Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Tricky Questions About Grief: Is There A Right Way To Do It? What To Say To People In Grief? And Can You Grieve For Things? | Sloane Crosley

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

A famed author and humorist takes a deep dive into grief (with Dr. Bianca Harris as co-host).Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling books Grief Is for People, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There’d Be Cake. She is also the author of Look Alive Out There, Cult Classic and The Clasp, both of which have been optioned for film. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed "Townies" series, a contributing editor at Interview Magazine, and a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Independent, Black Book, Departures and The New York Observer. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She has taught at Columbia University and The Yale Writers’ Workshop.In this episode we talk about:A series of consecutive losses that Sloane enduredThe concept of cumulative grief Sloane’s version of the five stages of griefHer beef with acceptanceBibliotherapy as a source of healingAnd much moreRelated Episodes:The Science Of Grief: What Helps, What Doesn’t, And Why We Don’t Talk About It Enough | Cody DelistratyHow To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck | Sam Sanders#450. The Science of Loss and Recovery | Mary-Frances O’ConnorSign 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/sloane-crosley-874Additional Resources:Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/downloadAnxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief: A Revolutionary Approach to Understanding and Healing the Impact of LossAll My Puny SorrowsOtherwise: New & Selected Poems By Jane KenyonSee 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. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, how we doing? Grief is a non-negotiable and often brutal fact of life. In a world where everything is changing all the time, loss of people, of animals, of possessions is just part of the deal. This may sound like the ultimate buzzkill, but there's a reason why Buddhists talk about this stuff all the time.

First, because if you're living in denial about grief and loss, you're setting yourself up for a lot of extra suffering when the inevitable occurs. And second, because staying in touch with this ground truth can wake you up and help you stop taking shit for granted. Today, we're gonna talk about some of the thornier questions as it relates to the issue of grief. Is there a right way to do it?

What do you say to somebody who's actively grieving? What are the complications of grieving for somebody who has died by suicide? Heads up, by the way, that we're gonna engage in some rather frank talk on the subject of suicide in this episode. And here's another question we're gonna touch on. Can you grieve for lost things

or is grief just for people? My guest today is the author Sloan Crossley who has a recent book called Grief is for People. It's a memoir about a series of losses she endured, including a burglary at her apartment and then the death by suicide of her best friend. I have a co-interviewer for this episode. It's my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris.

I asked her to join because she read and loved Sloan's book. And also because, as you will hear, Bianca has recently endured a pretty serious loss of her own. A little bit more about Sloan Crossley before we dive in here. She's the author of a number of bestselling books, aside from her new one, which again is called Grief is for People.

She's also written, How did you get this number? I was told there would be cake. Look alive out there. Cult classic and the class. She's also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and she has taught at Columbia University and the Yale Writers Workshop. In this conversation, we also cover the concept of cumulative grief, Sloan's version of the five stages of grief, her beef with acceptance, about which she is very funny, bibliotherapy as a source of healing, which I find really interesting, and much more.

Just a quick note that this is the third and final episode in our week-long series on grief. On Monday, we had the journalist Cody del Estrada on the search for a cure for grief. On Wednesday, the great podcaster Sam Sanders on how he coped with what he has called a Job year, as in the book of Job from the Bible. And of course, today, it's Sloan Crossley who's coming up right after this. Peloton has a variety of workouts for whatever era you're in. Holiday era, running era, wellness era, whatever era of life you're in, Peloton has the classes and motivation you need to get after it. With Peloton's All Access membership, you can work out where you need it.

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Sloan Crossley, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Dr. Bianca Harris, welcome back. Thank you. I just found out that Bianca has a new email address at danharris.com, and I'm so excited about that. Oh, wow. The jurisdiction is expanding. Yeah, it's an unhealthy dynamic in a marriage. I do want to say, Sloan, that you can really tell a lot about somebody by having them go through an onerous tech check

and you moved your whole setup. What that told me is that you're a wonderful person. So thank you for doing that. Wow. A wonderful person with a 600 square foot apartment. It's like living on a ship. You can't get anything messy or you're in the soup. But I appreciate you ascribing personality quality to my tiny apartment. I'm ascribing it solely to you and your good nature as we were asking you to do uncomfortable

things. So thank you. Thank you. So you're catching us just at an interesting time. We had planned this a while ago, but then Bianca's dad actually died a few weeks ago. And so the issue of grief is fresh for us. Oh, I'm truly sorry to hear that. Thank you.

Did you know that this was coming? Yes and no. He had end stage Alzheimer's, so for sure it was time. The details and the sort of events leading right up to the finale are never what you think they're gonna be. In the end though, he was made comfortable, so that's really what mattered the most. Still, I'm sorry.

