I’ve written about this idea in the past, but there’s something really specific about losing a loved one – particularly a child – that makes you ask the big questions. The Why questions. It’s such a middle finger to the sense most of us have about how the universe is supposed to work. When old people go, yes, it hurts. We grieve, but we sort of understand it. But children? Babies? How the hell does that compute?
So if you’re like me and you happen to experience a day like the day my wife and I lived through 14 years ago, you know that answers probably won’t help, but you want them anyway: Why? What possible good comes of this?
And there aren’t many, but there are people in the world who aren’t satisfied to answer those questions with tears and shrugs. They’ve lived enough life and have seen enough of the world to understand that we’re not powerless in the what-possible-good department. We don’t have full dominion over our destinies, but we have a say. When children die, that’s a tragedy. It’s an awful, fucked up tragedy. But there are tiny pockets of exceptional people on the planet that use tragedies as an excuse to introduce good back into the world.
And it’s wild, but one of these people is my sister Erin.
Erin is one of the most ethically convicted people I know and that’s been true for as long as she’s been alive. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t the moral compass of our family, which, full disclosure, was sometimes a real pain in the ass when we were children. Right and wrong has always been crystal clear to Erin and she’s never been shy or ambiguous about her convictions. She’s a truly authentic soul. And when we lost our sons, Erin decided almost immediately that the legacy of their brief lives should be one of positivity and beauty and charity.
Like a number of people in our life, Erin sacrificed and traveled to be with us in our lowest moment, in the weeks after we lost the boys. Some friends and family bought and built tributes and Erin was always a part of those remembrances. It helped. And, of course, as the months and years drifted past, the cards and the tributes and the encouragements from those who know us lessened. And that’s fine—it’s how human beings are and it makes sense. But for some reason, Erin kept remembering, kept giving and sacrificing. Flowers at Easter, notes and texts on birthdays and holidays, gifts given in the boys’ names to countless charities:
“Hey Jer and Care. In memory of the boys this Christmas, I decided to donate two winter clothing survival packs for Syrian refugees through The Preemptive Love Coalition.”
“Hey guys, did you get the card from the International Rescue Committee? A year of tuition has been taken care of in the triplets’ names to a child in a Third World country.”
“In honor of their birthday, I made a donation to Together Rising, a charity that helps mamas and kids get back on their feet after hard times.”
“I did some research on which organization would make the greatest impact, and I found PCRF. They care for Palestinian children who have had their lives torn apart by the genocide in Gaza. Remembering the boys with you.”
And it’s never stopped. Year after year, holiday after holiday. Because of their Aunt Erin, our sons’ impact on the world continues to grow, a legacy of feeding and clothing and housing and healing people all over the world who are in deep and desperate need.
Here’s the text we received last Christmas:
I’m tempted to say, ‘We should all be more like Erin,’ but that’s not being fair to anyone. As I told my wife recently, “Sometimes I think Erin does a better job of honoring our sons than we do.” The space that Erin holds in her heart for my children isn’t possible for most of us. Her love and empathy is tough to aspire to, so I guess I’ll just say: We’re all lucky to have her.
Erin, if you’re reading, you’re the perfect aunt. Thank you for continuing to remember and honor our boys holiday after holiday, year after year, with the goodness you pour into the world they left behind.
I wish they could have met you.
Before I go, a couple of small odds and ends:
First, last year’s 10 Death Interviews was something I still hear about from friends and acquaintances, citing the inspiration they took from it. Many readers expressed their gratitude for it. For my part, I’m still indescribably grateful to my 10 conversation partners for their time and insight.
One friend reached out to me and told me his read-through of the conversations wound up being a source of strength and encouragement to him as he faced the realities of the terminal disease he was battling. I have to say, his words to me made the whole project worth doing. He passed away a few short months later and he’s most sincerely missed. Rest in peace, Andy.
But there have been other unexpected blessings inspired by the 2024 Death Interview series. In fact, it was a major contributor to an even bigger project to which I’ve dedicated terrific amounts of time and passion in the weeks and months since. More on that (hopefully) soon.
Finally, today marks 14 years since Rudyard, Desmond and Oscar Bear arrived and left. That day has inspired many words and images and stories over the years. One of the most read and shared was a story I wrote several weeks later, called Best Possible. Of all the stories I’ve written in my life, it remains the piece that astonishes me the most—not because I think it’s such a great story, but rather because I’m amazed that anything coherent came out of my head during that time.
The story concerns all of the ways that my own life could have turned out and ‘What if all of those versions of my life could somehow meet each other?’ It opens with a version of me in which Oscar had lived and was about to enter high school. I have vague memories of imagining the 49-year-old me with a 14-year-old son and what that might be like. It seemed like a far-enough-into-the-future scenario to be distant and abstract, but not so distant as to be unimaginable.
Whatever the case, I am that age now. So Best Possible has a particular significance for me this year.
From the story:
He’s in his 40s, maybe even 50, and his hair’s starting in with the gray, but mostly he’s pretty thin up top. He’s paunchy and pale, with a voice like my father’s, only a little deeper, and a profile like my mother’s, only a little more beaky and it’s been a few days since he’s shaved.
Point of fact, he looks exactly like me. Or anyway, exactly how I’ll look in 10 or 15 years. Truth is, he’s my future self and he’s returned to his past, my present, to tell me to stay on the 710 south.
Pretty close, honestly, except for “pretty thin up top.” (Bald, younger Jeremy. The description you’re looking for is bald.)
Nevertheless, I’m still grateful for this story. I’m also grateful for the other bits and bobs, the stories and the links and the interviews and the experiments that still live here on Tips On Triplets all these years later, a chronicle of what it’s been like to anticipate and meet and lose and grieve and remember my sons, now 14 years later.
And if you’re among the faithful who have managed to hang on with me for nearly a decade and a half, I’m grateful for you too.
Yesterday, I concluded ten conversations about death and grief with writers of various disciplines. For those who would like to read them, here they are:
Jeff Jensen (Graphic Novelist, Entertainment Journalist, TV and Feature Film Screenwriter)
Tricia Lott Williford – Part 1 & Part 2 (Faith-Based Author, Speaker)
I entered into these conversations with an admittedly selfish goal: I wanted to understand death and grief better for my own sanity and peace of mind. I approached these ten artists specifically because I suspected they would teach me from a perspective I wouldn’t be able to manufacture on my own and that’s exactly what happened.
Several people in my life have asked me, “So, what have you learned from this?” I couldn’t really begin to catalogue it all because there’s so much packed into the above conversations and it would be futile to try to distill it into a handful of bullets. But I will say that I have a new appreciation for the diversity of experiences surrounding death and grief. No two people think about it and handle it exactly the same. And none of my conversation partners have any sort of illusions that their perspective is The Ultimate Perspective. We’re all learning; we’re all living through it and feeling our way around it.
But the bits of conversations that have maybe stuck with me the most are the parts that I wasn’t able to publish. Several (possibly most) of the conversations included at least something that I was asked to edit/augment/qualify/omit after the fact: “Please don’t put this in your transcript, but…” “I realized that I didn’t explain myself fully, so please mention…” “I’d prefer my own audience/family/friends/colleagues not read something I said, as they would find it unsettling…” or even simply: “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to answer that question.”
I completely understand and appreciate that. These are the toughest, most personal topics imaginable. And make no mistake, I see each of these conversations as a sacred space that I sort of invited myself into with these amazing people. So, “grateful” doesn’t begin to say it, but I’m indeed so grateful to be able to enter into these spaces with this wise group.
If there are any of these discussions you’ve yet to read, I encourage you to do so. There’s treasure throughout. And to Jeff, Lisa, Wallace, Marla, Dirk, Katherine, Chelsea, Alison, Sam and Tricia: thank you for your gracious transparency. I’m better for having had these conversations.
Today is Part 2 of my conversation with Tricia Lott Williford (please read Part 1 if you haven’t already).
Yesterday, Tricia and I discussed faith and theological deconstruction in the midst of incapacitating grief. We discovered, to both of our surprise, that the grief surrounding the losses of our loved ones (Tricia’s husband and my triplet sons, which happened in the same six month span) informed and influenced the other’s grief without either of us realizing it. We talked about the tension of enjoying the blessings of a second husband and three more children while living in the reality of a grief that’s never fully finished with us.
Today is the completion of our conversation. We discuss how Tricia talks about her first marriage with those unfamiliar with her story and what sort of advice she gives to those newly experiencing overwhelming grief. Also, we consider the possibility that grief could ever become a place of comfort, as opposed to only a place of pain. Finally, Tricia reexamines her thoughts on the reliability of faith and the nature of spiritual deconstruction.
Tricia: I can’t remember if I wrote it into And Life Comes Back or not, but there was a dream that I had where Robb and I were in the kitchen. He had been gone for about a year and we were in the kitchen together and we were making macaroni and cheese. And he was slamming cupboards. It was real passive aggressive, like “I’m mad, but I’m not gonna tell you what I’m mad about. Just notice that I’m mad, I’m angry with you.” And in my dream I was so glad to see him that I was like, “Hey, tell me what you need.” I was like a puppy, following him around in the kitchen. “Tell me, tell me.” And he turned to me and he took me by both shoulders. And he said, “You have to stop grieving me.” And then I woke up.
Jeremy: Sheezis.
He was mad at me because in my mind I was still making space for him.
Hmm.
That dream only happened one time, but the dissonance happened again and again in the sense of… like, I would get a new couch and: ‘Robb’s never seen this couch. I don’t know if he’s gonna be okay with how it fits in the living room. How would he feel about a red couch?’
Any time there would be something new that would close the gap, that would no longer leave space for a place where he sat in my home, I had to reconcile that again. I was just like, ‘Is this okay? Is it all right that I don’t want to drive a minivan anymore? Is it okay that I’m selling his car?’ And he said to me in my dream, “You have to STOP. THIS.”
Yeah. It’s… not a lie necessarily, but… this perception that there’s this perpetual honoring that has to happen and it’s beyond what’s helpful.
Yeah, I can’t live his life for him forever. His is over.
Right, he’s not diminished by your living a beautiful life.
The fact that he came and gave me permission, that he was just like, “Listen, I’m not releasing you, I’m irritated with you. I’m actually mad at you for the way you’re handling this.” Like, “Go fly, free bird,” as you have said. “Go, get on with it.”
That’s beautiful though.
Yeah.
So… I’ve had a certain experience many times over the years and I know it’s an experience that you know very well. A person in pain sees that I understand what they’re feeling because I’ve lived it. And they ask me, “What do I do? I mean, does this get better? How did you handle it?” What do we tell them? What do you tell them?
Mm. Alright, here’s what I tell them. I say, “This is terrible. And I’m so sorry that this happened to you. And the thing you have to know is that you get a new playbook now. All the rules are different. Because all of those people, they live on Planet Earth, and you live on Planet Someone I Love Has Died. And those are different worlds.”
Mm -hmm.
“And so here’s what that looks like. You get a permanent permission slip to not show up to things. You don’t have to go. You also can go and leave five minutes later when you discover, ‘No, I can’t. Peace out.’ You don’t have to explain. You get to do this for as long as you need to.”
Right.
“You also get to take a day off from sadness when people see you laughing and they say, ‘I thought your daughter died earlier this year.’ ‘Yeah, you know what, she did. We’re taking a day off. It’s hard work to grieve. So, we’re going to stop for today.”
Yeah. Yeah.
I do have a standard prescription that I write, which is: you get a permission slip to feel how you feel for as long as you feel, for as long as it feels that way. Whether it is joy when it doesn’t make sense or sadness when people think you should be fine by now. You get to do either one of those. The second thing is: you only ever have to do the next thing.
And sometimes the next thing is, ‘I need a glass of water. I need to go back to bed.’ For a long time, I went to Starbucks because that was the only way I could be sure I would stay out of bed. And so it became this anchor for me, but only because, like, ‘If I’m here, I’m out.’ I got to get out of this house so that I won’t die.
Yeah.
There was a time when I was contemplating, like, “Can I make this? Can I survive this?” “Yeah, you’re allowed. Let’s just not make that decision today. Let’s evaluate tomorrow.” And so there’s grace in the choice. Once I realized… because I was pretty angry, now that you mention it.
Mm-hmm.
And I was like, “I have no choice but to live this story.” And [my therapist] Jana was like, “You have a choice. You don’t have to do this. There will be consequences for that choice, but you get to make the choices. You get to decide if you want to live or die.” And then there was something empowering about that that. I was like, “Well, if I get to choose, then I’d like for my children to not be completely orphaned. I’ll do that for them.”
