October 5, 2023 • 26 mins
For this week’s Great Minds bonus episode, Dani sits down with bestselling author Kris Carr to explore the moving themes and meanings woven into a Family Secrets story from Season 6.
Listen to Trent Preszler’s episode, ’Taxidermied Duck’ here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You ain't never going to be man enough. Those words
would haunt me. I would hear their echo in his voice,
in the squish of hunting waiters stepping into a marsh,
in the metallic clinking of his wrenches while he fixed
the grain combine. I would hear those words every morning
when I walked to the one room schoolhouse and watered
the ponderous pine. I would hear them when I was
(00:28):
promoted to CEO, came out of the closet, got married
and divorced, and graduated twice from Cornell University with a
master's and doctorate. Knowing my father was not present for
any of it. Long after he came home from Vietnam
and started fighting a different war against cancer, I would
always remember that I ain't never going to be man enough.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's Trent Pressler. Trent is the CEO of Bedell Cellars,
an esteemed vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island.
He's the author of the debut mel More, Little and Often,
and Trent is also the builder of bespoke artisanal canoes.
His canoes have been called the most beautiful in the world.
(01:11):
This is the story of what one man does in
order to make meaning of the secrecy and silence surrounding
his life. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is a special
bonus episode of Family Secrets with best selling author wellness
(01:31):
expert Cancer Thriver, who has been living with stage four
cancer for the past two decades. Chris Carr. Chris has
been called one of our great thought leaders by Oprah Winfrey,
and her new book is I'm Not a Morning Person,
braving loss, grief and the big, messy emotions that happen
when life calls apart. Chris and I will be talking
(01:54):
about an episode from season six called Taxi dermid Duck,
which I hope you'll all try check out if you
haven't already. As always, I'm so glad you're here, Chris.
Thanks so much for coming on Family Secrets.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Thanks for having me, Danny, It's good to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I'm wondering what stood out for you as you were listening.
Did anything in particular strike.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
You about it? Oh? So many things. I think that
many of us have parallel experiences, especially with a strange
parents or parents we might not have been estranged with
but really did not know in any way, shape or form.
And you know, one of the big things that shoot
it out for me, it was the idea that we
(02:42):
fill the silence when there's silence in our homes, when
there's silence in our histories, when there's pieces and parts
that are missing, We clever humans fill that silence, and
usually we fill it with stories that are not very
beneficial to our mental well being.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I think Annie LaMotte once famously said something like my
head is a neighborhood that I shouldn't spend too much
time in.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It's so true. Well, you know, I met my biological father.
I met him when I was eighteen years old, and
I didn't know anything about him. You know, it was
something that we had to tiptoe around because I knew
that my mother had gone through so much pain around
that abandonment, and I really couldn't experience my own pain
(03:27):
except for internally, because I didn't want to bring up
more of her own. And so I remember filling the
void and filling that silence with all of the reasons
why he wasn't there. And then, of course I grew
up with a very wild and interesting grandmother who would
actually fill the void with stories, and it would be
(03:48):
like he died in a plane crash, the wedding dresses upstairs,
you know, like all of these things, and none of
them were true. So I just realized that later in life,
when I was a grown up figure it out on
my own. But again, I think that that's such a
beautiful point that you tease out in that episode, about
how we turn inward and sometimes turn on ourselves when
(04:12):
we don't have all the pieces.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, exactly, and then that ends up forming so much
of our lives. There's a piece of wisdom from Carl
Jung that I love and think about a lot, which is,
until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives,
and we will call it fate. So when your wild
grandmother would tell you these stories as a kid, did
(04:35):
you know that they weren't true, or did you try
to kind of attach yourself to them in some way
and try them on for size, or did you just
kind of know that this wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I think in the beginning I did believe her, but
then I realized there was a lot of other lies.
And then when you start to follow the bread crowns,
you're like, just doesn't add up, and I don't have
to be you know that wise to understand that. So
for me, it was really about trying to make sense
of it myself, and that's something that's really hard for
a child to do without turning it into something that
(05:07):
is about themselves, like it must be me, there must
be something wrong with me, flawed with me. And one
of the things that I love about your episode with
Trent is you know, he had lots of reasons to
self abandon especially with a father that essentially abandoned him,
but he didn't. And I found that to be so
beautiful and such a testament to his resilience and his
(05:31):
fortitude just as a person.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Absolutely, I mean, it's extraordinary to me that he grew
up in such an isolated way on this ranch in
South Dakota that was thousands of acres and more cows
than people, and you could drive for hours and hours
and still be on the land of this ranch. You know,
with his parents who were complicated people, and with his
sister who he adored, who became very ill, and who
(05:57):
he loved and he was a caretaker for and felt
very responsible for. And all of that is such a
prescription for not being able to escape or know that
there is a path that's different from the path that
he was already on. I mean, he's gay, and he
knows he's gay, and he's in a culture and in
(06:18):
a world that is completely rejecting of homosexuality, and a
church that believes that he's going to burn and help
for eternity if he's gay. To be able to leave
that world and go east and go to college and
carve out a life for himself just struck me as
(06:38):
such a tremendous act of, as you say, resilience.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I also loved that, you know, he mentions this word
and I write about this in my book, and it's
what I call ruptures. And it was the moment when
his sister died and he is going to the funeral,
and you know, he brings a boyfriend, he brings a partner,
a signific other, and it's really his big reveal. He's
(07:03):
revealing his secret, and he's doing it in a way
that's like, this is what I need to survive this storm.
