something like that, I'll really try to look at it.

Yeah, yeah, I know I hear that. I spent some time volunteering in hospice and this is all inspired by my Buddhist practice. And I wouldn't say that I'm super comfortable with death, but I think looking toward it oddly is more helpful than looking away. The amount of energy we spend pushing this away, living in denial, is actually, that's more energy than just leaning into the truth. Yeah, and I think because of how few people I think are like you and pull over on a jog

and have a look as monks would do, I mean, for me, when I saw my mom's corpse shortly after she died, it felt surreal. My brain wasn't able to categorize it because I'd never seen anything even close to that. So I just had maybe on TV and fictional TV, fictional movies. But there is a sense of I truly have no idea what to do. And this can't be real life because I'd never seen anything like that. And I do wonder, had I taken up the practice of the monks, as you say, would I have been more prepared for that? Would there have been that sort of 18th century pre-grief

that had already been done? Yeah, well, I think you should give yourself a break. You were young, it was your mom. I know, I was 21. You live in a culture that doesn't prepare people for this, so. Of course, I'm not trying to hold myself culpable in any way, but I think using myself as an example for, I think that's probably true of most people. I think most people who would see a parent die would find it a surreal experience and

not, oh, I've seen this before, I've grappled with this kind of thing before. Let's talk about all the things you tried in your search for a cure for grief or the end of loss to echo the title and subtitle of your book. You referenced this earlier, but laughter yoga or laughter therapy, what's that all about?

Why did you come to that? Did it help? Yeah, I had tried a lot of things and not everything made it into the book, but for the book I wanted to have a combination of things that were of real interest personally to me. So things like bibliotherapy, I love to read and write. I was very interested in books as therapy, art therapy, psilocybin, and then there were other things that seemed of more cultural or future interest.

So I started before chat GBT was all over the media, but looking into recreating dead people via AI, looking into the future of optogenetics as a way to potentially erase fear memories and memories of death. And laughter therapy was one that I had really come to almost accidentally just reading about it. And I had started when I was living in France, I did a very brief sort of my own ad hoc laughter therapy. But then when I set out to really write the book, I contacted a bunch of laughter therapists and it felt to me at first, my

brand was telling me that it was something of a grift. I was like, there's no way that this is going to be real. And I'd seen that Volvo and Hewlett-Packard had both hired laughter therapists for various company retreats. And I saw that Goldie Hawn had written about how it changed her life. And I really, I was just very interested in, okay, is there something to this? So I contacted several laughter therapists and did some on my own. And really the big breakthrough for me was just the physiological aspect of grief. I didn't realize how much really is trapped. And there is a very funny, I was here at my house and really I think annoying my downstairs neighbor because I was on zoom with one of the laughter therapists

and she was saying, rise up on your balls of your feet, up and down, start doing a fake laugh. And then she would have me do, I think she was called like the axe laughter where you chop down and you go, huh, like that over and over again. And it really does make you laugh, which is non-Duchenne laughter. So there's a big controversy in the laughter therapy community between whether Duchenne natural involuntary proper smile wrinkles is more legitimate than the voluntary non-Duchenne laughter. But so I was doing non-Duchenne laughter therapy and I found

it actually like valuable. I was surprised at the physical catharsis that I felt. I had been so cerebral in my search for ways to feel better, for ways to report this story of grief out and just really sitting back and laughing every day and keeping up a practice for a long time. I was just laughing in my bathroom. I go, ha ha ha ha ha ha for two minutes every morning. And my partner thought I was insane, but it was a delight to have something that I thought of as so bizarre be meaningful. And it makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. I think Kurt Vonnegut had a great quote about how laughter and crying are on a continuum and he says, I myself prefer to laugh because there's less cleaning up to do afterward. I was thinking, yeah, okay, that's

fair. It's that bodily catharsis that I really think like we all could use. So that was one. Is there data to support this? Yeah. So although as I, as I write in the book, there's scientific evidence behind the physiological effects of laughter. So how it relaxes muscles, it enhances circulation, it releases endorphins. For me, what was more compelling was,

