Sam Sanders: Life Has Been Lifing

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
What am I naming my grief today? Who is she?
We're gonna call her Sally today. She really wants to
watch reruns of Designing Women and then maybe put on
some old gospel records after that. And I think Sally
would like have some hagandash butter pecan ice cream with
me because my mother used to love that. And Sally

(00:22):
has a big laugh.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, And I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Somebody
a lot of you DMed and emailed me about Sam Sanders,
co host of the podcast five Check and host of
Into It. Today, Sam and I are talking about grief
and love and church and the importance of friends. So
many good and important things settle in everybody. All of

(00:48):
that is coming up right after this first break. Before
we get started too quick notes one, this episode is
an encore performance. I'm on break working on a giant
new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite

(01:08):
episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some
of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons,
and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that
you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we
cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time
here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled

(01:28):
support with a licensemantal health provider, or for professional supervision
related to your work. Take what you learn here, take
your thoughts and your reflections out into your world.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
And talk about it.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Hey, friends, So, Sam Sanders has been in the podcast
and the radio world for a long time. He was
the creator and host of National Public Radios podcast It's
Been a Minute, so you.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Might have heard him there.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
You might know him from his twelve years as a
reporter for MPR, where he covered electoral pololitics and was
one of the original co hosts of the NPR Politics podcast.
He's won awards as the best radio and podcast host
from both the Ambies and the Los Angeles Press Club.
You probably know his voice, even if you might not
know his name. As I mentioned in the teaser, so

(02:18):
many of you sent me the Vibe Check episode in
which co host Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford, and Say Jones
discussed grief. Now, if you haven't heard that conversation, look
for vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts. So you
can hear it, but you definitely don't need to have
heard that conversation with Sam and his co host already
in order to get into the episode today. This conversation

(02:41):
with Sam Sanders has everything you could possibly want in
a conversation about grief and love and taking care of
your people while also taking care of yourself.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
We've got the.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Good parts and the not so good parts of church,
so we're covering both community building and spiritual bypassing. We've
got expressions of grief that include ice cream and designing
women marathons. We have got the sheer goodness of men
supporting other men in their emotional and relational well being,
which is super important. And we've got ongoing relationships with

(03:14):
people who died years ago because we know that those relationships.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Never actually die. There's a lot here.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
You're going to hear Sam say towards the end of
the show that he felt fortified by our time together,
and I hope you do too. That's the beauty of
these conversations, everybody.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
They feed us.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
These conversations feed us if we let them, if we
make room for them. Now, just as so many people
sent me the original Vibejeck episode where Sam and his
friends discuss grief. I hope you will share this episode
with your friends and with strangers.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
On the internet.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
It is a great way to open up conversations that
feed you and make the whole world better at the
same time. Now, speaking of spreading the word and making
the world better, you all have been responding to my
pleas for reviews of the show, so thank you for that.
There have been several new ones lately. I love reading them.
Your reviews get people to listen to the show, and

(04:20):
if you leave a review for a specific guest, specific
episode of the show, I tend to pass those along
to my guests. So Alira, thank you for your review
of my conversation with Gina Rossero. I passed your message
along to Gena so that she could hear what she
means to you. So from both of us, thank you.
Thank you to everybody who has left a review. If

(04:42):
you haven't left a review yet, please do so about
the show in general or a specific episode that moved you. All.
Right on with today's show with the kind, funny, wise
and delightful Sam Sanders. I'm so glad to have you
here with me today, and I have to say that

(05:03):
everybody on the team was so excited that we were
going to get to chat today.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
So you know you have some fans, Yeah, some residence here.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Honored to be here and thank you for doing this work.
I think that I've been talking about on my shows
the last few weeks is how we and Americans especially
just don't talk about grief enough, and so for people
that do that intentionally, I'm grateful. So thanks for what
you do.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Absolutely. Yeah, it's neat to see how comfortable might not
be the right word, but how much more comfortable or
how much more frequently people are talking about grief. I
feel like when I started this work ten years ago,
no one was really talking about it. So there has
been a change, it's not quite enough of a change.
But before we jump into all that, I mean, the

(05:50):
obvious place for us to start here is with talking
about grief and talking about your recent episode on vibe
Check discussing your mom's death. Yeah, I would love to
start with would you introduce your mom to us?

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah. My mother's name is Regina Sanders. She was the
second youngest of six raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She was
an elementary school teacher and a middle school vice principal
and a Pentecostal church organist and a mother of two,
and she was in Wilvermine. I think the most energetically

(06:30):
charismatic person I've ever known in my life, I said
in Vibe Check. The thing about my mother was that
every room she entered, she won them all over. And
when it wasn't even a competition, or when there weren't
even stakes, you always wanted to find a way to
be on her side, because her side just seemed more fun.
She was a woman who taught me and my brother

(06:53):
and so many other people that you can be successful,
and you can be professional, and you can get a
lot of shit done, but you can like always find
time for laughter and joy and like whimsy. My mother
was like beautifully whimsical. She just she loved the weird joke,
she loved the crash joke, she loved laughing where you

(07:16):
shouldn't laugh, and till the very end, she was cracking
us all up. So that's her. She passed away June
twenty first, so a little over a month ago, and
we missed her dearly.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Such a big presence now, something that you didn't mention
in your description of who she was, and what she did.
She worked as a mortician when you were a kid,
right or adjacent to that.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, yeah, This is also what has made dealing with
grief over her passing a multifaceted exercise because my family,
more than most other families, dealt with death a lot.
So my parents met after my mother had finished college
in South Texas and was teaching grade school, and she

(08:01):
met my father and they had a quick courtship. And
they'll never admit it, but I think they were pregnant
with my brother when she was walking down the aisle.
Fine with it, But my father had had a multifaceted career.
He was trained as a farmer, and he had like
a master's degree in agriculture from Prairie View and a university,

(08:21):
and for many years he worked for the state. They
have what's called an extension service where a state like
Texas basically has farmers on the payroll to help other
farmers farm well. And so he was like a master
farmer who like taught farmers how to farm good shit.
So he did that, But when he left that, he
began managing like senior centers and he did some other shit.

