September 12, 2022 • 49 mins
What if you were just about to get divorced, but your partner gets sick? Like really sick? Rebecca Woolf was just about to leave an unhappy marriage when her husband got sick and died. What followed was a crash course in performative grief, and the dismantling of one life in order to build the next. In this epsiode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions (both internal and external), and personal agency - it’s QUITE the conversation. Sensitivity note: this episode contains the F word, and references sex.
In this episode we cover:
- The conventions of marriage and grief that trap people in inauthentic versions of themselves
- How you can love someone AND be relieved they’re dead
- Why everyone has an opinion about how soon is too soon to date, have sex, or otherwise live your life after someone dies
- Grieving the time you lost living someone else’s life
- Building your own “house of hope,” according to your own desires
Notable quotes:
About our guest:
Rebecca Woolf has worked as a writer since her teens - it’s the way she understands both herself and the world. Her essays have appeared on Refinery29, Huffington Post, Parenting and more. She currently authors the bi-weekly column Sex &the Single Mom on Romper.com. Her latest book, ALL OF THIS: a memoir of death and desire, hits the shelves this August, 2022.
Find her on IG @rebeccawooolf (with three o’s) and at Rebeccawoolf.com
Additional resources
It can be hard to find information about grieving the loss of a complicated relationship (an abusive parent, or an estranged partner, for example). Check out this post on grieving people you didn’t always like.
Get in touch:
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Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at (323) 643-3768 or visit megandevine.co
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think when you go through a traumatic experience, you
you kind of I mean, at least for me, like
when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my
of my sort of after afterlife came from realizing to
like how finite it all is and how fast he
went from being a healthy person to a sick person.
And that could happen to me too, It could happen
(00:21):
to anybody. This is Here After, and I'm your host,
Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay
that You're Not Okay. And it might seem like a
weird thing to say, but I really enjoy interesting conversations
about difficult things. Real talk about the hard parts of
being human is what makes us human. Hereafter is the
(00:43):
show where everyone is allowed to talk about what's real,
the good, the bad, the joyful, and the horrible, all
in the service of a more hopeful and connected world.
This week on Hereafter, my guest is author and advice
columnist Rebecca will Her new book All of This explores
what actually happens when the person you were going to
(01:06):
divorce get sick and eyes settle in. Everybody, this is
a really wild conversation. We'll be right back after this
first break. Before we get started, one quick note, well,
(01:28):
we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each
and every episode. This show is not a substitute for
skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for
professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, okay, so listen.
What do you do when you're just about to get
divorced but your partner gets sick? After years and years
(01:52):
of conflict and abuse, Rebecca Wolfe was ready to divorce
her husband. How they had already talked about it, they
read to it, and the only thing left was the leaving,
and then how it got sick, like really sick, like
very soon to be dying kind of sick, and Rebecca
(02:13):
was thrown into the position of caregiver and caretaker for
the man she had been excited to leave behind. What
followed was a crash course in performative grief and the
dismantling of one life in order to build the next.
In this episode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions,
(02:34):
and personal agency. It is quite the conversation I told you,
Rebecca is a lot of fun too. If we can
say that about a conversation where we also discuss terrible things. Honestly,
this episode really opens up the doors to how complex
human relationships are, how desire and grief and liberation can
(02:55):
all be intertwined. That's something we don't talk about very often.
But sometimes your own personal freedom comes as a result
of something bad happening. Now you know me, everybody, There
will not be a pretty bow stuck on death, no
transformation narrative where it all worked out for the best.
But just listen to this show content notes. This episode
(03:21):
explores sex and sexuality, and it definitely includes more than
a fair amount of swearing. Let's get into it, Rebecca.
It is so good to have you here now. I
was reading through a lot of your work yesterday to
get ready for our conversation today, and there was this
(03:42):
one line that actually stopped me. He wrote. It felt
a bit like the dreams I sometimes have where after
years of living in the same house, I discover another
room that had been there all along. That particular line
is from an essay on Refinery twenty nine on Queerness,
which we will link in the show notes. But I
have those like mysterious room dream all the time. And
(04:05):
I was reading it and I was like, oh my god,
somebody else has those dreams. Like, so, friends, if you
don't know what we're talking about, Like you have a
dream you're in a house that usually recognize or at
least often I recognize, and then there's a door and
it goes into this whole room or sometimes for me,
an entire wing that opens up. It's usually very elaborate. Yeah,
(04:25):
I love it to have those dreams too, because it's
that's probably like the since I was a young person,
the most like that has been the most recurring dream
I've had. And it's so awesome, Like it's such a
great dream. It's like this this idea that we have
that there's so much more that we're not aware of it,
Like that's going on inside of us and in our
(04:46):
like in all the inner cracks and crevices, like there's
stuff lurking there and that we have no idea what's
coming and what even exists in our space. Like yeah, yeah,
I mean it's that's life, right, Like there are dreams
you don't know, are rooms that you don't know where they're.
They're rooms that you wish you never had to go into.
There are rooms that you spend a lifetime trying to
get out of. I think for me, in those dreams,
(05:08):
I don't recall any of them feeling uncomfortable, more of
the like, holy crap, this was in my house right
this bathrooms that have waterfalls in them, or like this this,
Oh my gosh, it's been here all along, and like
for me, the one I had recently was like, oh
my god, my kids have been sharing a room and
they could have had their own room, or like I
couldn't have had my own office. Like all along there
(05:30):
was a space and I've been you know, I've been
unable to to take advantage of it, to use it,
and and there's like this sadness so like I've missed
out on years of of taking advantage of the space
that I didn't know was there. Which is a really
great place to start a conversation today, right, like can
you talk a little bit about the rooms that you
(05:53):
find yourself in now? Yeah? I mean I think really
it's it was it was more of finding a new
room after how died and more like understanding what I
could do with all the rooms I already had. And
actually it's funny because I just was thinking about this
(06:15):
yesterday because I was I was answering some questions for
someone else, and there was a question about cheating and affairs.