Thank you. Sorry about that. Thank you. As somebody who's written a memoir, I wince a little bit at having to ask you this question because I wince when people ask me this question, but I'm gonna do it anyway, which is can you just retell the basics of your story

of what happened to you? I believe it was in 2019 with these two consecutive losses that you went through. Oh, absolutely. A good way to start talking about this particular book because it's not a straightforward memoir, so it's sort of helpful to give the overview. So in this very apartment, in 2019, I was burglarized. I left the house for an hour to go get a hand x-ray, which is only relevant because I took off all my rings that I always wear. And as I say in

the book, luck is a dirty word when you're out of it. I took off these rings, also I think went to buy a paper towel. Anyway, I come back, it's just sort of a very innocuous afternoon and see that my window is open and someone has come into my apartment through the bedroom window and stolen all of my jewelry. And while you can't tell from audio, I am not Kim Kardashian. I don't have a lot of bait that I'm walking around with at any time. But someone has stolen all of my jewelry, which is obviously very devastating. Had to call the cops. And that was kind of the first loss of the book. And I was very upset by this, obviously, and complaining quite a bit and trying to figure out how this happened

to my old boss, whose name was Russell Perot, who I worked with in publishing at Vintage Books for about 10 years and then just became very close to me. People use the phrase work wife, work husband, but it felt more like two heads coming off the same body, which is graphic. But just we were extremely, extremely close. I spent a lot of my free time with him. I adored him. As I say in the book, we rotated roles like they do in experimental theater, where sometimes one person was the parent,

one person was the sibling, one person was annoyed by the other. Then exactly one month after the burglary, I had dinner with him three nights prior, and then he died by suicide at his home in Connecticut. And so the book is really exploring these losses, is loosely structured around the rather cliche five stages of grief. But it's about these sort of unusual losses that we don't necessarily always give credence to in our culture. The death of a friend, there's still a taboo around suicide.

And the burglary is sort of the framing device for that. The burglary is, I believe, part of the derivation for the title of the book, that your grief is for people you're not supposed to grieve lost things. Yeah, so basically it's funny because the book's title sets up this dichotomy, right? Where it comes from a line in the book where I'm having so much trouble figuring out how to grieve the burglary. It feels like it should just be stuff, right? A minor loss, a sort of girlish loss, but there's so much to it.

It really, you know, just the violation, yes, but also the missing stuff, you know, I really would like that back. And I'm struggling with it. And Russell also was someone who loved flea markets. He also believes in the soul and the meaning of objects as well. So he's really tied to it in this other way. And I couldn't really find anywhere to go. I mean, I didn't really want to go sit in a circle of folding chairs. But I just wanted some sort of forum. And then of course, when Russell died, well, they were coming out my ears, you know, you have for suicide, you have the loss of a parent, loss of a friend, God forbid, loss of a child. And it was the sort of realization for the book saying, ah, okay, so grief is for people, not things.

But that dichotomy is also false as someone whose cat recently died. But it's really about sort of setting up what we grieve and how we grieve and who has sort of the right or permission to grieve, which I'm sure if anyone listening told, let's say their therapist, I don't know if I have a right to grieve or any of those that language would be quickly dismissed, right? Because all of this is experienced absolutely. But there is something that is especially lonely making when you're the friend. So you had these two flavors of grief that you didn't feel full permission to feel. Yeah, and so I feel like that struggle is what makes art

and what makes writing. Joan Didion used to always say that she wrote in order to find out what she thought and what she felt. I've never actually really been that kind of writer previous or prior to this. Joan Didion used to always say that she wrote in order to find out what she thought and what she felt. I've never actually really been that kind of writer, previous or prior to this. I have two novels, three books of essays, and those are like a little more, okay, these are really funny stories. What's the meaning?

I'm going to apply to them. And I kind of know stuff in advance. This is the first one where I was really, I knew enough structurally, but I was feeling my way through the meaning of it as I was going through it. For whatever it's worth, I really agree with you about this more capacious understanding of grief. I come at it, I guess, through a Buddhist lens, which is that we are living in a universe where change is non-negotiable.

It's just happening all the time. In Buddhism, the source of suffering is clinging to things that won't last, and a universe characterized by impermanence. And so that's going to happen with stuff, it's going to happen with people, it's going to happen with cats. And by the way, I'm sorry to hear, but the cat, that's- Thank you. We've gone through that many times over here. So I say all of that just to get your response.

Does any of that land for you? Yes. In fact, it would have been very helpful to have a little bit of a Buddhist patina to the book or to the experience. I feel like so much of what you just said is actually part of the exploration and part of my conjecture or my sort of analysis of Russell and what happened. He worked, like I said, for vintage books, which for those of you who don't know is the very literary imprint of Knopf, which is part of Random House. So we're dealing with, I mean, I don't know how to say this without being crass, name a dead author.

You know, I mean, he was really in charge of banging the drum for anniversary editions of In Cold Blood, Lolita, he worked with Chumachébe, On Things Fall, Gorvodol, all these classics, as well as the modern library editions, which is then when you get back to Henry James and Nabokov and all these things. And so, so much of his life was living in the past and liking things a certain way. And what's funny about that is we tend to put a premium on that when we're just talking. People who are really into cool old black and white movies or movies from the 70s, old music, you know, it feels like they know what they're talking about,

you know, it's kind of cool to look back culturally. But then I think it really wound up with him emotionally and as the publishing world changed, as he got older, and the world changed around him without him being equipped, as you're saying, to roll with a lot of that change. I think it really actually caused him a lot of suffering. I mean, I feel like the more sort of what you're saying, and I don't know if this is a Buddhist principle or common sense, but the more prepared you are for change, the less it hurts you when it happens.

And I think that that was really hard for him. And it was hard for me too, because I was almost, you know, a disciple is a big word. I'm sure he would love it if he could hear me. But you know, so much of my literary taste, so much of my world, so much of my 20s and my 30s were fashioned after and around this person who I spent the lion's share of my time with. And so I'm a very nostalgic person as well. But there's this danger when nostalgia bleeds over into sort

of an inflexibility, I think. Rigidity, brittleness, because at that point, you're going to break. And his rigidity was a blast. It's fun to be around someone who says, you know, oh, well, they don't make movies like they used to and let me tell you why. That person is fun, you know, and he was a very fun. I mean, the book for all of its weight and seriousness is funny in a way that I am more apt to admit this book is funny than I was to cop to my humor essays being funny because

it sounds obnoxious. But half the humor comes from him. He was a very funny person. That's why I miss him. In some ways, these two losses kind of intertwine in your mind. And I think there's a term for this. I don't know if it applies here, but I know it comes up in the book, compound grief. Yeah, cumulative or compounded grief, where several things happen at once.