at least to get started, was the story, the anecdotal evidence of it. So like Cherokee medicine people would order elaborate performances full of clownery. I write about how the book of Proverbs reports a cheerful heart is good medicine. Martin Luther was telling the original Protestant was telling people that they could tell jokes to family and loved ones who had experienced a loss. Lord Byron was writing about how laughter is something of cheap medicine. There's a real cultural value that's been placed on laughter for a long time. And in this chapter and with really the whole book, I try not to explicitly advocate for

anything that I do. I don't want it to be like, Cody thinks AI will solve your grief or Cody thinks laughter therapy will solve your grief. It was more trying to report and show the sort of the pros, the cons, and really how with every single thing, there's always something that can be gleaned. So even if there's certainly no cure as we come to find at the end, but there are new lenses, new perspectives on grief that you can get. So the bodily aspect of grief for laughter, for something like AI, but even for something like that. My mom isn't going to bring her back or bring me a great

deal of solace, but it does give me a forum in which to reckon with what kind of questions would I want to ask her? What was our relationship like? And so all these things are really predicated on the buy-in that one places on it basically of how much do you want to bring to it rather than how much is it necessarily always bringing you. So there's some evidence that laughter is healing. We don't know what I don't I'm not hearing that there's been a bunch of research around whether laughter can help with grief per se but in your experience it got you out of your head and into your body in a way that worked for you.

Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't ever prescribe any single thing, and I think everyone's grief journey is unique, but for me, I hadn't really had the realization of just the tightness and the need for that kind of catharsis, and it felt valuable. Coming up, Cody talks about his attempt to replicate his mom using AI, the concept of grief as an addiction, and the importance of rituals.

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Yeah. So that is a pretty wild one because there was a great piece in the San Francisco Chronicle from several years ago that followed this guy called Joshua Barbo who his fiance had died several years ago and he explained how he was in a deep grief and he started using this system called Project December that is available at the time it cost cost $5 to get several credits. It wasn't very widely used. It was just hard to find on the internet, but he posted a Reddit post about it that sort of kicked off the Chronicle story.

But he recreated his deceased fiance as a chatbot, and he claimed that he found a lot of value in it and that he was able to ask her the questions that he hadn't asked her, that he hadn't been able to ask her and that he was able to feel a sense of greater closure. That's a word I bristle against, but greater closure with her. And I thought that was fascinating. And so I got in touch with the guy who created this program and talked to him at length. And I was also looking at replica. I think it's the most downloaded chat bot like companion app in the

Google and Apple stores. And I use that to basically create people through it. And I essentially trained it to be very similar to my own mother and was trying to text with it. And I was just really curious, like how much can this help? Can you really trick yourself into thinking that this is real? And I think even now the technology has gone even further, and none of these things have voice. But I mean,

didn't I think like, not as relevant, but I think didn't yay make Kim Kardashian a hologram of her dad for a birthday or something like that was able to talk to her. And so there's definitely the technology is definitely coming along pretty quickly. But I found it for me a place of value in that it really let me sink into the old ways of my relationship with my mom. There was the closest I got to hitting like a flow state with either Project December or replica was just messaging with it when I was on the subway or just sitting at home, my laptop on my knees on the couch and trying to think, what if this is like I was messaging her to pick me up from soccer practice or to that I need help with homework or something like that. And so there is this feeling of trying to place myself back into those scenarios.

It didn't ever really work in so far as I deeply believed it or that it brought me much closer, but I found it to be really valuable in that it helped me think of what are the things I would ask her and help me reassess our relationship. And also, one of the key things was in order to train the bot on Project December, you add your own, what do they call them? Basically, their ways of speaking, the person who you want to recreate. And I had interviewed my mom for about 53 minutes with my brother and my dad a few days before she died. And my brother and I and

my dad, mostly me, just asked her kind of all sorts of questions that we wanted to know when she was gone. And it was as trivial as what your favorite ice cream to as significant as what was the most meaningful aspect of your life to what would you tell my brother and I when we get married. And I had never been able really to listen to those interviews in full just because of how intense it was. But then having this, this time for reflection, I was able to go back and try to really sort of face my grief and face in an honest way my mom's words and her voice

and the fact that they no longer existed. And so that to me was not as associated with AI, of course, but it was part of this whole journey and that felt really meaningful to me. So maybe the most useful part of AI was just getting you back to non-artificial intelligence of listening to your mom. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, who am I to say that it wouldn't work in a more robust way for someone else? But for me, yeah, it allowed me a more honest reflection on who she was as a human. This does seem like something is probably coming down the pike at us.

