The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Grief: A Philosophical Guide by Michael Cholbi

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Grief: A Philosophical Guide by Michael Cholbi An engaging and illuminating exploration of grief―and why, despite its intense pain, it can also help us grow Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us―as universal as it is painful―is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity. Drawing on psychology, social science, and literature as well as philosophy, Cholbi explains that we grieve for the loss of those in whom our identities are invested, including people we don't know personally but cherish anyway, such as public figures. Their deaths not only deprive us of worthwhile experiences; they also disrupt our commitments and values. Yet grief is something we should embrace rather than avoid, an important part of a good and meaningful life. The key to understanding this paradox, Cholbi says, is that grief offers us a unique and powerful opportunity to grow in self-knowledge by fashioning a new identity. Although grief can be tumultuous and disorienting, it also reflects our distinctly human capacity to rationally adapt as the relationships we depend on evolve. An original account of how grieving works and why it is so important, Grief shows how the pain of this experience gives us a chance to deepen our relationships with others and ourselves.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i'm vokes is boss here from thechrisvossshow.com the chris voss show uh yeah i'm pretty sure it's a chris voss show it says it on my hat says it on the mic it says it behind me. So if I'm not on the Chris Voss Show and you're not listening to it, I don't know where I'm at. And clearly the Alzheimer's finally kicked in. Guys, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate

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Join that baby as well. And there you go. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences

in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO entrepreneurial toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. So anyway, we have an amazing author on the show. We always have amazing authors. I don't know where we get them. They just come to us and schedule through our scheduler, and we're just like, holy crap, this person is brilliant.

We should have him on the show. Today we have another gentleman on the show who has written an amazing book that just came out January 18, 2022. The book is called Grief, a Philosophical Guide. His name is Michael Cholby. He'll be on the show with us to talk about his book and everything else that goes in between and what it does and everything else. He is a philosopher and ethicist at the University of Edinburgh. His work addresses a variety of topics related to death, human morality,

including grief, suicide, and assisted dying, immortality, and capital punishment, and the fear of death. He is the founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying and has published a number of books, including, most recently, this book, Grief, a Philosophical Guide. He joins us right now. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you, sir? I'm doing well here in Scotland. I really appreciate the invitation to speak with you today.

It's wonderful to have you. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. You can certainly find a good bit of information about my work on grief at my own website, which is michael.cholby.com slash grief. You can certainly follow me at Twitter at Michael Cholby, but I would encourage everyone to pick up this book directly from the publisher, Princeton University Press, rather than a certain notorious online retailer. So there you go. Wonderful folks over at Princeton University Press. We have a number of their authors on a huge huge number, and they always bring

us the smartest people in the room, or at least I think so. And I'm the dumbest, so I should know. I don't know what that means. Anyway, Michael, tell us what motivation you want to write this book. Well, there are several motivations, but certainly some of them have to do with my own discipline, which is philosophy. It may surprise people to learn that philosophers have really not said all that much about grief over the course of the history of philosophy. And of course, the history of philosophy goes back a while. We're talking, you know, 2000 or more years. And you would expect that philosophers who are concerned with how to live our lives and how to be happy and how to flourish would have something to say about grief. But by and large, they haven't said very much.

What they have said has been a little bit dismissive or antagonistic, sort of viewing grief as, oh, something that you have to kind of put up with or tolerate, but, you know, really kind of a nuisance in human life. I was also motivated, I think, by the fact that when philosophers have talked about death, most of what they've talked about is, well, first personal. So how should we feel about our own deaths? Should we be afraid of it? Should we ever consider wanting to hasten our deaths to consider suicide? So I'm trying in a way to make philosophy more relevant to this topic, grief, which is a topic that, of course, psychologists and mental health professionals have had a lot to say about. But philosophers have been a bit on the sidelines. So I'm trying to put us in the game here and help people understand the philosophical questions that grief raises. And why are