I talked to a lot of people. There's a lot that's not in the book that I researched both in terms of ideas in the book that aren't there, but I just wanted to be familiar with them or familiarize myself with them from like Durkheim to Kant, a lot of philosophy that there's maybe one line here and there. And similarly, I talked to a couple of psychologists before I started tossing around terms like PTSD. I have respect for my association with it, most people's association with it, which to me almost comes from the military. So I'm sort of bowing down to that kind of experience and that kind

of life. But after the jewelry was taken, you know, I was like, what is this that's happening to me? Because two things are happening. One is the sort of PTSD of leaving my apartment, having seen footage of the burglar, burglar, makes him sound like a cat burglar, sounds almost adorable, this felon. You know, having seen footage of this burglar, burglar, makes him sound like a cat burglar. Sounds almost adorable, this felon. Having seen footage of this man and seeing someone who is the exact demographic opposite of him in every way you can think of, leaning on some scaffolding one day across the street from me a few months after the burglary and it was a heatwave. And I remember I got about five blocks thinking, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. And I ran back to my apartment to check on my apartment.

What about all that suspicious leaning I saw? You know, you become crazy. And that form of PTSD is basically, I mean, this is a very mild form of it, but it's not that you're triggered, which is normally the association by an event that reminds you of something else. It's that it never stopped. You think that the inciting incident is still happening. Everything is still happening. And that's one form of madness that happened after the burglary. And then when Russell died, I go on this sort of caper-like, very earnest hunt for the jewelry. My joke

is always that, you know, even though I'm an author, I'm essentially a freelance writer and you shouldn't mess with us because we have a lot of unstructured time on our hands and we will find you. And so, Russell was actually trying to help me hunt for the jewelry. And then I became almost at my own personal safety, you know, risking a lot to try to get some back. I became very obsessed with finding it because this is where the other sort of condition, which again, Didion talked about, which is magical thinking comes into play where I thought if I can just get some of the jewelry back, I can stop the bleed

of loss. You know, if I can just get a little bit of it back, things won't be so bad. I didn't actually think that Russell would come back on account of not being insane. But there is a sort of madness within grief. So much of the book is also about focusing on the stuff we don't talk about because when someone's grieving, obviously you have sympathy for that person. Ideally, you have empathy for that person or grace or whatever you want to apply to it. But in a way that person is not to be trusted. They're not sane. And especially with a sudden death, whether it's an accident or suicide, there's this feeling that denial is quite strong in those cases, that you could just reach through a bubble and pull them back. And you just

feel like in that moment, there were many people who I would have happily, I mean, this is being hyperbolic, but thrown under a bus to get my friend back. And those are the same people who are offering me condolences. So it's just a lot of the book is about giving a sort of wider topography to what we think of as just sending flowers and soup.

I want to make some space for you, Bianca. Any reflections on the foregoing? I mean, so many, to be honest with you. And the first is just that it was an incredible book. I love your writing. I love how it was very clear that you were figuring it out as you wrote, which is something that I'm finding very useful. And the fact that it is funny and not so precious and yet that much more insightful and helpful is just like A plus to me. Oh, thank you. And it came about...

Especially from someone who is now, I'm quite sorry to say, in this position of very recent authority about loss. It means a lot, so thank you. Well, thank you because at the time when I was reading it, I had not experienced loss of a direct, immediate family member or best friend, thank goodness. So the way I related to it, I got so much out of it for different reasons, but that all relate back to grief. And now with this bigger sense of loss,

it kind of made all of that other stuff make greater sense in my life in a way. But it took thinking about it really along the lines of the way you speak about it and not just sort of wondering like, what's wrong with me? Why does this thing still bother me? Because it really has been an accumulation of life experiences, some of which require more attention to grieve and heal, but most of them we don't know that we need to pay attention to them. And so over time, it just builds up and builds up.

And then, you know, in this case with my father passing, it's sort of most of my losses did involve him directly or indirectly. And it all sort of was like just one big embrace and send off in a way. It's very hard to find resources that address grief for living people or experiences or things that are not sort of a standard definition of death, and certainly not ones that I felt I could relate to. And so, even if your dichotomy that you speak of, some of it, you know, maybe in metaphor, some of it is actual grief or meaningful possessions that have history in your life. And certainly with Russell, as you say, some of it is the grief of the violation.

It is very hard to categorize those things, validate them, and know that there's a way to think about them. And when you start intermingling like real death, and how these things relate to each other, it does just all make sense. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the Yogi Berra, wherever you go, there you are. I mean, you're sort of using the same application and system to absorb all these things that happen to you.

And so much of it was just sort of say that, to give permission to, because I think people get a little, maybe this is a New York thing because we have so many, there are so many people when something bad happens to us, it's not better or worse than anyone else. I hate the only a New York thing. Like people run into their ex-boyfriends in Minneapolis, it happens. But there is something where because so many people are affected by our tragedies. And in the book, there is something where because so many people are affected by our tragedies and in the book there is a brief COVID chapter, it is sort of indicative of what I'm about to say that I felt I should warn people about that more than I should give them a warning

that there's a suicide in the book because people are so exhausted about no one wants to hear about hand sanitizer or toilet paper for the rest of their lives. But I just feel like there's something where, in New York, people get competitive over who had it worse. Who was the closest to the accident? That exploding manhole cover, 9-11, Sandy, the blackout, COVID, people get a little, well, you think you had it bad.