(08:45):
But when he and my mother got married, he was like,
I've always wanted to have a funeral home. This is
a very reliable business in black communities because you'll notice
Black people only bury their loved ones at black funeral homes.
It's even more secret than like Sunday Morning church in America,
the funeral business when it's it's black, right, So he

(09:06):
was like, I want to do that, And then my
mother was like, you know, I kind of always wanted
to have a daycare. So they decided when we were
young that they were going to have both a funeral
home and a daycare, and they did. And I worked
one summer in the daycare with the infants, actually two summers,
and my brother did more of the funeral homework, but
he would work the funerals like as an usher drive

(09:26):
in the car, and I did that for a little
bit too. But all through our childhood we were around death.
My parents had to work the funerals. My mother was
trained to embalm bodies. We were just like as kids
hang out at the funeral home all the time, which
meant that like we could run around the funeral home
and like play hide and go seek amongst the caskets,
and every now and then I would like, dare my
brother touch the body? Go touch the dead body. We

(09:47):
could just like get that close. So it was never
weird to me to be around a dead body, and
it was never weird for me to think about death,
which I realized in adulthood was a special kind of privilege.
This kind of privilege, there's a lot less queasiness about
this shit with me.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
How was grief talked about in your household?

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Grief was not talked about, Grief was performed.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Tell me about that.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
A black funeral is an exercise in performance art. And
I say that with love and with kindness. But it's
a fucking show. Have you you've been. You've been to
at least one. Yes, it's a show.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
It is.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
It's a show. It's a concert. They go on for hours.
It's not just one emotion, it's all of them. So
my first experience with grief, just as a kid growing
up in a black church and as a kid with
two black parents who owned a black funeral home, was
understanding from a very early age that grief emotionally was multifaceted.

(10:47):
There's multifaceted. You go into a black funeral, there's moments
of sadness, there's moments of humor, there's moments of joy,
there's moments of reflection. But it's not just sad. Right,
you are the kid of parents who own a funeral home.
You see all sides of the death industry. Right. I
used to know how much caskets actually cost. Turns out

(11:08):
you're all getting scammed. You're all getting scammed, like truly
buy your casket at costco, like save the money. But
I just always.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Explore burials, explore burials.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
Okay, well we'll put a little plug in there for that,
but yes.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yes, yeah, but I always just had a I guess,
more well rounded experience or understanding of what grief was
and what death was because I saw it through those ways,
which which was is prismatic is not the word, but
there was layers to it.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, It's interesting that when I ask you about grief,
we go to the funeral and the performance, the performance
aspect of that, you know, Like I hear from so
many people who either grew up or are still deeply
involved in church communities, and for them they feel like,
wait a second, like we had this out pouring of

(12:01):
love and celebration and wailing and mourning during the funeral,
and then a week later everybody was over it, and
I'm still like, my dad just died.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
I'm in that right now. Can I tell you what
I've been telling clothes Lease, Yes, we have the funeral.
It is a beautiful service. The church that we attended
most of our lives, they really showed up for us
and honored my mother with joy and humor and life,
and it was wonderful. The grave site was literally one
hundred and five degrees because it was a Texas heat
wave that week, but like we did it, it was

(12:34):
it was a damn good funeral. And I've been doing
a bunch of funerals, so I appreciate my entire church
family for doing that for us. But a week or
two later, I started telling my friends. I was like,
you know what I wish. I kind of wish she
had also been cremated so I would have an excuse
to make a trip to toss her ashes somewhere. I
wanted something else to mark the death that was smaller

(12:57):
and quieter and more personal, and I've been seeking those
moments in the weeks since her passing. So just this
past weekend, I just quietly without taking anybody with me,
not even my dog. Snuck off the San Diego and
just walked along the beach for hours for the whole weekend,
and it felt like it was getting me to that

(13:17):
place that I want to be in. But I still
have this weird desire to go somewhere, either alone or
with just a few people, to honor her in the
way that you would go somewhere to spread a parents'
ashes and not weird like she's in the ground. I
know she's in the ground, but I still want that
to That's not.

Speaker 3 (13:36):
Weird at all.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Nothing you do to honor, explore and maintain a connection
with someone you love is weird.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
That's the thing that I'm working with right now too,
because even though no one's telling you there's a script
on how to grieve, you're kind of always like, well,
am I doing it right?

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Am I doing it right? You know? Before I talked
about my mother's death on vibe Check, a podcast I
host with two of my favorite people in the world,
it was like, well, am I allowed to do this?
Is it okay? What are the rules? And then you
think long and hard about it. It's like, there are
no rules around grief and you shouldn't have any rules

(14:16):
around grief. You got to just live it. But yeah,
I'm so glad you raise that point, like, what are
the rules? The rules are you're sad. The rules are
you're sad and you got to work. But the rules
are also like sometimes you're not just sad, you're cracking
up over a memory of that awful joke she told
in the most unopportune moment, or sometimes you are. You know,

(14:36):
there's just a range. So yes, like not accepting that
there's no rule book and just saying this feels right today.
I think there is a work. That's the word.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah. I think the challenge here is that we've been
sold a rule book.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Oh yeah, right, we've been sold a.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Rule book with the you know, the five stages of
grief and then with prolonged grief disorder and then like
you know, you have six weeks to have your feelings
and then you should be back to normal. In this
whole idea that grief ends at the funeral instead of
it begins at the funeral, like there is a set
of rules that we've inherited, like the fact that we're like, shit,
am I allowed to talk about this? Says there is