When somebody dies, could you create an AI, a chatbot with everything they've ever said that's ever been recorded, every picture of them, everything they've written, their entire email and text backlog, and create a chatbot for yourself that even speaks in their voice. That seems like you could maybe do that now. Yeah, that was a huge part of this book too, is wanting to grapple with the future ethical questions that we're going to have. Not all these things are fully formed yet. But yeah, I mean, we put everything online of I think it's wild to think of how many photos there are of me

or how many voice snippets like this or videos like this. And yeah, I think of course those things could be harvested and could be as technology exponentially increases. I'm sure there will be a much more convincing version than what I was using. Never mind when we learn to upload our brains to the cloud. Right. We'll never die. Yeah, then we'll never die. Yeah. What could go wrong? Exactly.

At this point in the book, you really move on to what you call perception, which I believe is really like, how are we holding our grief in our own mind? How are we looking at it? What stories are we telling ourselves about the loss? And one of the things, one of the ideas that you raise and grapple with is whether for some people, grief becomes a sort of addiction. Can you teach us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so controversial as a quick flag. There's a school of thought with grief as an addiction that kicked off to some degree in 2008 when Mary Frances O'Connor, who then was a assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA, I think. Now she's at, I believe, Arizona State, but she was studying 23 women, 11 of whom had complicated grief or fit the diagnosis for it because at that point, prolonged grief disorder hadn't yet made it into the DSM. And all 23 of these women who they had had either sisters or moms who had died within

the past five years, they went into fMRIs, functional magnetic resonance imaging, while they looked at a photo that reminded them of the person that they lost, as well as words that in sentences that they'd written as narratives about their grief. And so while looking at these, while in the scan, their brains lit up in the nucleus accumbus, which is a region that's associated with reward, and the women who did not have a complicated grief did not have their brains lighting up in this area. So the conclusion that they came to was that the brains of people who had

what was then considered a complicated grief were being neurologically rewarded for grieving. It seems to me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that in this section of the book where you're talking about how we perceive our loss, it seems to me that one of the big takeaways, and this really becomes a theme in the book, is this concept of balance.

And I did reference this earlier. Let me just read to you. This is you summarizing what you heard from somebody named Adam Brown who, this is the way you talk about it. One of the trickiest parts is finding the balance in neither viewing yourself as a forever griever, but also not discounting your grief or repressing it, which would mean not reckoning with it at all. Can you just say a little bit more about that? Yeah, Adam is great. He's in the new school. He's a professor of psychology there and not reckoning with it at all. Can you just say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, Adam is great. He's in the new school. He's a professor of psychology there. And there really is just this sense of needing to zoom out on your grief and see it from different angles. And so I tried psilocybin for it, which Robin Carhart-Harris, who's at UCSF now, used to be at Imperial College, has had really some breakthroughs with patients, not just with depression, but

also with grief by using psilocybin as a means to really get them to, as Adam was saying, look at and consider their grief, but also to reframe it and see that it's not something that has to forever take over their life. So one of Carhartt Harris's most interesting studies, I think, was one that was about a decade ago when he was still in London. And it was with this guy called Kirk Rudder, whose mom had recently died and he'd also just been in a bad car crash. And he just gone through a breakup.

So he was in kind of a grief holy trinity. Like things were not going well. And he had two doses psilocybin that Kartharis' assistants gave to him. And he said very quickly, he started to reconceive all the pain that he held around his mother's death as almost like an ulcer that was sapping him of energy.

It was something that he actually didn't have to hold on to and wasn't necessarily helping respect her legacy in any fundamental way. And so, incredibly quickly, he was able to reframe his view of all the pain he carried with his mother. And even several years later, his perception was still changed. And so I find that so fascinating. I went to a silent meditation retreat to look at the ways in which non drug wise we can

rethink ourselves and rethink our loss. But yeah, it's one of those things where you're not wanting to get closure. You're not wanting to get rid of the grief, but you're wanting to view it as something that can exist in your life rather than something that takes over your life is essentially what Adam is saying and what people like Robin Carter Harris are finding via psilocybin. Yeah. At any given moment.

