Tomorrow, Today - Grief in a New World; Covid, Death, & Beyond with Marisa Renee Lee

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

In this episode, the team at Tomorrow, Today is joined by Marisa Renee Lee, author of "Grief is Love", to discuss the impacts of Covid-19 & death under quarantine will have on the future of how we relate with the process of death. In Grief is Love, Marisa reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one—healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief—whether you’ve lost the person recently or long ago—and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires. Marisa's background: In 2010, Marisa joined the Obama Administration first as an appointee at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and later joined the White House Domestic Policy Council and the White House Office of Public Engagement where she ultimately served as President Obama’s Deputy Director of Private Sector Engagement. During her time in the administration Marisa focused on a variety of issues including entrepreneurship and access to capital in underserved communities, implementation of the Small Business Jobs Act and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and developed a variety of public-private partnerships with the business community on behalf of President Obama. You can find her book at marisareneelee.com and her social medias @MarisaReneeLee

Welcome to Tomorrow Today, a podcast where we talk about the future, but today. Not yesterday? Not yesterday. Not right now. Right now. Well, I guess yes, right now. But not when you're listening to this episode, then it will have been in the past. So isn't the past, the present?

Tomorrow yesterday. Today. Today. A podcast about how time works. A podcast. We're linear. My name is Nash Flynn. I am joined as always by my illustrious co-host.

Is it the cat? The cat in the studio. And then there's this guy that you're listening to. And then there's this bearded one. He's not important. His name is Andy. You can forget that immediately right now. Not important at all.

It's not relevant to our conversation today. What's really important is the cat who just scratched me. Ow. That's why she's important. She was like, I can't believe you're taking my microphone right now. Excuse me. I have important things to meautificate. Wow.

Brutal. Sorry, I made it work. Did you? Is that what making it work looks like? You don't want to see when I don't make it work. What are we talking about today? Today we are talking about grief. We've got a little bit of that going on right now in 2022 and 2021 and...

Yeah, first of all, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't think we would be... 2019. Griefing any more than... I guess 2018. Right. The pandemic. 2017, yeah, definitely.

Right. And then there's 2016, which is, you know, I guess was not a bad year. Well, actually, 2016 was supposed to be the apocalypse, right? Or was that 2012? 2012. You're the death person. You should know the dates of all the apocalypse. There's been so many.

It's hard to keep track, you know? And that brings us to grief. And that brings us to grief. So today we are talking about grief with the very fantastic Marissa Renee Lee. Her book, Grief is Love, Living with Loss, came out in April of this. this year. And it's about COVID, sort of, but about the grief that we're dealing with post-COVID, and specifically about her grief dealing with the loss of her mother and also her miscarriage. But the reason we wanted to talk about grief on this podcast was because of COVID.

COVID and grief, you know, they go together like spaghetti and cheese. I feel like tomato sauce is like gone out of fashion, so I'm going with cheese. I don't know that we have to make grief a food-based metaphor. So anyway, what was the first time you saw a dead person or you went to your first funeral? Do you remember how old you were? Um, you know, honestly, I don't know. I remember the first time somebody in my family died and I was old enough to really get it. I was like six.

It was the second week of school in first grade. My grandfather had passed and my parents were up. My mother more particularly was upset. And I really wanted to go to the funeral because I didn't know. my grandfather that well and that the only memories I really have are when he was sick and it was just a curiosity more than anything. I think the first person I saw that was an actual like dead body was a wake for like a family friend that I didn't really know and I was probably like a couple years older eight or nine maybe 10. Yeah. But that that's really it. I mean,

I think I remember being creeped out. I don't remember the face or anything. but I remember being like, this is weird. What if he gets up? And like, obviously that's not going to happen. But I think as a child that is like the natural inclination is like, but how do we know? And it's like, well, yeah, because all of his insides aren't insides anymore. So his in he became an outy. I broke Nash.

I'm quitting this podcast and moving away. And I think, but I think, you know, to your point, your experience is sort of like every, child in the West, really. We don't really deal with death in a way that feels immediate at all. And so the first death we all remember from our childhood is sort of those tertiary connections where we're not really going in the funeral or if we are, that's our first experience with dead bodies is ones that have been pumped with chemicals and made to look like they're just sleeping, quote unquote. To Marissa's point, I think in her book, she talks a little bit about this. that's why we can't deal with death or grief,

because we have sort of put all of the deathways on the back burner in a sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to a larger trend in American Western culture of like ignoring the need for challenging ourselves, whether that's physical discomfort or whether it's basically any discomfort. Like discomfort is a good thing because it pushes us and challenges us in a lot of ways. And obviously there's healthy and unhealthy versions of that, which is a bigger discussion than what we're having right now. But in general, I think psychologically, physically, all of these different things, it's good for us to go through those experiences and death is in many ways no different.

