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Healing Through Humor · The Uplifters

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: An uplifter is a compelling leader who tries to breathe life and hope into people around them.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Who listen and care and guide and help.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Whose way of being in the world inspires.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Who uplifts with humor and understanding.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: who leads by example don't judge vulnerable bold determination who are here to create a better world who can learn and teach who encourages you who shines their light to lead other people who uses their best self in order to help others i found the life that i liked and i worked toward that we are all uplifters big love
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to The Uplifters podcast.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Aransas Savas and today I'm downright giddy to talk about death with Rebecca Sofer, the co-founder of Modern Loss.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: You've heard about Modern Loss on earlier episodes on this beautiful journey through loss and grief over the last five weeks.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: What Modern Loss does is look for creative, meaningful
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: encouraging ways to offer content and community to address the long arc of grief she is also the author of the best-selling Modern Loss Handbook an interactive guide to moving through grief and building your resilience which of course Gayle King named a favorite book of 2022 naturally
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: and Rebecca is also the co-author of the book Modern Loss, Candid Conversation About Grief.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Beginners, welcome.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: We need our place.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Rebecca's writing has appeared in so many places, including New York Times, Time, Glamour, NBC.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: She's spoken on loss and resilience around the world and maybe unexpectedly,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: but really importantly, we're gonna talk about the joy and the humor that can be found across the long arc of loss and some ideas that we can use to creatively and intentionally build resilience on that long journey.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Rebecca, thank you for being here.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: We are missing some key details to this story though.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't imagine you or any young woman starts out her life dreaming of becoming an expert and a guide through loss and resilience.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would gather that you are correct in that assumption.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: There may be.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like, look at Beetlejuice.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Look at Winona Ryder's character.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: She was pretty connected to death and grief and all that.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I wasn't like her and probably like many young people.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't grow up even knowing that you could have a career or carve out some sort of meaningful path working with grief and loss communities.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know I wanted to be a journalist and then I wanted to be a political satire producer and I also wanted to be an intergalactic DJ which you know sadly I mean there is still hope I mean actually that's the thing that might actually come true more than any of these dreams but I started out my career after getting my graduate degree from Columbia Journalism School by working for the Colbert Report so I started
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Post-grad school working in comedy, in political satire, because one of the reasons that I love Stephen, I mean, everyone loves Stephen and The Daily Show is because they manage to convey important information in ways in which you will absorb that information.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you won't like turn off the TV or zone out or go running for the hills and never come back.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was really drawn to that way of telling stories and telling important stories.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: and you know I'm a little weird I was having a blast and I really felt like I was starting to cook with gas in my life I had just turned 30 I'd been there for a couple years by then I was a
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: went on vacation with my parents camping in upstate New York in Lake George that was kind of our place I'm originally from Philadelphia and I'm an only child between my mom and dad and that night after they dropped me off in my disgusting camping gear we've been you know on an island for like five or six days in the middle of a
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: 32 mile long lake with no running water I was smelling ripe I hugged my mom I kissed her she dropped me off she used the bathroom I was going to see her a few days later down in Philly for a family wedding and instead a few days later I was putting her into the ground because she died between leaving me and getting safely home it was
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Terrible and traumatizing and all of the things that somebody would assume that going through something like that would be.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: My dad was in the car with her.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So then I was also just ejected not only into the after of what it's like to live with loss, but also the after of like being so worried about your surviving parent and feeling like you had to take care of them because, you know, my dad had just lost the love of his life.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: and survived a terrible accident.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I just started this new stage of life where I just became intimately acquainted with grief, with loss, and with especially how allergic we seem to be.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: at talking about this stuff in ways that don't make people feel like something is wrong with them for moving through it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that is the pivotal moment of my career, which was when I realized how isolating we make it for people to
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: not only like grieve like deep grief but just like live with the shit across the long arc and I decided to make it my mission after several years went by after my dad also died four years after my mom died
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: to just kind of help people to feel less alone and not only feel less alone in what they were going through but also to be shown examples of resilience and of the mess and of all the nuances of what it felt like to live with loss and for those examples to serve as inspiration to them because we all deserve to live great lives even if we've been dealt hard hands and all of us have
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so interested in this journey because here you are this young woman whose future vision has been sort of completely reshaped by situations and context and one of the things we talk a