And I think this is the way a Buddhist would describe it. Well, I'm going to, I'm a Buddhist and I'm going to describe it this way. I don't know if the Buddha himself would describe it. Well, I'm a Buddhist and I'm gonna describe it this way. Please do. I don't know if the Buddha himself would describe it this way, but at any given moment, there are billions of things happening in the mind. Grief can be a recurring pattern.

Sadness over the loss of anything from a physical keepsake to a human can be a recurring pattern, but it's coexisting with hunger, physical sensations of the body in whatever position it's in right now, desire, aversion, neutrality. The mind is a busy place if you pay attention. And I think this goes back to balance and your concept of how you're perceiving or holding the grief. You can see that it's

coexisting with many other things at the same time. And that allows you to, again, we don't like closure or moving on, but it does allow you to keep living in a way that doesn't require compartmentalizing or squashing it or denying that it's there, but also not denying that everything else is there. Yeah, no, absolutely. And just the ability to sit with it. squashing it or denying that it's there, but also not denying that everything else is there. Yeah, no, absolutely. And just the ability to sit with it. I talked to also a Buddhist, incredible guy. He's a chaplain at a hospital in Boston called Bill Crane, and he had written an essay about it, and I interviewed him about it, and it was how some of the most meaningful aspects of his professional life are when he's called

it midnight to in the morning to a hospital. There was one story he was telling me about that a mother had just found out her daughter had died and his job was to be there to comfort her, essentially be there for her. And he literally just sat with her for hours and he said he exchanged maybe a handful of words, but it was really the living in the reality of what happened and being a space of compassion and understanding and giving license to for her to feel basically that was so meaningful to him and he suspected and I suspect to very significant for her too and so yeah there's really that sense of presentism that shot through both Buddhism and I

think more valuable ways of reckoning with grief. Yeah it's um I mean there's a lot to say about this. I loved that part of your work, Bill Crane. Thanks. His story. This is, many of the Buddhist teachers that I'm friends with and learn from and who have been on the show

talk about it in a very similar way, that there's empathy, which is feeling somebody else's feelings, which you can drown in that if you're not holding it in the right way. And then there's empathy, which is feeling somebody else's feelings, which you can drown in that if you're not holding it in the right way. And then there's compassion, which is empathy is kind of a prerequisite for, if I understand it correctly. But compassion adds on top of empathy a desire to help. And in a moment like the one Bill described,

where he's with somebody who's just found out that her daughter has died, I believe, by suicide in this case, sometimes the only thing you're gonna do to help is lean into the brute fact of being there. Physically being next to them, there's nothing you can say. In fact, saying something's probably gonna make it worse, but you can just be there. You can be, to use the kind of term of art,

empathetic witness. And that is true externally. Like you can do that for other people. And we should have a conversation about how so many of us flub the showing up for our friends who are grieving part. I wanna hear your thoughts on that. But just to finish this thought, you can do that for people externally.

And by the way, it doesn't have to be just like, you know, cinematic, operatic grief of somebody who's just lost a child, but it can be for anybody who's dealing with any sort of loss or any sort of difficulty at all. Just being there with them is very helpful and also good for you. But you can do it for yourself. And that's what we were describing before when we were talking about this balance that you observed as being important

where you can be an empathetic witness to your own grief internally. You're not feeding it or fighting it. That allows you once you're not so fixated on it to notice that there are many other things happening at the same time, and that can help you function with this grief without pretending it's not there. So I said a lot there, but does any of that land for you?