It really is interesting, though, because I had spoken about when my mother's father had died. when my father's father died, I was a young teenager. And that funeral was very, very different than anything else that I'd experienced because my father's family is very Italian and like very engaged with the world of death, I think, in a different way where there's like a lot of laughter at the week. Like there were a lot of jokes being cracked. And I think that is a unique thing to southern Europeans. And I think it also is a part of a culture that has been predominantly poor and had high rates of child loss and things like that. So like you have to engage with it in a much different way than I think we think of as the quote unquote West. Right. Right. Well, a lot of how Americans deal with death right now is actually from the American Civil War.

So after, during the American Civil War, we're still seeing a lot of this Victorian idea of the good death, right? You die in your home. Everybody's present there. They listen to your last words. It takes you several days to die. And everybody's just kind of, it's a big communal experience. And then after the Civil War ends, there's so many bodies, right? We just, we have too many dead people to really do a good job of making sure all those people get the rights that they would have expected.

We're just sort of leaving bodies decaying in the sun in some battlefields. We couldn't deal with that scope. And so that's sort of where we start to see this movement for, it's the word I need, embalming. It's where we start to see this glorified, they're just sleeping type death. And from the mass death in the Civil War, that's where we start to break death from our daily lives. We're like, well, we don't have to look at it now. We can embalm people. people are dying in hospitals more and more.

And so the farther we get from that. At the same time that we learned how to preserve food, we were also learning how to preserve bodies. It's the same technique, my man, refrigeration and alcohol. That's what the jelly is? I mean, it's formaldehyde. It's formaldehyde and alcohol, but the combination is formulae.

It's what they use you. They pump it through your circulatory system after they remove all your internal organs. And that gives you like a U-shelf life of like about 10 years. which given that you're maybe on display for 48 hours and then immediately, well, unless you're Lenin, which is just a bummer. But if you're Lenin, I mean, I guess there's a whole lab designed to make sure you still look like you're alive. I mean, it's bad for Lenin.

It's been sort of good for science. I feel like he would appreciate that piece of it. Bad for me, but good for the greater good. I think he really, on the whole, would have been just upset. Yeah, but silver lining. So let's go with that. All right. Okay.

Yes, he would have been like, this proves the Soviet science is superior. I've been dead for 100 years and I look great. But like also, I don't want to be here and no one should have put here. But anyway, Lenin aside. This is where we start to see this involvement culture and this sort of total erasure of death from our real lives. And now very few people can say that they've seen somebody die unless your person was very old and in hospice. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah.

And I think even when we do, it become, I don't know, I think about like the morning process for people who go through that and this idea that it's a lifelong psychological terror. I actually don't know if I've seen someone die, but I've definitely seen someone come close to dying. And that's definitely something that stood with me. And I'm not sure if, like, like, I have personally a really hard time, like, grappling with this idea that it's like this form of. of memory because it shouldn't be because like you're saying this is something that people have lived with their entire lives and we're much like many things in human history where the anomaly like our generation the generation before us uh the generation before that like the last hundred years or so have been this huge anomaly this blippen time for human history where we're

not doing anything the way we've always done it right and then anytime we engage with the world how humans have for the previous hundred thousand years we act like as if that that's like this psychological like mind fuck that like we are doing something as innately inhumane when in actuality is the opposite. We're actually engaging with the world as a human for the first time for many of us in our whole lives. Right. And that's we sort of got into this death wise in in the episode with Dr. Susanna Monsault who

talks a little bit about how animals understand the concept of death. And in some ways I think they understand it better than humans do in modern times because we deal with it so much less frequently. Personally. I mean, in frequency and, and, you know, for all of us as people. I mean, I do think in a 24-hour news media cycle, we actually sort of listen to its periphery quite a lot between, you know, wars and a pandemic. You know, we know the numbers are out there, but we're not seeing them.