I'll give you something to cry about. And in some ways, it's funny, I did it to myself, where it's almost like the jewelry was bad and then the world was like, I'll give you something to cry about, and it was Russell. But I feel like part of the book's purpose is stripping the conversation of that questioning and that competition over what's real grief. It's all experienced absolutely. Yeah, I felt all of that through your writing and also the notion of how to be sad with somebody else and the requisite flowers and people mean well, but it's not really what

you need. And I remember an experience I had around the time that I was reading your book where I made a new friend and she told me some challenges that her son had as a baby that continued that were quite difficult. And I remember having a moment, especially having just met her and not wanting to say the wrong thing, where I thought that saying, I can't imagine what that must be like, I thought it was the right thing. Like I actually had thought about it for a millisecond.

And maybe it is for some people. But very quickly, she said, actually, you can imagine. And for me, it's triggering when somebody says that because you can imagine this is why we're having the conversation because you can imagine how horrible this is. When I tell you the lesson at the end of this hopefully short story, it's so basic that it's a little bit silly. But, you know, sometimes people get flummoxed about grief and how to respond to it, especially if it's to your friend's point you can imagine and you just don't want to

because it's actually either a sort of spectrum of loss you have within your own mind. And it's like, oh, that's really at the end where I don't even want to look. I'm prepared for some things to change as we were talking about, but not this. People have come up to me a lot because I've gone on tour for this book with their own stories. And again, this has happened in the past, but it's usually something

that's a little bit easier to handle. It's someone who says, "'Oh, I enjoyed your funny essay on XYZ. You know, I too got fired from my volunteer job. Ha ha ha." This, we're dealing with a whole different ballgame of people who have their own experiences, especially people whose friends have died by suicide. And I didn't know what to do at first because I'm sorry for your loss.

You are sorry, but you are. It's just hard to know how to respond. And I finally realized, I think it's distancing. I can't imagine or I'm sorry if your loss is good, you should say whatever you want to say. You know, you're but human, you're expressing your condolences. But for me, I've discovered the best thing I can say is I'm so glad you told me that. Like I now have it. It's mine. And I'm happy you shared that so people don't feel like they're out on a limb, like they feel caught.

And it seems to work wonders. And I mean it. So that's helpful too. I was just going to say that my sister had an experience recently with a friend who she hadn't seen in years. And unfortunately, he had lost his teenager. I don't know the circumstances, but she was acknowledged that she was very nervous about going up to him in the context of this loss. What do you say? And she just found herself saying to him,

you know, what was that like for you? And what do you need from me? And he was stunned and so grateful and he said, nobody's ever asked me that. And they talked for a little bit and yeah, mean, it was illuminating to her as well because it wasn't really thought out. She just sort of said it because it came from a place of wanting really to be in it with him, I think. I think that's beautiful. And the last, this tacit kind of slow head pat, like, oh, yikes, sorry, you know, that's even better than what I said,

because we can combine these two, just thank you for telling me that, what was that like? It's like, not only are you welcome here with this narrative, but I would like you to go on. I'm not bored, I'm not disgusted, I'm not freaked out. I think that's really nice. I had a lot of people ask me, did you know? Which is a suicide thing, obviously.

And I always found that, you know, I don't want to police how people offer their condolences too much because people are just trying their best. And the reason it's horrific is that, you know, it's because something real has happened. But I did you know, every once in a while, I would be asked it in a really sincere way, which I heard as, tell me about your friend. What the hell happened? Are you okay? I heard a lot of questions within it,

but a lot of times it just seemed like rubbernecking because people are so horrified by suicide. Also, there's a long history of glamorizing it. Also, we've established that my friend worked in the literary world and so do I. From the people who brought you Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf comes, did you know? It becomes sort of calcified before it's time, like a story that's already happened. Just picking up on this issue of suicide, you've hugged the third rail here and say some pretty

challenging things. I want to read you back to you and just get you to respond on the other side. This is from the book. The question everyone should therefore ask is not why otherwise healthy people kill themselves, but why they themselves should go on living. That sentence will surely read as morbid to those who have never identified as depressed and disconcerting to those who know me personally,

but it's no threat to anyone's psychological soundness to think this way. We all have something we're trying to fend off. The question is how big and with what. You know, it's not meant to sound dismissive of life. It's meant to sound embracing of life. To ignore half the texture of life, which includes grief, which includes death,

which includes these thoughts, is to intentionally, I don't know, it's to have a moth problem and shut the closet. Do you know what I mean? And like keep it in the dark and just hope it goes away and instead of festers. I mean, the concept of just embracing the fact that we wake up every day and we go about our business

and we do these things and we have these challenges and we keep going and we have this notion of a future. I'm just saying we should pat ourselves on the back for that a little bit more, that it's not automatic. And having these things happen, these sort of fringe experiences of someone dying like this, I'm just saying we should pat ourselves on the back for that a little bit more, that it's not automatic. And having these things happen, these sort of fringe experiences of someone dying like this, it's shocking in a lot of ways because you thought, hold on a second, I thought we all agreed to sort of muddle through this together.