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Reclaim what has been added to our stories, integrate it with the story we were building or telling and our own gifts and interests and passions and create something new out of that.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Would you remember the moment after that when you started to come out and try to create something out of these tragic moments?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember like what I was wearing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: I do know that Grey's Anatomy was probably on the air because it's been on the air for like 100 years.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: So some moment in time over the course of the Grey's Anatomy series arc, I had this realization.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty soon after my mom died because keep in mind, I was very much in the build mode of my life.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was 30.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was single.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to do all the things.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, 30.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I get it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh, you're 30.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: But like, you know, in New York, 30 is like 21.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: and I had also just gone to grad school a couple years beforehand so I really felt like I was embarking upon my career of choice and I was building on that and I'd just gotten promoted and I was navigating social life and trying to get a dog and all that stuff and then all of a sudden bam I also had to navigate enormous loss and
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: and I had trouble reconciling how you do the two things together because there didn't seem to be a lot of space in my daily schedule for me to fit the loss in, fit the grief in.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Companies, employers aren't so good at that in general.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: In my case, it got to a point where I really had to rely on the kindness and empathy of the people I worked for and described to them what it felt like to
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: B-30, Have Your Mom Die on a Highway, and have to go back to Philly every weekend to look after your dad and try and carve out time to see a grief counselor when you're in a daily TV production every single day.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a real lifestyle that lends itself to a lot of self-care during business hours.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized that I had to become my own advocate.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of sat around and waited for like the world to serve me like little kittens on silver platters.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, it's going to be okay.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to, the universe is going to take care of you.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized that the universe doesn't give a flying fig about taking care of me.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just like it doesn't give a flying fig about taking care of anybody else.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: It just, it's, you know, things just happen and you have to figure out like, what are you going to do now that they've happened?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: and for me I just realized that eventually I got to the point where I was like I get it I've tried the things that everyone says they're sure I should do like everyone was totally sure that I should go back to work and you know and keep myself busy or that I should take a leave from work and like go to a hilltop or that I should try and date because that would be hopeful or that I should definitely not date because I'm in a really hard time everyone had their own opinion of what I should do in the depths of my grief
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: and I started by listening to them because I was just so desperate for guidance and eventually I realized oh I get it only I know what I should be doing for myself and also the version of me at 12 p.m.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: today has no idea what the version of me at 2 p.m.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: tomorrow is going to need because grief is such a strict mistress and it revels in sneak attacks and it shifts and ebbs and flows and one day you might
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: from Modern Loss, Aransas Savas
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Other people who could show me instead of telling me it's going to be okay.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a year.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you should go to work.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Show me what you've done.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Show me what worked for you.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Show me how you've changed.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And also show me that it's going to get better, but also make me feel seen in the reality that this stuff is hard no matter what forevermore.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Make me feel less alone in this mess.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: I just was like okay I think this Modern Loss idea I think it's something I can do as a writer and a producer a publisher and also just like someone who understands how to convene communities and also convey
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: maybe sometimes boring maybe sometimes scary overwhelming information in tones that are comfortable to people because that is what you do when you work in comedy and satire yeah you talk about wars you talk about politics you talk about like crazy shit that's going on you talk about boring things like weird economic things but by the end of the show your audience members have learned something it's like you trick them into learning
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: and that is kind of what I wanted to do with the topics of grief and loss I wanted to trick people into like coming into these warm waters of conversation and have them realize like oh my god oh wait it's like totally fine in here like it's not scary the worst has already happened this is fine in fact it feels really good to have a forum and a community to talk about this stuff I feel better now so what are you saying
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: to allow people to access that emotional connection in a way that doesn't