We're not participating in those rituals. We're not participating in those deaths at all. They are happening behind a curtain that we don't actually want. to understand or engage with. And I think that makes grieving those things all the more difficult. And part of why we can't let go of these things and why they become these psychological barriers of, oh, you saw someone die and suddenly your life is going down this like different path because of this one incident, even if that person wasn't somebody you were intimate with. It speaks to that fact that we're not engaging with this for such a long time on the earth. When historically

that's something we've been exposed to our entire lives. By the time you're an adult, when these things happen on a more intimate level, you're much better prepared for that. Right. And I think because we sort of understand the world very globally now when we have access to it, with quite a bit of immediacy, you know, with social media and basically the news happens on Twitter, we're not dealing with any of that in a fundamental way. So then when our first death happens, like you said, it feels all the more worse because we're not processing the grief of the things that weren't immediate to us. And that's a little bit about what Marissa's point is with her book. And actually something I never really thought about. You know, I've studied death for many, many years as an academic.

And I said to her in our interview, it's sort of embarrassing to me that when I've been studying death this whole time and forgetting that grief is what happens after death. You know, I'm concerned with the rights and rituals of the dead and the dying. But I forgot totally that grief happens to everybody else after the person I'm thinking about is dead, which is, I think, sort of indicative of the same problem, right? Yeah, that they're like these disparate things because it exists kind of on its own pedestal from the rest of our lived experiences. But I didn't even ask you what your first death, dead body experience was.

So the first dead body I had ever seen was the ex-husband of my mother's best friend growing up. So it was very, very distant for me. I remember I was told it was going to be a closed casket. He wasn't going to be visible. They ended up changing their mind to the last minute. He was very visible. He died of a heart attack, so there was no, like, nothing physical. He just, he did look like he was sleeping. I didn't know him in life, so he really did just look like he was sleeping. And I just, I remember as a kid, sort of thinking along the same lines, that he looked alive enough that I would have believed if he had sat up. But my second, And the second death was a little bit more traumatic than that. My uncle killed himself when I was 18, and I remember the shock around that. And I found, I think, that when deaths are shocking, the public response, your friends, your family, your work, tend to be a bit more gracious about your grief than if it was an expected death. And I think that's also really interesting. Like, we don't want people to grieve near us because it reminds us of the death process and we find it very, very uncomfortable. But we're

willing to make sacrifices when it's like, oh my gosh, who would have ever seen that coming? But there's still a point at which we're like, please stop grieving near us. You know, like it's making everybody bummed out. Yeah, like we have things to do. Like, I can't be going to Starbucks feeling like this. Come on. Right. Chop, chop.

I can't help but think that this is capitalism's fault in a lot of ways. I mean, I wouldn't say you're wrong. And I wouldn't disagree with you. Thank you. So, I mean, I think it's industrialism as a whole. Regardless of the capital component, I think the industrialized society model and the concentration of individuals and places like urban spaces inherently is designed in a way that you can't bury your dead locally. And it starts to expand what death means in the sense, in the very physical sense, where the graves, the iconography, the practices, the morning, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. visitation and all of these things become bigger, more and more physically, spatially,

disconnected from the world that we live in day to day. Right. And you think about that in terms of, you know, death and dying, but actually it also affects how we grieve. Where you fall in a class system, where you fall in an ethnic or racist system, unfortunately also means that your grieving can look very, very different in how society treats and perceives you wherever you fall in that is also affected by those things. So we don't give everybody the same rights of grief and the same rights to, to, you know, going back to work, to being societally accepted. We don't treat everybody the same way. So death is not at all an equalizer of anything. I wouldn't expect in the modern world that anything is an equalizer.

That's right. That's true. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. I guess I want to ask before we get into this, interview. How, in your opinion, outside of the scope of this interview, did you think that, or have you thought about how COVID has changed mourning and deathways and kind of from an academics perspective, how we will look back 100 years from now and how COVID has changed the way we engage with the subject? Well, unfortunately, I think that COVID has made the problem worse.

Because we had so many deaths happening all at once. For grief, I think it may have helped things. You know, where we're talking about the death rights and rituals is sort of a different piece here. Grief, I would hope that we will look back on this as an opportunity for us to deal with humanity's collective grief. You know, we're not even just watching COVID. We're watching probably at the time of this recording what's about to be, you know, a major political scuffle. in the U.S. We're watching what's potentially going to turn into a world war in Eastern Europe.