philosophical people holding out on us? What's going on there, man? What are they trying to keep from us? Well, I think part of it is that grief is just tricky, right? If people know anything about grief, they know the famous five-stage model proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, right? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, which those who studied grief have, I think, included that's not a terribly accurate model for most people's grief. But I think philosophers have just struggled to understand grief in part because of the emotional complexity that it involves. It involves, of course, sorrow and sadness, but people have a lot of other emotions in the course of grief too. They feel things like guilt and anxiety, maybe even a bit of resentment or anger. But another reason I think

philosophers have been perhaps reticent about grief is there are certain philosophical schools, especially those that were prominent, say, in ancient Greek philosophy, that kind of viewed grief as sort of a failure, right? That if the point of life is to be self-sufficient, right? To be, you know, upstanding and stoical and invulnerable to all the things that are happening to you in the world. Well, what is grief then? Well, grief is just sort of a sign that you haven't gotten there, right? That you haven't been living a good human life because look at how somebody else's death is making you feel. It's sort of causing you to, you know, feel all this sorrow and pain. So it must be that you haven't really lived a virtuous and self-sufficient life.

Wow. We talked before the show, I just completed one of Robert Greene's books, and he talked in it about how, and I believe his data references someone else, so forgive me whoever that was, but they talked about how we sanitize death to where we don't see it anymore, where in tribal days or caveman sort of times, we would see death and it would be very reticent in our minds. And the impact of what death is would be really, would be forefront. Instead, we kind of pack it away. We put it in

hospitals so it's sanitized. Only people who are dying or loved ones of the dying have to go there and witness it. The rest of us can kind of see it from a removed objection point when it shows up in the obituaries. We're called little pictures of people and sayings about them. I don't mean to mince that, but I do mean to accent that there's a disconnect there. I think that's right. Grief is one of those phenomena where over time, at least in countries, say, you know, like US, Canada, Europe, grieving has become more private, right? It's become sort of more something that people do kind of behind closed doors. And so there are, of course, interesting exceptions to that, right? Like one, I think, really interesting ritual surrounding grief is at the New Orleans jazz funeral, right, Where people take a casket through the streets and play jazz music and so on. But that's kind of exceptional.

Most grieving nowadays, I think, is more private. I think one of the things that made the pandemic really quite jarring is seeing death, right? In a certain way, very much out in the open. Many of us, I think, saw pictures of corpses out in parking lots or in India being burned in the open air, which was very shocking from the standpoint of Indian culture and religious belief. So I think you're right that grief is another

manifestation perhaps of people's inability or unwillingness or wariness about engaging with death. But one of my motivations for writing this book is all of us are going to have to deal with this phenomenon at some point in our lives. We have parents, siblings, friends, loved ones. So I'm trying to give people, as the title says, a philosophical guide to the phenomenon, which I don't think has been done before. There you go. A quick question, because we mentioned COVID. Do you think maybe since people couldn't visit their dying ones in the hospital and hold their hand over COVID, kind of help contribute to some of the conspiracies and some of the denial? Because it seemed to me that a lot of these anti-vaxxers and people that

were going through the COVID really isn't a thing, where a lot of people who are just in, well, they're stupid. And there are also people that are in mental shock because they don't, it's just too horrific for them to put their brain around or to realize how it is. And there's kind of a mental state that they go into of denial. Do you think that if we would have been able to see more of it, we would have been able to get more cameras, of course, in the hospital rooms if it hadn't been for COVID, it would have had a bigger impact on people realizing how the extent of it?

I really can't say. I think one of the things that is true about the pandemic is that it just upended a lot of our expectations surrounding death and dying. So most people nowadays die, for lack of a better word, sort of slow lingering deaths, right? They contract diseases like cancer and so forth, and they decline over a period of weeks, months, years even. But COVID is an infectious disease, and the people that it took in comparison very quickly, right? No matter if it's days or weeks. And of course,

the process of grieving doesn't just begin right at the point where a person has died. It also sort of begins as we anticipate, right? The person dying. And so those people who were precluded from being with their loved ones as they died because of the nature of an infectious disease like COVID, no doubt their expectations around grieving were disrupted. And that seems to be sort of traumatic for people. But again, I do think that COVID in a way was a bit of a shock to our collective systems around death and dying because it kind of put it in our face in a way that we're not accustomed to. We hadn't really seen a global event like this since the flu epidemic that followed upon the First World War. So give us an overall arcing of your book and what it entails. So this is, to my knowledge at least, sort of the first attempt by a philosopher to kind of lay out a comprehensive picture, right, of grief.