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that I'm saying, I think I'm just like being really honest with people.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've written two books.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: I co-founded this site with my good friend, Gabby Berkner, 10 years ago.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've done lots of live events, a lot of live storytelling events, grief comedy events.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: I speak at companies, I speak at nonprofits, et cetera.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: The through line is that I am very upfront that like when someone says like, oh, it's grief expert, Rebecca Zephyr.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm no more of an expert than like you are, but I'm just as much of an expert as you are.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: The message that I want to get across more than anything is that grief is not a pathology.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's not an illness.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not anything that has any cure.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it doesn't have a vaccine or like a Paxlovid.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like a thing that you have to move through.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also the most universal thing that anybody can go through.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, fine.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: In addition to being born and dying.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right, great.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Every single one of us is going to experience grief if we care about anything.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Some of us experience profound loss a lot earlier than others and a lot more unexpectedly than others, but we're all going to go through it.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: What I want people to realize is
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: right away is that it's messy and that there's no such thing as a linear progression and that there's also no such thing as a binary experience in grief.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's never over.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's never closure.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: People are like, I got over, like, I'm trying to get over my grief.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I get it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I understand what you're saying, but like, that's never going to happen.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I say that not to be like a Debbie Downer, but almost to be kind and hopeful to that person.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: and make them realize that like if they're still having shitty moments way down the line guess what that's totally normal it's normal you know because you still have a living relationship with the person who died or your pet who died or what have you because you're still alive
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Uplifters featuring Modern Loss, Aransas Savas titled Healing Through Humor
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: a really long time after everybody in society seems to think you should be doing better and wall things like grief counseling and people with letters after their names can be incredibly helpful to people who are grieving like super helpful I think everyone should have a good grief counselor it's not everything you know I think that community is what people need
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: and I think that the more people realize that it's a mess it's a forever 24-7 365 day a year thing I want people to realize that grief is an individual experience no matter what but when we kind of
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Silo Ourselves in the conversation and we're like, okay, I'm just going to like reserve this for like my therapist or like that one person.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: When we don't allow ourselves to get to a point where we're starting to share kind of communally and I'm not saying post everything on Facebook or Twitter.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying just like let it out a little bit more, you know, be a bit more open with your colleagues, your manager that you're having a hard time, you know, ask for what you need and see if you can get it.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Start setting boundaries with people who aren't making you feel great or try and ask other people to pull you in a little bit more if you need to feel pulled in.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: The more that you do that, then you are making something that is an individual experience, a much less isolating one.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell you, that is like the key to everything, feeling like you're not alone in it.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I agree.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not just grief and loss.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: As you said, it is everything.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Every experience of being a human being is easier carried if it is normalized through the lens of connection with other people who've had similar experiences.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: And if we allow ourselves to feel whatever dimensions of emotion we are experiencing with that experience,
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and also I want to say that when you feel like your burden is being divided up multiple times over and carried on many shoulders, you're going to feel so much lighter.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Not like, oh my God, everything's totally fine now because you have a loss, you know, and that's normal and that's awful.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: but you're going to feel so much lighter with regard to having more energy to dedicate to getting yourself what you need as opposed to spending so much of your energy trying to get some acknowledgement in your hard thing.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: if you feel like other people are seeing you acknowledging you there as a sounding board or somewhere to put your primal scream sometimes or just someone you can call on a hard trigger day or whatnot you just feel like you just have so much more energy to think about what else you can do for yourself to make yourself you know feel i don't want to say stronger because like we're all strong but like you're building more coping mechanisms to put in your toolbox
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's, for me, it's about not burning all of my energy on hiding.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's exhausting.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it takes a lot.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it takes a lot of energy to pretend that you're fine.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, either like disappear or like be everywhere and put on this mask of like, oh, I'm fine.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how are you?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, totally fine, totally fine.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: When you're like, honestly feel like you're disintegrating inside.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I am familiar with that.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was an Oscar level pro before.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: at that and I flamed out my energy crashed and burned after about a year or so because I couldn't keep up with it anymore I just needed to just let it all hang out and it was really only when you know I went to dinner with a few other women who had all lost parents and we
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: did get to a point where we could kind of share honestly and openly it was like the floodgates had opened and there was this emotional exhale and it was just so amazing to not have to explain yeah I'm telling you about a bad date I had but like you don't understand because it's so much more complex because it's happening against the backdrop of like a dead mom it just felt so much better to not have to say any of that to these people because they got it and they didn't know exactly what I was going through but they knew what it felt like
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: to grieve somebody notable and meaningful in their lives.