And I would like to think that we could say that this moment becomes a turning point for how we accept and talk about grief and death and dying. In terms of the death and dying, unfortunately, because so many of our deaths are still happening behind the scenes. You know, we're talking about bodies that people don't get to visit. Nobody's able to attend to their COVID relative. as they're dying, I think that that separation is just going to worsen our distance from death. I hope that it doesn't.

I hope that maybe we say, you know, this is ridiculous that we can't be with our dying loved ones and we can't participate in that more functionally and more wholly. But I don't think that that's where we are yet. I hope we get there. I really do. But I don't know that that's where we are yet. So this has been the least funny. Yeah, no.

that we have done so far. I will get no money. Congratulations. I will get no money from the comedian portion of my time on this podcast. But maybe they'll pay me more on the history side. I don't know. Today I got to sit down with the very fantastic Marissa Renee Lee. She's the co-founder of Supportal, an online support community for grief. She's the founder of the Pink Agenda, a national nonprofit doing research and raising awareness about breast cancer. And she's also the author of Grief is Love, Living with Loss, which came on April of this year and which we're going to talk a little bit about today. Marissa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, we love talking about grief. Let's do it. Just to jump off, can you talk a little bit about how your work with grief began and how it's changed over the course of it? Oh, that's so interesting. Yes. So my work with grief began, unfortunately, the way I think it begins for many people by actually experiencing it. my mom was sick growing up. And then when I was graduating from college, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. So she had stage four cancer and multiple sclerosis. And I knew, you know, the second she was diagnosed that she was going to die soon.

And so I then, you know, in my typical type A, you know, aggressive self, started doing everything I could to prepare myself and her and my family for her death. And I thought because, you know, I read the books on grief and death and dying and did the research and was organized and knew what she wanted with her things and for her funeral, I thought that when she actually died, it was going to be easier for me. And then it happened. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, it's like, it's like getting hit by a truck except you're still expected to, like,

live and function in the world. And I really struggled. and I didn't understand why I was so sad and lost and overwhelmed and depressed and anxious. And so I spent I spent a while after she died just kind of like trying to downplay the grief and saying things to myself like, you know, parents die. Like that's the natural order of things. Is this really such a big deal? And then finally, after months and months of beating myself up and, you know, just about

convincing myself that there must be something wrong with me for being so upset about the loss of my mother, I hit a wall and I decided that it wasn't me, that there are plenty of flaws within me, but there was nothing wrong with me for the way I reacted to losing my mom. And where the problem sits is in how we think about grief and loss and death and what it means to live your full, best, most joyful life after you lose someone you love. And so, So I wrote in a journal in August of 2008, just about six months after my mom died, I'm going to write a book about grief that won't just be sad and depressing and will be a New York Times bestseller. And so far, we've checked two out of the three boxes.

So if anyone who the New York Times is listening, feel free to throw me on that list. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I'm actually curious. So your mother got a terminal diagnosis. do you think, and this is, this is maybe a crass question, but do you think it was it was easier or harder because you had this period where she was alive and dying? Or do you think the shocking deaths are somewhat easier? It's such an interesting question.

When I was in middle school, my best friend at the time, her father, who was good friends with my parents, was shot and killed in a road rage incident. We were like 13 and 14 years old. And I felt like that had to be the worst thing in the world, you know, like to have your dad go to work in the morning and never come home again. But I don't know. Like she and I have talked about it a little bit. And like I don't think there's any sort of firm conclusion on either side. I will say I am incredibly grateful that I knew what was coming because it did an amazing. me to have certain conversations with her and to, you know, make sure that the last few years

of her life were as good as they could possibly be. And it also enabled me to reprioritize my life and spend more time with my parents. You know, she got that diagnosis. It was a couple days before I was graduating from college. And today is actually the day I graduated 17 years ago. So it was literally this week 17 years ago. I left campus to be with my parents for her oncology appointment to find out together what was going on. And, you know, the minute that the doctor said, can you feel that after placing her hand on her left breast? And she said yes, I knew that everything had changed in my life, you know, like this, this sense of stability and just like continued optimism that I'd had my entire life up until that point suddenly disappeared. And I was going through my own