I need to be who I am and I need
to be with somebody I love. And I think that
that's the inciting incident for him, and like for so
many of us, the ruptures are what set us on
our path to I think, becoming more ourselves. And you know,
(07:26):
one of the things that I have explored is that
ruptures come in all shapes and sizes, and none of
us are immune to them. And they're hard and they're painful.
It's the divorce, it's the miscarriage, it's you know, you
lose your job, you lose your former sense of self,
the diagnosis, whatever it is, and it doesn't take away
from the pain what I'm about to say. But all
(07:47):
of these ruptures also have the power to rearrange us,
realign our values, our priorities, point us more towards what
really matters, and maybe even awaken dreams that we have
long since let die because we think this time is
behind me. And I think that the ruptures make us
(08:08):
realize that the time that's in front of us, we
need to spend it living authentically. And I think that
that's something that I really loved about his story, because
it was through that loss that he went on this
journey of being himself.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
And one of the things about that journey and that
rupture is that that was a moment for him that
he really, for his own self preservation and for his
own growth, needed to really distance himself and separate himself
from his parents, from his father in particular, because he
(08:51):
can't be he won't be accepted by him, and that
lack of being accepted becomes unbearable. I mean, it had
always been true up until then, but at that point,
that's what makes it a rupture, is that in the
grief about the loss of his sister, and you know,
he describes it so beautifully. You know, the man who
is his partner he's in a relationship with, is relegated
(09:13):
to the back row of the church and trend to
sitting up with family because it's his friend who he's brought.
His partner is not family. And he turns around as
the casket is coming in and he sees this man,
his partner's face in the back row, and something in
him just rips open and it becomes unacceptable.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
One of the things that you're talking about, and that
we talk a lot about on this podcast is meaning making.
It seems like those are moments when they happen, that
are you know, kind of sink or swim moments. You know,
are we going to succumb to this feeling of despair
(09:57):
and grief which is not to say we're not going
to feel all of our feelings, but are we going
to succumb or is this actually going to be some
kind of turning point from which we make meaning out
of that sorrow, that chaos.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Yeah, it's a good question, and I think it's one
that we all struggle with at some point when we
were going through loss. And that moment, that rupture for
me happened with my biological father when his mother died
and I wasn't allowed to be in contact with any
member of his family, but his mom, my grandmother, would
(10:37):
write me, sneak me these little letters over the years
and a little piece of jewelry and just a little
trinket or a Christmas ornament. And right around the time
when I was eighteen, I decided to write her. And
I had sent her little things as well, but I
decided to write her, and all I wanted was a
picture of my father. I just wanted to see if
(10:58):
we looked like each other. And before she got the letter,
she died, and so her loss was really the moment
where I said, I am going to find this person.
I'm going to find him. I'm going to ask him
if he'll meet me. And if he won't meet me,
(11:18):
then he has to have the guts to tell me why.
And if it wasn't for her passing, I'm not so sure,
especially at that time in my life, eighteen, filled with
all the hormones and all of the angst, I'm not
so sure that I would have done it. But to
your point about making meaning, you know, the things that
the secrets that we hide I think hold, or the
(11:39):
secrets that are you know, a part of our lives,
have the power to lead us to that meaning, to
lead us to a better understanding of ourselves and truly
who we want to be.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
We'll be right back. I was struck reading your book
at the idea that I just think is a universal
truth for all of us, that there are lives contain
multiple ruptures, right, they contain multiple before and after moments,
(12:15):
And you're describing one of them in your world, and
you're in your life and in the case of seeking
out and meeting your biological father, can you imagine a
parallel world in which you hadn't done that, and that
just would have continued to remain this question mark that
sort of walked alongside you, you know, in your life.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Moving forward now, I've never thought about that. That's a
great question, Danny. Probably not, because I really long to
at least have some understanding of the other half of
my DNA. You know, I just I wanted to know
certain things. I mean, of course I wanted to know why,
but more so, I think I wanted to know what
(12:55):
does he like, what's his humor like, what's his personality like,
what's he into? Is he tall, he's short, you know,
is he skinny? What does he look like? And that
was something that I just really wrestled with for so long.