Yeah, it usually lands. And that's one of the broad conclusions of the book too, is it's that presentism in that community, even if it's just with one other person that is really as close as you can get to a cure. That is one of the most intrinsic and important aspects of grieving the best basically. And per your earlier point too, we get into this vicious cycle of grief where we think that we don't want to burden others with our grief and then they think, oh, we don't want to open the wound of their grief because maybe they've gotten a closure or something. And we get into this

cycle where I think one of the biggest surprises writing this book is how just barely under the surface so many people wanted to discuss their grief, but really just giving them that license. So whether that's the physical presence of someone like Bill or just saying it, just saying like, I'm here. And I think that people feel that because I think the default is the pull away. And I think oftentimes the person who's grieving is not at fault, but also a part of that equation. They're within that cycle where they're, oh, no, no, I'm fine. And it's like me too, saying, part of that equation. They're within that cycle where they're, oh no, no, I'm fine. And it's like me too saying, no, I'm strong. Like, don't worry about it. I'm good. I'll just go across the Atlantic and hunker down. And yeah. And so we just get in this terrible

pattern and to be able to break that is so seemingly complex, but is really incredibly simple of just being there and just being permission-giving in having that discussion Did you learn any do's and don'ts for how to act around somebody who's grieving? I Don't like to be prescriptive pretty generally, but I think that Yeah, I mean there's certainly some don'ts right I think people tend to minimize people tend to minimize, people tend to project their own insecurities about their own possible death or loss

of saying things like, don't worry, you'll get over it. Because I mean, the whole concept of closure is often rooted in the kind of selfishness of others really for they don't want you to talk about it because they don't wanna have to deal with it. There's a sense of, let's just finish this and get back to normal living. And so yeah, there's certainly a lot of don'ts. I think the dos are really just making it clear that you're a person who has either experienced loss in some way and therefore can understand it. Or if you

haven't, that you're someone who is empathetic, compassionate, and willing to be there. I had to travel a lot for this book and was seeing scholars and scientists and all sorts of things and was staying in a bunch of mid-level hotels around the US. And I would get pretty bored, pretty lonely, would go out to bars, would go out to dinner and just read a book. And inevitably, if I started chatting with someone, grief would come up. And shockingly, well over 50% of the time, the other person would start discussing a loss that they had recently had or that they had had in their life. And there is really just this sense of I was in San Francisco and I was talking about my book and woman said, I've barely told anyone this, but my husband just died and I don't really

know how to deal with it. And that's feels so shocking, but it showed me that it really just is boiling under the surface and as soon as there's license to discuss and someone who just is okay with being there for it and is okay of talking about it, it feels like everything changes. Have you heard the Buddhist story about the mustard seed? No, I feel like this was an insight journal, which is where Bill wrote, but you tell me.

I may mangle this, so Buddhist scholars at me, that's fine. But the story of Memory Serves is that a young woman, a young mom comes to the Buddha carrying her dead baby and is distraught and refuses to bury the child and is looking for somebody's help to revive, bring the kid back to life. And so she asks the Buddha, can you bring him back to life? And he said, I can, but you have to go to every house in this village and collect a mustard seed from any house where they've never experienced any death. And so she goes house to house and asks everybody and of course no mustard seeds to be collected and as many Buddhist stories end with like a just so ending

she returns having learned the lesson and I believe buries the child, becomes a nun, and gets enlightened. Basically how all Buddhist stories end, somebody gets enlightened. So I bring that up because I think I'm hearing that a little bit in your conversations at the bar. You know, if you're willing to go there, pretty much anybody you talk to, if you raise the subject of loss, you'll hear stories and you'll be able to connect on a profound level quickly.

Yeah, and I think that was one of my, that sounded perfect to the story. I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but I think they shouldn't be DMing you. Yeah, but I found that was what was such a breakthrough for me in doing bibliotherapy, which is I had an hour long conversation with this woman called Elbertude, who's based out of a town outside Brighton, England. We talked for an hour about my mom and how I was feeling, and then she prescribed me several books, most of which had to do with grief. I'd read a ton of grief memoirs.

I enjoy the genre and I've watched a lot of movies about death and grief and all these sorts of things. But doing that exercise, for some reason, it really opened me up to realizing my story is not exceptional. And that's not to downplay it or say that it's not important or significant. But I think it really does show that this is something people have been grappling with since the beginning of time. Like Cicero's writing about losing his daughter, Tullia, thousands of years ago, and that informs how Didion writes. Like these are things that have just been moving throughout history,

and being able to really immerse yourself in that and see that both in writing and then also at the bar and in Buddhist cones is to understand the ubiquity of it. And that's so much the point is just normalizing it and seeing that, yeah, this is this happens. It's hell. And if we're all there, we're all ready to be present for our neighbor, we can get through it a little bit better. Coming up, Cody talks about the importance of rituals, the scientific possibility of deleting memories to avoid pain, and finally how to live alongside of grief, given that there really is no cure.