So there are really sort of two kinds of questions that the book tries to address. So the first question is just what is grief? You might think that's a sort of straightforward and easy question to answer, but I actually think that upon reflection, it's a much more tricky phenomenon than we think. So just what is it, right? What prompts it? What exactly are we grieving for when we're grieving? What is the loss that leads us to grieve? The second set of questions that I'm interested in are questions about the value of grief. And here I put front and center something that I call the paradox. So on the one hand, I think we can all see that grief feels pretty terrible for people, right?

It involves a whole lot of emotions that in everyday life we don't want to have, right? We don't want to feel sad, angry, worried, anxious, and so forth. But at the same time, I think most will agree that grief is not something that we would want to see go away or be eradicated. There's something about it that seems valuable, important, worthwhile, something that we would think if your life was lacking in grief altogether, you hadn't lived a very full or complete human life. So the paradox is how do we make sense of those two ideas, right? That grief on the one hand certainly can be, you know, very emotionally taxing, but at the same time it seems somehow to be an important, valuable experience, right? Something that we wouldn't want to see expunged from human life, say.

What would some of those values be? Do you outline those in the book? Well, in effect what I say in the book is that I think grief should be seen as a kind of tool. It's a kind of tool that allows us to understand, on the one hand, what it is that we've lost. We grieve those with whom we've had a certain kind of relationship. And when they die, we can't continue our relationship with them in quite the same terms. That doesn't mean that we have to end the relationship. I think most of us, in a certain way, continue to relate to those who are dead, right, in various sorts of ways.

We keep pictures of them. We visit their graves and that sort of thing. But the relationship has to change. So part of the value of grief is that it's a tool for helping us make sense of and to articulate what it is that we've lost. The other part of it is that it allows us to sort of figure out how to go on, right? Figure out how to live with the absence of that person who was such an important presence for our lives. You mentioned earlier about the stages of grief. Are those accurate then in terms of what philosophers, I guess, majority of them believe

in? I've always dealt with when someone has died around me or you see my dogs that I love the most, my dog children. I hate the beginning of that process because I'm like, oh great, the four stages or whatever they are of grief and I've got to go through them. And this takes time to process sometimes years. And I hate that. But like you mentioned, it's kind of a healthy necessity. Well, I think people who've studied this, and they really are going to be out of psychology rather than philosophy, I think people have looked at how people proceed through their grieving. They've concluded that there's some truth in what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said in that famous five-stage model. A lot of us do have a moment where there's some denial, maybe a bit of anger, maybe a bit of depression. But for most of us, our grieving doesn't follow

that exact pattern, right? We don't go through all five of the stages, or maybe there's another stage that we go through, or maybe we go through them in a different order. Some of the research has found that for most of us, grief starts in a certain sense, unsurprisingly, with acceptance, right? Sort of recognition that this person really has left our lives. And so we need to react and respond to that. So it's not the initial thing of the bargaining and the, because I go through the bargaining and the denial. And sometimes I think this has to be a nightmare.

I'm going to wake up from this. I did that with 9-11, watching the TV in the morning. I literally was like, I was horribly hungover from the night before. We locked a bunch of mortgage loans and lost $75,000. And so terrorist attack. You might want to turn on your TV. And I said, denial. In some ways, religion is kind of a denial of death. It's a thing of trying to approach this sort of fantastical thing of, hey, you're going to be able to hang out with your friends and relatives after. Don't worry about it. It's going to be just fine.

An appeasing death. And it seems like a lot of different vehicles in our lives are designed to try and hide, mask, or de-lower the impact of grief. Is that what we do in our society? We try and lower the impact of grief by all sorts of different mechanisms? Well, I do think things are changing, right? I think that people are becoming more accepting of the fact of grief, as you were putting it a moment ago, that it's a kind of necessity in our lives that we grieve. So I think societies are becoming more accepting. The fact of grief, as you were putting a moment ago, that it's a kind of necessity in our lives that we grieve.