Of course, underneath it, I wrestled with the abandonment, but
on top of it was just, you know, how do
I look so different from everybody else in my family?
(13:17):
And not everybody wants to know, but I did want
to know. And I remember when I met him, he said,
you know, we'd never seen each other, and I hadn't
even seen a picture of him. And I just got
out of the car and he got out of the house,
and we walked towards each other, and I put out
my hand and he put out his hand, and I said,
hi am Kristen, and he said hi, I am Crispin.
(13:37):
And we were mirror images of each other, and it
was like, wow, this it was so bright. I could
barely look at him. I spent most of the time
looking at the ground.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah, I really, I really understand that you never thought
of him and have never thought of him as your dad.
He was your biological father, he was the person that
you come from, but the man who raised you and
who married your mother and who became your dad. So
(14:10):
much of your book is about the loss of him,
And you know, I think one of the reasons why
I chose Trent's episode to talk about with you is that,
in many ways, your book is about the shape of grief,
and grief has something that none of us can escape.
It's part of the human condition. I mean, the subtitle
(14:31):
of your book is Braving Loss, Grief and the big
messy emotions that happen when life falls apart, which is
just kind of everything. I mean, life just feels like
it's full of big, messy emotions and we're constantly, in
one way or another, trying to tamp them down or
find nice, tidy containers for them, and then a profound
(14:53):
loss comes along, and grief just does not allow for
any of those tidy containers for our big, messy selves.
And you know, and I was thinking about in Trent's episode,
I mean, just the incredible symbolism of his inheritance is
(15:14):
that his father leaves him his toolbox along with a
taxidermy duck that there's a story about that. I hope
people will go back and listen to the episode and
here why this taxi duck was Trent's inheritance. But his
father gives him this toolbox, and Trent drives all the
way from South Dakota back to the east end of
(15:37):
Long Island where he lives with his dog, Caper and
this toolbox, and he's in this kind of wild, complicated
grief because it was a complicated relationship and a really
difficult one. And when he gets back, it's not like
a stunt. It's not like something he decides to do
(15:58):
or something that he read about in a book somewhere.
He just thinks, what am I going to do with
this toolbox? And he thinks, I'm going to build a boat?
And he clears out all of his furniture, every last
stick of furniture in the home that he's living in,
so that he can build a canoe using his father's
(16:19):
toolbox and he'd never built anything before. I mean, he's
a CEO of a vineyard. This wasn't this wasn't part
of his skill set. And yet this becomes like the
shape of his grief. And you write in your book
about anticipating grief, which is its own thing that I'm
very interested in because I think I do that. I
(16:41):
pre grieve things as if you can actually pre grieve them,
and then somehow spare yourself grief later. All you're doing
is pre grieving and adding more grief to the grief sandwich.
But you know, in the case of Trent's loss of
his father, he hadn't really anticipated it. He hadn't been
in touch with his family. I hadn't been in touch
(17:02):
with his father, and it's almost like he doesn't know
how to grieve or where to put it. So it
takes on this physical manifestation of this project.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You know, I called my book I'm not a morning
person because I didn't want to be. It was the
one emotion I didn't want to go near. It was
so big I thought if I touched it, I would drown.
And that's how I started the process. And then, you know,
through a lot of my own healing, and therapy and
certainly an enormous amount of research. As I was writing
the book, I realized that we live in a grief phobic, messy,
(17:36):
emotions averse society. So a few of us know how
to handle storms of that magnitude, and so we oftentimes
bury the pain in different ways. You know. It's like
emotional physics. But what doesn't come out one way will
come out another way. And hopefully we can find ways
(17:58):
so that the emotion can come out healthy way. And
I think with all of these big feelings, many of
us want to amputate them, you know, because they are
so painful. But we can't amputate any of our emotions
and hope to be whole. And I think that's the
whole part of the human experience of saying, all of
these parts are of me, are welcome in each of
(18:21):
my emotions, server purpose, and ultimately at the core of them,
it's just information, and it's information that leads me back
to myself and a deeper layer of my own healing.
And for him, what I thought was so wonderful was,
you know, like I said about emotional physics, what doesn't
come out one way will come out another way. If
you come out through drinking, shopping, gambling, you name it,
(18:46):
all of the things that you can think to put
on the wound to temporarily numb it. But it also
can come out in a really healthy way through the
creative process. And that building of the canoe for me
is like, I know what it was for me writing
the book. I imagine you would probably agree with me there
(19:07):
that the creative process just the act of getting the hammer,
getting the nails, getting the woods, you know, having the meltdowns,
being with his dad's tools and trying to build something
that he had never done before, with the tools that
still embody the energy of a man that he really
truly didn't know, but perhaps was getting to know in
(19:29):
a deeper, more meaningful way in some way, shape or form.