What did you do? You know, and I quote after that passage, a line from one of Russell's favorite plays and movies, which is the line in Winter, where there's a line where someone is shocked, one character is shocked, then another character has a knife on him, and the other character says, of course he has a knife, we all have knives. Like, we're all walking around with a little bit of sadness and a little bit of consciousness of our own mortality.

And I think it's less stigmatizing of those who then pay that tax so dearly, you know, going sort of towards this darkness or having very real clinical problems. It's over stigmatizing if we just keep saying, that's so weird, you know? That's what I'm saying. If we just say, if we keep pushing it away and saying, oh, well, that's not part of me at all. It's probably not part of you where you're not going to hurt yourself, but it is part

of the human condition. And so I just feel like it feels like more welcoming to those people and healing to those people to say, you're not alone. I too have had, you know, maybe not suicidal thoughts, but I'm aware that this exists and I understand how it could happen. Yeah, you're not trying to glamorize, trying to normalize the fact that there's this thing that many of us don't want to look at or that we go through privately, but everybody has probably had the thought at one time or another. Well, yeah, but it's also even how we talk to each other. I just feel like people who

are not suicidal and not depressed, it's so much work just to put the onus of this on only the segment of the population that's in danger. I feel like we should be aware of it too, if that makes any sense. We should be aware that... Of our own mortality, the fears around our own mortality that, you know, 55,000, I think, people died of suicide last year in this country. No one is arguing, certainly I am not, to normalize that. But I think part of

helping sort of mitigate or minimize those numbers or bring them down is to talk about it openly and not consider it such an insane freak thing. It is in fact a public health crisis. And when I use the word normalize, I meant more like to normalize that even in the happiest of lives, despair will occasionally rear its head and these unspeakable thoughts enter all of our minds and the fact that they're unspeakable makes it worse. Yes, exactly, exactly.

And I feel like instead, I think it should be like, well, you sound like a well-rounded person who's conscious of the pain and the preciousness of the world. I really actually found that passage to be illuminating when I read it, both because of this normalization that, if we're going to use that word, the reality that many of us have probably thought in sort of 360 degree ways about how to look at our lives and how to deal with adversity. But in particular for me with this passage, it sort of struck me because one key fact in my family is that my mother's father committed suicide.

And I can rattle that off as just part of the family tree, like someone had cancer and this that and the other. And I don't think I really sat with it and thought about the gravity of it, both with regards to the proximity, even if one generation removed or two generations removed, but through the eyes of my mother, who in fact, and this is not meant to be a criticism, but sort of weaponized it for her own way of dealing with her feelings. In the sense that I don't know if she's fully even grieved now,

and I don't know that she sees it that way, but suddenly I saw her that way and it wasn't about me. It's also a generational thing. I mean, I think that with each passing generation, we become more comfortable about talking about all sorts of things that our parents and their parents were not comfortable with. I mean, going back, back, back until, you know, I mentioned in the book, people used, you know, from a religious perspective, you were sort of a heretic, you'd be dragged through the

streets if you died by suicide or, you know, you couldn't be buried in this cemetery or nobody talked about it. We still do this with the obituaries where I don't know about you, but when I read an obituary of someone who's below a certain age and it doesn't say the cause of death, I go to certain places. And if it's a celebrity, frankly, maybe I'm guilty of just going to a drug place. I just feel like the more we talk about it, the more I just feel like I wish Russell had told somebody about what he was feeling, you know, as I sort of mentioned in the book. In a way, it's almost like he wasn't built for it, because he was so sarcastic and so funny.

So my joke in the book is that I say, you know, if Fran Leibowitz came up to you and said, oh my God, I'd rather kill myself and go to Times Square. Would you be like, should you talk to somebody? Do we need to get you somewhere? Not without full body armor, you wouldn't do that. And so he was like that. You know, I talk in the book about skipping the anger phase, but I feel like I wish he had built his life with a little more, I guess, sincerity or something in it or some sort of pocket where he could have had a valve of, I need help, or this is really bad, you know? And instead, it's like, I think there was no place for him to put that except for to implode.

Coming up Sloan talks about her version of the five stages of grief, her beef with the notion of acceptance, bibliotherapy as a source of healing and much more. What's the first step to growing your business? Getting people to notice you. But how do you do that? Two words.

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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. You talk about the anger phase. In fact, as you mentioned earlier, the book is structured around the so-called five stages of grief.

You may not go through all these stages and it might not be orderly and you may go into anger and then into depression and then back to anger and it doesn't end on your timetable. But what did you learn about these stages of grief? I almost just called them the Myers-Briggs stages of grief instead of the Kubler-Hoss stages of grief. I don't know if you've heard this, but I read somewhere, and it just sort of blew my mind and changed everything, which is that they're meant for the dying person.

The reason why we struggle with them so much is because they're not for us. I mean, if you read, just all you do is then take a quick scan through them and you think, well, that makes sense. Who has something to bargain with? Who has something to be depressed about, to be in denial of, to accept the dying person? It just locks into place to me better than this eternal struggle we have about what

we go through as the people left behind. And so I was sort of like nodding or sort of in a tongue and cheek manner by structuring the book like this to the concept of it, to the self-help books that I was sent, which all were well-meaning, but I didn't find particularly helpful. And it's also switched around. I think I switched two of them. And then instead of acceptance, because it's a book, I wrote afterward.