So I think societies are becoming more accepting. I think U.S. society in particular has often not been particularly welcoming of grief. The old joke is, sorry to hear about your mother. You get two days off and we'll see you on Monday. A very kind of rote, impersonal kind of approach. So I think that we're becoming more accepting of grieving, and I think we're also becoming more creative or innovative about it. You're starting to see people in the funeral industry thinking in new ways about what people want about their grief experience, right? Nowadays, funerals are increasingly, as they say, celebrations of life,

not attempts to not sort of kind of wallowing in the sadness, but kind of an attempt to honor or recognize the contribution that the deceased person made to our lives. And there's also this phenomenon of green funerals now. These are people, you know, wanting their funerals to kind of express their environmental or ecological commitments, being buried underneath trees or being cremated and have your ashes put in the rainforest, say. So there's all kinds of innovation, I think, going on that reflects maybe, you know, slow evolution toward a bit more candor, a bit more honesty, a bit more bravery around grief. Yeah. The one thing you can't was death and taxes.

Those are the two things you can't avoid in life. But there is a macabre to it, a darkness that people don't want to do. And I guess in your book, you strive to maybe overcome some of that where we can kind of accept it maybe more. I think that's fair. I mean, there's that old song, right? The greatest fear is the fear of the unknown. And so if my work as a philosopher can help people understand what they will go through when they grieve or perhaps understand what they have gone through as they grieve, then I'd like to think I've done the world a service.

I think if we have some vocabulary, right, some concepts, some ideas to talk about grief, that I think makes it less disorienting, less frightening, less bewildering to people. One of my favorite works on grief is actually a work by someone with a very philosophical cast of mind, right? The author C.S. Lewis, right? The person responsible for the Chronicles of Narnia stories that many of us read as kids. And he has a memoir, right, that he wrote.

His wife died. And he's so brilliant at capturing just this feeling of grief and not just sort of shock, but just sort of a complete condition of confusion and puzzlement about what's going on. And that's itself kind of frightening. So again, if I can kind of help people get their bearings in grief, I think I've done something important. That's good. That's good. And I guess understanding it, I mean, this seems like a cheeky, mean way to describe what people go through. But I remember one of the things that gave me heart after losing one of my dog children from cancer.

So it was a bit of a long suffering. It was it was Winnie the Pooh statement, something along the lines of how blessed I am to have had something so wonderful in my life that I miss it so much when it's gone. And that gave me a bit of comfort because I realized how valuable, it spoke to how valuable that relationship was and how blessed I was that I had it at the time that it was happening. And I had to realize that, and I think most of us are denial about this, is that the loved ones around us, the people who care the most about this, they can be taken at any moment. And recognizing the value and having the gratitude of that is really important. And maybe that's one of the most important things we need to find in the stages of grief is gratitude and identifying how much that person meant to us. Hopefully it's not too late by the time we realize that.

Yeah, that's a nice observation. That leads me to give a shout out to another philosopher actually named Robert Solomon, who's sadly now deceased, but he wrote an article in the early 2000s, basically saying that there's a deep connection between grief and gratitude, right? That your ability to grieve seems to have a certain kind of correlation to your ability to be grateful. So I think there's definitely something to that. And based on the views that I defend in my book, I think of grief as a kind of an emotional

alert system, right? It tells us that something really big has happened, that someone who matters to us has died. And one of the things that it does for us, I think, is serves as a kind of emotional data dump, right? We have all these different feelings about this person, or you're talking about your pets, this animal that's died. And I think of all that feeling, all that affect, all those emotions as really a rich vein of information, right? About this person and how

they matter to us. And we shouldn't be at all regretful, right? About having that information at our disposal. We should be glad, right? We're sort of learning or relearning how this individual mattered to us. Yeah. And maybe that's the lesson that grief teaches us and what we should take from it. Yeah. I think it's one of the things that grief does for us is it allows us to better grasp, right, our own situation in the world, right? Better grasp how a parent or a pet or a friend or a business partner or whatever it is whose death we're grieving, the part that they played in our world, right? Better grasp how a parent or a pet or a friend or a business