I mean, that's what the creative process can do for us,
and I feel like it's a very very smart thing
to turn to when we're grieving and we don't even
know how to touch that feeling. It's like you can
faw into the feeling through the creative process. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I love that, And you know, it brings to mind
one of my favorite lines in Trent's book and in
his story, which is that a woodworker says to him
as he's struggling to build this kind of monster of
a canoe. You know, he smashes it. He has this
relationship with it. It's like a you know, it's like
a it's like a golum or something. It's like something
(20:14):
that he's like, just like it ogre in his in
his it's taken over his life. And this woodworker says
to him, don't find the grain, follow it. And that
strikes me as so much what the what the creative
process is and what the morning process is. You know,
it's not something that can be forster that's going to
kind of adhere to a certain kind of schedule, which
(20:36):
I think can sometimes make people feel really angry with themselves.
I mean, it breaks my heart to look at like
my journals from the year that my dad died when
I was twenty three, and you know, I have lines
in there like, you know, it's been six months. I
should be over it by now, And I just think, oh, honey,
you're this young woman who's lost your beloved father. It's
(21:01):
not going to work that way. Give yourself up some rope,
give yourself a break. But so often we don't, and
it goes back to what you were saying about our
being in a sort of grief phobic society. And there's
a part of your book that I was so happy
that you included and that I would love for you
to talk a little bit about, which is the things
that people say. The things that people say. I mean,
(21:22):
I found this several years ago when my husband Michael
was ill with cancer, and the things that people would
say were just that, they said the damnedest things, and
they said them with perfectly decent intentions, but they would
sometimes be so sort of really not what I needed
(21:43):
to hear. And you have a section of your book
where you talk about that, and also with yourself as
someone who has been living with cancer for two decades.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, I call this awkward times awkward people. And you know,
I'll start by saying that we all mess up. And
if we go back to the idea that we don't
know what we're doing with the tough stuff, then of course,
when we don't know what we're doing, what do we do?
We become anxious, And when we're anxious, we put words
together that probably should never go together. And so I
(22:19):
try to come from this place that we're all good intentions.
We just make mistakes, and so it's the stuff like
you'll have another baby, you're young, it's only a dog.
Why are you so sad? Aren't you over it by now?
It's been a month, six months, a year, ten years, whatever.
To your point, there is no over, there's through, there's forward.
(22:41):
It's just like love never doesn't die, love doesn't go away,
grief doesn't go away. But we live in this very
black and white society where there's winners and there's losers,
and it's so hard for us to live in the gray.
It goes against our grain because we want that hot,
happy Hollywood ending. We want that bow on top of
the story. But that's not realistic, and I think it
(23:04):
does our humanity of grave injustice. How can we learn
to hold all of it? How can we learn to
hold the both? And you're successful and unsuccessful. For me,
I have dozens of tumors in my body. I've been
living with stage four cancer for twenty years, and I'm healthy.
(23:25):
And I feel like part of this process of coming
back to ourselves and meaning coming home to ourselves and
allowing the parts of ourselves like grief, to exist as well,
is how we start to live in that gray and
live really full. Magnificent lives in that place. So it's
(23:46):
been a very interesting journey for me to go on
first and foremost, but then to navigate that idea that
we're going to do it wrong, We're going to get
it wrong, we're going to say it wrong. But can
we show up differently time? Right? You can't say anything,
and it's not your job to fix it. And I
think that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves
(24:07):
to fix things for other people. I think the best
thing that we can do is just listen and be
fully present and just keep showing up, even saying I
don't know what to say, but I'm here and I
love you so true.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
And we all live in the gray, whether or not
we are admitting to ourselves that we do, We're all
always in that gray area. Trens in his memoir is
titled little and Often, which refers to the way that
ultimately he learned how to build a canoe and actually
(24:43):
becomes a master builder of the most beautiful canoes in
the world. Little and Often also seems like the way
that healing happens. It doesn't happen in a great sweep
of drama, you know, violins playing and everything being illuminated.
(25:04):
Healing happens bit by bit, and it's also never done.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, And I think that's the part that gets people
frustrated because it does take that patience. And there's a
difference between healing and curing, and curing takes place in
the body and it may or may not happen, but
healing takes place in the heart. And that's possible for
(25:30):
all of us, even up into the moment of our death,
you know, and just being willing to say I'm up
for this journey and I'm going to give myself the
space to actually truly walk it. Like you said, I mean,
it's in the little moments. And I remember this one
(25:51):
thing that my dad's surgeon said, and he was going
through a very rough time at this point, and you know,
we said we'll take it week day at a time,
and he corrected us, he said, you know what, just
take it one step at a time. Don't even try
to go for one full day at a time. And
I thought, Wow, wouldn't it be great if we all
(26:11):
just lowered the bar so that we could just take
one little bite and chew it thoroughly and say that's
enough for today.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
That's just beautiful and wise, just as you are.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Chris.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
I want to thank you so much for joining me
today to talk about real important things.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Thanks for having me. I always love hearttending with you.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You ain't never going to be man enough. Those words
would haunt me. I would hear their echo in his voice,
in the squish of hunting waiters stepping into a marsh,
in the metallic clinking of his wrenches while he fixed
the grain combine. I would hear those words every morning
when I walked to the one room schoolhouse and watered
the ponderous pine. I would hear them when I was
(00:28):
promoted to CEO, came out of the closet, got married
and divorced, and graduated twice from Cornell University with a
master's and doctorate. Knowing my father was not present for
any of it. Long after he came home from Vietnam
and started fighting a different war against cancer, I would
always remember that I ain't never going to be man enough.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's Trent Pressler. Trent is the CEO of Bedell Cellars,
an esteemed vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island.