Yeah.
So, what I also speak to quite a bit is the people surrounding the person who is cracked in half. Because they come to me and they say, “Hey, my sister’s husband just died. She’s in bad shape. Can she talk to you?” A: No. She cannot talk to me. Because I can’t. You’re the one she needs to talk to.
Right, right. Yeah.
Be in it with her. B: You have no idea how easy it is for me to get tanked by this. So this is a very careful chemistry here. And I can’t take on her grief. And C: You need to let her have a hard time.
So those are the things that I say. It takes as long as it takes. I also say plan on at least two years, because people really want a timeline.
Hm. I hadn’t heard that two-year thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first year was for my head to make sense of what had happened. And the second year was for my heart to make sense of what happened. So the first calendar year, I was simply just living day to day and like, “Valentine’s Day is coming. How am I gonna do that one? Our wedding anniversary is coming, how am I gonna do that one?” Like, “I just gotta figure out the nuts and bolts of a life right now.” But I was frozen and I was numb. And so I didn’t really feel anything until a year later. And that second year was, in a lot of ways, more emotional and more taxing because it was my heart. I could feel it now. So, for sure two years with a sprinkling of sunny days.
Right.
It’s gonna be really bad for two years. And there’s something freeing about that because then people are delighted if they get a day off before that two years is up and they don’t expect there to be any reprieve. It’s a marathon. ‘I gotta make sense of why I’m not gonna go to church on Mother’s Day because I’m in the two years.‘
You know, one thing that I remember experiencing and also just encountering this in other people—even people who are freshly in it—they’re nervous that they will one day stop grieving.
Mmm.
Which seems strange, but I remember… we hadn’t even gone home from the hospital yet and [our doctor] said to Carey, “Okay, I’m gonna prescribe this to you.” And I don’t remember what she prescribed, but it was depression-related. And she said, “You need to take this every single day. Please do it.” And Carey said, “But if I take this, what if I don’t feel it?”
And the doctor understood what she was saying. And the doctor said, “You will feel it.” Because that was Carey’s worry. “I don’t want to be numb to this.” She also didn’t know how she was going to continue, so it was this really odd thing.
And I found that people that are freshly in it have asked me the same thing. “Does it stop? Because I don’t know that I want it to stop.” And I get that. And I don’t think that’s something that’s apparent or obvious to people that haven’t lived this, that you’re nervous that you’re going to have to give up this grief someday. And that’s something that feels a little tough to do.
You know, the cliché is true and it’s something that I don’t hesitate to tell people in this position every time, which is, “I promise you, this will always be hard. But it won’t always be this hard. It’s important for you to know that.”
Mmm.
And I don’t usually say this next part unless I feel like it’s something that would be received well, but I’ll sometimes say, you know, “There’s going to be be a day that you’re going to be grateful for this grief. It’s going to be a gift in your life.” The grief is a gift in my life, put it that way. I’m still angry and sad. It’s been 13 years; I’m still angry and sad. And I’m so grateful for that anger and that sadness that I still have, that still stabs me in the belly button… sometimes when I don’t know it’s coming, but I’m much better now at knowing when it is.
Because I know what that is. It’s there because my kids lived. And they meant something. And they continue to mean something. And it’s important that that’s still in the world. And that pain, you know, even more than my tattoo or anything else, is the best reminder that I have.
And so I always try to be careful to remind people: “You’re never going to be robbed of this. You will always have this.“
Man, just today at lunch, it was somebody’s wedding anniversary. And so everybody around the table was like, “Well, how long have you been married? How long have you been married?” And I thought, “I’m not gonna say it because it’s just gonna rain on everybody’s parade.” But 24 years is how long. 24 years to this man and eight years to this one.
My gosh, I know that question. And the bullshit cycle my brain goes through when someone says, “So, how many kids do you have?”
“How many kids do you have?”
And the answer doesn’t just fly right out, you know? You skip on it a little bit.
You do. You skip on it. And part of me is trying to figure out if these people can handle it. Can the room handle it? Is this gonna suck all the air out of this room? Do I want the next comment? Do I want the, “Ugh… ugh… sorry.” Okay, well you didn’t know him, you didn’t know me, you don’t know any of this. So, you know what? “Eight years, we’re gonna celebrate eight years in May.”
Dude, yeah, that’s where I am. The answer is ‘three children.’ Apologies to the universe, that is my answer. Because I’m just not gonna have that conversation right now.
“I’m just not gonna have that conversation right now.” I like that.
One of the things that has sustained me every single day for the last 13 years is the Book of Psalms. I read it every single day.
Wow. Amazing.
It’s not a hero thing. It’s not a spiritual discipline. It’s a lifeline. I drink my coffee and I brush my teeth and I read the Book of Psalms. And I’ve copied the Book of Psalms from beginning to end. And I’ve worn out two Bibles. “Let me just copy it until I figure out how to say it.” And Psalm 88 is just ashes from beginning to end. It’s so refreshing because there isn’t a, “…But I will glorify the Lord, His name will be praised.” There isn’t any of that. It literally ends with, “I’d rather be dead.” And I loved that that Psalm made it through all the drafts of the canonization of the Bible. Because it’s fair and because I’m allowed to feel that way.
But this week I was reading, I think, 86. It’s the one that says, “When you walk through the valley of weeping, the autumn rains will turn the ground into fertile soil” or “blessings” or something like that. So I just started writing, like, what does that actually mean to me? Because it’s true. It’s what you were just saying. Like, this is a sacred grief. Don’t take it away from me.
So, in that Robin Williams movie [What Dreams May Come], that depiction when he goes into her isolation of Hell, and it’s all gray, and it’s all trees that are all bare, and there’s no life, and you can hear the branches breaking under your feet because it’s all dry. There’s nothing good here.
And so I wrote about going into that space that’s the valley of weeping and the darkness. That barren space, it’s so cold and it’s so empty, and I’m the only one here. Nobody can go here with me. But then right in the middle of it, there’s this cottage.
And in the cottage, there’s a light on inside. There’s something here. And I go into it and I discover that it’s full. It’s lined with books. On all of the shelves of this place, books that are tried and tested and I can read about theology or psychology or writing or parenting or fiction or nonfiction or short stories that are escapist or heavy novels that I have to wrestle with and I can stay for as long as I want. And there’s a bed that’s just so welcoming.
And then there’s just a table for two people. There’s just bread and butter. And it’s really good bread and really good butter. But that’s all there is and it’s just simple. And I can stay for years, or I can stay for hours. And I’m the only one in here. Except that there’s this other chair. Because I’m not alone.
And then the weather changes and you look outside and things start to turn a little bit green. So, I can stay long enough to get my courage and get my bearings and catch my breath and sleep for a minute or two years. And then I can step outside, but I’m free to come back at any time. And so the Valley of Weeping is no longer a threatening place to me. In fact, I’m a little nostalgic for it.
Not for the pain, I don’t want the pain. But because in that, there’s gonna be this that’s waiting for me though. I do get to go to that beautiful place. I get to go to that place with all the books and the bread and butter. I can stay in there. It’s fine. It’s just me and this other chair.
That’s so beautiful.
Well, thank you, it feels rambly right now.
No. Beautiful. So beautiful.
There’s something about that as you were explaining it, it just felt like, ‘Okay, that’s the sacredness of it. Don’t take that from me. That can’t be taken from me.’ And sometimes I have to just leave all of this so that I can go back to that place of, ‘Yeah, I can’t do this at your pace, everybody. I can’t do this. I’m out. But I’ve got that place to go to.’
I woke up this morning thinking, “I got it wrong. I have to talk to him again. I got it wrong.” But I didn’t know what I’d gotten wrong, because everything about those three hours was perfectly right. Just, something wasn’t right. I’ve been sitting with it all day, letting it take shape. I’ve been patient with it, waiting for it to bloom. I’ve been in an achey, poured out place today, where it feels like I moved a lot of furniture yesterday. In a way, I kind of did. More than I’ve moved in a long, long time.
[My therapist] Jana reminds me that emotional work takes a physical toll, that the best conversations can wear like a marathon. So I’ve been patient and sleepy, and then patient with sleep, and then sleepily patient. It’s been a slow morning, in the way of a slow harvest. But I found it. I know what I got wrong.
Let’s unpack this, please.
It starts here: Jeremy asked, “Did you ever go through a deconstruction?”
Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
When my boys were small, Legos were a whole thing. (Please never you mind about bothering to tell me that the plural of Legos is actually Lego. I cannot with this. I need some things to feel right in my mouth, and plural Lego will never be right. Let me be wrong about Legos being right.) Anyway, we were up to our necks in the Legos scene. The sun rose and set around their Lego creations on the floor, on the coffee table, in the bathtub, and sometimes even in my pillowcase. My sons were builders.
I remember when they would build something big and tall and glorious, a tower of their own making. “Look, Mommy. Look how strong and tall my ___________ [spaceship, castle, tower, etc.] is!” And then Molly, our chocolate lab, would pick up on the excitement in their voices, and she’d walk by and wag her tail, and the whole structure would start to sway. Panic would ensue as they rushed in to make repairs.
From my taller and wiser vantage point, I might say something like, “Hey, pal, what if you . . . maybe you need to . . . “
But my young builder would say, “No! Mommy! Don’t touch it! I made it! Don’t touch it!”
“But it’s going to crash, honey.”
“This is what I want it to look like, Mommy. Don’t touch it.”
“I won’t touch it. I’m just making a suggestion. If you build a broader base over here, or maybe if you add some pillars over here . . . ”
Essentially, I was saying, “If you are willing to deconstruct this and build a firmer foundation, this is going to be even better later on.”
Sometimes, when you look again at what’s holding things up, you find the wobbles and the lack of support and the pieces not quite connecting. Sometimes, rebuilding makes the whole structure stronger. Sometimes we must unbuild in order to rebuild.
I’ve built some wobbly structures to house my belief systems, Jeremy. You know them well. We literally come from the very same Lego factory. I mean, I felt like they looked good on the outside, but essentially what I had was a house of cards, ready to topple over on a breeze. I couldn’t see the flaws in my construction, and it made me very uncomfortable when anyone questioned what I’d built.
If this isn’t solid, if this falls down around me, then what have I spent all this time building?
Take a look at the life map I had constructed, for example. I actually thought I was an example of his favor for a life well lived, a reward in exchange for my three decades of obedience. I thought he had been so kind to me because he loved me so much. After all, he’s a good, good Father who works all things for the good of those who love him. Put a bow on this, I thought. Obey God, and he gives you the life you want, I thought. Smooth all of that with a frosting theology of grace to cover any mistakes in my math, and you’ve got yourself a formula for God’s favor and faithfulness.
It wasn’t just that I thought A + B = C. I had created some sort of complex algebraic formula, where, if you compute all the factors, you get Faithfulness and Favor. But, get one single factor a little bit off, and you’ve lost your equation for Faithfulness and Favor.
That’s exhausting and impossible. And also that’s legalism, the personal hell we create for ourselves when we rely excessively on moral laws, rules, and formulas.
And in the end, trying to do everything right didn’t “pay off” for me. My formula for favor was actually an algorithm for a great unraveling. It was deeply unsettling. A house of cards in a wind storm.
Or, a Lego tower in the path of a dog’s tail. My construction was unbuilding.
But if I were to survive this kind of unbuilding, I would have to take apart what I had believed or understood about God. Maybe all the pieces might fit together in a different way, or maybe I was missing pieces altogether, or maybe we picked up some of the wrong pieces in the first place. I panicked the same way my boys did. “Don’t touch it!”
But the truth is, living with a faith that is static and unmoving doesn’t leave room for God to be who he is.
We aren’t all-knowing people. Some of what we were taught, or what we have believed, very well could be taking us away from him rather than closer to him. In the midst of the scary noise, there’s a deeper reality: We have to unbuild in order for our faith to grow.
When my boys’ Lego towers threatened to topple over, I had a few suggestions. Essentially, I was saying, “If you are willing to deconstruct this and build a firmer foundation, this is going to be even better later on. I have a little more life experience to see; all you need is this one other thing.”
In the aftermath of the decade following The Worst Thing, God coached me, “Trish, it’s okay. What you have is very beautiful. I’m just asking you to take what you’ve continued to learn about me and renovate your foundation.”
When you depend on a formula, you have put God in a box. When that formula breaks, you meet a bigger, stronger God who doesn’t need boxes at all.