partner or whatever it is that whose death we're grieving, the part that they played in our lives, right? So I think that when you are at the stage of grieving or at the point in grieving where you are experiencing, you know, feelings of gratitude, that's probably a good sign, right? That indicates that you are reaching a stage where you have become perhaps not happy, but at least comfortable with the fact that you can now live in the world where that person is absent rather than present. And when you mentioned development and stuff, there's some people that don't deal with grief, or I think they try and bury grief. I imagine they're dealing with it in one way or another, whether they try and ignore it or bury it or not.

Do you talk about that in the book and where people try to deny grief? Like a grandmother dies and you just try and maybe you didn't spend a lot of time around her. She wasn't within your proximity enough. She was across the country or something. And you can kind of shove it out of your mind. Like people who don't see their loved one's bodies, like in situations of war or kidnappings or something where they can't find the body. The brain has a hard time coming to grips with the fact that person is really dead. There's kind of that specter of optimism where they go, well, maybe there's still a chance since I haven't seen it with my own eyes. It doesn't happen.

Do you talk about that? Briefly, I do. I mean, I think going back to a theme we were discussing earlier, I do think bodies do matter to people's grieving processes because it does, as you were saying, verify beyond a doubt, right, that this really has happened. And so there are certainly instances, right, of people dying in war and their loved ones feeling a certain kind of, I don't want to say delayed grief, but sort of less than complete grief, right? Because they don't have that person that sort of brings their grief to its conclusion, brings it to its fruition. But in the end, I hope that people will not try to deny grief to the utmost. But on the other hand, I want to be a little bit forgiving about that, because I think sometimes we have a good sense of where to fit grief into our lives. And maybe we grieve when we're ready.

That doesn't necessarily mean that it happens within a day or within a week or within a month of when the death occurs. So I think it's important to be open to it. But on the other hand, let it come in the course when it feels comfortable. Is that something we have to, I mean, we just have to process it when we can put our heads around it then? I think so. I mean, I think we have to fully grasp, as we were saying about Kubler-Ross and the five stages and acceptance. I think we really do have to be in a frame of mind where we can affirm, right, in our own minds that this person is gone, right? And I think that's really the beginning of grief. So I think we have to affirm that in our own minds and be in a position to sort of hear,

right, our own emotions, right? Be in a position where we can really sort of listen to them. Because I think grief is kind of a cacophony, right? People experience a lot of different things. And so just, you have to be in a state of mind where you can give it your attention. And I think sometimes people have that attention in a given moment mind where you can give it your attention. And I think sometimes people have that attention in a given moment and hopefully they'll come to a moment where they can make time, right? Make space in their consciousness for their own grief. Yeah. And I've kind of centered most of our discussion so far on the loss of death. I mean, I imagine in your book, you talk about all types of grief, maybe loss of relationships

or other things. Well, in truth, my book is really about grief that we feel at the deaths of those who matter to us, because I think of that as really the fundamental case, right? It's the one that I think helps us understand some of these others. I think that I want to place that kind of grief on a kind of continuum, right? With other kinds of traumatic emotions that we undergo, in particular, traumatic emotions that we undergo when our relationships with others have to change, much in a way that they have to change when they die. So, you know, certainly people feel grief-like emotions sometimes in the course of divorcing or when your children move away to college or university or how you move away from a community.

So I'm focused in my book, first and foremost, on the death case, because I think it's kind of our clearest and most vivid example. It also has some distinctive features. We can't get this person back. I like to point out to people that what was it that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, I can't remember, they married and remarried three or four times or something. So even divorce isn't final, but death is. And I think it also, death is different because you were mentioning this, I think, a moment ago, Chris, that death is final. And when we're grieving the death of someone else, I think it's a powerful reminder of our own limitations,

our own finitude, our own vulnerability. So I think it burrows kind of more deeply into our minds than other kinds of emotional traumas. Yeah, it definitely does. I mean, like you mentioned, it's a final stage. I remember when my father was declining and he was starting to have lots of strokes and heart attacks and stuff. And he was really starting to go on a dementia from it. It was really just starting to really come fast enough to where you had to realize that the time was short. And I spent time with him trying to clean everything that might have gone between us that maybe we need to forgive each other for. And I made a concerted effort to that, to clean up.