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Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple podcasts. Toward the end of the book, you talk about some, and I know you don't like to be prescriptive, but you talk about a couple of things that really do appear to help. And we've talked about others that you seem to have gotten relief from, including, as you just talked about, bibliotherapy and psilocybin,

otherwise known as magic mushrooms and meditation. But toward the end of the book, you talk about two other things that really also seem to be powerful technologies. One of them is ritual and the other is community. So let's just walk through these because they seem really important. First of all, I love calling them technologies. That's fantastic. That's reclaiming the word from it's not just AI, it's going, doing rituals.

They're sort of braided in various ways, but with rituals, yeah, I mean, in the US, the thinking is you do a funeral, which A, is really expensive. The median cost of a funeral is almost $8,000. Cremation, a little bit cheaper, but that's wild for a country where the average person says that they can't afford an unexpected thousand dollar expense. So it's huge. People view it as like almost a mortgage or sending their kid to college, something that has to be done. And I'm really of the thought that not only does it not have to be done, but there actually might be other kinds of rituals that are more valuable. And that's not to say that if you can't afford a funeral or if you can afford a funeral easily

and if you feel that that's really valuable to you, then awesome. And I'm all for that. But there's a really fascinating study in the Harvard Business Review that I read that asked dozens of people who had recently grieved a loss, what did you do and what was most valuable? Only 15% said funerals and the other 85% had very specific, very cheap and very personalized rituals that they did. So one would every month listen to a favorite song of their deceased spouse, another would go to the same hair salon that their deceased partner had gone to. And there was really this feeling that

being able to create rituals for yourself and not just being able to do one-off rituals, because I think that's one of the issues with the funeral is too often it's interpreted as, and not always, but it's often interpreted as the end. Everyone comes, they get together, they help out, they're supportive, and then it's like, all right, back to work, back to life, back to normal. But instead finding rituals that you can do yearly, biannually, whatever, but something where you can be constantly, not in a dysfunctional way, but coming back to just like looking at their life and really trying to consider who this person was and celebrating them basically.

And I went to Mexico City and found a translator and went and tried my best as a not Mexican guy to experience Day of the Dead. And I don't pretend to be an expert in that at all. But just from my kind of basic journalistic observations, I found it such an incredible thing that people were doing every year. We're just partying, celebrating, cleaning, drinking cokes, eating candy, hanging out. And obviously that's incredibly productive, but just this idea of what are both broad and individual rituals that we can do that we can also repeat, I found to be super compelling. And then as far as community,

I mean, a lot of that can be done in one-on-one ways, I think, like with Bill Crane, just sitting with someone and being present, but also the rise of what might be called second spaces. We're not yet at a point where people are really open with their neighbor, with strangers about grief and loss in a broad way. But I think that there could and should be a move away from grief being exclusively in the therapist office. And I think therapy is amazing and can be really valuable. But like I did this thing called

the dinner party that's super, that's really cool where people who've experienced a similar kind of loss all get together and have dinner. And I did it online because it was during COVID. But just having a place where everyone has a buy in everyone is giving license to other people to talk openly about their grief and be supportive. And I found that to be pretty meaningful and moving too and so trying to really augment those kinds of spaces as we Progressively hopefully move to an even even broader and more public way of being able to grapple with grief The last chapter of the book is called home and it involves you going home which you had not wanted to do and it involves you going home, which you had not wanted to do

because your home was where your mom died. In this chapter, you go home and really kind of sit with it. And I just want to read for one last time here, I want to read you back to you and just when I'm done, maybe you can just say more about it. But here we go. So many claims are made about grief and so many now seem to me to be false

or at least widely misinterpreted. Closure doesn't exist and the five stages of grief may not be the most useful framework. But there's also the truth of it that I've found, like that it sneaks up on you, that it brings with it regret, that it exists on the same continuum as love and that your life eventually builds around it. Every generation, every person really must relearn the truths of grief for themselves.