So, circling back. When you asked if I deconstructed, yes I did. But before that, you asked if there was a time when my faith couldn’t go the distance.
And that’s the thing I answered wrong. Or the answer I would change, on this afternoon after an achey morning of sleepy patience.
In all of my unbuilding, I still believed there was a God, that he made me, he made this, and he knew what was going on. That is faith. When you or I say that we are persons of faith, that’s what it boils down to me for me: You and I each believe that there is a God, that he made us, he made this, and he is aware of what’s going on.
But I don’t understand why he’s not fixing it.
I don’t understand why Robb died.
I don’t understand why your boys were created and then not sustained.
I don’t understand what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, why he sees this is a good way to love us.
And I don’t understand what he’s in charge of and what he can change, why he sometimes steps in and why he sometimes lets the pieces fall.
But I keep believing he is there. That he made me, he made this, and he is aware of what’s going on, and that I want to trust him. When I can’t, I want to want to. And that is faith. That part is solid.
It’s the understanding that messes with me.
Was there a time when my faith couldn’t go the distance? No. But my understanding came woefully short of the journey. And the only good thing about that is that faith isn’t about understanding. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s the belief in the face of unbelief, the stubborn insistence in the things I cannot understand.
So it isn’t my faith that couldn’t go the distance. It was my understanding.
Tricia’s latest book, You Are Safe Now, is written with her therapist, Jana Richardson, LPC. It tells the story of the private trauma that occurred soon after she lost her husband: grooming, manipulation, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse by a person of trust. Tricia and Jana have written a resource to help others recognize the veiled dynamics of abuse, where it starts, how it escalates, and how survivors can break free and find freedom.
In addition to her books on grief, marriage, family and Bible-related topics, she’s also a bestselling collaborator, who has helped many dynamic individuals tell their own stories.
Of everyone on my writers-I-admire list, Tricia has been in my life the longest and it’s not even close, as I’ve known her since I was a high school teenager. She has Strange Powers, as I told her recently, in that (among other extra-human abilities) every time I have an interaction with her, I feel inspired to be a kinder, more conscientious person. “A better man,” as Jack Nicholson once told Helen Hunt.
And though I determined this wouldn’t be a series of interviews with experts on grief, Tricia is one. Just before Christmas of 2010, she lost her husband Robb to a sudden, savage illness. Her first book, And Life Comes Back, was about that experience and her new normal of life as a young widow with two little boys.
In the same way I knew from the start I wanted to begin this series with Jeff, I also knew I wanted to end with Tricia. Not necessarily because she would have the best answers to my death questions (she’d tell you that’s silly), but because she’s dedicated more of her life than just about anyone I know to understanding and empathizing and hacking away at many of the exact sorts of ideas and frustrations I’ve lived with for the past 13 years. And frankly, I can’t think of anyone I trust more than Tricia.
Jeremy: As I see it, faith and grief can have a sort of ‘frenemy’ relationship and I struggle with it. The questions I had about God didn’t smooth themselves out when I began the journey of grief. If anything, they got tougher. We’ve both metaphorically—maybe even literally—yelled “WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?” into the sky, but my impression is you’ve found faith to be a warmer, more reliable and comforting place than maybe I have. Though, in fairness, you’ve asked the same questions I’ve asked. I remember being knocked over by your words from your first book: “How do I make sense of the miracles Jesus chooses to perform and those he seems to overlook?”
You’ve written so much on the topic, but nevertheless: Does faith ever fail to take you where you need to go when it comes to grief?
Tricia: “Does faith ever fail to take me where I need to go?”
[pause] I wanted it to fail me.
Faith?
I wanted to be, like, “This is where it all falls apart. And okay, so now I got my terrible thing that happened to me. Now I get to be angry.” And it just costs too much. I didn’t have the energy.
Yeah.
I really tried. I felt like, “I can’t talk to you, God. I don’t want to.” And I really wanted to feel lost and I didn’t feel lost, Jeremy. I felt anchored and I felt so sad. What failed to take me where I needed to go was everything else. Every single other thing. And I refuse in this space and in any space to speak in any kind of spiritual cliché. So what I’m saying is tested. And it’s nobody’s experience but my own. There’s a place where nobody else can go. And only faith can go there with me.
And that’s been consistent for you.
Yeah, it has. I had to find my way. Like, I had to find the language. Maybe that’s part of the evolution of [what] I had to learn: speaking in my voice. “Wait, so I’m allowed to push back?” I felt so confused. I felt betrayed. I felt like, “Hey, I did my part. Why’d you do it this way?” But I just felt… I’m sorry if this sounds not true, but I swear to God, it’s the truest thing I know: The Holy Spirit just continued to meet me there, to be like, “Yeah, let’s talk about it.” And I felt that presence and leaned into those questions and now it’s unshakable. The universe and the skeptics are too late to ask me these questions, because it’s just too sweet now. It’s just too solid. Like, legitimately, where else would I go? What else am I going to do?
Have you ever had what I guess people call these days a ‘deconstruction journey?’
Yes. I have had a deconstruction journey. And that’s layered for me [because I had] multiple traumas that all happened at one time. But I thought I had it right. I thought I had done my formula: Christian high school missions trips, summer camps, Christian college. I did all the things. I gave it all. I was a virgin when I got married the first time. I did all the things that I thought I was supposed to do. And so I thought I had earned the suburbs and the minivan. Like, you follow along and then God says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Great is your reward.”
“Here’s your Aerostar.”
“You get a minivan and a dog.” Yeah, that’s right. “You followed all the rules.” I think the deconstruction was in realizing that I didn’t earn it and I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t earn the goodness of this and I don’t deserve the goodness of this. But also I didn’t earn the devastation of this and I don’t deserve the devastation of this. Both of those things are true.
So, I’m interested in that, in this sort of ‘deserve’ idea because ‘deserve’ is so loaded. It’s culturally loaded. It’s certainly in our… I say ‘our’ because we come from the same place… in our faith tradition, it’s a very loaded idea. Where does that come from, ‘what we deserve and what we don’t deserve?’
I mean, it’s just the basis of morality. It’s the idea, I think, of like, you do good things and good things happen to you. You do bad things, bad things happen to you. So, when the worst thing happens to somebody who followed all the rules, did I get something wrong, then? Because I thought that I deserved to have my husband here. I thought we had a deal. So, if I didn’t deserve it, then did I do something to deserve this kind of wrath? Are you mad at me?
Yeah. Maybe I felt this more intensely than I should have but I remember growing up with a sort of feeling that was kind of pounded into me that the default is that I deserve very little. Who I am as a person, the world I was born into and my own sinfulness and grossness means I deserve very little.
Mm.
And any good thing that rises above awfulness is a gift and blessing that I don’t deserve. And maybe that wasn’t a factor in play for you, but I know that was in my own life when I’ve had difficulty and tragedy. I don’t know that I believed it, but it was a nag in the back of my skull a little bit. I’d been taught that I don’t really deserve wonderfulness and any wonderfulness I get is by the grace of God. For me, that was a toxicity that I had to fight against, but I don’t know if you relate to that.
Yeah, I think somehow I feel the opposite. For better and for worse, my parents have always overly loved me.
Mm. I’ve always wanted to be in your family a little bit, by the way. I’m sorry, I know we’re talking seriously here, but I’ve thought, “I wonder if I could get in with the Lotts. I’m good at adopting people. If I could adopt a Lott, I’d be in. I could go to the Thanksgivings.”
[Laughter] You could, that’s true. But it was a really good family. And my dad just loved me. So, it wasn’t hard for me to translate that to God. It wasn’t hard for me to understand that God adores me. He really thinks I’m great. He wants to celebrate me because my dad wants to celebrate me. And then when my heart was broken, it was like, “Well, my dad’s sad; I bet God’s sad too.”
And I don’t know how to reconcile that. A great gift in my life is that I am very comfortable not understanding, not knowing.I’m comfortable in that space of: You know what? Things go missing. It’s gonna show up. Toilets get clogged. It’s not really the person; they didn’t mean for that to happen. And people die. I don’t know why I have that [mindset], but it has sustained me because I’ve just been like, “Well, I don’t know.”
So, to go back to the ‘deserved’ part, I think I entered the space of grief believing that God was good. Because my dad, Doyle Lott, wouldn’t allow something terrible to happen to me without holding on to me through the whole thing. So, I’m going to believe that I’m not going to drown in this.
And that doesn’t mean that it felt good. It just means that that faith was able to sustain that gap of like, ‘this really doesn’t make sense’ and ‘man, I wish it was different’ and ‘I really am tired of feeling like this, but I can’t make sense of it and I’m too tired to try.’ So, I’m just gonna let myself feel really sad.
Yeah. The exhaustion and the anger wasn’t…
I couldn’t afford it. I just couldn’t afford it. For a long time, I only had six ounces of energy, and I needed it to last for 32 ounces.
Yeah.
And anger is just masking something else anyway. So can we just get past it? Like what do I really feel? I feel so sad. So sad. So let me just feel that. Let me just feel that for as long as it takes.
Yeah, sad is enough.
Yeah.
You know, when we lost our sons, it wasn’t like, you know, on June 4th, our kids were born and then they died, and then on June 5th, we just got mad at God. That’s not really how it went. I’ve had 13 years since then, and it’s kind of like a rolling wave of struggle in a lot of ways. Because, you know, in that moment, frankly, we were surrounded by love and care. In fact, for all the struggles I’ve had, one thing that’s not debatable is the fact that the people who gave my wife and me the most, sacrificed the biggest, loved us the hardest in our grief were people of faith. And I want to be clear for those reading this later: at no point did that love feel self-serving or manipulative. The church did what the church was supposed to do when we were at our lowest. And that’s the strange tension I’m in. I ask, “Where was God when our sons died?” and someone could look at the chuch and say, “…Well… *there*, genius.”
But is that it? Cased closed? Am I missing the bigger picture if I’m not always satisfied with that?
I gotta be honest with you, I struggled more with your story than with mine.
Mine?
Uh-huh. The sovereignty of God was harder for me in the story of your boys than it was in my own story.
Okay.
That could be because, from the day that Robb died, it has always been easier for me to think of ‘How is this impacting other people?’ than to actually look at my own dumpster fire. On the day that I was receiving people into my home–and there were 30 people in my house on the day that Robb died, 30 people in my house–I was greeting them and saying, “I’m so sorry you lost a friend. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. This guy that you worked with, I mean, you sat in a cubicle next to him! You just saw him yesterday! I’m so sorry.”
And people were looking at me like, “I don’t know what to say with what you’re saying right now.” And it was genuinely authentic. That was the capacity of the grief that I could hold.
Yeah.
I think that’s why my writing was so fertile then. Because it was way easier for me to write about being a widow than it actually was to be a widow.
Man, that’s so much truer than I want it to be. My god. That’s a hard relate.
If anybody can relate, it’s you. I was able to step out of it and be like, ‘Wow, so what actually is happening here? What happened today? Let me just be the narrator of it rather than actually looking at it.’
Yeah. Man.
So when your boys died… because they died in ‘11, right? 2011, six months after [Robb]?
Yeah, in fact, I’m gonna want to take this back as soon as I say it, but I’ll say it anyway: I remember finding out that my wife was pregnant in January. And I remember thinking, ‘This is like a goddamn ER episode because Tricia just lost her husband.’ And they always do this in those TV shows. They have a baby born the same episode because they feel like they have to do it. And I remember it was maybe a few weeks after you lost Robb that we found out about the pregnancy. And I thought of you immediately. I was uncomfortable with it. But I related the two things.
Anyhow, yes, it was in ’11.
I want you to know that I felt the same way. Like, I was reading Tips on Triplets! And I was like, Holy God, okay, you’re doing something different. You’re doing something different. I was in it. I was like, “Okay, let me just invest everything in this, because something good is going to happen here.” And then it didn’t.
Yeah.
I remember exactly where I was sitting when I learned your story. And it was just like, “Okay, now this, though, this isn’t cool, actually. This is unfair. This is really unfair, because there is no reason for this one. You could have done this differently, God.” So, there was a numbness that I felt around my own story. And maybe it’s the way the calendar pages fell, but I feel like it’s more than that. But there was a grief that was tied to your story. Sort of like when something goes wrong, when I argue with my son in the morning, but I don’t cry about it until I drop a plate of spaghetti that night. And I’m not crying about the spaghetti, right? And so the nature of the timing of it, but also the coupling of it, that it felt like, it felt like you were in the Spring. And then… “What?”