Now I'm an atheist, so I don't believe that there's a bonus round where I get to go work on that stuff later. And to me, and studies have shown this, I think Robert Green talked about this in his book, that people who have that sort of clarity value the richness of this life, especially when you deem it as one of the ultimate dice roll lottery wins in the world when it comes to your life or the universe, I should say, in universal law. The miracle of life is beyond extraordinary, and I don't mean miracle as some sort of the puppet master's creation.

There's certainly a math to the universe. But in that, I had communications with relatives that had issues with my father, as I did from my younger years. And I advised them to settle up. And you may want to work this out because this is very final. Once he's gone, you can't, when you finally decide to grow up and be forgiving and maybe let it all go, you're not going when you finally decide to grow up and be forgiving and maybe let it all go, you're not going to be able to have a conversation with him. And their response was,

yeah, we'll just work out an attorney in the bonus round. And I'm like, what if there is no bonus round? But you know, that's people have their opinions and that's not for me to decide. But it's interesting that how we, what I'm trying to illustrate is how people have this denial of death and the reality of it sometimes, whether or not there's a bonus round or not. It's like Raucho Marx's game where you have to guess the word in his head and no one knows it. Probably you could be devout Catholic all your life and the true word is Mormon, something I don't know. It's a joke from South Park. But this is how we process it.

This is how we deal with it. And I've had the one of the things I've had with people that being a dog lover and having dogs, there's this fantastical bonus round two for animals called the Rainbow Bridge. And I never heard of it till my first dog died. And suddenly everyone's like, oh, she's gone to the Rainbow Bridge. What is the Rainbow Bridge? That's where all the dogs go to play. I guess it's another fantastical thing that against this sort of there used to be some sort of narrative where dogs wouldn't get into heaven or some bs it's just it's like interesting this stuff we make a 3 000 gods i mean and counting

next week there'll be another one or some cult leader but this is an example of some of the different some of the different things that we do to process grief and deal with it. And I have to tell you, when my first dog died and being an atheist, there was such a tempting demand in my brain, in my psyche, to want to embrace the rainbow bridge concept, the heaven concept, to become, to believe in the bonus round, Puppet Master's bonus round. There was such a demand. It was a bit of a battle that had to go on to go, we're staying in science and reality here. Your dog died.

This is the beauty of it. And I did have to convince myself, like I said, with the Winnie the Pooh memes, which seemed very simplistic, but they were very powerful and reminding me what you've wrote about, that I should feel blessed. And that's kind of the place that I got to over a short time, if I recall rightly, that I needed to appreciate and feel blessed and just really love this sort of life. One thing that, one thing that's interesting to me is you mentioned, you were talking earlier about how it kind of shows us the importance of the loss and the person or whatever we lost in the thing. It kind of wakes us up, doesn't it? Because we kind of sleepwalk through life. We're like, everybody's eternal. I was guilty of that until my first dog died.

I hadn't had anybody die around me for 27 years. And I literally was thinking in the back of my head this sort of narrative that, like, maybe we're eternal. We'll live forever. Or at least I'll outlive my dogs. Or they'll outlive me. I don't know if you want to speak to that, the fact that we put that off. Yeah, you might need a veterinarian rather than a philosopher for some of these things.