I mean, I suppose you could also argue that acceptance is something you work on every day, but afterward felt better to me in the book. But part of the reason it's structured that way is actually because when you're looking to sort of write a book and think, how am I going to tell this story, these are two chronologically close but very different losses. Let's put that way, one I describe as an elephant and one is the fly. And what happened was during bargaining, quote unquote, I was trying to get my jewelry back and I also kind of couldn't believe that Russell was dead. And I thought if I could

do certain things, it would make it not so. And so it's very rare, I think in a book, at least for me to have this structure and the meaning just fall into place on the first shot. Like, you know, if you ever open a picnic blanket and you don't have to mess with it too much. That's sort of what it felt like. Because then I realized that depression was COVID and anger was publishing. And like all of these things, all these different losses that he was feeling, these old worlds he used to live in, matched up really well with these stages. So that's why it's those five stages. But you say in this part of the book that instead of acceptance in the afterward,

it's about being okay with not letting go and allowing yourself not to feel the pressure to quote unquote get over it. And I wonder to me that reads as acceptance. I think it is. I mean, at a certain point, there are certain bromides or cliches that you can't avoid. So this is sort of a, you're writing about grief.

And so this, I think that's well observed. It was just sort of a different way of saying, when we think of exceptions regularly, I guess when it's applied to things that are not grief, I think we, there's a more of a tinge of the get over it-ness-ness. I'm a writer, this is what I do for a living. But you know, there's more of a tinge of that because you think of a breakup, right? Or a divorce. We're hanging on to a lot of the facets of what hurt and a lot of that pain or the feeling of being done to if you're the one being abandoned, any kind of thing like that. We want to be able to digest that, you know, to sort of confront the ghost and release

it, right? You're not supposed to just get over it, but you are supposed to sort of confront the ghost and release it right you're not supposed to just get over it But you are supposed to sort of work on it look at it from a couple of different angles Absorb it stop looking at it And I feel like with Russell what I'm saying is You know hopefully the whole book is true But I feel sometimes the truest line for it or a couple of lines is That the written word should never be mistaken

for the final word. I still wonder about his death. I am still not over it. I still think about him all the time and not only in the Moony tribute to my friend way. I think it's changed me forever. And so I feel like when we talk about acceptance in other realms, I just don't think that's how it should apply to grief. Even though being broken up with or having a divorce or something like that is a form of grief. I'm also not an expert at this. And I think a lot of people have this without writing books about it, that panic that your dear friend, this wonderful person is going to be forgotten. I think I still hold on to that, even having written the book.

Yeah, that's a lot. But in a fun, joyful way. Exactly. Just to get back to acceptance, I mean, I refract all this, again, through my understanding of Buddhism such as it is. My understanding of it is, you know, there's this often used, and I think this is a phrase that can be weaponized, and it gets used in Buddhist or contemplative or meditative circles, let it go.

But actually a better set of words would be let it be. So your real acceptance is, oh yeah, the rest of my life, I'm going to be having these thoughts. The sadness will keep coming. I think of this article I read in The New Yorker a million years ago about a guy who had lost a child. And he said, I have a new organ that just secretes sadness. It might be Alexander Heyman. Yeah, I think I know that line. And I didn't even have a child when I read this. Now it really lands even more powerfully, but I remember being really struck by that. And to me, that seems like the most appropriate form of acceptance that I'm not going to,

instead of Je ne accept Rien, I don't accept anything. It's like, yeah, equanimity is throwing the doors open and not struggling with reality in any way. Yeah, I think that's a really well put, the new organ that just secretes sadness is true. But I think the thing is, is that there's such an impulse to feel better, you know, to make someone feel better. And I think what it is a different way that I put it in the book, but also weirdly physiological is part of all of this, recognizing that not all of your tissue got damaged in the accident. This will always be a damage, you know, this section of your life.

But it's that living your life crowds it out. So that organ that secretes sadness for that author, who I think maybe I know who it is, he has other organs. So that will keep him moving forward. But weirdly, my organ is that I don't accept this organ. That's the sort of irony of it. It's a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. But I guess whatever language we use to describe it,

I just feel like, I don't know, like I'm happy nursing this thing, this loss, and think about it as many people who have also experienced it probably a lot more than the average bearer thinks I think about it as many people who have also experienced it probably a lot more than the average bearer thinks I think about it. I think it's possible, and I'm not in your mind, to accept the lack of acceptance. And that's what I'm hearing. Yes, exactly.

Maybe that's a very succinct. Bianca, I've been meaning to ask you this question for a couple of minutes since Sloan referenced all of these self-help books that didn't quite land for her. I think I saw a self-help book about grief on your desk the other day. Do you have any recommendations? Are there any books that really have worked for you? Not that one. That was an unsolicited, well-thought out gift from somebody, but not for me.

Mostly, I feel like I've learned from other people's experiences and memoirs and beautiful insights in writing. But I think Claire Bidwell Smith does a pretty good job with, pretty good job. She does a really good job with her writing on grief. Her experience is extraordinary, but one of her books is called Anxiety, the Missing Stage of Grief. And I found that to be especially helpful because it did sort of apply widely to many different kinds of grief or at least the things or people you are grieving for in what ways

and is sort of a way to just understand the things about yourself that you can't understand. You don't have to know exactly why you're anxious, but that it's there floating around is possibly and often and maybe always given that we're human a reflection of some unmetabolized grief or something along those lines. I truly have learned so much not just about the grieving process but just about how other people relate to themselves and I was gonna bring up one of my favorite lines from your book was that you said, I had stored everything I liked best about myself and Russell. And so that obviously that's bi-directional in a way. And when somebody leaves you, do they take that with them or

were you able to sort of hold onto it and bring it back? Or am I being too sort of concrete about the whole thing? No, no, no. I think I've clawed some of it back. I mean, I think that a lot of the book is this incredibly close friendship, right? That has all these different sort of phases and layers to it. A big part of the book is realizing, I just wanted to be like him in so many ways, which is a weird sensation for like a fully actualized adult to sort of look up to, you know, I feel like I hadn't felt this since I was like 13, you know, at summer camp, being like, oh, I really like that girl. I want to listen to the same music she listens to, that kind of thing. And we were different people, but I just felt like we made a really good team.