So I grieved differently. “God, I can see what you might be doing here, but I cannot see what you’re doing there.” That felt like a bait and switch. That felt like a game.
Well, thank you. I didn’t know that.
And I’m sorry, this is a side tangent. But it was the same way for me. I remember the chair I was in when I learned that Robb had died. I remember I was about to shut down for Christmas at work and I saw it online. And I sat in that chair, and one by one, everyone around me shut down for Christmas. And they all left. And the only coworker who was left was walking by, and they saw that I just had tears coming out of my face. And I remember they said, “Are you okay? Did something happen?” And I said, “Yes, my friend died.” And I remember even as I said it, I thought, “Why did I say that? I’ve never met Robb; I don’t know him.” But that’s the way it felt in that moment. And they said, “Well, I’m very sorry.” And I said, “Thank you.” And then they left, so it was just me. And I think I just sat there for maybe another 20 minutes or something. And I closed up and I went home.
Jeremy, for all of my days and all of my words, I will never be able to tell you what that meant to me just now.
Oh, well I’m glad, then. Thank you.
I’ll try someday, but I won’t be able to. But this is the full circle for me. And I just said this to my sister-in-law [who’s also grieving a loss]. I said, “Listen, nothing is going to make this OK. But it’s going to be 1,000 small mercies that are going to keep you from drowning. And I’m talking really small. So whatever you might think, ‘Wow, that would really be a gift,’ I want you to cut that in half and watch for something, even the smallest of things. Like a parking spot at the airport or a flight that leaves on time. Or 20 more minutes that you don’t have to wait at the courthouse. “All right, if I could find one good thing today, it’s…” whatever is the end of that sentence. And I said, “Nothing is going to make this OK, but it’s going to be the thousand small mercies that are going to keep you from giving up.” And that’s what you gave me; that was a mercy.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Robb recently because everything’s coming together for [our sons]. They’re finding their way. And I really believe that their dad is part of it. Not like, “Wow, I hope he’s watching.” Not some cosmic TV screen. I think that he is closer. I think he’s in it with us. Because I know that’s who Robb was as a dad. If he had any choice to be involved in their lives, he would spend the rest of his days being involved. And because I believe that’s just where I’ve landed, that’s what God would allow.
And so I’ve been thinking about him and also because [our son] Tucker is exactly the size that Robb was when I met Robb. I hug Tucker and he can rest his chin on the top of my head. And he has the same build as his dad, and it messes with my head. It’s a little trippy. But I’ve been missing him in a different way.
Yeah. Can I talk to you about that a little bit?
Yeah.
I think it links because you were also just talking about small mercies, small blessings. And I know you and I have corresponded about this a little bit: the tug of war between tragedy and blessing. You lost Robb, but through that gained the blessing of [your husband] Peter. I lost Rudyard, Desmond and Oscar, but through that gained the blessing of Chloe, Chelsea and Topher. In your most vulnerable moment of pain and grief, you were targeted and abused by a predator. But your story has helped and will help countless survivors of abuse, not to mention their loved ones who want to love them better and understand their experience.
It’s all very beautiful in a literary sense, but it’s complex and maddening to live it. What are your thoughts about this? What’s it like being a 21st century Job?
Yeah…
Because, you know, we’ve really nailed the replacements.
[Laughing] “Nailed the replacements…”
I’m sorry, that’s terrible.
No, please don’t apologize. Because that’s exactly what it looks like, isn’t it?
Yeah, and I want to know what the marriage version of this is. Because I know what the parenting version of this is, where I have three kids that I love very much and they know what happened in our lives. We’ve been clear about it from the beginning, but there’s a line that we walk to make sure our kids never feel like they’re the kids we ‘settled for,’ you know?
Yeah, yeah.
There are moments we have to say, you know, “Mom and Dad have to grieve today, we have to deal with this. And we love you.” And it’s not, ‘It would have been better if…’ that’s not what it is. I mean, sure, your mind goes everywhere, of course. “Well, what would this have been and that have been?”
In fact, I’m sorry, this is just a funny side story that I have to tell you. Before adopting our kids, when they were all in our house on that first day, we took them out to dinner and we had The Talk about, you know, “We know this is a big transition, but we’re so excited.” And we told them during that dinner, “Just so you know, we did have three boys and they passed away. So, you’re going to see things like that around our house. And that’s what that is. But, you know, we love you very much. And we don’t have any worries at all that something bad is going to happen to you. You’re very safe here,” and all that. And [our daughter] Chelsea, who was 10 at the time, said, “You know what? I just realized: If your three boys had lived, you would have six kids now.”
I said, “We never thought of it that way. I guess that’s true.”And she was very satisfied that she’d put that together. But that tension isn’t something that’s over when you close the book on that really amazing novel. This is something that you live. So what is that like?
That is a great, great question.
Um… I can’t hold it. It doesn’t make sense. That it’s two halves of a whole. Each one feels like one whole.
Yeah. Yeah.
For some reason it’s coming to my mind: when Elizabeth Gilbert, who [wrote] Eat, Pray, Love… she talked about when Eat, Pray, Love was turned into a movie and Julia Roberts played her and somebody was like, “What do you even do with that?” She was like, “That’s not anything I process. That’s not related to my life. I mean, yes, it is my life and yes, she’s playing me and yes, we are very linked, but also not at all.” And that’s what it feels like.
I don’t know. I think the part that absolutely continues to blow my mind is the understanding that I can love two people at one time.
Mm-hmm.
I’m fairly codependent and so I’m always looking to protect the people around me for better and for worse. And so before Peter and I got married, I just was like, “Listen, we gotta put all this away. I’m not gonna ask you to live in a place…” I mean it wasn’t the same house, it’s a different life.
Right.
So I’m just gonna put it away and I think I’ve done that. And… I’ve never thought about it this way, but I’m right now thinking of the idea that “Mary treasured these things in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)
Tell me what that means.
Because how could she even hold all the pieces of, like, “I’m sorry that your son died. I’m sorry that it’s brutal, that everybody hates him. I’m sorry for all the abuse that was endured, but look! ‘Savior of the world!’” I think she was like, ‘Yeah, you know what? I can’t. Really, I can’t. That’s a different thing.’ Please understand I’m not comparing myself to Mary.
I understand.
But the phrase “She treasured these things in her heart.” I think she got to a place where she was like, “I just can’t talk about it with you guys anymore.”
[Phone vibrating] Can we pause for just a second? My sons are texting me like crazy. Let me just see…
Yeah, of course.
[After a brief phone call] One thing that’s true about my family is that when we can’t reach each other, we panic immediately. Collectively, all of us. It is a whole PTSD hair trigger of like, “Wait, she’s not answering! She’s not answering!”
Oh, right. Man.
Okay. But “Mary treasured these things in her heart.” What that means to me right now is that she [felt] it was too sacred. It wasn’t a trade. “I will miss my son forever. And I’m glad that you got eternal life out of the gig. But I lost my son.” And so the power, the magnitude of that, they don’t cancel each other.
And I remember when you reached out to me on some anniversary. And you said exactly that. It was the first time that someone had named that.
Really?
Yeah. [It was] the first time someone had said, like, “Hey, I just want you to know… seems like a great love story you got here. Peter’s a good looking dude. Glad things are working out. Looks like you guys are really happy. And also, I’m very aware of the fact that that didn’t happen without an utter shattering that won’t be fixed.”
Yeah. Yeah.
And it takes that depth of loss that you’ve experienced, that I’ve experienced, to be able to say from across the room, like a chin nod. “Yeah, we don’t have to talk about that. Yeah, I got you.”
Tricia’s latest book, You Are Safe Now, is written with her therapist, Jana Richardson, LPC. It tells the story of the private trauma that occurred soon after she lost her husband: grooming, manipulation, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse by a person of trust. Tricia and Jana have written a resource to help others recognize the veiled dynamics of abuse, where it starts, how it escalates, and how survivors can break free and find freedom.
In addition to her books on grief, marriage, family and Bible-related topics, she’s also a bestselling collaborator, who has helped many dynamic individuals tell their own stories.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
I’m not a sportsy guy, but I knew my friend Sam had a job that was related to sports journalism and that was about it. You can imagine my surprise when his name once came up in conversation and the person I was speaking with said, “Sam Miller? As in baseball writer Sam Miller? You know him? What’s he like?” And that was the moment I realized a couple of things: 1) Sam is a bigger deal than I thought and 2) Part of the reason Sam and I get along so well is I have no frame of reference whatsoever for what he does and, at least for Sam, that’s kind of a relief.
And even though he’s a legendary baseball journalist, author and podcaster, I have difficulty associating Sam with any of that. Sam is my smart, strange, funny, contrarian friend who seems to have an out-of-the-box hot take on every possible topic. I have no idea what death and grief have to do with baseball, but I knew Sam would have thoughts on the matter because Sam always has thoughts.
Jeremy: I tried coming up with a baseball-related access point to a discussion about death and grief, but I’m dry here. So maybe I’ll take the lazy path and put that back on you. You think a lot about baseball and I know you think about death. Do these topics overlap at all?
Sam: If you try to trace sports all the way back to their beginning, one place you end up is the gladiatorial games. In A Brief Theology Of Sport, Lincoln Harvey wrote:
Here the citizen—the citizen of a society where three out of five people died in their twenties—could learn how to die well. Of course, the gory nature of the killing would have appealed to the sadistic among the crowd. But the majority of the people were more interested in the dying than in the killing. Here they could witness true ‘manliness,’ the cardinal virtue of virtus again.
You know I’m a film guy and I’m not much for sports movies, as they usually hit me as manipulative and formulaic, but I’ll allow there are some great ones. One of my all time favorites is Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, which is the best examination of what you’re talking about I’ve ever seen. (And Tarantino calls it one of the best films ever made, so I know I’m onto something.) But it makes the case that American football specifically is one of the closest things we have to simulating the life-or-death, gladiatorial mentality of Bronze Age combat-as-entertainment. We see the threat of death in front of us and it moves us.
I think a lot about what the central metaphor of sport is, and my position is that it’s about seeing the process of aging, exaggerated and sped up. In fact, I once wrote a long magazine piece about what specifically happens to players’ bodies as they age, and the whole time I worked on it I felt like I was writing to my therapist about my aging parents. We respond to baseball because we are moved by seeing a scaled-down version of the life cycle. Players quickly go through the phases of maturation, physical peak, then adaptation, then resignation, and eventually the end. The most touching phase is often the last, and every writer’s best pieces seem to be about athletes who are worse than they used to be. With very few exceptions, every player, from the humblest to the greatest, reaches a point where because of age or injury they are failing in front of us. This isn’t a small part of the experience. We try to ignore the knowledge that senescence and death are coming for us all, but our psyches must deal with these facts somehow.
That’s amazing. I knew you’d come through.
In terms of volume, you read more and write more than maybe anyone I know. What’s a book/article/piece of pop culture that’s influenced your thoughts on the nature of death? Do you have anything you can point to that’s made you think, “Ah! That’s interesting! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
This is a very literal answer—it’s not a work of art or of fiction but a self-helpish book about the actual nature of death, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. At least some of my death anxiety comes from the thought that death = lost opportunity. Once I die (and/or as I age), I can no longer do all the things. The way we armor ourselves against this is by trying to do all the things now, as though we’re making progress toward a fulfillment goal. But Burkeman makes the case that this is absurd; that if you try to, for instance, read all the important books—which is definitely a goal I had for a long time, and that I see now was a reflection of death anxiety—you will read maybe 1/1000th of all the worthwhile books there are, and none of the worthwhile books that are going to be published in the future. Other people do this with travel, or career goals, or fitness—but the most extreme traveler will not see more than 1/1000th of this world (let alone the cosmos), etc etc etc. Resisting these truths simply reinforces death anxiety, by constantly reminding us of how little progress we are making or could ever make.
It’s much better to accept the finitude of life, which applies not just to what we experience (the books we won’t read) but to what we are. Each of us mostly already barely exists. We don’t exist in most places on Earth right now; we don’t exist to most people on Earth right now; and we don’t witness or experience most of what’s happening on Earth right now. So when we die to this Earth, in a numerical sense it will actually change very little. I find this freeing. When I get anxious—and I consider all anxiety to be at least partially death anxiety—my mantra is: “Think about all the places you already aren’t.”
Sold. Four Thousand Weeks = now on my Kindle.