I've seen them and they have seen me. Well, so obviously the question of whether we survive death, whether there's an afterlife, immortality, I mean, it's one of the things I try to do in the book is to try to put forth an understanding of grief that doesn't require us to commit to any answer to those questions. Right. So what I argue is that we grieve because the relationships that we had with that deceased person can't go on in the same way. that your loved ones are really and truly gone, that they don't exist anymore, or whether you believe that they sort of exist in the afterlife, since you can't sort of relate to those who are in heaven or hell or whatever it is quite in the same way you can relate to the person that you share a bed with or have dinner with every night or whatever it might be. So I don't try to settle those big questions about the afterlife or immortality, at least in this book. But I do think that most healthy grief does come around to, as you say, sort of an appreciation or gratitude for having had the opportunity to be engaged with this person, right, during their lives, during our

lives. But, you know, sort of what you say about us being on autopilot, I mean, it's surprising, right? I mean, how do you sort of reconcile something that seems very obvious, which is that we know that we're mortal, we know that everything that we know about is mortal. And yet at the same time, grief comes and it comes sort of as a shock often enough. Why is this happening to me? Well, part of me wants to sort of grab people by the lapels and say, that doesn't make any sense. Why aren't we better prepared for all this? It's not as if it gets literally a surprise that the person was going to die. So, but at the same time, I think it's the sort of guiding question of much of my career in philosophy has been how should we relate to the fact that we're mortal?

And I guess my own opinion on that is that we should live, you know, in the light of our mortality, but not in a shadow. And that's probably not a good thing to be preoccupied with our own mortality or the mortality of others, because in a way that will serve to kind of distract us from, you know, living a full and rich life, right? I mean, the person who's sort of constantly worried, right, that life could end in a minute or in an hour in a day is going to live like a kind of hyper hypochondriac or something like that, fearful and so forth. So I think we want to live our lives mindful, right, of our own mortality, but not sort of living with it, sort of casting a shadow over

all that we say or do, because I think that's a recipe for living in a way that's not very rich or full. Yeah, it can be very crippling, the presence of it being there in our own thing. Yeah, The Denial of Death was a great book, as we mentioned before, that I read as a child and had a huge impact on me. It was really weird. It was one of those things that I learned in high school that I didn't really learn. I just, it stuck in that brain. And then later as I went through life, it kind of came to fruition. I was like, wait, I see what that's about now. There's a lot of things that you collect in life and you realize later you're like, wow, okay. That's a, that's definitely interesting. Do you give any tips or you realize later you're like, wow, okay, that's definitely

interesting. Do you give any tips or tricks? It seems kind of archaic, I'm sorry. Do you give any tips or advice on how people can deal with grief or what's a good way, in your opinion, to go forward with it? Well, as I said, I think that my contribution is to give people some conceptual tools for thinking about what grief is and what good might be found in it. I'm definitely not a therapist or anything like that. And I think grief experiences vary so much, it's kind of fruitless to try to give people very specific advice. We grieve the deaths of our parents differently from the way we grieve, say, the deaths of our siblings. I think that we can grieve and do in fact grieve, say, celebrities, pop stars, political leaders that we admire. And those, you know, are different flavors of grief. They're going to have different feels to them, right? too specific because in some sense that would be to overlook just how variegated a phenomenon grief is. Two siblings can grieve a deceased parent differently because they have very different relationships with them, right? What we might want to say to one might not be applicable to the other

or vice versa. So I think what I'm trying to do is just to give people some ways of thinking about their experience that operates at a pretty sort of high level, sort of talking about the experience in a very kind of general way. Because again, it's just so idiosyncratic and impersonal in that way. Yeah. And I think you're right. I think we need to embrace it. I've embraced it now as I've lost more people in my life and it's still painful. It's still sad. It still sometimes takes me three years to process it and come to a good place where I can smile when I see their faces instead of turning into a blubbing wreck that day. And I think most people seem to take a lot of time to do that. Is there a time thing that we should use to process grief? Or is it just

kind of to each of our own sort of development, I guess? Well, you would expect that the more profound the relationship we had with the deceased, probably the longer the grief is going to be. Well, not necessarily, right? I mean, but you were mentioning some efforts you undertook with one of your parents, you know, to kind of have a sort of reconciliation, right, for the person's death, right? And that might be a technique that we use that might shorten our grief in a way, but shorten it in a way that's desirable maybe, right? Yeah.