And I mean, his partner, who I also showed this book to, also thought so, you know. And he knows how close we were. And I think part of the book is that struggle of realizing, and part of the reason why I feel free of sort of unselfconscious about saying things, like, maybe we all think this way, maybe, you know, like, let's explore that. What we were talking about before, Dan, is because I feel like the journey of the book, if there's sort of an emotional arc to it, is realizing that we're not the same. That this person I thought, we were so like, you know, these like sort of twin

hearts here. No, we're not the same. And it's really hard for me to admit that just because I valued his opinion so much. I think that actually is not really the answer to your question. But I do think that's sort of what was the lesson of thinking. And it helps mitigate the confusion and the hurt, you know, which of course you should stew in and feel. I accept nothing is the theme. Is there a title for each episode? I accept nothing. But you know, part of moving on or moving forward rather, or being in your life, is that whatever we want to call it, is realizing sort of how that person differs from you. I mean, in some weird way, this is like the basic Freudian thing, right?

Isn't there like a stage when you are a baby, or I think you're probably the best Buddhist you'll probably ever be, because there's no difference between you and the mother and the crib and the stuffed animal. You just do it naturally, and then you realize that these are different items. And so I almost had to relearn that after he died. I think that's why I love memoir so much is because all of that complexity and the fact that it's not tied up neatly, you know, with a bow is just so real. And certainly there are some wonderful books out there on grief, but at least for me, it's just so real and certainly there are some wonderful books out there on grief,

but at least for me, it feels like something else I could fail at. You know? Well, not to be, that sounded really dark. If the implication are these are the things that you can do, the logic in my mind is that at the end of it, there's something to achieve that will better my sense of well-being and healing. And I guess to your point, that's not always true, but that's okay. I mean, I think it's a tapas thing, right? Like if you can find something from those books, I mean, most of those books, I didn't particularly, I think also someone sent me some fairly dated

ones, which obviously the worst of them will remain nameless. But some of them occasionally, it's not one size fits all. You know, you fish through, you find the thing that means something to you, that's fine. I happened to find one that encouraged me to think about my needs, print them out on a piece of paper, and hand them to people who said, you know, I'm sorry for your loss. And so, I mean, even in the book, I say that it gave me my first laugh after Russell died of the idea of like laminating something, like a little card. And people were like, oh, I heard about Russell and just sort of wordlessly handing them this card.

Like, how is this supposed to work exactly? But I think that the book that you got sent that also apparently will remain nameless is, I think you even said it, it's like a meaningless algorithm that's sort of showing well-meaning mourners how to help their friends and loved ones. But yeah, I don't feel like I've failed at it. I don't think you can. I mean, I think that if you are, I guess you can pick a timeframe, and I certainly did with myself. If you're dismissing or unable to hear your friends' lives and your family's lives and

you're unable to connect with other people after a certain point, then yes, maybe then you're doing it wrong because you're hurting yourself and you're hurting them. But I don't think that in that period, be it two months or two years, that there's a wrong way to do it. It wasn't necessarily failing at grieving. It was failing at the potential to fail at grieving. It was more the idea that there's a set of ways that you can look at it and approach it.

And barring the extreme pathology of not being able to sort of be functional years into it, you never quite know if you're doing it right. I sort of tried to figure out through reading books and thinking about the types of losses I was trying to process before my father passed. And some of it was anticipating him passing. And in Alzheimer's, there's a lot of real life death. You keep losing the person. Yeah. And then there's actually the big one.

And that, funny enough, took me all the way back to the pre-Alzheimer's human and not at all to that space in between. And so I was struggling so hard at various stages to figure out what to feel and what does grief mean and what does forgiveness mean and all of that. And it just the only thing that I could come to and that worked that I didn't see anywhere. But it's just simple. It's just feel everything. Just have your eyes open to it and feel everything and just don't push it away. I mean, the thing that helped me in the end, and again, this should come as a shock to no one if they've listened this far, was novels

and poetry in the past. Jane Kenyon, things like that, poets like that. Or there's a novel called All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Tau's Taves. Shoot. It's spelled very difficult for maybe me and me alone, but she's a Canadian author. She wrote Women Talking, but All My Puny Sorrows is a novel about her sister who is suicidal and hospitalized for it. It's unbelievably funny and beautiful. Just so beautiful. Her use of humor to create beauty and

just these wretched moments was something I really admired. Just go back further. Sometimes I feel like I don't necessarily, it's not that I'm not willing to accept help from my contemporaries or people who are still walking the earth, but sometimes what helps is to even go bigger and wider and understand what we were talking about before. This is part of the human experience that to be humbled by something other than the death that's in front of you and instead just be humbled by the fact that like this is part of the package. You have now entered this room. We're doing a whole week on grief this week, which sounds super fun.