I hard-relate to the idea that death is the deadline of the project of building a meaningful life of exploring, creating, building and experiencing. I’m in the midst of a creative project with another artist right now and I recently told them, “I’ve wanted to ask you to do this for years and I’ve always talked myself out of it. I regret that I waited until I was in the latter half of my 40s to ask.” And they essentially said, “Well, the important thing is we’re doing it now, so put your pants on and let’s go.” And it 100% comes down to the march of death coming for me. I’m looking at the clock and thinking, ‘I’m over halfway done. And I’ve done maybe 25%? 30% of the stuff I’d hoped to do at this point?’ It’s a low-burn panic that hangs onto the back of my neck each day.
How much do you think about the afterlife? What aspect of it doesn’t get enough discussion?
I don’t think much about the afterlife. I have a fairly immature/inexperienced relationship to death and grieving, and my death thoughts are definitely more focused on a) fear of the actual pain of dying, i.e. there is a very good chance the the most painful moments of my life are going to be the last thing I experience, and as a fairly committed avoider of pain I think that sucks; b) the fear of losing Earth, all the sensations and ambitions of my Earthly life. Like anybody I sometimes speculate on what the afterlife could be, how it could fit into the meaning of this all. But mostly I just trust that it won’t be cruel. Nothing about my experience with God leads me to worry it will be cruel.
In another conversation in this series, a friend who works with a lot of dynamic, high-performance people mentioned that she’s noticed that a common trait among them is they spend minimal time thinking about death and are much more rooted in the present. So you’re in good company in not ruminating much on the Great Beyond.
The moment of death, however, is something I think a lot of us think about but rarely talk about. In fact, I’ve noticed that older people in my life (and some who have passed away), sometimes appear to talk about death less as it gets closer. There are definitely exceptions to that, but there appears to be a point in life where many/most people tend to close up about it because the reality of it is so immediate that there aren’t really words anymore. And I’ve wondered if that’s an apprehension or fear about the moment of death itself.
But I agree with you that whatever’s next won’t be cruel. While I’m a person of faith, I don’t believe in Hell – or at least Hell in the traditional “hot-place-of-torture-for-doing-or-believing-the-wrong-thing” sense.
When you and I get together, we usually talk about movies and the experience of being dads. What, if anything, has fatherhood done to change or evolve your perspective on death?
There was a point when my daughter was maybe 7 or 8 (or maybe 4 or maybe 11, I don’t remember it precisely) that I realized, “oh, she definitely knows me now, I’m permanent in her brain.” I very consciously realized at that point that I was much less resistant to dying than I had been before. I don’t want to die. But I’m clearly in physical decline, I’m probably in creative decline, my parents got to see me become a happy adult, I’ve had a marriage that has reprogrammed my brain into something less egotistical and alone, I’ve made some lives better, and I’ve experienced enough of the world that I’m almost literally never surprised by how anything feels, tastes, looks, etc. anymore. So when I realized that my daughter understood me and would remember me forever, I concluded that my life was basically complete. I had reached a point where I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see my death as “tragically young” anymore.
Sam’s voice—particularly as it relates to all things baseball—can be found all over the place. From televised interviews to podcasts to articles to blogs to books.
One book, which he co-authored with collaborator Ben Lindbergh, is The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. It chronicles the story of an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, who offered who offered Sam and Ben the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
Alison is best known for writing and directing the suspense thriller The Apology (starring Anna Gunn, Janeane Garofalo and Linus Roache), about a grieving woman who learns the shocking truth about what happened to her daughter. If you watch The Apology—which is great, you should—it’s tempting to imagine that the woman behind a story so harsh and intense is herself harsh and intense. And while there’s an intensity to Ali that informs her work, what comes through most (at least to me) is her empathy for those around her and her commitment to giving voice to the voiceless.
I like being around Ali because she carries a sort of expert-in-the-room air with her. Not in an intimidating sense, but more of a “Phew, if any of this goes off the rails, at least somebody here has a handle on what’s going on.” She’s a lady who writes and produces entertainments and those entertainments sometimes have to do with death and grief. So I wanted to talk with her.
Jeremy: Very few people realize what a massive undertaking a feature film is. As a writer/director, you live with this thing for years and you have an intimacy with every aspect of it, down to the mundane. You lived with The Apology for a long time, which is a story in many ways about grief. Specifically, a mother’s grief. What did your story illuminate to you about grief?
Alison: I became really fascinated with the idea that everyone grieves in different ways, that apart from compartmentalizing/avoiding it, there’s really no “bad” way to do it. And that needing answers or justice or reckoning with the circumstances of each loss is a key part of moving your way through it, as much as one can. The ending of the film stayed consistent throughout the process because for me, it represents that hopefully, we can each get to the place in our grieving process where the gratitude and joy of having had that person in our life will start to take precedence over the pain.
I also just realized, through the making of the film, the collaboration process, just how varied people are in terms of how they view humor in relation to grief. For me, humor is kind of everything. But other people really thought it was avoidant. And the great Janeane Garofalo, who I was so dang lucky to work with on this, called it “pragmatic humor,” so she was looking at it as a very fair and human flavor of humor. So it was a fascinating challenge to find that balance in the way we talked about each character’s grief, not just for Sally but what she represented for them about their identities/roles.
“Pragmatic humor.” That’s great. In fact, it connects with another conversation I’m having right now about humor and grief, where I have to admit that humor has been crucial in my life and experiences with grief. It has less to do with strength and bravery and much more to do with an attempt to claw out a survival tactic when grief is overwhelming.
I imagine, working on a film like The Apology, grief-related (or death-related) conversations would be inevitable. Was that the case? Did you find that the cast and crew were inspired to have conversations with you and with each other at that level?
Yes, we all had a lot of conversations about grief and justice and where those two things intersect and how important it was to convey that one character thought they knew what the other character would need but what she actually needed was quite different. For example, we had a lot of healthy disagreements about what information would be important to [the protagonist] Darlene and when. I never felt that knowing exactly where a burial site was was as important as other details, but some of my collaborators really felt it would be so key for her to start asking that early. So that was something that came into play earlier in the story than I had originally placed it. It’s important to be true to your character but also listen when something feels so primally important to a collaborator, too. I was missing something there and they pointed it out.
You’ve told me that horror is your genre of choice. Horror is joined at the hip with death, no way around it, and I suppose it’s because the whole point of horror is to ratchet the visceral fear response up to 11. And what could be scarier than death (or the threat of it)? You made a film that straddles the line between the fun of suspense/horror tropes and the sober realities of death and grief. I wonder if you might talk to me about fear and death and how people like you guide us through it through pop entertainment. Do you see your treatment of it as a responsibility?
I really do. I even end up using phrases like “sacred duty” around that responsibility, because I’m such a darn Girl Scout. I always say that horror feels like the most honest genre, because it is typically a safe space to “go there” with the hard stuff, to work through our fears, challenges, losses, etc. And I do feel a huge drive to represent for the voiceless and all that, to talk about trickier topics like gender and disability rights issues in my scary stories. That’s the stuff that scares me the most. I love a monster movie or a ghost story so very much but they’re always more impactful when there are these deeper layers woven into it.
Even American Werewolf In London, that feels so breezy in a lot of ways, is about living under inflation, the ever-present fear of anti-semitism, survivor’s guilt and all of these things. But I definitely don’t think it needs to be serious stuff to do that. I think a goofy slasher can sometimes help us deal with that, too. One of my favorite things about Wes Craven was that if you watch the “kills” in his movies, there’s a real sense of respect for the loss, a stomach punch every time, and that’s part of why he was one of the greats. I think there are certainly times where horror moments can feel icky because they are just going for an easy shock. And in so doing, they accidentally show some underlying sexism or racism or the like. But usually, I think the filmmaker has just breezed over something they could’ve made more specific and thus more effective. If you want to move or scare or haunt an audience, you have to make them care about the characters.
This is great because I think there’s often a mistaken notion that horror-themed entertainments are the purview of storytellers who have no reverence for death or loss and have little interest in an empathetic or sophisticated relationship with their audiences. But maybe if death is only treated with sobriety and reverence, we’re missing out on a potentially helpful way to approach the topic in our own lives.
I found that I do care about your characters, but it’s not because (or at least it’s not only because) they’re grieving. Admittedly, I’ve seen plenty of “grief” moments in films over the years that haven’t always provoked me to give a shit. So what are you doing differently? What are you adding to that grief story that invests us as an audience?
I think the key is to let them be flawed, relatable characters, the source of grief and the griever. For example, Darlene is devoted, obsessive, caring, prickly, giving, and self-destructive. I don’t think you care as much about “saints.” To love someone is to love their faults, too, to recognize them. That makes them more real. World building also helps. It was really important to me that every detail of her house is specific. [Her daughter] Sally’s room had so much personality because we spend so little time with the actual Sally. There’s no dining table because Darlene hasn’t hosted something bigger in years. She has a purple couch because she’s a woman living alone and that felt like a fun bit of rebellion to her. Providing your characters with layers of detail makes you root for them and hurt with them.
As you know, I lost my children 13 years ago. As far as I know, you’re not in the exact same situation, but you know what it feels like to have a child who requires extra care and vigilance, as you’re the mother of a child on the autism spectrum. You and I have talked in the past about the common experience of parents imagining the worst in terms of what could happen to our kids. Trying to be careful how I ask this, but does the experience of having a vulnerable child affect your perspective on death?
First of all, I have to say how much I admire how you’ve taken your grief and directed it into a dedication to examining the complexities of grief. For me, I’ve found that having the losses I’ve experienced and having my daughter, who has autism on a level where she is very vulnerable and that may mean she really might live with us for the rest of our lives, has put the pressure on of not just trying to live as long as possible but also of making my life mean as much as possible, that I don’t just “wait until she’s grown” to go for it in various ways. Too often, parents put off their own dreams to be obsessively there for their children, especially their special needs children. And while I definitely did that for a number of years, facing down my own mortality that happens more as you get older did give me a kick in the pants. For my husband, he’s been more concerned about what happens to her after we die, but I try to focus on our incredible good fortune that our girl has an incredible village that I know would rise to be there for her if that happened. But I will continue to be mindful that we always have a detailed plan in place for when that time comes.
But in terms of the work, I obsessively write about my fears around my child, that she’ll be physically safe (now that’s she older and bigger – girlfriend is 6’ so I pity the fool who’d try) but also she’ll feel safe enough to pursue her own dreams and not have the world assume she can’t, just because she’s autistic.
Having children definitely changes the game. Death fears that began with ‘I’m scared of what might happen to me’ evolve into ‘What if something happened to my child?’ and then wind back around again to ‘I hope nothing happens to me any time soon for the sake of my kids.’ And it affects even little choices in my life: ‘I’d better wait to merge onto the 405. If it goes bad, I don’t want my wife to have to finish raising our kids by herself.’ And I’m grateful for your sharing how that feeling is sort of hyper-complex in your specific parenting experience. It’s great to hear you have a plan in place.
In my experience, death-related conversations are few and uneasy with my children. I haven’t found a great way to talk about it, as my kids have complicated and difficult backgrounds and I try not to add to the fear pile. What about you? What’s a good way to talk about death with kids?
I’ve found that it’s really hard for death to be anything like a clear thing to kids until they suffer a “big” loss. It certainly was for me. She’s had losses in her life but she hasn’t had one of the “big” ones yet, someone who is a constant or crucial presence. But I’ve tried to sort of her normalize it or “prep” her in a way, keeping her updated when someone is really sick or hurt and possibly close to death, not keeping these things from her, talking about how I feel when I’m worried or grieving and being careful not to use alternate phrasing when someone I love dies. I say they died and we talk about what happens to them and how little we know about what happens after we die, apart from what will happen to their body. She’s seen me lose my brother and dear friends and I don’t hide that from her. I feel like the best we can do for our kids is to be honest with them and model hopefully healthy (and therefore complicated) reactions to death. We talk about how sometimes you cry a bunch right away and sometimes, it sneaks up on you with some memory of that person, that grief isn’t a straight line.
That’s beautiful. It sounds like you’re doing it right. But speaking of kids, what do you think about kids watching horror? Pro? Against?
I’m a big believer in showing horror to kids. So many of my favorite people, folks who have such resilience and humor and caring natures, grew up watching horror. I don’t think it’s like a necessary prescription, of course. Some kids really don’t take it well. But I think if we treat those films as bad or harmful instead of an opportunity for conversation and processing of hard topics, then of course kids won’t take them well. And the idea that horror films will plague kids with nightmares, I get wanting to protect our kids. Of course, I do. Like every mother, I’m obsessed with that. But I don’t think protecting them should mean shielding them or keeping them in a bubble. So I just don’t fear nightmares so much. Nightmares help us work through things. Horror films can give you a safe space to “go there” as an audience member, too.