big life change. And, you know, I made the decision to spend the first year after college at home with my parents, like helping them figure out how to manage my mom's health and, you know, like what her different medical needs were and just trying to get her to a stable place and support them both. And then from there, I split my time between my parents' house and suburbs and my job in New York City. And I spent a lot of time with my mom and dad the last few years of her life. And I wouldn't have done any of those things if she hadn't been diagnosed. And if I didn't know that I had time, but that time was limited. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It does. And I feel like it's one of those things that you only get when you've had both of them. So I also had both the

shocking loss and then the one that got the terminal diagnosis and you get to hang out for the for the end part and for me I can't decide which one was was better because when you get when you get far out they're sort of the same right they still sort of hit you in these waves like the shock of I think the first kind goes away and then you're left I think months down the line with with what should have come right after after death but I do think it's it's really really fascinating how how different they feel as they're ending Yeah. Horrible. But one of the things in your book that I think struck me the most was this aspect of grief that you say is missing, and that's the permission part that you have to give

yourself permission to grief. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of allowing that grief and why do you think we're not usually providing that permission? Yes. So permission is the first chapter in grief is love. It is also the longest chapter in grief is love. And it was, you know, as I thought about my manuscript that I'd already submitted and why it wasn't right, I realized I had written in the first draft a book about grief, which is what I was tasked to do. But I realized after the fact that I didn't really want to write a book about grief. Like, I wanted to write a book about healing and what it looks like to live a full and joyful life after experiencing a life-changing loss. And so I had to sit and ask myself, okay, like, what?

what enables me in the absence of my mother and, you know, following my husband and I lost a much wanted pregnancy, like how are we able to be happy, be joyful, still find moments of like peace in our lives, even with all of this grief. And it starts with permission. Because when my mom first died, I did not give myself permission to grave. Like I gave myself permission to step up and go back to work and help my family, but I did not give myself permission to grieve. And the thing about grief, and I think this is true for pretty much all challenging emotions, you can ignore them, but they don't go away when you ignore them. And so if we start from a place of permission, it opens up the door to the other things that you need to heal and live with your loss. Like if you're not even willing or able to acknowledge the grief and

give yourself permission to experience it, you're not going to heal. Like what does healing look like if you refuse that basic form of acknowledgement? And so that's why I felt like it was one of the most important pieces. And as you know, it comes up again and again throughout the book because it ties into all of the other pieces that I think are important. And in terms of why I think we don't often give ourselves this permission, our culture, you know, Western American culture is very much focused on improvement and positivity. You know, like if you're feeling sad or angry or, you know, you're grieving,

there is this expectation that that is somehow bad or wrong and that it is your job to essentially pick yourself up by your emotional bootstraps and be just fine. And, you know, there is this whole toxic positivity culture that you see a lot on social media in particular. And based on the research that went into this book, you know, we are all born with five innate emotions. And I'm not going to remember them all off the top of my head, but you will have to trust me when I say that half of them are things like anger, sadness, fear, and disgust, I want to say, are like some of the primary emotions. So like if that's how you're wired when you first come into this world, how can any of those things be bad? Like we're not, we're not meant to suppress or ignore these challenging feelings and emotions. Like we're meant to experience them.

Like they are a part of what it means to be a human being. And there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think we need to stop judging our feelings and instead just give ourselves permission to experience them. that's beautiful um i do want to make sure our male listeners heard that go to therapy it's time this is yeah this is your moment if you're listening to this podcast yes everyone therapy for all therapy for all everybody especially in a pandemic you know what i mean like oh god oh god i know i know yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes i'm curious actually because you brought it up do you think do you think the grief and social media have a place i mean you have support a

which is not social media specifically, but is there a way to use social media as a tool for grieving? I do. I mean, I have seen, as I've shared more and more of my grief publicly, I have seen my community online grow exponentially

just from me sharing my experiences with grief and loss. That said, I am someone who also kind of hates social media because I feel like there is a lot that is present. in a way that often makes us feel badly about ourselves. You know, like I make sure to share when I'm sad, when I'm having a hard time, when I'm angry, you know, when I'm just struggling with whether it's the state of the world and the