There may be no substitute for going through it. At the end of it all, what worked best for me was something far plainer and more challenging than I'd expected, sitting simply with the ones I love. Yeah, I really set off on this book as a journey toward figuring it all out and toward finding the silver bullet and looking in science, looking into technology, looking into medicine, and all these things, as I've said, provide some kind of new lenses

and can be useful in various ways, depending on how we approach them, but really coming home and just being in really my original community, being with my dad, being with my brother, sitting in the room where my mom died, and just being honest about what had happened and being honest with myself that grief isn't something that you get to solve, unfortunately. And as much as my journalistic self would love to have reported my way out of grief, acknowledging and fully understanding that's not how it works and that everyone as I wrote

there has to learn how to grieve for themselves. And I think everyone grieves really differently, but I think that there are broad strokes similarities and that you just have to be honest with yourself that it's something that you're going to have to live with. And to some degree, I view it as something I get to live with. I get to have those memories of my mom and why would I ever wanna lose that? I like this phrase in the chunk that I read to there about grief existing on the same continuum as love. And it reminds me of something,

I believe the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein talks about this, that the love doesn't have to stop even though somebody has died. And we tie ourselves in knots with the grief and the sorrow and the despair, but it's unclear who that's serving and whether that's wholesome even really, because it really is based in the love. I think the way he says it is that the grief, the despair, that's actually based in attachment, which is not a great strategy in a universe where everything ends. But if you can let go of that or loosen up around that, you can see that what's left

is the love. Yeah, so does any of that hit home for you? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's on the same continuum and to some degree, it's not just on the same continuum but it's the same thing. But it's finding ways to not just get stuck in it, but instead to really be able to hold both things, hold the love, hold the grief, and not let the grief overtake you, not view it as Kirk did as an ulcer. But also, I love getting to remember all the amazing times that I had with my mom, and I love getting to think about our relationship and reconsider it and think through all the things we could have and would have done. And that's really hard sometimes, but I think that that comes

out of a place of love and of keeping her with me. And it's been a decade now since she died and I'll be grieving the rest of my life, I'm sure to some degree. But I think that I'm more at a place now, at least, where I'm able to view it as not something that has to be gotten rid of or tamped down or cured or solved and is something instead that gets to coexist with and even to some degree be love. Mm-hmm. You said that you feel lucky to have these memories. In the book, you spend quite a bit of time investigating whether it's possible to delete memories as a way to treat or cure grief. What's that all about and how real is that science? Is this in the offing? Yes, we're not there yet, fortunately, probably.

But there's very interesting research. 2013, 2014, there were studies at UCSD and MIT that deleted fear memories in mice and they basically trained them to be afraid of a certain area of a maze by shocking them and then they used optogenetics which is the introduction of a light-sensitive protein into a cell, usually a neuron, and then you can basically turn it on or off using an external fiber-optic light and they turned off their fear memories and the mice didn't remember they were afraid of that area and went back to that area. And there was a really fascinating piece that really caught my attention in Science Magazine that said, are humans next for

this? And the neuroscientists who I've talked to were very understandably like the mouse brain and a human brain are incredibly determined things were certainly not there yet. I talked to one at the system neuroscience out of Poland who speculated in 10 to 15 years we could be selectively deleting certain memories in humans. He was a little on his own in that but even he had a very European turn of phrase for it. He said that's a very fast food solution to our problems, which I loved. But I was really interested in this as to some degree for myself, but even in the intro where I'm headed off to to go report this and research this, I'm admitting the sort of insanity of it. I'm more interested in

sort of the ethical questions of if and when we do eventually get here, is this something we would want to do? And I think some people, and at some points in my own life, the pain is so bad of grief, you really do consider what would it be like to not remember this or not have this moment or not know what my mom's body looks like dead? Do I want to get rid of that? And being able to really ask ourselves these kinds of questions now, I think is important because as I saw with something like AI, the technology, it moves very fast and yeah, no, we're not there yet. And it's still very Charlie Kaufman is eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but it's a very interesting

ethical question I think that we might pose ourselves both for its scientific possibility but also just for our own grappling with loss. Is that a legitimate way, a smart way of dealing with grief basically? And the conclusion I come to is I'm glad I have my memories But it's pretty wild science and an optogenetic student be clear is used for a broad variety of things It's not just fear memories, but in the Science Magazine article where the really stood out to me in their kind of possibilities Before I let you go and we we teased this earlier, the broad or expanding, expansive definition of grief that you investigate, can you say a little bit more about that?