All that being said, I’ve tried to pay attention to what kinds of stories make my daughter too uncomfortable and am mindful of not having those on around her. And when folks ask me for recommendations for horror that might be a safer bet for their kids, I try to ask a lot of questions and recommend a good “gateway” horror and not, ya know, a New French Extremity film or something. But my daughter’s not a movie kid so far in general. She struggles to sit and attend for too long. But she’s really flexible about us having whatever on. We often have “spooky movie” nights where we order dinner and my husband and I watch a horror film and she watches pieces but mostly circulates. We’ve always wanted to be sure she’s exposed to all kinds of films. It’s so wild to me that she doesn’t really care about movies and yet she’s growing up in our house, with her parents being filmmakers and rabid cinephiles.
Do your personal beliefs about death (not just the physical reality of it, but the metaphysical or even spiritual questions it introduces) find their way into the stories you tell? Or what about going the other way: has telling stories about death influenced your own beliefs about the soul, the afterlife, what happens to us when we go?
I tend to be on the agnostic/open side of things but I’m also really fascinated with stories about “the other side” or a parallel dimension, like in ghost or haunted house stories. So I’m really curious. While I don’t have a strong belief in the specifics of what happens after we die, I assume that everything about life is also true about death: it’s all ultimately complex and unknowable and that’s kind of the beauty of it. The searching and questioning is more the thing than ever really having solid answers. Accepting that you’ll never fully understand even another living being gives you the freedom and compassion to know that there might be infinite possibilities of what happens in the afterlife too. I hope that our collective fascination with what happens after we die provides a motivation that we will reach the end/beginning with a decent amount of peace with the way we lived our lives and treated other people.
So I mostly just look at it as a mirror. Characters on either side of the life/afterlife can learn from each other, can reach some of that peace together. But do I hope that when I die, I’ll get to joke around with my grandpa and listen to music with my brother again? Darn straight. But even if I don’t, I got to know and love them and that’s good enough for me.
I like that. It’s nearly impossible to find anyone who has a belief in the afterlife but thinks that experience is wholly unrelated to our beliefs, character, relationships and choices in this life. I mean who knows? But it seems like there’s something in our collective unconscious that suggests that who we are and who we love must have some sort of carry-over, whatever happens to us.
Is there anything on the topics of death or the afterlife that you feel is under-discussed in entertainment or maybe in our culture in general?
I’d love to see more discussion and representation about the pragmatic details and especially different cultural approaches around those details of arranging funerals, how they “fit” the details of death and loss around the rest of their lives, how much room do people get to deal with that. I often think of a loved one who had a miscarriage and then had to go back to work the next day, because no one took that loss seriously. And she needed the money. We rarely give ourselves or other people enough space and support to recover from loss. It might be that we know that it’s so ongoing, but there is still too little compassion for how hard it is to start, ya know, cooking and giving your kiddo a bath when you’ve just lost a loved one. But the world doesn’t stop. But then again, aren’t we always living our lives around some level of grief?
Alison’s newest short film, Pick Up Time, is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit. Her feature film, The Apology, is streaming on Hulu, AMC+ and Shudder (and available for rent/purchase on all major VOD services).
Additionally, Alison is the co-host (with her husband, writer/editor John Patrick Nelson) of the podcast Sensory Overload, which discusses the joys and challenges of raising a child on the autism spectrum.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
My first memory of Chelsea Davis was a Shakespeare group I’d joined, where, at each meeting, roles were assigned and we’d read The Bard’s words aloud. Chelsea’s performance stood out to me, but I also remember her dressing for the occasion in a gown that fit her character. She was talented and she was all in and those are my favorite sorts of people.
Chelsea is a musician who comes from musicians and she’s done it all: she’s worked commercially, she’s been in a pop band, she’s been a jazz performer, she’s been a voice teacher and a music director and, now, she’s producing a musical based on the life of singer and civil rights icon Marian Anderson.
I wanted to ask her about death and grief from a musician’s point of view, but death has unfortunately touched her family very recently, as her father passed away earlier this year. So I was hesitant because this is all still very fresh and painful. Nevertheless, we talked.
Jeremy: You and I worked together once, which I have to say was maybe the simplest, easiest creative collaboration I’ve ever had in my life.
Chelsea: Really?
I heard a bunch of your music and I said, “I bet that one would work.” And you said, “Here’s all the stuff.” And I said, “Here’s your money.” And that was it.
Well, I was like, “Somebody wants to use our music in a commercial?”
[Laughs] And you sent me all the stems of that song, all the individual pieces and tracks. But, you know, as I was thinking about the questions I wanted to ask you, I thought, ‘It’s a metaphor, in a way. Our lives are part of a bigger story. While we’re living it, we can’t hear the whole song. We’re all our own, I don’t know, stem.’ You know?
You strike me as somebody who hears music in a lot of different things, maybe in everything. And I wanted to know how you felt about death. Is it a terrible interruption of something beautiful or is it a crucial part of the composition?
Well, first of all, I just wrote down, ‘We are all our own stems.’ I sort of wish I had thought about that before we had this conversation.
What comes to mind is this short story I read by Tolkien that really shaped some of my imagination around death. It’s called Leaf by Niggle. And in it, there’s this man, he’s a painter, and he’s sort of obsessed with painting leaves and it grows into this tree, but he’s constantly interrupted. And in the back of his mind, he knows he has to go on this journey, but he doesn’t know when, but he’s not really getting ready. And eventually he goes on a journey and he has to leave everything behind. He goes out into this green country and he’s walking along and he sees the tree that he was painting, but it’s real and it’s alive and it’s full and it’s a living thing, but it started with him.
And I’ve been thinking about that since I read it. One, because we don’t always get to finish what we start. And two, because to me it feels like the things that we make here are hopefully beautiful and good and true or, you know, give life meaning, but they feel like the seeds of something more real. At least in my imagination, that’s what it’s like.
Ah.
My dad died in January. He was working on a commission for his second symphony for this chamber orchestra in Cincinnati. And he was working furiously. And all he asked when we found out he was diagnosed with stage four cancer was, “I want to finish the symphony and I want to meet my grandsons.” [At the time], I was pregnant and my sister-in-law was pregnant. And so it was like, ‘Okay, all right.’
So we just, you know, ran interference on all the people that wanted to see him because he really wanted to write. And he did. And I was with him one afternoon and we got to talking about my musical, Marian, which he’s been a huge champion of and really a dramaturg for. And he started to cry and he said, “I really regret that I’ll never get to hear your musical and I won’t get to hear either of my symphonies.”
But I just thought, “I don’t know that that’s true.” Like in some way, here or elsewhere, wherever that is, I think he will, I think there’s the seed of something real.
Mm-hmm.
He poured his heart and his life into it, a real thing that is growing and flourishing. Is that making sense?
Yeah. I know what you’re saying. When you look at the event of his passing on, does that feel like the end of [his] story? How do you look at it?
The story continues. I don’t get to see it or experience it in the same way. But I definitely didn’t feel like it was over. I didn’t even feel like my dad’s music was over. I just have this image of him conducting, wherever he is. I don’t think that’s fanciful. I think that’s real.
When he was in hospice, I’d recently joined a church and [asked them to] please pray for my dad and this guy in the church who doesn’t know anything about us at all – I mean, nothing –sent me a message and he said, “I have this picture that keeps coming to mind. And Jesus is playing the violin.” And that was my dad’s first instrument.
Wow.
And I wasn’t there in the moment that he died. I think he waited for all of us to be out of the room. But our family friend was there. She said The Lord’s Prayer. And then he passed. And I arrived a couple of hours later and he had a smile on his face.
In death.
In death. He looked so peaceful, but he had a smile like he was hearing something. And I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t know what he heard, but must have been really good because he was a real harsh critic. He had very high standards.’
My goodness. Thank you for sharing that with me. That’s amazing. You know, I’m finding that the most incredible, amazing, beautiful, dynamic people have sometimes the most dramatic death stories. But, of everyone that I’m speaking with, death has touched your life the most recently. And also, you just had a son earlier this year, so new life has touched your life more recently than anyone else that I’ve spoken with. And those two things right up against each other… that’s complicated, man.
It’s wild.
Tell me what that experience is like, you know, as a musician who understands timing and the concert of things and events. What’s this been like for you?
That’s a really great question.
Well, this isn’t the timing I would have chosen. I think that’s the first thing. He wanted to finish the symphony, which he did. I can’t even tell you, Jeremy, he was literally having trouble breathing and he was able to tell me where the files were on his computer so I could send them to the copyist to make the sheet music. It felt like a miracle that he could navigate me through his whole system so it could be completed. And once we did that, I just felt this palpable release.
He held on for it.
He did. He did. He fought really hard to finish that work. And then he was able to meet my nephew, who was born about six weeks before my son. My brother and sister-in-law smuggled him into the hospital in a winter coat and presented him like Simba to my dad. And he was overcome. He was so delighted. And in one sense, I’m so grateful because I felt like I was experiencing it vicariously, because [my son] Henry wasn’t born [until after he passed]. But I did have this moment in the hospital before we transitioned to hospice where it was kind of like, “Hey dad, do you wanna feel the baby?” So he, you know, he put his hand on my belly and rubbed it and said, “Be good.” And it felt like, ‘Okay, this is what I needed.‘
There was still that introduction of sorts.
Yeah, yeah. And to be honest, it’s been so all-consuming to have an infant that I haven’t really been able to wallow in my deep grief. I probably need a little bit more time, you know, to experience it. But every day there’s a human to take care of.
Right, right.
But yesterday, I got out the Brahms Requiem and we listened to it on our record player because I’m feeling cool. And the record had my dad’s name on it. It was his copy. So there are these ways I feel like he’s here.
Well, that kind of leads to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which is about your ideas of Heaven and the afterlife and how it works. Because I’ll be honest, the more time I spend with that topic, the less I feel like I understand it. I imagine, as a musician, you picture something that I don’t or can’t. Speaking frankly, the classical notion of eternally praising God or worshiping into infinity without end doesn’t sound awesome to me, it sounds terrifying. Where does your mind go when you sit with these ideas?
It’s so funny. I think you need to broaden your definition of what worship is.
Probably.
Because that sounds horrible to me too. But part of that is, as a musician, I actually really relish silence. It’s really important to me.
Yeah.
Back to that Leaf by Niggle story, one of the things I love about that story is that it has this sort of purgatory time and not in the traditional Catholic definition, but there’s transition. And that makes sense to me as a musician, like transitioning between a section, you know, but you bring the theme back differently. It’s like you start it here and then you hear it again, but it’s got a lot more flourish or variation to it and it’s more developed. That’s sort of a symphonic idea. But I imagine that to be what Heaven is like.
What we’ve started here that is good and worthy or who we’ve loved or what we’ve given our time and attention and life to is more developed there. You know, I always knew my dad would die when he couldn’t work anymore because composing just gripped him. He was compelled to do it. And I’m more of a collaborator. He could sit alone in a room for 16 hours and write. Deep focus and eat peanuts and coffee. When he stopped being able to work, he finished his symphony. And then he died.
Mm.
But I don’t think it’s done. It’s like in the story, even though this tree was real… and in a real country, you know, when he entered the heaven or wherever he’s supposed to be, it was still unfinished. And there was work to be done. That’s sort of what I imagine.
Well, let me ask you this because I think it relates: The difference between creating something and performing something. For example, if it’s a worship portion of a Sunday morning [church service]… I’m sorry, you’re gonna like me a little less when I say this and I apologize… It’s my least favorite part. And the reason is because I feel like I’m asked to perform in a way that I’m really not good at and I feel self-conscious about it.
That’s okay.
Now, if I’m just listening and not performing it, suddenly that becomes my favorite part of the entire Sunday morning. It’s completely different because the pressure is off me and I can sort of live inside of it. And I know it’s completely different for you. And I love that. And I respect that. But I love creating art. It’s my favorite thing. I love writing and I love drawing and painting.
Yeah. And theater.
Right. But music is different. But you do it all and you do it really well.
Well, I mean, I do find a deeper connection, I think, when I’m singing, particularly if I’m leading. I’ve also had seasons where I go to a church and I sit in absolute silence and I don’t sing at all for the 20 or 30 minutes that they do music and it’s more receptive. So I don’t think there’s a wrong way.