grief that that brings up for all of us, especially right now, or, you know, struggling with the loss of my mom, because I think it's important for people to see the full picture. Like it is very easy to create an Instagram feed that looks like the most perfect life you can imagine, but that's not real. And so I think it's important if, you know, for folks who are listening, if they're trying to figure out how to navigate sort of the grief landscape on social media, stick with people who are either actual licensed professionals who I think, you know, have some really deep and thoughtful and important insights. or stick with people who are just really keeping it real and, you know, telling the truth about all of the messy and challenging emotions that come with grief. Because you don't want to get yourself in a position where you're feeling bad about yourself more than you already are when you're grieving, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's stop following, you know, influencers and start following more like therapists, comedians, philosophers. Yes. People writing books about grief. Let's do that instead. Exactly. Like focus on the substance. Yes. Yes. Let's stop paying people to go to Disneyland, I think, is my primary. Oh my God. Yes. Please. Lord. Disney adults, am I right? Oh, my God. Not for me. I'm also a pass. But you touched on this one a little bit. So we're dealing with grief. I think a lot as a society. And some of it, I think, is immediate to us and others is just sort of how the world looks now. And when you look back at history, I think there's a, there's a, There's a nice comfort in it, which is why I do it.

History relieves a lot of my anxieties about the narrative. There are people living through the Spanish influenza at the same time as, you know, World War I. That was sort of happening at the same moment. So it's easy for us to be like, historians, to be like, oh, well, you know, it can't be that bad. We have a pandemic now in a World War and everybody lived through it. But I think...

It's actually a really interesting perspective. I mean, everything ends, right? And so historians are solved by that. It's true. It's true. Yeah. So I'm curious to what you'd say about, is there a way to process? some of this less immediate bad news, you know, death happening everywhere that isn't necessarily

personally connected to us. Yeah. I mean, for me, it comes down to the things that I share in grief is love. You know, so many people are grieving something right now, you know, whether it's a physical loss of a loved one, either to the pandemic or something else or perhaps something else that they lost as a result of the pandemic or, you know, the fear that comes with all of these mass shootings or the fear that comes with all of this white supremacy and racist garbage that's been happening lately. Like it is a lot. And so I think it's important for people to give themselves permission to grieve and to not expect. to be at their best.

You know, like, I don't know about you, but the day of the Evaldi shooting, like, I was, like, not productive at all. Right. And I don't know anyone who was murdered. You know, I don't have any personal connection. It was just the idea. And, you know, I remember putting my,

my baby to bed that night and thinking, like, there are all of these parents that sent their kids to school and that will never get to do again what I'm doing right now. And that's just horrifying to me. And so I think giving yourself permission to be okay with how those things impact you, even though they're not personally yours, is important. I think it's also really important during these challenging times. And I have to remind myself of this all the time.

But for all of us to move through the world with more compassion and grace, because no one is wearing a T-shirt that says, hi, my name is Kathy and I'm grieving. Like that's not how it works. And so just keeping in mind that like you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes for someone and maybe being a little bit more patient and gracious and forgiving when people aren't their best right now. Although I do think maybe we should make those T-shirts. I think that there would be- We should definitely make those T-shirts.

Like those dogs to say do not pay me and work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would like a shirt that says, I'm grieving. You know, just don't come at me today. But I do feel like, I feel like I would wear it every day. Because I feel like lately, especially, there's like sort of always something to be grappling with. Oh my God. But I do think the t-shirts is a good idea. We can get sort of, they'll be like glowing shirts. So we'll make for T-shirts. Another practical thing that I think is important, or at least that's helped me, is taking a break from the new cycle, taking a break from so. social media. Like, you know, I'm not advocating completely checking out for good and acting like the world is something that it's not, but it is overload right now. So, you know, taking a few days off from the news, not getting on Twitter too close to bedtime, you know, like those kinds of things I think really do practically make a difference as well. I mean, yeah, like crisis fatigue is very, very real. And especially in a moment where we're just bombarded by crises pretty much

from all directions. Yeah, take a break. I can't take a break because, you know, social media is an addiction. So I don't know what would happen to me, but for everyone else, do as I say, not as I do. One of the things that you mentioned a little bit in the book is about the expectations and suppressions of grief and loss for black women specifically. So can you talk a little bit about the history that sort of got us to this point and what your experience have been? And from your perspective, is there a difference in how grief is experienced and managed? in different communities.