(15:14):
there's a line we feel like we're not supposed to
cross and so much of the work and so like,
so many people sent me your episode on Vibe Tech
exploring grief, talking about grief, saying we have to talk
about this stuff.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
They were like, it's happening. This is so exciting that
people are.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Talking about it. And it really is like there there
is no cage, right, We've been sold a cage, but
there is no cage. And what's normal in grief is
to feel how you feel and express how you express
and not know how to do this right because you've
never had to live without your mom before. Yeah, so
anything that you do is like that is new, Yeah,

(15:54):
is new and acceptable and like the only rule book
is I mean to be poetic about it here.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
The only rule book is your own heart. That is
the thing.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, it's funny thinking about rules a thing I was
thinking about doing last week, and I was like, this
might not be good for me. I was thinking a
lot about the things that my mother loved, and I
could always remember movies that she loved because we watched
a bunch of movies together, and I remember she loved
Still Magnolias and whenever it came on, like TBS in
my youth, we would just watch it to Magnolia's is on.

(16:26):
We're watching it, and for a second I was like, Oh,
that movie's actually about grief. Julia Roberts's character dies in
that movie is very painful. Maybe watching that would like
help me. And then I was like, no, Sam, maybe
it won't. Maybe this Hollywood version of death and grief
is the opposite of what you need, because as watching

(16:46):
this going to make you think that you need to
perform your grief in a still Magnolias kind of way.
So I haven't watched it yet, I might, I think
if I do, all watch it with the critical lens,
not a lens the wish to inform myself. But yet
there are rule books everywhere.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
There really really are, and I like, this is all
an experiment, right, Like you don't know. You think it
might be a great idea or maybe a caution to
watch Steal Magnolias. So you turn on Steel Magnolias and
you check in with yourself and you're like, how's this
feeling to me? This is actually not feeling good, So
I'm gonna turn this off. This actually feels different than
I expected. Let me explore this right, Like it's all an.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Experiment, Yeah, and relative exactly.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
On one day, Steel Magnolia's might be the best thing ever,
and you might want to be like, let's throw a
Steel Magnolia's party because that sounds fascinating.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
I don't know, I haven't.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
Done this before, but there really is so much like
I think, Like, I think one of the reasons that
we try to put so many rules around grief is
we don't like the chaos. We don't like not knowing,
we don't like not knowing the answer. And it's like
we're supposed to keep this whole buttoned up thing around
all the parts of being human, and it's just it's weird.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, Like, the thing that we know the least about
is what happens to us after we die. Some people
think they know. Some people make up stories to feel
good about it. We don't fucking know. Yeah, So, of course,
in the absence of knowledge of what happens to your
loved one of yourself after this death, of course, it's

(18:18):
like human nature to want to put rules and norms
around it, to give this thing some semblance of order.
So I get it. But yeah, I think, like, can
we live our grief with the same amount of openness
that death itself is. Yeah, death is an extreme openness

(18:39):
because you actually don't fucking know. I don't know where
my mother is. I don't know if she's looking at me.
I don't know if she's like, why the fuck are
you talking about me? I don't know. But I can
still love her and her memory in the I don't
know of it all. And so it's like, how can
I take that same okay with the I don't know that? No,

(19:00):
take that same feeling and apply it to how I'm
living out my grief.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
Yes, I love that you brought up the afterlife and
our ideas about that. I think one of the things
that happens for so many people, no matter what the
spiritual practice is or what the religious tradition is, a
lot of people feel like they get this shaming from
their community, like, don't be sad.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
Your mother's with Jesus. Don't be sad.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
It's all she's at places I don't know. Are you
fucking sure? Are you are? What's the zip code? You
tell me? Where is she?

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Exactly?

Speaker 2 (19:38):
It really is this? Do you know that term spiritual bypassing?

Speaker 1 (19:42):
No?

Speaker 3 (19:42):
Tell me so spiritual bypassing, right, where we use.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Religious ideas, spiritual ideas to bypass the human condition. And
that's what's happening when you're saying something like you know
your your mother wouldn't wouldn't want you.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
To be sad.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
She's in her better place, she's gone to Jesus. Like
whether or not all of that stuff is true for
the person like not relevant in this moment because right
now I am missing her here, right, it doesn't matter,
It doesn't matter that there is something after this if
we're using that as a way to invalidate the person

(20:19):
who's right in front of us and the way that
they're feeling and the way that we might care for them.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
So for a lot of people in religious communities, they're like,
I can't I can't lean on my church community the
way that I used to, because all they want to
do is see me happy that my loved one is
reunited with the life force, and I don't feel that.
And I can be more than one thing. I can
be really happy that my person's body and spirit has

(20:43):
rejoined the oneness and really fucking want them still here. Right,
Both of the like you contain multitudes, like you can
have all of these feelings at once, and they're all valid.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, And this is the thing. And I will say
I was a church kid. I love my church experience.
I've left the church, but I still think I believe
in God. But yeah, I think sometimes our faith traditions
are asking us or are giving us distraction. Sometimes it's
just distraction. It's saying, I get it, you're having some
really negative feelings around this death right now, but don't

(21:16):
think of those negative feelings, think of these positive feelings,
think about heaven. Isn't that cool? And on the face
you're like, isn't that such a nice offering for them
to give to me? But it's not getting rid of
the negative emotions. It's just distracting you from them temporarily.
They're still there, and they're there until they're gone. And
I think, like, I would love for our faith traditions

(21:40):
to have a better language at helping us here in
this world sit with our feelings. I would love to
know that churches are doing the thing where they're telling
you about heaven if that makes you feel good, but
also saying to you very clearly and forthrightly, every emotion
you feel is allowed and is in fact holy because
God made them all. That's what I want to hear.