How are you guys doing? But one of the other experts talks about bibliotherapy, which is a thing. Oh, I didn't even know this. That's good. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, that James Baldwin thing about you think your pains and sorrows are unique in the history of the world. Yeah, and then you read. Let me ask you as we wing toward the end of our time together.

You mentioned this earlier, I'm still not over Russell's death. I kind of be curious though on an overall update, did you ever get any of the jewelry back? Where are you vis-a-vis Russell? Did writing about it help you? You've indicated in an interview with Jay McInerney that maybe not as much as that some people might think. So some wrap up.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's, if I can use a cheesy jewelry term, we'll just, you know, like the clasp, we'll just end where we started with the jewelry. Yeah, I did end up getting some of it back. There were three pieces that I got back. Pieces also is such a big word. It makes it sound like a real jewelry collection.

There were just a couple of things that I actually didn't know how much they were worth because they were from my not so nice grandmother. So I just had a weird relationship with these items because she was pretty horrible to my mom. And so there's a ring I never had to praise. And boy, do I regret that now. But yeah, I did end up getting some of it back, but I don't think it's a big spoiler to the book

to say that like, what do you think happens when I get some of the jewelry back? Do you think it makes Russell's death okay? It doesn't. But it does provide a sort of suspense Do you think it makes Russell's death okay? It doesn't. But it does provide a sort of suspense to a story that's not suspenseful normally. You know, when you talk about a grief story or a death story, like, guess what happens at the end of the Titanic?

Totally sinks. You know what I mean? But why is it a movie? Like there's some sort of suspense story that is real, but that's overlaid. And so I won't spoil the whole jewelry thing too much, but yeah, it's overlaid over his death. There's a lot of stuff that happens with the jewelry up until the end.

In this interview you did with Jay McInerdy, which was really interesting, I just read it. Somehow it comes up like, did it make you feel better to write all this? And you did not go for the easy, yeah, it really helped me metabolize everything, it's all good now, you said, maybe it made you feel a little bit worse,

although you added, you feel like a little bit more of a whole person, so I'd be curious to hear you expand on that. I mean, it's the question of catharsis, right? You know, in the book, I mentioned the Italian author in Italian Ginsburg, I'm gonna butcher the quote, but it's something like, you cannot hope to be soothed for your grief from writing or to be caressed by your profession. You know, and I think that's really what it is. I felt like, you know, Russell

worked behind the scenes in the arts. A lot of the book, if it has like a D plot, is a sort of tacit tribute to people who work behind the scenes in these sort of old industries who really believe in it, who really believe in the music, the film, the books. But it's not shiny. You really are sort of invisible. Because of that, even though he changed so many people's lives, not just his friends, but so many authors and really changed some of what you guys have probably read, you know, in the past 20, 30 years. But because he was behind the scenes, he didn't get an obituary.

And so the book, I say, really was me getting about 200 something pages worth of pissed that he didn't get an obituary. You know, in the anger section, I'm like, well, I don't really think the anger part's coming. And then only after I've published the book and only like, honestly around now have I realized, oh, it's like a forest through the trees thing. I can't find the anger because the whole book is angry. That's sort of what gives it, in addition to the humor, in addition to the sadness,

what gives it its engine, sort of this forgotten person, not under my watch, not on my watch, you know? And so I feel better in that way, but I don't feel like something has now been exercised from my body or my brain and onto the page. That's the catharsis of writing. That's, to me, if it works for you and you're a professional writer, that's amazing. But for me, it's more

of the jurisdiction of journals. Do you journal or were you journaling prior to writing the manuscript? I take notes. I always take notes. As is the Nora Ephron, everything is copy, you know, write it down, take notes. And I actually, you know, there is a chronological function to the book in addition to the structure. So some of this was just unfortunately given to me, was already writing or thinking I was gonna write something shorter about, sort of less expansive

about the human condition, about the burglary. Because there was also so many funny things that happened with the burglary. I was upset, someone had broken into my home, crawled over my bed, left muddy boot prints on my bed, destroyed and smashed some drawers and taken everything I have ever been left, collected, bought, you know, any sort of beaded necklace my niece had given me, everything gone, right? So I am not a happy camper at this moment. But even when I called in my state of let's just panic and called 911, I guess 911 is a workplace

like any other and the operator was in the midst of sharing a joke with her colleague clearly when she picked up. And so she picked up the phone and she said, 911, what's your emergency? And I'm like, this is crazy. So it didn't change the upset, you know, it didn't like take the edge off. But I just sort of always was taking notes about stuff like that. But I don't really journal mostly because my handwriting is very bad. I can't read it. Other people can't read it. It's really inconsistent. Every time

I sign a book for someone, I apologize because it looks like I'm threatening them. So I honestly really that's most of the reason I just can't even look at it. Is that self-hating? Maybe that's for another podcast. Before it goes long, can you just remind everybody of the name of this book and others that you've written? Just shamelessly plug if you don't mind. As much as it pains me to shamelessly plug, I'll muddle through.

So this book is called Grief is for People, and it's a short but heavy memoir. And then I had a novel that came out just before this called Cult Classic about a woman who keeps running into her exes in the Lower East Side. And then I won't go through the plots of all of them. And then the other books are I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which is a collection of essays. Also Look Alive Out There, How Did You Get This Number? And then my first novel, The Clasp. Truly. Slone, thank you very much.

Appreciate it. Great to meet you. These were wonderful questions. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Slone and to Bianca. Appreciate both of them coming on. Don't forget to check out what we're doing over at danharris.com. Would love to have you sign up or you can get the paid version for free if you just

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