He's the author of the debut mel More, Little and Often,
and Trent is also the builder of bespoke artisanal canoes.
His canoes have been called the most beautiful in the world.
(01:11):
This is the story of what one man does in
order to make meaning of the secrecy and silence surrounding
his life. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is a special
bonus episode of Family Secrets with best selling author wellness
(01:31):
expert Cancer Thriver, who has been living with stage four
cancer for the past two decades. Chris Carr. Chris has
been called one of our great thought leaders by Oprah Winfrey,
and her new book is I'm Not a Morning Person,
braving loss, grief and the big, messy emotions that happen
when life calls apart. Chris and I will be talking
(01:54):
about an episode from season six called Taxi dermid Duck,
which I hope you'll all try check out if you
haven't already. As always, I'm so glad you're here, Chris.
Thanks so much for coming on Family Secrets.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Thanks for having me, Danny, It's good to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I'm wondering what stood out for you as you were listening.
Did anything in particular strike.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
You about it? Oh? So many things. I think that
many of us have parallel experiences, especially with a strange
parents or parents we might not have been estranged with
but really did not know in any way, shape or form.
And you know, one of the big things that shoot
it out for me, it was the idea that we
(02:42):
fill the silence when there's silence in our homes, when
there's silence in our histories, when there's pieces and parts
that are missing, We clever humans fill that silence, and
usually we fill it with stories that are not very
beneficial to our mental well being.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I think Annie LaMotte once famously said something like my
head is a neighborhood that I shouldn't spend too much
time in.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It's so true. Well, you know, I met my biological father.
I met him when I was eighteen years old, and
I didn't know anything about him. You know, it was
something that we had to tiptoe around because I knew
that my mother had gone through so much pain around
that abandonment, and I really couldn't experience my own pain
(03:27):
except for internally, because I didn't want to bring up
more of her own. And so I remember filling the
void and filling that silence with all of the reasons
why he wasn't there. And then, of course I grew
up with a very wild and interesting grandmother who would
actually fill the void with stories, and it would be
(03:48):
like he died in a plane crash, the wedding dresses upstairs,
you know, like all of these things, and none of
them were true. So I just realized that later in life,
when I was a grown up figure it out on
my own. But again, I think that that's such a
beautiful point that you tease out in that episode, about
how we turn inward and sometimes turn on ourselves when
(04:12):
we don't have all the pieces.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, exactly, and then that ends up forming so much
of our lives. There's a piece of wisdom from Carl
Jung that I love and think about a lot, which is,
until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives,
and we will call it fate. So when your wild
grandmother would tell you these stories as a kid, did
(04:35):
you know that they weren't true, or did you try
to kind of attach yourself to them in some way
and try them on for size, or did you just
kind of know that this wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I think in the beginning I did believe her, but
then I realized there was a lot of other lies.
And then when you start to follow the bread crowns,
you're like, just doesn't add up, and I don't have
to be you know that wise to understand that. So
for me, it was really about trying to make sense
of it myself, and that's something that's really hard for
a child to do without turning it into something that
(05:07):
is about themselves, like it must be me, there must
be something wrong with me, flawed with me. And one
of the things that I love about your episode with
Trent is you know, he had lots of reasons to
self abandon especially with a father that essentially abandoned him,
but he didn't. And I found that to be so
beautiful and such a testament to his resilience and his
(05:31):
fortitude just as a person.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Absolutely, I mean, it's extraordinary to me that he grew
up in such an isolated way on this ranch in
South Dakota that was thousands of acres and more cows
than people, and you could drive for hours and hours
and still be on the land of this ranch. You know,
with his parents who were complicated people, and with his
sister who he adored, who became very ill, and who
(05:57):
he loved and he was a caretaker for and felt
very responsible for. And all of that is such a
prescription for not being able to escape or know that
there is a path that's different from the path that
he was already on. I mean, he's gay, and he
knows he's gay, and he's in a culture and in
(06:18):
a world that is completely rejecting of homosexuality, and a
church that believes that he's going to burn and help
for eternity if he's gay. To be able to leave
that world and go east and go to college and
carve out a life for himself just struck me as
(06:38):
such a tremendous act of, as you say, resilience.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I also loved that, you know, he mentions this word
and I write about this in my book, and it's
what I call ruptures. And it was the moment when
his sister died and he is going to the funeral,
and you know, he brings a boyfriend, he brings a partner,
a signific other, and it's really his big reveal. He's
(07:03):
revealing his secret, and he's doing it in a way
that's like, this is what I need to survive this storm.