So, if I sit there like an asshole with my arms folded, that’s…
I mean, you’re still an asshole. No, I’m just kidding. No, no. I think that’s totally acceptable, Jeremy. I actually think it’s preferable to feeling like you have to be something that you’re not. To me, that actually is the antithesis of heaven. Heaven would be more like where you are in your fullest expression.
“Your fullest expression.” Yeah.
Yeah, of who you’re made to be, right? Whatever that looks like. I mean, for somebody who’s going to be gardening, [they would garden], you know. I don’t know what that would look like for you, especially because you’re so good at so many different things.
Thank you. But maybe that changes too, you know? Who knows?
Maybe. But I know you wanted to interview me because of music. So in the spirit of finding a metaphor, right? [In music, there are] all of these textures and colors and they’re very specific; they have specific roles in the way that they interact. And it’s like the flutes occupy a certain frequency in the grand scheme of the orchestra. The cellos are on a different frequency level. So, when you’re orchestrating, you try not to have instruments play in the same range because the frequencies literally start to cancel each other out. And so you need them to be very distinct and to have this strata of unique, different sounds. And so maybe Heaven’s a little bit more like that, right? Your frequency, where you fit in the scheme of things, is a different spot. But the overall experience is one of wholeness. That’s what I think about Heaven. It’s a wholeness or a completeness that we hopefully grow into. I doubt it’s immediate, because I feel like everything takes time.
Well, see, that’s an interesting idea too, because music is time-dependent. It’s not like a painting or something like that, where you can spend a second or, if you want, spend an hour with it. Music isn’t that way. It’s very tied to time, which challenges my ideas about how the infinite works because what does music become in that context? And here we’re getting into super-big, weird ideas…
No, it [doesn’t] sound weird to me at all. And my dad was deeply interested in quantum physics. And so some of our conversations in the last couple of years were tied to these ideas [of time and space].
So, I wrote a piece on Heaven. It was either while Carey was pregnant and then I published it later or I wrote it like maybe within a couple of months after our boys were born and passed away. [Goes into a lengthy explanation of a “Heaven” theory that can be found here.]
…And I know that sounds wild and crazy and insane, but this is an idea that I’ve lived with. And it became so important to me when we lost our kids, because I thought, ‘Well, if that’s the case, are our boys in a place where they see all of our lives, the dad that I could have been? Is it possible when they arrived in that place, we were already waiting for them to receive them?’ But even before we talked, I was thinking about this time aspect of music. Where is music in all of that?
But the part of it that I’m most interested in is this idea of our loved ones. Where are they? Where is your dad? And what is his experience? Where are my sons? I’m a reasonable person. I have to reasonably concede that there is a chance, of course, that my kids just died and that was it. Of course, my brain doesn’t fit into that because I reject that. But, you know, the access that our loved ones have to us when they’re on the other side of this veil… Being so freshly in it, I just wonder if you’d be willing to talk about it a little bit more.
That’s a lot, I apologize, but…
No, it’s beautiful. My mind, my head is gonna explode a little bit when I think about like, ‘What is music outside of time?’ Because it is so time dependent. And it’s like, ‘Whoa, is it just every possible combination of melody?’ Which feels a little bit like a 20th century orchestral piece I wouldn’t want to listen to. It sounds like noise, right?
Right, suddenly it’s Revolution #9 and no one needs that forever and ever.
…As opposed to like a thread that you can follow. Yeah. But I, okay, so I have a lot of thoughts about this idea of time and where people are, just based on my experience. The week that my dad was dying, two separate people texted me on the same day and said, “I don’t really know how and I don’t understand why, but I have this sense that your dad is going to hold [your son] Henry before you do.” And I was like, ‘Huh.’ And I could see it.
Did that give you comfort or…?
It did. I mean, it was sort of like, ‘Wow, the world is mysterious. And I don’t really know how that works.’ I guess I had never really thought about, ‘Does a soul come from someplace else and then land in the body?’ I had always conceived that the soul is created at the same time that the body is created. I didn’t even realize I thought that. And then I was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it comes from somewhere else. And we come through our bodies. And then we go on back into that state.’ I have no idea. But it was an interesting idea [and] I felt like I was standing at this threshold. And there was three weeks between when my dad died and when my son was born. And it was this liminal threshold of doors being opened on either side. ‘Okay, my dad just left. My son is coming. And there’s this time of crossing in between. So maybe, maybe my dad met the baby.’
Yeah.
My Aunt Pat was a chaplain at a hospital. And she told me story after story after story of people dying when she was in the room. Once it happened three times in one day and she was like, ‘My gosh, what is wrong with me?’ And her supervisor was like, ‘You just have a presence that allows people to go.’ And she told me so many stories where someone would dream about their loved ones that had gone before them or they would see them in the room and then they would die. And I mean, it just happened so frequently that I thought, ‘OK, wherever we go after this is not the end.’
But when I was giving birth, I thought, ‘I really want to have a birth as peaceful as my dad’s death.’ That’s my vision for this. And he was very medicated, so I got an epidural—this was a good choice. And the next afternoon, I was ready to push. And I realized I didn’t have any music chosen for that moment. And my husband suggested, “Hey, how about Dvorak’s New World Symphony?” And I was like, “Sure.” So my friend just picks a random recording on Spotify and presses play. And I pushed for 40 minutes and Henry was born at the climax in the final notes of the New World Symphony. And they put him on my chest and I guess it was a live recording and it broke into applause.
Come on.
And I just started to cry. And I felt like [my dad] was there.
Man, this kid is gonna grow up with some ego on him. The very first thing you hear is applause as you enter into the world…
[Laughs] So, I don’t know how it works, but I do feel like [death] is not the end in some way. People are able to be near to us.
There is some sort of access that they may have.
Yeah. And I love your image of time being not linear, right? I don’t know how that works with music, but that makes sense to me that you would be there to welcome [your sons]. That feels real.
I guess I think the only way I’m able to imagine it is going back to the beginning of our conversation with the stems, you know? In a context like that, we can go inside the music and we can hear every aspect of it with all the different layers turned off, turned on, however [we like]. Every variation on everything, and there’s just new layers of interest the more you explore. And there’s infinite time to do it.
I like the idea of things turning on and off, because that’s a very dynamic experience. And that feels a lot less chaotic to me than all the sounds. ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ right?
Yeah, it’s all too specific in my mind for it to just be, ‘No, they’re gone and they’re just waiting in Heaven.’
I don’t think that’s all. I also don’t think that’s biblical. Like there’s that idea of the “cloud of witnesses.” And I think the creative process is a lot like that too. It’s almost like if you get into that flow state or whatever, it’s almost like this thing is coming through you from somewhere else.
And not to press on this too hard, but the nature of that feels musical to me too. There’s sort of a spiritual component, the binding of elements that I can’t describe.
I think, yeah, for me, it’s like experience something that’s sublime. There is that sense of the world, like layers peeling back, right? Like you’re touching something that’s indescribable. You can’t see music, right? You can feel the vibration of it, you can hear it, but you can’t physically touch it, you can’t see it. It’s around you, like the sound waves. It’s invisible.
Invisible but, in a way, sort of knowable.
[Our mutual friend] Jessie Flasschoen told this to me one time–it might be Dante, but I don’t know–and I just keep thinking about it. She said, “When you peel back the skin of the universe, you’ll find love.” So, my dad’s second symphony, which is the thing that he was working so hard on before he died, he called it, “The Voices of God.” And he sent that title to a poet and asked her to write something based on that. And then he wrote these five movements based on her poems. And she conceived five very different experiences of love.
At his funeral, this was his one request: We played the final movement of his first symphony, which was never performed, but he had a mock-up recording. And I was a little worried because it’s classical. I don’t know, you know, all of my uncles are like construction workers. We’re a weird family in our family. But so many people came up to me afterwards; they were so moved. I mean, people I didn’t expect to even like it just felt like they had been lifted to some other place. And my friend was sitting in the back holding my son. And apparently, while that was playing, he lifted his arms up.
Life is a mystery. There’s a mystery.
Yes. Any other thoughts about death before we close?
Just the ‘Plato’s Cave’ kind of idea: What we’re seeing is only a shadow of the real thing and the real thing actually exists. That’s also how I think about death. This [life] feels the most real to me. I can touch it. I can smell it. But what about your idea of all of these multiple dimensions, smell or color or taste? What if it’s just so infinitely magnified? The real thing is something that my brain couldn’t process in [its] current state.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I was just thinking about this recently because I’m working on a story with another writer and we were talking about names. I’ve never felt that the word “Jeremy” was a good descriptor of who I am. And that’s how it is with just about anyone: ‘Yeah, I mean, that’s their name. That’s how I know them. But does that really sum them up?’ And I wonder if death is a little bit like that. For right now, we have a [flawed] description, but it works well enough for now. But the real description is to come and it’s bigger than anything we can know in this life.
I think that’s accurate. I mean, how can we know what’s unknowable in this form? I do think [about something] a friend of mine once said: “Catholics and Protestants actually agree on something about death, which is that in order to experience whatever Heaven is, we have to be changed.” But the difference is Protestants think it happens instantaneously. Like, boom, you’re in Heaven. And Catholics or Orthodox think it’s a process. That’s the idea of Purgatory, maybe in its truest sense.
And maybe because music is time-oriented, it feels reasonable to me that there would be time in some way to acclimate to whatever’s next.
And maybe that’s part of why people stay close, you know? They’re acclimating.
Chelsea is a co-composer/co-lyricist of the original musical, MARIAN, about the black singer and civil rights icon, Marian Anderson. She’s one of five female writers (intergenerational, multiracial) collaborating to create an unforgettable experience for audiences. Additionally, she’s a songwriter, jazz singer, voice teacher, and music director.
Chelsea’s original creative work is supported through the generosity of her patron community on Patreon. She can be found at patreon.com/ChelseaMarieDavis.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
While I respect and admire each of the writers in this series, Katherine holds a special place. Like Marla, she’s a published poet, but she’s also a Young Adult author (her supernatural YA coming-of-age, The Cellar, is among my daughters’ favorites). And while her precise, assured style is enough to include her among this august group of pensmiths, it’s also who Katherine is and what she means to me when she’s not typing opuses that made me want to talk with her.
Katherine, probably more than any other writer, invested in me and my own writing as a teacher/leader/mentor and what I’ve learned from her example and instruction can never be replaced. She not only approaches her own craft with intention and discipline, she also guides writers around and under her in that same discipline, pushing hard to make us better. If it’s not obvious, I’m grateful for her and the storyteller I am is thanks in part to her.
Jeremy: I didn’t just want to talk to you because you’re an accomplished writer, but you’re also a teacher and a mentor. In fact, you’ve mentored me in my own writing. Can you speak to the value of processing big ideas, particularly dark or difficult ideas like death, through writing?
Katherine: I have turned to writing instinctively to process big or difficult things for most of my life, but I don’t know that I’ve ever sat down and written out the reasons or benefits of doing that, so thanks for this question, Jeremy!
As many others before me have noted, writing is thinking and a form of meditation. And by meditation, I mean it’s a way of observing and being present to your own thoughts and emotions about difficult things. It’s so easy for thoughts (and emotions) that remain inside your head to spin out of control and get stuck in that spin, like a tornado that sucks you up and never lands or lets you out. Writing, at least for me, is a way out of the tornado. I suppose you could say it’s a form of exerting control, but I think it’s a healthier and more life-giving act than that definition implies. If you can name something—even if you are naming doubt and pain and anger—there is a kind of freedom or relief to that. You might still be in the middle of it, but at least you know what you’re dealing with. You’re having a conversation or argument with it—it’s not just tossing you around. Writing, naming, is the opposite of escaping. So much of the time, we want to escape what is hard and scary and painful, but deep down we know it’s still there and will get us eventually. To write about something is to turn around and face it. And, as I know you’ve experienced both as writer and reader, when you are able to articulate something authentic or true in writing, it has the potential to not only provide some relief for you, but also for others who read it and say, “Yes!” and have that cathartic recognition.
That makes sense and it’s a helpful frame for people such as myself who feel a need to turn my own demons and difficulties into some sort of cathartic expression. I’m interested in this idea of writing as a way to exert a sort of control over an intimidating or impossible situation. I haven’t really spent much time questioning the health of that idea. I’ve mostly treated it as a given that making art from hardship is a worthwhile thing to do. But I suppose there could be an element of avoidance to it, as it requires a sort of self-removal to say something artistically worthwhile. But maybe that removal is part of the point of evolving ourselves through the situation?