• 19:06
  Yeah.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like they also had in common that they were women and they were around your age group and they lived in a similar place, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: So there's some commonality.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: That totally helped.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: It did.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I can't lie.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like when two people who understand grief meet each other, there is such an enormous opportunity for real intimacy to happen really quickly.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: You feel more comfortable.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, oh, you have a lawsuit.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then you just like, oh my gosh, like you kind of like exhale a little bit and then you feel like you're like revealing more and you're sharing more.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: You're being more empathetic toward them automatically than you might ordinarily be to somebody else whose story you really don't know.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: and everything on social media is like so flattened like there's no room for nuance and as I said before grief is certainly not a binary thing it's not black and white there's all the nuance so when you really do make connections through loss they can be some of the most powerful gratifying hopeful connections that you could ever have it's trust
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: It is, it's trust.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a safe space where there's enough understanding and it's the same thing we hopefully get to experience with our own families.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And this is just sort of an acceleration of that because of the context.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: I know you talk as much about resilience as you do loss.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: Why has that become a central theme of your work, Rebecca?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because when my mom died, I was 30 and I really needed to know that my life hadn't ended too because hers did.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: But it felt like it had because she was my person and I didn't understand the landscape of the world anymore.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And she was also my witness to my childhood and she was also the person who I kind of assumed was going to be there as I hit all of the milestones that I wanted to hit in my life.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I kind of figured out eventually that I just was going to have to mother myself somehow which some days I pat myself on the back about and other days I fail miserably and the resilience part was really just like in I know it's like a buzzword it's like a hashtag now but what is resilience it's the ability to level up
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: with yourself when things get hard when you're dealt a blow how can you recover from that and I'm not talking about how quickly like and how can you get over it no no no it's like how do you deal with it how do you keep going how do you keep going in ways that don't promote you suffering because you don't deserve to suffer uh-huh
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Someone in your life dies, that's going to be awful, but you don't deserve to suffer for the rest of your life.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: You deserve to figure out how to tease some meaning from it and use that meaning to carry on and build a life where your life will hopefully continue to expand.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: around your grief and your grief will hopefully again I'm not a therapist I'm not like a clinician but this is the way I describe it hopefully your grief will turn more to loss which is something that I live with I live with my loss but I'm not a grieving woman like you know I think grieving is to me it feels more not like passive but it feels like something that is taking control over me and when I feel like I'm living with loss it's more like it's my companion it's always there and
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm aware of it.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: I know that the waves are going to come and they're going to be really hard sometimes, but I also now know that they're going to go like they're going to know it's ebb and flow.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I can be more prepared as time goes by, like anticipate those waves, not just the expected ones around Mother's Day or birthdays, but also have tools that I've developed that
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: to handle the unexpected ones like the ones on Tuesday night at eight o'clock when I see a commercial that totally reminds me of her or like you know like but normally it's like a Google commercial about like family photos and then like I'm sitting with my kids and I'm like sobbing you know I mean they they figured out how to pull at the hard strings so like a Toyota or Subaru commercial I don't know they're like weirdly like they're like weirdly emotional things to watch I feel like Subaru and Volvo especially yeah
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: yeah I don't know like what's up with them but I just like I needed to figure out ways to kind of handle those triggers as which were more unexpected as well as the expected ones the coping mechanisms are wide-ranging it's not just like mindfulness or doing yoga those are great awesome I'm terrible at yoga
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: more power to anybody who does that but also ways to figure out how to get better sleep ways to harness like creative endeavors like writing and music and different practical projects where you're using your hands you're moving your body as you do a ritual that has like a beginning and a closing so that you feel like you're carving out space to honor a moment
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: ways to remember and connect through memory and then maybe ways to honor by creating some sort of bespoke holiday or tradition ways to pass on memory to my children who will never meet my parents ever and also ways to figure out how to still have a work life and navigate your intimate life and your social dynamics and figure out ways to build boundaries you
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: When You Need To or Lower Boundaries When You Need To.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: These are all connected to building resilience.