(22:03):
All of it's valid, and I want to And this
is not a theology conversation because I really don't know
where I stand, But I if I believe in a
higher power, a God, a Jesus, whatever, I believe that
like that higher power is always telling us that pretty
much everything about us is okay because we were made

(22:25):
in the higher powers image. And if I'm feeling sad
today and sadness is in me, it is holy. It's holy,
and how can I respect it and not just distract
myself by thinking about who my mother is playing the
tambourine with in heaven? You know that's right?

Speaker 2 (22:42):
And also this idea that there are negative emotions and
positive emotions.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
It's just emotions, an on or off.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
I love that you just called them all holy, and
I'm with you on that one. There is no part
of the human experience that is not holy. It doesn't
mean that some people aren't jerks and that there's like
not bad behavior, that's not what we're talking about. But
we're talking about, like the way that you feel is
the way that you feel, and can we find a

(23:11):
way to surround that with love and curiosity and support
and connection instead of trying to shove people out of
what they feel by saying they're doing it wrong or
this is the right way to be or get out
of this. And like, I think this is why these
conversations are so important, because we have inherited those rules
around goodness and badness, positive and negative, what you're supposed

(23:33):
to be doing and what you're not supposed to be doing,
And how do you honor the debt?

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Like stop right, Like, let's just be in this moment,
in this.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Humanness that we're having and see each other.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
How rad would that be?

Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah? Well, and how can we respect these emotions as
multifaceted beings in and of them selves. What if a
good thought exercise is to even personify our grief and
talk to it.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
I love that you just said that, because there's a
course that I've been running for like ten years now
called Writing Your Grief, and one of the prompts in
there is personifying your grief. So it's this whole like
creative prompt around can you if grief has a voice,
If grief is a character, how does it move? What
does it where? How does it speak? Does it speak?
If it has a voice. Let it like, let's listen.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
I love that. So I love that you just brought
that up. Yeah, there's just like a nice little Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Well, now I'm thinking, like, what am I naming my
grief today?

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Who is she? We're gonna call her Sally today. She
really wants to watch reruns of Designing Women and then
maybe put on some old gospel records after that. And
I think Sally would like have some hagandash butter pecan
ice cream with me because my mother used to love that.
And Sally has a big laugh. That's today for grief.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
See, I love her.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
I love her too. Oh my goodness, she's great. Oh Sally,
come on in the front door, Sally.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
We have got the ice cream getting to the proper
thowt texture a speak. I love this and this is
this is what becomes available when you throw out the
inherited rule book.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah. Well, and throwing out the inherited rule book allows
me to just like see things that I once thought
were static as a multifaceted. One of the things I
talked about in the Vibe Check episode with Zach and
Sayeed it was that, like, we are taught so much
from an early age that grief itself is an exercise
in scarcity and a practice in a scarcity mindset. But

(25:43):
what of grief is abundance? I've been trying to look
for in the ways since my mother has died, in
what ways my grief over her and grieving her has
expanded my world? So much of our default thought about
grief is that like, it sucks, it's sad we lost something.
But my reef that I've been experiencing since my mother
passed away has been abundant in so many ways. When

(26:06):
people ask me how I'm feeling now, I say, my
mother died a few weeks ago. It's kind of weird.
And then you know what they tell me their grief story.
They tell me about someone who died. They tell me
about a loved one, and that story and that sharing
is abundance. It's a new connection, right. I was in
the bank cashing out the CD that we had tucked

(26:29):
away to cover my mother's youneral expenses, and nice bank
lady was like, so what are you using this for?
And they expect like a down payment for a house, Sure,
my kid's going to college, And I was like, for
my mother's funeral. And then we just talked for twenty
minutes in the bank office and by the end she's
crying and I'm crying, and I know all about her aunt.

(26:49):
Something that's abundance, right, So how can I see grief
not just as scarcity but as abundance, SAYI Jones on
the podcast said, one of the phrases he likes to
use and he's hurt from someone else, is that we
are not just grieving, we are anointed with grief.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
I loved that phrase from him.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah, And if you look at anointing in the biblical sense,
anytime any character in the Bible had a special anointing,
it meant that they had a gift that had to
be shared. You weren't making full and good use of
your anointing unless you were using it to help and
share with other people. And so on some days, not

(27:32):
all days. Thinking about grief in that way helps me.
It's abundance, it's building community, it's sharing stories, it's bigger,
it's not just scarcity.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
I love that we laid that down, that idea that
grief can be an anointing and grief is abundance.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
We lay that down.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
After our conversation about none of this is about talking
you out of your grief.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
I think sometimes we can.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Like conflate abundance with celebrity, and then we're right back
to where we started again with like hold on positive
vibes only, and if it's abundance, it's a celebration, and
we're only going to talk like we can like derail.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
That so quickly.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yes, yes, hey, before we get back to my conversation
with Sam Sanders. You know, Sam created that character for
his grief, the glorious Sally who eats butterbecan ice cream
and watches a marathon of designing women. I love how

(28:31):
that unfolded. That was that was completely unscripted, everybody. The
Writing your Grief course that I mentioned in that part
of the show is truly one of the best things
I've ever created, and it includes that prompt on personifying
grief that Sam ran with to find the voice of Sally.
So if you want to explore your grief in creative