I need to be who I am and I need
to be with somebody I love. And I think that
that's the inciting incident for him, and like for so
many of us, the ruptures are what set us on
our path to I think, becoming more ourselves. And you know,
(07:26):
one of the things that I have explored is that
ruptures come in all shapes and sizes, and none of
us are immune to them. And they're hard and they're painful.
It's the divorce, it's the miscarriage, it's you know, you
lose your job, you lose your former sense of self,
the diagnosis, whatever it is, and it doesn't take away
from the pain what I'm about to say. But all
(07:47):
of these ruptures also have the power to rearrange us,
realign our values, our priorities, point us more towards what
really matters, and maybe even awaken dreams that we have
long since let die because we think this time is
behind me. And I think that the ruptures make us
(08:08):
realize that the time that's in front of us, we
need to spend it living authentically. And I think that
that's something that I really loved about his story, because
it was through that loss that he went on this
journey of being himself.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
And one of the things about that journey and that
rupture is that that was a moment for him that
he really, for his own self preservation and for his
own growth, needed to really distance himself and separate himself
from his parents, from his father in particular, because he
(08:51):
can't be he won't be accepted by him, and that
lack of being accepted becomes unbearable. I mean, it had
always been true up until then, but at that point,
that's what makes it a rupture, is that in the
grief about the loss of his sister, and you know,
he describes it so beautifully. You know, the man who
is his partner he's in a relationship with, is relegated
(09:13):
to the back row of the church and trend to
sitting up with family because it's his friend who he's brought.
His partner is not family. And he turns around as
the casket is coming in and he sees this man,
his partner's face in the back row, and something in
him just rips open and it becomes unacceptable.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
One of the things that you're talking about, and that
we talk a lot about on this podcast is meaning making.
It seems like those are moments when they happen, that
are you know, kind of sink or swim moments. You know,
are we going to succumb to this feeling of despair
(09:57):
and grief which is not to say we're not going
to feel all of our feelings, but are we going
to succumb or is this actually going to be some
kind of turning point from which we make meaning out
of that sorrow, that chaos.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Yeah, it's a good question, and I think it's one
that we all struggle with at some point when we
were going through loss. And that moment, that rupture for
me happened with my biological father when his mother died
and I wasn't allowed to be in contact with any
member of his family, but his mom, my grandmother, would
(10:37):
write me, sneak me these little letters over the years
and a little piece of jewelry and just a little
trinket or a Christmas ornament. And right around the time
when I was eighteen, I decided to write her. And
I had sent her little things as well, but I
decided to write her, and all I wanted was a
picture of my father. I just wanted to see if
(10:58):
we looked like each other. And before she got the letter,
she died, and so her loss was really the moment
where I said, I am going to find this person.
I'm going to find him. I'm going to ask him
if he'll meet me. And if he won't meet me,
(11:18):
then he has to have the guts to tell me why.
And if it wasn't for her passing, I'm not so sure,
especially at that time in my life, eighteen, filled with
all the hormones and all of the angst, I'm not
so sure that I would have done it. But to
your point about making meaning, you know, the things that
the secrets that we hide I think hold, or the
(11:39):
secrets that are you know, a part of our lives,
have the power to lead us to that meaning, to
lead us to a better understanding of ourselves and truly
who we want to be.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
We'll be right back. I was struck reading your book
at the idea that I just think is a universal
truth for all of us, that there are lives contain
multiple ruptures, right, they contain multiple before and after moments,
(12:15):
And you're describing one of them in your world, and
you're in your life and in the case of seeking
out and meeting your biological father, can you imagine a
parallel world in which you hadn't done that, and that
just would have continued to remain this question mark that
sort of walked alongside you, you know, in your life.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Moving forward now, I've never thought about that. That's a
great question, Danny. Probably not, because I really long to
at least have some understanding of the other half of
my DNA. You know, I just I wanted to know
certain things. I mean, of course I wanted to know why,
but more so, I think I wanted to know what
(12:55):
does he like, what's his humor like, what's his personality like,
what's he into? Is he tall, he's short, you know,
is he skinny? What does he look like? And that
was something that I just really wrestled with for so long.
Of course, underneath it, I wrestled with the abandonment, but
on top of it was just, you know, how do
I look so different from everybody else in my family?