• 24:34
  Yeah.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And not any one tool is going to work every single time.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: But when you have enough of them and the one thing doesn't work, you have something else to choose from.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I'm hearing.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: You have a whole tool belt and when you need a hammer, you go for the hammer.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: I use the hammer a lot.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's a velvet hammer, but yeah, yeah.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's important, right?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: It serves a purpose, but it's not the only tool you have in your tool belt.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe some you rely on more than others.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing I'm really taking from this, I don't know how much you've read about the research on the oscillating narrative that showed that families who tell their stories as a series of ups and downs have greater resilience than those who tell the story of we came from Poland and everything was great or the ones who said we came from Poland and everything was awful.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's the ones who say we came from Poland and some things were great, some things were bad.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: So what is that up and down appreciation?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like you're telling, but you're really showing.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're showing and not telling.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, yeah, when you're telling a family story of challenges and successes and failures, like that is to me showing, not telling.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: You're not like, oh, it was bad.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was great.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, no, no, no.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like this like great grandpa,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Shlomo came from the shtetl and like he had like two cents in his pocket and then like then he started a grocery and on the Lower East Side and then like oh it burned down during the great thing and that you know it's just like and that is you're right it's showing how it can be awesome and terrible and hopeful and but that the end all be all isn't always the high point or the low point it just keeps going.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: right and if there is such a thing as generational trauma of course there is also generational resilience and I think that is something I really hear in the way that you were translating this into your family dynamics too and the way you're talking to your children about it
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: even just yesterday yeah I took my kid on a field trip to a presidential library my fourth grader and they did this exercise with presidential marketing campaign materials and like they were looking at original versions of like the Johnson versus Goldwater bumper stickers and pins and like Kennedy some of them were really clever and it hit me because he was like oh this one's cool like I like this one and I was like do you know who made some of this stuff your grandfather
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: My dad, my dad did lots of political campaigns and I started telling him about it because he's at the age, he's 10, where like, it's almost like he's 13 already, where like everything is lame.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, wait, really?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, he was literally super witty, very smart, like very clever, like you.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just so neat when I see those moments arise that I don't anticipate them.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know we were going to be like knee deep in campaign marketing materials, but here we are.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think that telling those stories is so important.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: yeah especially when you're when you have kids and let's say your brother died or your dad died or your partner died just like talking about them is so important because so frequently we get fixated and stuck in the illness or the death right and eventually the hope is that we are able to pull ourselves back and
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the ties that we have to the memories, the better memories.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: I say that also with a big asterisk for our listeners because I'm hugely aware that not every relationship is a positive one.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: When somebody dies, it's never tied up with a perfect little bow, but some connections are much more damaging than others.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: In my book, The Modern Loss Handbook, I have a whole section on the tough stuff.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, only do this when you're ready.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a series of questions that really makes you think through, you know, if there's anything that your person ever did to you that they never apologized for.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Did they have any regrets?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know do you have any it's like really important to think through this stuff because that's stuff that like you don't realize is in you but then when it comes to the surface it's something that you might want to take to a mental health professional and further examine I love that my father died when I was 22 but I didn't have a relationship with him I never really knew him I had no positive associations with him
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: and so I definitely have always felt a very different sense of loss and I don't feel any connection to people who lose a parent because I lost a stranger for all intents and purposes I lost some access maybe to a bit of history but even that I just those people didn't raise me I don't have the sense of having lost a parent
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: and so I really appreciate you representing that because there was a part of me for a long time that felt guilty like I think you're supposed to feel bad when you lose a parent like you should be sad or yeah I lost a stranger the more we talk about these things the more we can experience them with acceptance and without judgment and finding the people who do relate and who understand and create that sense of
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: Safety and Journey to Move Along the Art.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the whole tenet of Modern Loss is as long as you're not hurting yourself or anybody else, you do you.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like you do your grief your way.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: You do your loss your way.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I'm like, don't freaking judge anyone else for the way they're doing theirs.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: So this is dense stuff.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: How do you integrate humor into the conversation?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Very easily.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's because it's kind of who I am in many ways.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, for God's sake, I was working for Comedy Central when my mom died.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm clearly somebody who enjoys comedy and I love dark comedy.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: I love connecting through shared hard experiences and laughing over them, not because I'm making light of them,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: but because hard experiences are naturally very messy and within mess there's a lot of humor just like there's tons of humor in the mess of life there's humor in the mess of death when we launched Modern Loss we got a lot of attention right away because our tone was very unapologetic we were very tongue-in-cheek we used a lot of humor and we always said to people for those of you who ask when is it okay to laugh after a death