(28:54):
and truly helpful ways, check it out Writing your Grief.
You can find it at refuge in grief dot com
backslash wyg, which is for Writing your Grief, or click
the link in the show notes.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
All Right, everybody.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Back to my conversation with co host of vibe Check,
Sam Sanders, what I love in that story about your
conversation with the woman at the bank, Like I remember
when I was first, when we were first shopping my
book around to publishing houses, people were like, this is
so great, it's so necessary, it's so needed, but nobody
wants to talk about grief. So we pass, And I'm like,

(29:30):
you know, nobody ever wants to talk about grief. If
you talk about it as this finite thing that if
you do the steps correctly, you're over it and you
never talk about it again, Nobody wants to talk about that.
But if you open up opportunities for people to tell
the real truth about their grief and connect in that
without being hijacked or bypassed or talked out of it
or cheered up or any of those things, then everybody

(29:53):
wants to talk about it. And I think, you know,
this is something that we see coming out of that
Vibecheck episode, is that when you talk about grief in
unbounded ways, not as a measure of psychological health as
to how quickly you can snap back to normal and
be positive, but when you talk about it like a human.
Everybody wants in on that conversation.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yes, yeah, well, and like, that was the least scripted
and pre planned episode of Vibe Check we've ever taped.
So one of the EPs of the show is a
dear friend of mine and he lives like a mile
down the street. It's hanging out with him. We both
have dogs, a walker dogs other. Sometimes we're talking about
life whatever, and I was like, Brandon, hear me out.

(30:38):
All I want to talk about right now is my
mother's death. And vibe Check is a show where the
three of us talk about our feelings. Would it be
weird to do that? He's like, do it. Then we
tell the rest of the team and they're just like
do it. And then we're all like, well, just stop there.
We're not going to script this. We're not going to
research this, we're not going to have bulleted talking points
and try to stick a certain landing. We're just going
to talk about it. In that episode was off the cuff,

(31:03):
and I think that is what our grief conversations maybe
need more of. I'm over twelve steps for anything. I'm
over a playbook or a grief one on one for dummies.
I need to hear myself think out loud about this
and allow others to hear that too, so that they
know that they can do it as well. And that's

(31:24):
what I think the episode accomplished. It was a goal,
you know.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, and I think we've covered this a lot already,
but like one of the things that you said in
that episode was like, this is so important because I
feel like they're shame around grief and I want to
pull one thing in just to make sure that he's mentioned.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
So, your dad died when you were a kid.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Eighteen, Yeah, eighteen.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Interesting intersections.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
So my partner died the day before his son's eighteenth birthday.
So like this, like loss of your dad at this
like really pivotal, just graduating from high school, just turned eighteen,
all of this stuff, and then here is this person
who disappears, right, So I wanted to bring him into

(32:10):
into our expere into our conversation. And also when you
talked in the Vibe Check episode about we need to
be able to talk about this without shame, it made
me curious as to how have you experienced that shame
previously and what was it like being a young man
losing your dad and navigating all of those things that

(32:34):
are inherent in being a young adult, a young adult
black man in this culture. Yeah, I guess my question
in all of that soup is like, where did you
intersect with that shame that you mentioned in this episode?

Speaker 1 (32:49):
It was compounded, and I'll tell you I but first
I'll say, like, the circumstances of his death just it
was wild. So my father died December fifteenth, two thousand
and two. So winter of two thousand and two, I
had finished high school. The first week of June in
two thousand and two, I had graduated. I was set
to go off to California to college. I ended up
not going because my mother had her stroke which paralyzed

(33:12):
her in September of that year two thousand and two,
and then right after that, my father was hospitalized with
in stage kidney failure, which would kill him by the
time we got to December of that year. So basically
June I graduate, September, my mother's paralyzed, my father's already
in the hospital, and by December he dies. I deferred

(33:34):
a year from college just to take care of them,
and then I ended up staying in San Antonio to
go to undergrad to care for my mother. But over
the course of that year before my father died, that
summer to fall, it was probably the most depressing time
in my life. I'll never forget my aunt Alta, my
mother's sister. She and I had Thanksgiving dinner in the

(33:57):
hospital cafeteria, and my mother was on one floor of
that hospital and my father was on another. And this
is after I had turned down the chance to go
to Stanford to be there with them, after I had,
as an eighteen year old, had to close down the
family businesses, and I was just like, I don't see

(34:17):
how things get worse than this, Right, So I experienced
the loss of my father in just more of a
low point in life period. You know, my mother died
last month, But my life outside of that is pretty good.
I like my two jobs, I just bought a house.
I'm love in La right, Like, life was okay. So

(34:39):
that was the biggest difference from the start. But I
also think I had a lot more shame around grieving
my father, and it was all compounded by being closeted
at that moment in time. I really didn't start to
come out until my mid twenties and my father died
not knowing that I was gay, or I hadn't told

(35:00):
him that I'm gay. I think he knew, and there
were moments, especially when in his last several months of
life when I was his primary caregiver, where I could
just see in his eyes that he knew, you know
what I'm saying. But we never had that conversation, and
so I think had I been out of the closet
the way that I dealt with my grief and talked
about my grief, a big part of it would have

(35:21):
been a conversation about how to make peace with knowing
that I hadn't come out to him before he died.
Because I wasn't out, I just didn't have that conversation
with anybody, not even myself. So my grief, the totality
of my grief was not truncated. What's the word I'm
looking for. I couldn't have all of the grief conversations

(35:42):
I wanted to have or on my father's death because
I wasn't out of the closet, and so I did
not grieve as holistically or as fully as I'm able
to grieve now with my mother's death. Right, I also
think that life was just in such disarray. I was
just trying to keep my head above water and really

(36:03):
try to not think about grieving. I was still taking
care of my mother, who was bedridden. I was still
figuring out if I might go to college or not.
I was still figuring out how to live as an
eighteen year old with no functioning parents. My father had died.
My mother was there, but she couldn't be a parent
to me anymore. So all of a sudden, I'm eighteen,