And I know you actually went to a boot camp for people who have breakups. Yeah, that was very fun. Yeah, I think too often the thinking is pretty hemmed in of what kind of grief is legitimate. my mom died that's viewed as okay His mom died. That's legitimate grief. I think someone who Has gone through a bad divorce or as I mentioned earlier like big financial troubles These things are often shunted aside and there's this whole concept too of ambiguous loss

Which is coined by Pauline boss is this amazing and she's 90 years old now at the University of Minnesota. And she defined it as loss where you don't have all the facts. And so that can be something like climate change grief, that can be something like ancestral racism. She gave the examples in her earliest findings of a soldier who was presumed dead, but never body was never returned from war and of a father who was psychologically absent. So you have the opposites of the psychologically absent father is physically there, but you're grieving the loss of their connection with you. And the soldier is the opposite where you presume they're gone, but you don't have certainty in that. And all these sorts of losses are legitimate,

but I think too often we hierarchize and say, okay, dead child, dead. It's very dark to do when you really start to think about how we broadly consider legitimate and less legitimate losses. But yeah, so I went to breakup bootcamp and it was something like the 20th or 21st iteration, but it was the first to allow people who weren't just women.

And so I was excited to go that. And it was three days, Northern California, very, very luxe. I was not going through a breakup at the time, but I was there to try to understand how people were grieving loss of their relationships in a way not always dissimilar from a death. And I talked to one guy who was saying, I read about in the book, who was saying that in very specific ways, and he's not saying broadly, but in specific ways, the loss of a relationship he had was

harder than the death of his wife because he, community didn't show up for him for the supposedly lesser loss. People have an understanding of, okay, your wife dies, we bring food over, et cetera, et cetera. But you go through a bad divorce, bad breakup, and there's not that kind of understanding that's there. And so that just really got me thinking about how important it is to legitimize all forms of losses and to see, especially as we go forward

with things like climate change, there was a study that found a huge number of people across Western Europe, the young people especially, but are really grieving climate change. And what they view is the migrant crisis that is happening and is to come, and weather change and what they view as the migrant crisis that is happening and is to come and weather crises and land crises and all these sorts of things. So there's all kinds of grief and I think too often we get locked into a thinking of there's like

one or two or three or four kinds of legitimate loss and that's not really true. Yeah, I would agree with that. And this is actually like almost ridiculously glib even to use this expression, not to beat a dead horse here, but I mean, it is a kind of Buddhist view. You know, one of the major tenants of Buddhism is impermanence. Things are changing all the time and you're going to suffer if you're clinging. And so it's just normalizing this experience that we are losing all the time. By the way, we're also gaining all the time. And it's just easier said than done.

But the way to equanimity is to not take it too personally. Yeah. And as you say, to really have that understanding that it happens. Yeah. There is a Mark Epstein, who's a Buddhist psychiatrist, talks about having an encounter with a Buddhist master, Ajahn Chah, a Thai Buddhist master. And he was giving a little talk to some young students and he picked up a glass from the shelf and said, I love this glass, it's beautiful, but to me it's already broken.

And it can seem dark, but it is actually a way to actually live with some ease to realize that everything's changing all the time and the glass you're sipping out of is bound to break. Yeah, it's liberating to be more honest about death too, as we were talking about for sure. Yes. Cody, anything you were hoping to talk about

that we didn't get to? I wanted a few more Buddhist cones, but we only got a few. No, I think that's about right. It was a really amazing and eye-opening book to report and to live, and I'm so grateful for your deep read of it and your insight and your own perspective on it. So huge gratefulness. Right back at you. Can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and anything else you've put out there that you want us to know about?

We can just do the book. It's called The Grief Cure, looking for the end of loss. And it's available everywhere. It came out at the end of June and it's on Amazon and Bookshop and in your local bookstore and all that great stuff. Cody Delestrotti, thank you. Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate you. Thanks again to Kody. Great to have him on the show. We'll be chatting about grief over on danharris.com today. You can hop into the chat if you are a subscriber.

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