I mean, this is obviously a question that I feel like you should answer as the historian and anthropologist, but I will give you my two cents. You know, I realized after we lost our pregnancy, which we shared very publicly. You know, I wrote articles. It was on social media. Like, we were very upfront and honest about my health and our resulting infertility and then this loss. And so many people gave.

me compliments for being vulnerable. And it always made me feel uncomfortable and a little bit icky. Like even talking about it now, I'm like, like, why are you saying that to me? And I realized I didn't feel comfortable accepting that as a compliment because I had reached a point in my life when we lost our pregnancy where like I honestly didn't give a fuck what people thought about me. Like if people thought that I was being dramatic or too sad or, you know, shouldn't be so emotional over such an early pregnancy. I was just like, I don't care. Like, if you don't like me, don't follow me, don't read my stuff.

Like, I don't care. But I realized that that attitude comes from a place of privilege. Like, by the time we lost our pregnancy, you know, we are financially, relatively well off. I am married. I have worked on Wall Street and in the White House and I own my own businesses. And, you know, like, I have checked a lot of boxes that put me in a place in this world where even as a black woman, I'm pretty much as like safe as you can get if you're not Beyonce or Oprah Winfrey, right? And so I didn't have to care what people thought of me.

But when I compared that experience to the experience of losing my mom, you know, just five minutes out of college in my first job, you know, no money, no partner, no plan, no career success to hang my hat on when I want to take time off from work. It was just such a different situation. And I realized that vulnerability, like the public kind of vulnerability that we're constantly complimenting people for requires a degree of safety that is not equally distributed in this country. And so, like, I could be publicly as vulnerable as I wanted to be in 2019 when the pregnancy loss happened because of who I was in the world. And I just, it felt, really important to me to acknowledge that and to then thread the needle back to, okay, so what are

the implications then for grief for different people and like different communities? You know, if you're poor, if you're black, if you're female, LGBTQ, like if you are someone who is not safe, how do you find space to emotionally fall apart a bit, which is a part of what grief requires? And it's just a lot harder for people. You know, like the thing that was in my mind right around the time the book came out, you know, in this thinking about safety and grief, you know, there was this image that went viral of mothers in Ukraine writing contact information and, you know, like names and stuff and permanent marker on their children's bodies in case they got separated in the midst

of trying to flee a war zone. And it's like, those people don't have time for grief. I felt tremendous grief seeing that. But like those people aren't grieving. Like they're barely surviving and like just trying to stay alive. And so I think it's really important in conversations around grief and in conversations around vulnerability that we look at things like privilege and safety and how being perceived differently by society impacts what you can and can't do when it comes to something like grief.

Right. Right. I think one of the things that, one of those sayings that people perpetuate that annoys me the most is death is the great equalizer because it isn't. It's not. It's not true. If it were, we would not have pyramids. You know what I mean? If we were, we wouldn't have grave desecration. We wouldn't have body mutilation. Those things are real and they're all over the world. No, you're absolutely right. And I think grief is sort of the same thing, is that, you know, especially in a capitalist economy. Exactly.

The people that don't get to grieve are the people that think that need it more often. And like can't afford to grade. No, 100%. I mean, it's like when people were saying early on in the pandemic, you know, we're all in the same boat. Like, no, we were not all in the same boat. Like, not even close. So, yeah, there is a public policy piece that I haven't had,

I haven't had as much time as I would like to to dig into around it. Because the thing that I want to ensure is that my work helps to create a world where healing from grief, loss, trauma, et cetera, is no longer a privilege. So I lost my grandfather this past year. I'm sorry. Thank you. I did have the benefit of sitting with him for his final days. It happened very, very quickly. He had a terminal cancer diagnosis like your mom. And then it took, it took very, very little time for him to pass. You know, he went from being very functional to being not very functional at all. But, you know, I reported back to work saying that I just lost my grandfather. He helped raise me. And they were like, great, you can have four days of bereavement. And I was like,

yeah, right? Like those four days I'm going to spend planning his funeral, which isn't grieving. That's just business. Yeah, it's logistics. Yeah. Yeah. And then everybody just is like, well, you've had your bereavement time. So yeah. There you go. It's, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. And like, we just, we need to, we need to shift that thinking and those types of policies because we're now in a place where millions of Americans are experiencing grief for the very first time because of the over one million Americans that have died in two years to the COVID-19 pandemic. So I feel like I hate to call it a moment of opportunity, but I'm really hopeful that this time of massive grief will lead to some substantive policy changes.

I'm with you. And I feel like, you know, the longer we don't actually grapple with grief, and the longer we don't actually grapple with death in a way, the more fundamental we lose some parts of our humanity. You know, we really don't deal with death at all. You don't, you don't bury your loved one in a shroud and a grave at your home. You don't wash the body. They sort of leave you at the hospital and that's it. It's very antiseptic.