(36:25):
not in school. One parent is dead, I'm taking care
of the other. There's really no supervision. My church was
there to support, but they weren't going to tell me
what to do. So I was just trying to figure
out how to make sense of this very new life
that was thrust upon me. And I think making sense
of that meant that, like I maybe didn't give myself
enough time to just live grief holistically. Now at thirty eight,

(36:49):
with my mother passing once, she had been sick and
bedridden for twenty years, so we knew it was going
to happen at some point. I don't think we expected
it to happen now because she had lived twenty years.
We all thought she's going to live to be like
eighty five, just bed ridden, so I wasn't ready for it,
but I knew that death was coming. But I also
think that I'm in a place in my life where
things feel more settled and I'm able to just take

(37:12):
more time to think about my grief. The fact that
last weekend I drove down to San Diego. It has
been a weekend on the beach and think about grief.
That was a luxury I was not able to afford
myself when I was eighteen. So my life is more
comfortable now, which means I have more space to just
let the grief be, if that makes sense. But also

(37:33):
so much these conversations are easier because I can talk
about being gay, having a mother, and growing up in
a church that was anti gay until it kind of wasn't,
and having a mother where I think the last person
in my life close to me who accepted that I'm
actually gay was my mother, and I don't think it
clicks to her until I brought a man home for

(37:54):
Thanksgiving two years ago. So a lot of my grief
is working through that. My mother is the love of
my life. I don't think she actually accepted the totality
of my life until the end of hers What the
fuck is that about? But even being able to say
that that's part of the conversation. I couldn't do that
when I was eighteen and my father died. Sorry, that

(38:16):
was a very long answer.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
I love that answer because this is the reality here.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Like, we don't grieve in a vacuum, we don't love
in a vacuum. There are cultural issues, there are communal issues,
there are interpersonal issues, and they all have to do
with how fully are we allowed to know ourselves and
how fully are we allowed to let other people know us?
And that's not always an easy answer, right. It's not

(38:44):
always safe to be seen as who you are or
to be loved as who you are. And sometimes the
people we love aren't capable of loving the totality of
your life the way that you just said, right, And
there's just so much to grieve in all of that.
There's so much to grieve in all of that. Like
it's just like, it's ridiculous to me that we think

(39:05):
that grief is this siloed thing that happens at this
very specific time when a person dies and it's over
really quickly, Like babe, grief.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Is like the backdrop of the world right.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
It is everywhere, and until we make space for that
and open conversations about that, then we're not gonna get
the full abundance that we're longing for.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, think thinking more
on like the difference between grieving my father and my mother.
And I talked about this a little bit on vibe check,
but in a Twitter threat a few months ago. I
want to say, actuly, a few weeks ago, round Father's Day.
One of the things I had to make peace with
allowing myself to do well some of the world building
we do around dead loved ones. My father was a

(39:52):
very present father. He was always there, and because he
actually was the parent who did like pick up and
drop off forever everything, So every band practice, every meet,
every whatever, if my dad was the one there. He
was a constant in our lives. But like many straight
male fathers, he was physically present and emotionally distant. You know,
they're very good at that, those men. And so I

(40:15):
found myself after his death continuing to hold down to
his hold on to his memory in my heart and
in my mind. But I made his memory this character
that grew emotions and in the twenty one years that
he's been gone, I felt the memory of my father
become a fully formed character who changes and lives and breathes.

(40:39):
And there's some moments in my life where I feel
like he and I are like throwing back cocktails and
shit talking. There are some moments in my life where
he is my champion or my hero, or there's some
moments in life where he is like the prankster. But
like the memory of my father has become its own being.

(41:01):
That is almost what I need him to be when
I need it. And I used to get mad at
myself for building him up in that way in my
heart and in my mind, but now I'm kind of
like it's allowed. It's my dad and it's my mind,
and this helps. And so part of this whole idea
of like grief as abundant, some of that abundance is

(41:23):
like you get to do with your dead loved ones
memory whatever you need to do with it, and you
get to build that world. And that actually has been
so cool. And my father's memory has been able to
sustain me and parent me in ways that my father
when he was here might not have been able to do.

(41:46):
So I like it.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
I love it, and I love what you just said
there that like whatever you grow that relationship into or
imagine into for that relationship, like that is yours. Sort
of like staking this claim to your own life.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Mm hm.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
Honestly, every conversation that I've had for the last year,
like we always come back to you agency and sovereignty, right,
Like this is your life.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yes, your heart, your mind, your love, your life.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Yes, And that other people get to have theirs as well,
and that other people's love, life, grief, all of these.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
Things are not a threat to yours exactly.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
You get to love as you love, and explore as
you explore, and grieve as you grieve. And can we
acknowledge that in each other and share that with each
other and not see it as one of you is
doing it right and one of.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
You is doing it wrong and acknowledge is just going
to be different. You know, my brother and I are
ten months apart in age. Our parents literally had us
back to back, and I took care of my mother
for about the first five years after she had her strength,
and my brother took care of her the last five
years and the last five years or so she had

(43:06):
de benia so his experience caring for her was different
than my experience caring for her, And so I know
that the way she lives in his head after she's
gone is going to be different than what it was
for me. That's okay, right, Like, that's okay. And now
it's like, you know, I'm still just weeks out from
her death, and I don't think her memory has come

(43:27):
back to me and the way my father's has yet,
but I'm waiting for her to show up. I'm like,
all right, Regina, when you come back into my heart
and my mind in this like new form, post death form,
just for me, what you're gonna be like, I'm excited
to see, if that makes sense, I'm excited to see.