(13:17):
And not everybody wants to know, but I did want
to know. And I remember when I met him, he said,
you know, we'd never seen each other, and I hadn't
even seen a picture of him. And I just got
out of the car and he got out of the house,
and we walked towards each other, and I put out
my hand and he put out his hand, and I said,
hi am Kristen, and he said hi, I am Crispin.
(13:37):
And we were mirror images of each other, and it
was like, wow, this it was so bright. I could
barely look at him. I spent most of the time
looking at the ground.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah, I really, I really understand that you never thought
of him and have never thought of him as your dad.
He was your biological father, he was the person that
you come from, but the man who raised you and
who married your mother and who became your dad. So
(14:10):
much of your book is about the loss of him,
And you know, I think one of the reasons why
I chose Trent's episode to talk about with you is that,
in many ways, your book is about the shape of grief,
and grief has something that none of us can escape.
It's part of the human condition. I mean, the subtitle
(14:31):
of your book is Braving Loss, Grief and the big
messy emotions that happen when life falls apart, which is
just kind of everything. I mean, life just feels like
it's full of big, messy emotions and we're constantly, in
one way or another, trying to tamp them down or
find nice, tidy containers for them, and then a profound
(14:53):
loss comes along, and grief just does not allow for
any of those tidy containers for our big, messy selves.
And you know, and I was thinking about in Trent's episode,
I mean, just the incredible symbolism of his inheritance is
(15:14):
that his father leaves him his toolbox along with a
taxidermy duck that there's a story about that. I hope
people will go back and listen to the episode and
here why this taxi duck was Trent's inheritance. But his
father gives him this toolbox, and Trent drives all the
way from South Dakota back to the east end of
(15:37):
Long Island where he lives with his dog, Caper and
this toolbox, and he's in this kind of wild, complicated
grief because it was a complicated relationship and a really
difficult one. And when he gets back, it's not like
a stunt. It's not like something he decides to do
(15:58):
or something that he read about in a book somewhere.
He just thinks, what am I going to do with
this toolbox? And he thinks, I'm going to build a boat?
And he clears out all of his furniture, every last
stick of furniture in the home that he's living in,
so that he can build a canoe using his father's
(16:19):
toolbox and he'd never built anything before. I mean, he's
a CEO of a vineyard. This wasn't this wasn't part
of his skill set. And yet this becomes like the
shape of his grief. And you write in your book
about anticipating grief, which is its own thing that I'm
very interested in because I think I do that. I
(16:41):
pre grieve things as if you can actually pre grieve them,
and then somehow spare yourself grief later. All you're doing
is pre grieving and adding more grief to the grief sandwich.
But you know, in the case of Trent's loss of
his father, he hadn't really anticipated it. He hadn't been
in touch with his family. I hadn't been in touch
(17:02):
with his father, and it's almost like he doesn't know
how to grieve or where to put it. So it
takes on this physical manifestation of this project.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You know, I called my book I'm not a morning
person because I didn't want to be. It was the
one emotion I didn't want to go near. It was
so big I thought if I touched it, I would drown.
And that's how I started the process. And then, you know,
through a lot of my own healing, and therapy and
certainly an enormous amount of research. As I was writing
the book, I realized that we live in a grief phobic, messy,
(17:36):
emotions averse society. So a few of us know how
to handle storms of that magnitude, and so we oftentimes
bury the pain in different ways. You know. It's like
emotional physics. But what doesn't come out one way will
come out another way. And hopefully we can find ways
(17:58):
so that the emotion can come out healthy way. And
I think with all of these big feelings, many of
us want to amputate them, you know, because they are
so painful. But we can't amputate any of our emotions
and hope to be whole. And I think that's the
whole part of the human experience of saying, all of
these parts are of me, are welcome in each of
(18:21):
my emotions, server purpose, and ultimately at the core of them,
it's just information, and it's information that leads me back
to myself and a deeper layer of my own healing.
And for him, what I thought was so wonderful was,
you know, like I said about emotional physics, what doesn't
come out one way will come out another way. If
you come out through drinking, shopping, gambling, you name it,
(18:46):
all of the things that you can think to put
on the wound to temporarily numb it. But it also
can come out in a really healthy way through the
creative process. And that building of the canoe for me
is like, I know what it was for me writing
the book. I imagine you would probably agree with me there
(19:07):
that the creative process just the act of getting the hammer,
getting the nails, getting the woods, you know, having the meltdowns,
being with his dad's tools and trying to build something
that he had never done before, with the tools that
still embody the energy of a man that he really
truly didn't know, but perhaps was getting to know in
(19:29):
a deeper, more meaningful way in some way, shape or form.