I don’t know, maybe creativity is all upside. I imagine you and I think similarly as creative people who rely on the catharsis of expression. So maybe I’ll just ask: is there a downside to creative expression as a way to trudge through the dark corners of ourselves or our environments or our experiences?
I imagine a downside is possible since so many ‘goods’ also have a shadow side. I think a lot depends on an individual’s personality and approach to things. If there is a downside for me, I remain blissfully unaware of it.
You’ve had grief and difficulty in your own life. Your poetry style is precise, ultra-considered and even elevated. Beautiful, lyrical descriptions of the sublime, the mundane, the difficult, the wonderful. It doesn’t just seem to be how you write, but also how you think. How does a mind like yours explore a fuckin’ horse pill of a topic like grief?
Well, that’s a very lovely way to describe my poetry, and I’m deeply gratified if that’s how it comes across. The reality is that there’s a lot of messy, chaotic, and not-good unseen writing behind any final draft that makes it out into the world. To answer your questions (sort of), I was in graduate school when my mother suffered through a horrible form of cancer and died. I took a leave of absence for a year because of that and my father’s breakdown and suicide attempt six months after my mother’s death.
The first class I took upon returning was an Emily Dickinson seminar, and the professor challenged us to read not only the hundred or so assigned poems, but all 1,800. I did, and it’s what helped me survive that dark time (Dickinson and Prozac were the perfect combo for me). I read her poems while I ate breakfast and dinner, on weekend afternoons, while sitting in the doctor’s office or getting the oil in my car changed. And that was a transformative experience. It was soon after that semester that I started writing my own poetry again and getting interested in really learning the craft of doing it well. I write nothing like Dickinson—I don’t think anyone does or can—but her work had a profound impact on me. She is a master of writing about big ideas and uncomfortable things, and how to approach them both bluntly and obliquely, with curiosity and sly humor (“I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true”—how great is that?!?). There is a kind of wonderful detachment in her poetry that invites the reader in to thinking and feeling with her vs. making the reader simply witness her have emotions and thoughts, which is what less-skilled poets do.
Mary Oliver is another poet I deeply admire and have learned a lot from about how to ask questions and explore hard things with a light touch (“Black Bear in the Orchard” is a marvelous example of this). I am still learning how to do that well.
By the way, I knew your parents’ stories, but I don’t think I knew all of that, so I’m grateful for your sharing. That’s absolutely amazing and also heartbreaking.
Not to overstep, but I wonder if your experience with Dickinson bordered on the spiritual. It doesn’t seem so terrifically far removed from what many of us (raising my own hand here) have been asked to do from a young age with sacred texts (in my case, the Bible). “Digest and meditate on this massive tome of literature and let it permeate your soul. And when you’ve finished, do it again.” If there’s truth or depth underneath it, it’s inevitably going to have a deep impact and contribute to your worldview. It sounds like you had a transformative experience. Now I’m wondering if I should spend a month in the desert with Emily Dickinson.
There is no doubt that Emily Dickinson’s work ministered to me and became a kind of sacred text to me in the way I experienced it at that particular time of my life. And yes, what you describe calls to mind Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians to think about or spend time meditating on whatever is true, lovely, honorable, just, pure, or commendable (Philippians 4:8), which is a wonderfully expansive and gracious command that encompasses so much of the world.
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think there’s an inherent poetry in grief?
Yes, I do think there’s inherent poetry in grief because grief is an immersive reality that demands honesty and your full attention, and I think that’s true of poetry as well. As for my own mind, the only thing I have to offer is that I’ve always questioned binaries and gravitated instead to paradoxes and tensions. And I’ve always (even as a weird kid) had a kind of observational approach to my own life—it’s happening to me but there’s also always part of me watching it happen and thinking about it. I’ve heard other writers describe this, so I know it’s not uncommon for more introverted and interior types of folks.
Writing as a way to “watch from the outside” is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Do you think this takes talent and skill to pull off? You write a lot, so you’ve developed this muscle with terrific commitment and practice. But can anyone do this? Or is this a gift sort of only given to writers?
I ask because I was (and am) fortunate to have several creative outlets for my grief. But I imagine many people feel like writing or art-making isn’t necessarily something they can explore in a way that would be helpful or satisfying. You also teach this sort of thing, so what do you think?
I really don’t know and certainly feel no authority to say what is or isn’t possible for someone else. I just know that it’s always been intuitive and natural to me, so I resist calling it a talent. It’s just one way of being. What I can say is that I think people tend to much more quickly dismiss the possibility of themselves as writers than they should, and when they say, “Oh, I can’t [insert whatever]” what they’re really saying is “I don’t think I’m as good at [blank] as I want to be or think I should be.” In my experience, when you remove the pressure to be “good” and make the writing low stakes, people often surprise themselves with what comes out and how much they enjoy it. I think everyone should give themselves a chance to discover that, especially if they secretly long to but have somehow disqualified themselves from trying. But I also think people process in all kinds of other equally valid ways—music, drawing, photography, cooking, fashion, writing software code, organizing a closet. I think anything one finds satisfaction in and dedicates themselves to becoming skilled at (including crafting good relationships) can be a kind of art and can offer an outlet, even if it might seem more indirect on the surface.
I write about grief every year at the same time, which is the point of this whole project. 13 years in, it’s still a helpful tradition, even when I don’t know what I’m going to write about. But that’s something I feel I’ve learned from you: the ritual, the discipline of writing when you don’t necessarily feel ready or properly inspired.
What part does discipline and ritual play in your life and does it have a relationship to your ability to navigate big moments and feelings like grief?
As many far more accomplished writers/creators have already said, if you want to accomplish anything, you have to do the work. If you’re always waiting around for inspiration, you’re not going to produce very much, which also means you’re not going to grow very much. There are some people, like my husband, who have about 20 ideas popping into their heads at any given moment and can easily write for hours about any of them. I am not such a person. Sometimes inspiration comes first, but a lot of my poems have come from me sitting my butt in the chair and just getting started, even if I had absolutely no idea what was going to come out. Sometimes I’ll use prompts, read other poets and grab a line or idea to get my own draft started, or just start describing something I’m seeing or hearing. Whatever gets the ball rolling. Sometimes what I write just stays flat and boring and I consider it a kind of exercise. But sometimes, after I’ve gotten a few stale, flat lines out of the way, something sparks and my brain makes a totally unexpected leap. It’s so great when that happens, but it wouldn’t happen if I didn’t start with the forced part. I think grief is also work that requires a certain amount of discipline and commitment. Life is so busy and there are so many ways of distracting and numbing ourselves that it can become habit not to think about or feel certain things. And the longer you go without doing so, the scarier it becomes (like going back to writing after a long time away from it).
I really admire what you’ve done by committing to write every year at the same time about your sons and making it public, which is a very vulnerable and generous act. And I think in whatever way, big or small, anyone can make themselves accountable and create a structure that supports that is really beneficial, whether it’s in writing or grieving.
Thank you, that’s kind.
I don’t know if this connects or not, but one of my favorite musicians is Stephin Merritt and I’ll never forget this piece of advice he gave to aspiring songwriters. I’ll screw it up, but it went something like: “Never write about emotions you’re currently feeling, because it’ll wind up a mess. Rather, write about feelings you remember feeling.” Granted, he was speaking about songs and not poetry or other types of writing. But I’ve always struggled with whether or not that could be good advice or just puffed up, pseudo-expertise.
What do you think? You write about some deeply felt stuff. I guess this goes back to the earlier topic of removal a little bit. But do you find Merritt’s words to be true? Is writing about a charged emotion you’re in the middle of feeling a recipe for disaster?
That’s so interesting because a Wordsworth quote I share with my students when we do our Romantic Poetry unit is,
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
Which is totally contradictory on the surface but aligns really well with what Stephin Merritt says because as much as the English Romantics were about feelings and spontaneity, they still recognized that to write good poetry, they had to apply thought and craft to those feelings, which requires some distance. They wanted the reader to feel like the poem was dashed out on paper right on the spot and went straight to publication, but the poem was still a composed product. For example, Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” was actually written down at an inn in Bristol. It’s also in decasyllabic blank verse (ten syllable, metrical lines), so not exactly off the cuff.
But look, let’s face it—the stereotypical image a lot of people have about poets is that they’re walking around with little notebooks and swooning under trees and writing really emotive, angsty stuff. But my experience has been that if you’re in the heat of emotion while writing, unless you’re a rare genius like Keats, you’re most likely just writing a diary entry with line breaks—not poems. Or at least not good poems. In my earlier days of writing, if I was feeling strong emotion while writing, it could convince me that what I was writing was really powerful. Then I’d come back to it after some time had passed and realize it wasn’t at all, which was kind of embarrassing—even more embarrassing if someone else pointed that out. A good lesson, though.
That said, I think there’s tremendous value to writing as a way to uncover and process or express emotion. It can be one of those structured ways of giving attention to and space for grief that I mentioned earlier, a kind of excavation of what’s below. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve written my way into identifying or naming something I didn’t know was there or didn’t fully understand before I started writing—a specific loss, a need, a fear, a memory—and I just have to stop and weep. Getting to those discoveries can feel uncomfortable and scary, but there is always relief after, at least for me. But that is typically writing I do for my own discovery and understanding and catharsis. Some of what comes out in that writing may have benefit for others as well or it may not. But it’s hard for me to see that aspect clearly until I’m more removed from the initial experience, and even then, it can be hard to predict. You never know what’s going to resonate with others, so my goal with whatever I write to share in a public space is to be as authentic to the experience as possible in the best language and form I am capable of.
You know, I can relate to that. Sometimes I’ll surprise myself when I open up something I’d written years earlier. I’ll see a connection or an insight that I have no memory of making, so it’s an insight that’s all new and helpful for me all over again. It’s as if the me of the past had a perspective that wouldn’t fully flower until later, so it’s sort of packaged as a gift to the me of the future. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a gift that would never have gotten to me if I hadn’t entered that sort of plugged-in writing state that opens doors I had no idea existed.
So, this one’s a little personal, but June 4, 2011 was the toughest day of my life, the day we lost our sons. There are parts of that day I remember with crystal clarity and others are a sort of hazy blur. There’s a tiny handful of people who I interacted with on that day and I’m grateful you happened to be one of them. You came to the hospital and handed me quinoa salad to eat and I don’t really remember anything about the exchange we had, if any, because my brain was pudding. I’ve never asked you this, but it’s semi-topical today, so here goes: Do you remember that interaction?
I do remember. I think I’d just finished making that food to bring over when I heard the news. I called a mutual friend because I was really torn about whether it was insanely inappropriate or possibly helpful to still bring the food, and this friend encouraged me to go ahead and bring it. I fully intended to simply leave it at the nurses’ station for them to pass along to you and Carey—God knows, the last thing I wanted to do was intrude on such a painful and sacred time. But after asking me my name and who I was there to see, the nurse just got up and left before I could explain. I think, too, that I wasn’t very coherent at the time. You came out into the hallway a few minutes later, looking like you’d been bludgeoned. I’m crying again just remembering because I can still see your face, how haggard you looked, and how bloodshot your eyes were. I remember hugging you, both of us crying, and telling you how sorry I was. I felt completely inadequate to the situation and also silly and stupid to be handing you a bag of food in such a moment, but you were so gracious about it and thanked me. I told you to give Carey my love and that I was praying for you both, and then I left.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I won’t be able to tell you what it means to me, to have a new camera angle on a day upon which I’ve spent endless hours fixating.
I have relationships in my life that I go to for intellectual and spiritual stimulation. Others for love and support. Others for advice, instruction and feedback. Others for creative inspiration… you’re one of the few people that I’ve been consistently able to approach for all of the above. I’m so grateful to know you and I’m so grateful I had such a dear friend with a caring face and a Tupperware full of quinoa on the hardest day of my life.
You’re the best, KLo.
Right back at you, JBear. You are the whole package and, as Anne of Green Gables (hero of my childhood) would put it, you are a bosom friend. Grateful for that deep, rich, long history of knowing each other.
Her YA novel, The Cellar, follows the story of a teenaged girl who experiences love, loss and an encounter with the supernatural in a house that’s far from the home she knows.
I'm Jeremy. Thanks for stopping in. If you're curious about the name of this blog, the easiest thing to do is click the FAQ link at the top, which should clear everything up.
Before I forget, be sure to visit my wife at her own blog: Mod Vegan.
Tips On Triplets 