(43:48):
I'm excited to see what the character of my dead
mother becomes in me and how I talk to that.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
I love that I could talk to you, but I
want to, like at least start turning in the direction
of the door. So there are two questions that I
want to get into. So thinking about that difference between
being able to tell yourself the whole truth before you
can tell others the whole truth, and the difference between

(44:19):
the aftermath of your dad's death and the aftermath of
your mom's death. Like, one of the things that I've
seen in my inbox, in my comments in my DMS
stemming from your episode is how thankful people are that
a bunch of men are sitting down and having this conversation, right,
that there is something so special to hear any people,

(44:42):
a group of people, but specifically a group of men
come together and really make space for each other and
listen to each other and hear each other. And this
isn't something that comes out of the blue, right like this,
Like my mom died and I decided to start having deep,
vulnerable conversations with people in my life. That's that doesn't
just arrive. Yeah, it's reminded me of when I was

(45:04):
getting ready for our time here together. I remember reading
about an incident with your male friends in grad school.
I don't know if it was grad school or undergrad
where it was an interview.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
I read with you a while ago, where you were.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Talking about you hadn't come out yet, and your straight
male friends were like, dude, stop hurting yourself by pretending
to be something else.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
Please please be who you are.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, this was the thing. It's like one of the
biggest catalysts and like coming out journey was not gay
people being like, come out girl, because my straight friends
being like, we already know when we see you struggling,
what the hell? That's what it was like. That was
a catalyst, and like yeah, my dear friend Desmond Surrett
love him dearly, sat me down well after midnight and

(45:50):
an I hop in Harvard Square. I was like, we're
here for you, dude, Like we know. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
I for sure cut you off, go ahead, finish your thought.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
No, I was hoping you would pick that up and
tell that story a little bit.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
But there's there's.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Something in there. And then also sort of looking at
your career and being known as a person who actually
somebody writing about your career with NPR somebody wrote surfacing
uncommon pathways for emotional sincerity has long been the object
of Sanders work.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Is not sweet. I love this, appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
So there's this connection there, or this sort of call
and response that I saw as I was learning about
you and reading what you've said about yourself and what
others have said about you and listening to you obviously
that there's this long standing, deeply rooted interest in what
is below the surface?

Speaker 3 (46:44):
Yeah, and how do we connect there? And how do
we talk about that?

Speaker 2 (46:47):
And I wonder if that that assessment that that person wrote,
surfacing uncommon pathways for emotional sincerity has long been the
object of Sanders' work. Does that feel accurate? And if so, like,
how how do you see that showing up in not
just your grief? And this is a super long, complicated question, apologies,

(47:08):
welcome to my brain, but like, if it does feel accurate,
how does that relate not just to your grief, but
the way that you are connecting with the people in
your life through that vulnerability, depth, and honesty.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
That is the.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Longest, most convoluted question ever in the world. And if
you heard a real question in there, let me know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
I think the question is like, how did you get
cool with talking about feelings? And talking about feelings a
lot and in different ways. I talk about feelings as
they relate to entertainment and popular culture. When I covered politics,
I talked about the way our emotions inform our political lives.
When I was a news reporter, a lot of the

(47:53):
work was like this thing just happened, how do people
feel about it. I've always liked looking at the journalism
do through the lens of emotion, like stories or facts
and figures and numbers and whatever, but there are also
stories about how people feel, and how they feel always
drives the action for any news story. So that's always
undergird how I approached like my professional work. And then

(48:15):
I think personally, maybe part of why I'm so eager
to have these kind of conversations in adulthood is because
in childhood I just really didn't have them. I was
surrounded by a loving family and a loving church and
people who cared for me, but there were two things
that kept me from being truly emotionally honest as a kid.
I was gay in South text asn't very closeted. And two,

(48:38):
I had a really bad stutter. It was very hard
for me to talk for a very long time. I
don't think I really worked through it fully until my twenties.
So I remember this yearney in aching to be better
able to express myself as a kid and say all
these things I wanted to say. I think part of
why I gravitated to music and playing the saxophone was

(48:59):
because that was a way that I could express something
without a stutter on it, right, So I think that's
the second reason why I'm so into having these kind
of conversations as a grown up. I'm one of those
people who like loves talking to strangers. I love it.
I'm in a long line waiting for something. Oh, we're talking.

(49:20):
We're talking. I'm at the CBS, we're talking. Don't put
me in an uber where the ride is longer than
half an hour, because by the end I'm walking out
the car being like, I think it's all gonna work out.
You're gonna get custody. Keep me posted on Blair, like
I get in.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
There right exactly.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
And I think all of that is like from this,
it's like feeding and nurturing this child too, for a
few reasons, just didn't get to have all the conversations
he needed to have as a kid. So now I
probably overconversate and I found ways to get paid to conversate,
which isn't even a real word, but I like it conversate.

(49:59):
But yeah, I think the part of it, I.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Love the play on over conversate and overcompensate. Love that.
But this is also like medicinal time travel, right, like,
oh yeah, here is my life, and it is an
answer to what I longed for as a child, Like
we're always doing that.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
Yeah, I tell folks that Vibe Check, which is on
purpose a show hosted by three black gay men. I
tell folks Vibe Check is having the podcasts and cultivating
the friendships that I wish I could have had as
a young queer black kid in South Texas. I didn't
have that. I didn't have a saight in Zach when

(50:40):
I was a kid. I would have loved to have
those friends as a kid. I get to have them
now as an adult. And my favorite letters we get
from listeners are younger queer folks saying, listening to y'all
is like hearing my gay elders and the elder sure,
all al whatever, but take it. Yeah, if we we're
modeling something that people don't get enough of, especially queer folks,