I mean, that's what the creative process can do for us,
and I feel like it's a very very smart thing
to turn to when we're grieving and we don't even
know how to touch that feeling. It's like you can
faw into the feeling through the creative process. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I love that, And you know, it brings to mind
one of my favorite lines in Trent's book and in
his story, which is that a woodworker says to him
as he's struggling to build this kind of monster of
a canoe. You know, he smashes it. He has this
relationship with it. It's like a you know, it's like
a it's like a golum or something. It's like something
(20:14):
that he's like, just like it ogre in his in
his it's taken over his life. And this woodworker says
to him, don't find the grain, follow it. And that
strikes me as so much what the what the creative
process is and what the morning process is. You know,
it's not something that can be forster that's going to
kind of adhere to a certain kind of schedule, which
(20:36):
I think can sometimes make people feel really angry with themselves.
I mean, it breaks my heart to look at like
my journals from the year that my dad died when
I was twenty three, and you know, I have lines
in there like, you know, it's been six months. I
should be over it by now, And I just think, oh, honey,
you're this young woman who's lost your beloved father. It's
(21:01):
not going to work that way. Give yourself up some rope,
give yourself a break. But so often we don't, and
it goes back to what you were saying about our
being in a sort of grief phobic society. And there's
a part of your book that I was so happy
that you included and that I would love for you
to talk a little bit about, which is the things
that people say. The things that people say. I mean,
(21:22):
I found this several years ago when my husband Michael
was ill with cancer, and the things that people would
say were just that, they said the damnedest things, and
they said them with perfectly decent intentions, but they would
sometimes be so sort of really not what I needed
(21:43):
to hear. And you have a section of your book
where you talk about that, and also with yourself as
someone who has been living with cancer for two decades.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, I call this awkward times awkward people. And you know,
I'll start by saying that we all mess up. And
if we go back to the idea that we don't
know what we're doing with the tough stuff, then of course,
when we don't know what we're doing, what do we do?
We become anxious, And when we're anxious, we put words
together that probably should never go together. And so I
(22:19):
try to come from this place that we're all good intentions.
We just make mistakes, and so it's the stuff like
you'll have another baby, you're young, it's only a dog.
Why are you so sad? Aren't you over it by now?
It's been a month, six months, a year, ten years, whatever.
To your point, there is no over, there's through, there's forward.
(22:41):
It's just like love never doesn't die, love doesn't go away,
grief doesn't go away. But we live in this very
black and white society where there's winners and there's losers,
and it's so hard for us to live in the gray.
It goes against our grain because we want that hot,
happy Hollywood ending. We want that bow on top of
the story. But that's not realistic, and I think it
(23:04):
does our humanity of grave injustice. How can we learn
to hold all of it? How can we learn to
hold the both? And you're successful and unsuccessful. For me,
I have dozens of tumors in my body. I've been
living with stage four cancer for twenty years, and I'm healthy.
(23:25):
And I feel like part of this process of coming
back to ourselves and meaning coming home to ourselves and
allowing the parts of ourselves like grief, to exist as well,
is how we start to live in that gray and
live really full. Magnificent lives in that place. So it's
(23:46):
been a very interesting journey for me to go on
first and foremost, but then to navigate that idea that
we're going to do it wrong, We're going to get
it wrong, we're going to say it wrong. But can
we show up differently time? Right? You can't say anything,
and it's not your job to fix it. And I
think that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves
(24:07):
to fix things for other people. I think the best
thing that we can do is just listen and be
fully present and just keep showing up, even saying I
don't know what to say, but I'm here and I
love you so true.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
And we all live in the gray, whether or not
we are admitting to ourselves that we do, We're all
always in that gray area. Trens in his memoir is
titled little and Often, which refers to the way that
ultimately he learned how to build a canoe and actually
(24:43):
becomes a master builder of the most beautiful canoes in
the world. Little and Often also seems like the way
that healing happens. It doesn't happen in a great sweep
of drama, you know, violins playing and everything being illuminated.
(25:04):
Healing happens bit by bit, and it's also never done.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, And I think that's the part that gets people
frustrated because it does take that patience. And there's a
difference between healing and curing, and curing takes place in
the body and it may or may not happen, but
healing takes place in the heart. And that's possible for
(25:30):
all of us, even up into the moment of our death,
you know, and just being willing to say I'm up
for this journey and I'm going to give myself the
space to actually truly walk it. Like you said, I mean,
it's in the little moments. And I remember this one
(25:51):
thing that my dad's surgeon said, and he was going
through a very rough time at this point, and you know,
we said we'll take it week day at a time,
and he corrected us, he said, you know what, just
take it one step at a time. Don't even try
to go for one full day at a time. And
I thought, Wow, wouldn't it be great if we all
(26:11):
just lowered the bar so that we could just take
one little bite and chew it thoroughly and say that's
enough for today.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
That's just beautiful and wise, just as you are.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Chris.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
I want to thank you so much for joining me
today to talk about real important things.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Thanks for having me. I always love hearttending with you.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
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