Yes, exactly. And so I feel like that's part of our inability to grieve properly is because we don't actually take the steps for that grief to be fundamental. That makes perfect sense. And I also think, and I think this is part of why I struggled so much right after my mom died. You know, we have, we have this dated notion around the five stages of grief, first of all, which like, I'm sure you know, as an anthropologist in a story, and like those five stages were not written for you after your grandfather died or for me after my mom died. Like they were written for people who were terminally ill and dying themselves. And somehow in the game of telephone, they've been translated into this thing that people, compare to like the 12 steps in AA where you go through these stages in some sort of sequential order. And then when you don't do that, you think there's something wrong with you or when you're not, quote, over it and it's been six months or heaven forbid a year. And I just, I want to be a part of getting rid of all of that.

You know, like my mom has been dead for over 14 years. I will never get over it because I still, I still love her. I still miss her. Am I like, and like, what does getting over even mean? Like, am I supposed to forget that I had a mom for 25 years who was amazing and like never reckon with that absence ever again? Like, it truly does not even make sense. And so in grief is love, I redefine grief as the repeated experience of learning to live

in the midst of a significant loss. Because, you know, for me, losing my mom at 25 meant revisiting that loss when I met the guy who would become my husband, revisiting that loss the day we got married. revisiting that loss again when we struggled with infertility. And then again, when we lost our pregnancy, and then again, when we were fortunate enough to adopt, you know, a beautiful baby boy and, like, not having her here to, like, share in that experience. Like, it comes up often, and it's not, it's not always this, like, weeping and wailing, like, sadness. You know, like, sometimes it's, like, two tears. Sometimes it's no tears. And just a thought of, oh, wow, she really would have

enjoyed that perfect chocolate chip cookie or, you know, I know she would have loved being at Bennett's baptism, for instance. You know, like, but the whole getting over it, I just, I'm like, I don't know what that means. We're not doing that anymore. I don't think we should do it at all, to be honest. But yeah, and in your book, you talk about your mother sort of being, being in the water, and that's where you sort of visit her. And it's funny. So my, my uncle committed suicide when I was 19 years old. That's not the funny part. I was. Okay. Those sentence shouldn't have been connected. There's a comma in here somewhere. But he often comes back to our family as a seagull.

That's like a big thing. And I have to tell you, he has stolen my lunch on the beach so many times now that I actually believe it. You know, like, you need to stop coming here and doing this to me. I'll never know, I guess, until I, you know, get on the other side and he's like. Yeah. You'll have to find out. Or he's just like, I really like French fries and you eat a lot of French fries. You know, it's hard to say what's happening beyond the veil.

So last question for you. If you got to change one thing about how death is managed today, you know, anything from how we get terminally diagnosed to deathbed time, to funerals, to burials, to grieving expectations, what would you change and what do you hope the future of mourning would look like based on that change? So if I could change anything, I would create a culture where grief is embraced as a normal part of life because I think if we if we can if we can create that world if we can really normalize grief and loss and grief as like an expectation in life then it will be so much

so much easier for people to move through it when it shows up for them you know because it's like like there are certain things in life that you just know are coming that are going to be messy or hard or complicated, but you expect them as a normal part of life, like teenage years, you know, parents complain about them, kids complain about them. It's like it can be beautiful and amazing, but it's also kind of terrible. You know, adolescence is a lot of change, but like, we accept it. And like that's and we've normalized it. And I know there are other things like that.

And like we just, we need to normalize death and grief because we're not going to get away from it. Like it's coming for all of us. Yes. And I love having very practical conversations about death. You know, I feel like your grandparents are like, oh, you know when I go. Feel free to take the chair in the corner. Everybody's like, oh, don't talk about that grandma. But it's like, you're 86 years old, grandma. It's coming for you a lot sooner than it's coming for everybody else. And I think we should just have frank conversation. But this is true. If you're uncomfortable with your grandparent talking about death, they can call me and I will happily help them in their funeral because I do love that. But thank you so much for coming on. This is. been a fantastic conversation. I feel like I can go like grieve now. Like I feel like I want that to be like a thing that I go upstairs and do now. Yes, go do it. Go do it. I love it. Let's get some grief on. Thank you so much. Thank you.