(51:04):
let me do that. I love doing that.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
I love doing that exactly.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
I mean, this is the whole reason for this podcast, right,
is to have the conversations that we long to have,
that we need to have personally, interpersonally collectively, to give
people conversation starters, to give them something to live into,
to give them something that says it is okay to

(51:29):
do this.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Yes, Well, it's like I mean, not to totally overuse
the most overused quote of all time, which is incorrectly
attributed to Nelson Mandela, but that Marian Williamson quote. You
know when I let my light shine, it shines right
on you. Whatever. It's so, it feels corny, but it's true.
Modeling this kind of behavior helps other people start doing

(51:52):
it themselves. Modeling a grief conversation. Modeling a mature and
friendly conversation between queer men, between black men that allows
other people and inspires them to do it themselves. Se
if just one person leaves this episode or that Vibe

(52:12):
Check episode and says to themselves, I want to talk
about Greek with the loved one today. All of it
was worth it. All of it was worth it. That
was actually the point.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Yeah, that is a great setup for closing question. Okay,
knowing what you know and living what you have lived,
what does hope look like for you today?

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Hope looks like my dog lay it on me. My dog,
Zura is the sweetest dog ever, an old, lovely pit bull.
She has been with me through every major milestone of
my last twelve years. She's moved across the country with
me twice. She was in the room when I introduced

(52:59):
my mother to my boyfriend, and she finally like got
it that I was like actually gay. Like forever, Zora
was with me and with my aunt Paulette as she
died of cancer. She has been in the room and
in the space as I've navigated friendships and relationships. She's
just been there for it all. She has been the
forest cump of my life, just kind of like always

(53:20):
there for all the big moments. And when I see her,
I see the entirety of what she's lived with me,
and I also see an ending coming. She will die.
She is old, she's grayer this year than she was
last year. She's on flower medication, she's on arthritis medication.

(53:42):
She's had in the last six months two major surgeries.
She will die. And what I get to do every
day was Theora the dog is make peace with that juxtaposition.
I've lived a whole life with her, and it feels
so big and I know she's going to die. What
do you do in the face of that? Like, we
know that everything we love will leave us, but a

(54:04):
dog is a very present reminder of that, And what
do we do when we have a dog in our lives.
Even knowing that they're going to leave us before we
want them to, we love them even harder. I love
her more every day. I love her more today. Sorry,
cry with you. I love her more today with her
scars and her arthritis and her crotchity old bones, and

(54:30):
I have to pick her up and get her in
the bed now. And I love her more today than
when she was a little bitty puppy. Isn't that hope?
That's hope, you know? So like for me, it's like
that is hope, knowing all of this will end and
loving it anyway. You got me. I'm crying. My dog

(54:52):
is hope. My dog is hope she will leave me,
And so what, I still love her. Love God, damn.
I don't think there's going to be the dog that set.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Me off, right. It's always the dog.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
I can do such a good emotional callous to most things,
but the second it's a dog.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
Mean, I mean every time, yeah, every.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Time, every single time. All right, thank you so much
for being here, for both being on this show, for
being on your shows, and for being in the world
in all the ways that you are in the world.
I'm so glad you're here.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
This was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for
the work you do. I feel fortified after this conversation.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Thank you, thank you. All Right, we are going to
link to vibe check in the show notes obviously, anything
else you want people to know about, or places they
can look for you, or any other you know missions.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
I'm on social channels at Sam Sanders. My other show
for a Vulture is not really in the spirit of
the Vitract conversation or your show, but it is a
pop culture podcast I host. So if you wanted to
mention it, cool, but like, no need to. You know,
different worlds.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
But yeah, that's it, all right, everybody, stay tuned for
your questions to carry with you. I'm going to go
compose myself. We'll be right back each week. I leave
you with some questions to carry with you until we
meet again.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
One thing that really struck me in this conversation was
how much fun it was. There are a lot of
ways to be playful, even when you're talking about difficult things. Right,
Playfulness is healing. I think you learn a lot about
who you are and what you need when you allow
yourself to be freed from that cage and play a
little bit right. I also really liked how Sam looks

(56:58):
back on his grief soon his dad died and sees
it in context. What was available to him then is
different than what's available to him now, and one way
of grieving one context isn't more correct than the other.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
There's such kindness and such honoring in that view of
the past self and the current self. So maybe that's
something you might play with in your own life. Who
were you back then and what kind of emotional life
or emotional expression was available to you? And who are
you now today? Knowing what you know and what is

(57:37):
available to you at this time. I think that kind
of respectful questioning or curiosity, I think that can apply
to any pivotal part of our lives, not just death. Yeah,
how about you? What stuck with you from this conversation?
Everybody's going to take something different from the show, but
I do hope you found something to hold on too.

(58:00):
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you, And while you're at it, you could also
tag at Sam Sanders let him know.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
How his story affected you.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
Spread your reflections are around. Follow the show at It's
Okay Pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else
to see video clips from the show and use the
hashtag It's Okay pod on all the platforms, so not
only I can find you, but others can too. None
of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start
talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that You're not okay.

(58:44):
You're in good company. That's it for this week. Remember
to subscribe to the show leave a review as I
requested earlier. I love to read your reviews. I'd love
to pass them along to our guests to coming up
next week on the show. Temblock, author of the book
From Scratch and the very very popular Netflix show by
the same name, and just a lovely all around human being.

(59:09):
Follow It's Okay on your favorite platform so you do
not miss an episode It's Okay that You're not Okay.
The podcast is written and produced by me Meghan Devine.
Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio,
with logistical and social media support from Micah, post production
and editing by Houston Tilley, Music provided by Wave Crush,

(59:30):
and very quiet background noise provided by Luna gently pawing
at me to go get her some snacks

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Host

Megan Devine

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