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Who cares?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever you need to laugh, who's saying it's not okay?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: We also assure you that you're going to feel really sad.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you find yourself laughing at a funeral or having a laugh on like a death-aversary or something or laughing about a memory of when someone was really ill and they couldn't take care of themselves forever, that doesn't mean you're a bad person.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: It means that it's a coping mechanism for you.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can't always just like rend your clothes over something you don't deserve to.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: That means you're suffering.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: and I feel like when we're able to connect through humor in the wake of grief and across the arc of loss that is when we are able to make those real deep connections with other people not only because humor is fun like who doesn't love laughing like I can tell you so many funeral stories about my mom and my dad's funeral
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: and people who don't get it, they like don't know if it's okay to laugh when I tell them when I went to say like goodbye in heavy quotes to my mom in the coffin, I noticed they put the wrong shade of lipstick on her and I flipped out and I ended up taking out my lipstick and putting it on her dead body so that she didn't have to like go to all of eternity looking tacky in the wrong shade.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Is that morbid?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: absolutely like did I ever think I was a human person capable of doing something like that no but did I find myself doing something like that did my body move in that direction yeah and is that funny you bet when else would I have ever done that in my life and so when you can talk about that doesn't mean I don't miss my mom doesn't mean I wouldn't give at least one to three limbs to have her back with me so that she could be a part of my life but it just means that
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: I figured out a channel where I can put my feelings and it feels a lot better than the channel where like I lose my mind through my feelings sometimes I don't have a choice sometimes I do feel like I'm losing my mind and it's really hard and I can't find the humor the lightness and that is fair
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: those moments exist for a lot of people and especially for a lot of people who have children who die or lose people to terrible things that is incredibly traumatizing to grieve those type of losses but in general we do use a lot of humor because we know that not only does it feel good to laugh but when you find yourself laughing because whether you realize it or not you're kind of reminding yourself that you're still in there and you're in this
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Experience that's otherwise completely foreign to you.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: But when you find yourself laughing, it's like, oh wait, I'm still me.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a little spark.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's still there.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: I keep picturing you since the beginning of this conversation, zooming off as an intergalactic DJ.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, from your mouth to the universe's ears.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: No, you fully manifested that today.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's happening.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: We are coming to your set.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: I need to learn how to use all the equipment first.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I would rock a hollow notes slash
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Taylor Swift mashup I don't even know which songs those would be but I mean all of it all of it all of it I feel like there's some major platforms she was involved at the very least thank you for the work that you're doing in the world thank you for sharing your story and as you said it's something we will have the opportunity to practice
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: and I take from this personally a reminder that when I am in those times I get to trust the uncertainty and the mystery and the wildness of that ride as it continues so here's to just being human here's to being human
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uplifters, thank you for being here.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for being on this grief and loss journey with us over these last five weeks.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: I hope you'll tune in to the other episodes from this series where we hear from folks at the dinner party.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: We hear from folks who lost infants and children and the team at Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep and
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: the team at Be Present Care who are helping people make decisions in their last days and that collectively we find ways to still be uplifters for ourselves and for each other even through the toughest moments and I can't wait to come together
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: and to connect and celebrate all of our humanness and our beauty and a safe space to be honest and raw and vulnerable and messy together on May 17 in New York City.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: And if you haven't gotten your tickets yet, check the show notes, they'll be there or check us out on Substack.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to The Uplifters Podcast.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you're getting a boost from these episodes, please share them with the uplifters in your life and then join us in conversation over at theuplifterspodcast.com.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: head over to Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast and like, follow and rate our show it'll really help us connect with more Uplifters and it'll ensure you never miss one of these beautiful stories big love
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: Painted water sunshine with rosemary and thyme Dwell in the perplexing though you find it vexing Toss a star and hover, be your own best lover Relish in a new prime, plant a tree in springtime Dance with idle hindsight, bring the sun to twilight
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: Lift you up, oh Lift you up, oh Lift you up, oh Lift you up Lift you up, oh
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Beautiful.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_03: I cried.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's that little thing you did with your voice.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: Right, in the pre-chorus, right?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: I was like... Mommy, stop crying.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: You're disturbing the peace.