Leaving fewer questions unaddressed. One of the emotions people do feel sometimes is regret, right? It's a common emotion in grief. But I don't think there's a certain timeframe or schedule for it all. We're past the time in our culture when we were really prescriptive about these things, telling Victorian widows that they had to wear black for a year or something like that. So I think people shouldn't expect it to arrive on a certain schedule or depart on a certain schedule. There are people who work in mental health who deal with grief when it becomes too arduous or too difficult for people. That is, I think, a consideration that people in that profession should be thinking about. Do you really want, is it really good for a person to be struggling with three or four or five or 10 or 20 years after the fact?

Maybe not, right? Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. What are some other aspects we haven't touched on the book before we go out that we should tease out? Well, I think one issue that I would flag that I think might be of particular interest nowadays is the subject of the very last chapter of the book, which is whether or not we should, as I put it, medicalize grief, sort of think of grief as something akin to an illness or a medical problem. And as I was saying a moment ago, sometimes people who are grieving struggle with it and they seek out, and I would say rightfully, the help of mental health professionals. They may need that kind of help. At the same time, though, I think we should be reluctant, right, to think of grief as like an illness because, again, I think it's an important and powerful tool to allow us to navigate our

mortality and the mortality that we share with other people. You know, I've been noticing that people are predicting that we're going to see. I've been noticing that people are predicting that we're going to see or undergo a lot of grief in the world, right? We've been undergoing a lot of grief in the world with the pandemic and so forth. But I think we should be hesitant to describe that the way some people have, as a grief pandemic. Because that, of course, sounds like grief is itself an illness.

I think we should be reluctant to label grief in such a way that it looks sort of like a pathology rather than, I think we should be reluctant to label grief in such a way that it looks sort of like a pathology rather than I think the powerful emotional tool that it in fact is. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, we need to see it as we do so many things to repress our different emotions, sometimes using sort of all sorts of ways to bury that, whether it's vodka or pills or some sort of thing to reduce the feeling and experience of life. And really, that is the fabric of life, is the experience, the feeling of it, the story, and the things that has an impact from us.

I mean, I've learned so much from the sad things that have happened in life and destructive things that have happened in life, maybe more so than some of the good things that have happened in life because of the power of the delivery of the loss. I think that's right. And I think we experience grief because we are ourselves mortal creatures that share, you know, our world with other mortal creatures. And I think that we would be making a big mistake if we, it'd be a good thing to, you know, wave our, our pharmacological or medical magical wands and try to get rid of this thing. Right. I think it's a very important tool to figure out both what we've lost, but also how to continue to live the world with loss, right?

And with the person who was once present is now absent. How can we go on? I think grief helps us figure that out. Yeah, it definitely does. Me losing my dog, my first dog, and it was my first loss in 27 years, so I had like no callus to loss. And so it hit me really hard when she passed within 30 minutes of a seizure. It was just quick, which I never thought would happen. You don't,

you don't think of that, but after that and going through the process and reevaluating everything, it's helped me process future losses and really understand the importance of it. And it's given me more value. Like a lot of things you've talked about in your book had given me more value to what's the here and now, to how fragile life is to where some can walk out a door and you'll never see them again in a living sense. And that kind of minimalizes a lot of the stupidity and fighting and silly stuff like who didn't put the cap on the toothpaste. There's a point that you realize sometimes in your losses that was really juvenile. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show. This has been a brilliant that you realize sometimes in your losses that that was really juvenile. So it's been wonderful

to have you on the show. This has been a brilliant discussion, Michael. I really loved it. Well, thank you. I really appreciate having the opportunity to talk with you.

And of course, we'll be very interested to see what the audience has to say about this too. Yeah, this will definitely resonate with everyone, I think. Michael, give us your plug so people can find you

on the interwebs, please. So once again, my book is Grief, a Philosophical Guide available through Princeton University Press. Buy it from them. people can find you on the interwebs, please. So once again, my book is Grief, a Philosophical Guide, available through Princeton University Press. Buy it from them. You can find my work on grief at michael.cholby.com slash grief. And then you can follow me on Twitter, too.

That's at Michael Cholby. There you go, guys. Out January 18, 2022. So definitely pick up that book and give it a read. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. Our group's on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all those a read. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Go to youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss, goodreads.com forward slash chrisvoss. Our group's on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,

and all those different places. Thanks everyone. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.