And as I was writing about what my feelings are
now like in retrospect about having affairs in my marriage,
it occurred to me that the affairs themselves were mundane
(06:37):
in comparison to the fact that my entire marriage was
really built on performance and lies. And in every capacity
I was lying to him, I was lying to myself.
I was trying to fit inside a room right that
did not feel comfortable for me. I was trying to
figure out how to decorate that room with ship that
(06:58):
I didn't like. I think for me, like coming out
the other side of that, I know what I want now,
and I'm not willing to take the things that I
think that I need and fill the rooms that I
am and have been uncomfortable. And for years, I think
it's like I'm I'm really sort of at a point
where I have been for the last few years, where
(07:19):
I'm just burning down the house and building a new one,
and I'm questioning all of the materials that I used
to build the original house, and like, were those even
actual materials? Like I don't think they were, Like there
was so much to my old life that I think
was just me trying to figure out how to just
be good and make everyone else happy and like do
(07:42):
the things that I was supposed to do. And I'm like,
fuck it, like the opposite, like you want me, you
want me here, I'm gonna go over there. You want
me to talk about this, I'm going to talk about that.
So I think the rooms for me are are still
under construction, but they look so they look very difference
than the ones that I walked around and before. Yeah,
(08:04):
I love that idea of burning the old burning the
old life to the ground. There's a poem which I
will also link in this in the show notes, about
burning the old year, right and just burning that to
the ground and letting the smoke of that be your
prayers from what's coming next. Right, And you've had to
do that so many times. It's so interesting because and
I write about this in my book, like I the
(08:25):
reason we got married was because I got pregnant. Like
everything that happened in our relationship was a surprise, right,
Like surprise you're pregnant, Surprise you're dying. Like that, There's
this this really kind of incredible like full circle um
aspect to our relationship, which was like we were sort
of thrown together. You know, we ended we be married
(08:47):
because I was pregnant, and we stayed together because he
was dying, which is sort of amazing. Like if you
think about what, it's very me. It's like, I don't
I never make plans. It's like things happened and I
respond to them. So it's like I got pregnant, I
guess I'm gonna marry you. You're dying, I guess I'm
gonna stick this out. Like it's for someone who feels
(09:09):
like I feel like I'm a very like active with
like person of with agency, like I've actually everything sort
of happened to me, and it's been very passive in
this way that I think for me has has made
me feel like I need to sort of exert exert
some sort of authority over the situation or some agency
(09:31):
over the situation because I'm like, wait, I was going
to leave. I swear like this whole experience for me
has been sort of this way. But I don't feel
like a widow. Wait, but I was miserable and I
was about to leave, Like he left me first, I
was going to leave him finally and I finally got
the guts to do it, and I was ready and
like I was making plans, and a little bit a
(09:54):
part of me was like mad at him because I
felt robbed of finally doing the thing that I've been
like psyching myself up to do for so many years.
Which sounds crazy, like to be mad at someone for dying,
but I think, like there's a lot of times when
we lose somebody that we do feel anger, and a
lot of that comes from, you know, unresolved feelings, unresolved
(10:18):
that you know, the things that we we wanted to
do or wanted to say, regardless of what they are,
even if they were, like even if they were a divorce,
Like I was resenting him that he could he died
before I was able to get a divorce, Like how
could you? Like now I'm a widow. Now I'm I'm
stuck with you for life, Like I have to write
on all my on all my paperwork, widowed, right, Like
I'm not a single woman or a divorce woman. I'm widowed.
(10:41):
I love that though, that the complexity, I mean, everything
you write is about complexity, right. The Jenny Lawson's review
of your book, she described your book as a profound
work on the complexities of grief, desire, and being human,
which is an awesome blurb for the jacket of your
book and also correct. But that that complexity of like
I love how you phrase that, I just worked myself
(11:02):
up to take my power back for myself and make
a decision about my life, and then the bastard got sick. Now,
if you all are listening and thinking like you you
don't speak ill of the dead. Like we talked about
what's true here, right, and and this is something that
I want to talk about with you, that that experience
that you had, So before hell I got sick, you
(11:26):
had made the decision to leave. You were feeling empowered
around that and like taking your agency and your power back,
and then he got his diagnosis. Were there times during
that whole illness where you felt like you had to
perform as the happy wife? Oh? For sure. I mean
I was in survival mode for sure. So my priority
was like making sure that I was there to be
(11:47):
this advocate. Like that's something that I knew I had
to do and something that I was very okay with doing.
But yeah, like when you're when you're the primary caretaker
of someone who's dying, like you're like I I wasn't
even really able to explore my own feelings as it
was happening, because for me, it was like I had
to take care of him. I had to go. You know,
we're basically living in the hospital for four months. I
(12:09):
had to make sure my kids were okay. I wasn't
even in a place where I could really you know,
my own feelings and we're not I didn't even know
what they were yet. I was just like, oh my god,
this is happening, Like I have to be I have
to be on my a game. And I was like
very stoic, and I wasn't emotional in a way that
(12:31):
like I'd never been before. Like I cried everything, and
I think I was, you know, I was like a
little soldier. I was like, you know, doing everything I
was supposed to do, doing everything right. You know, there's
sort of a relief when you're when you're so when
someone's really sick and your your job is to do
sort of all of the like all the medical stuff
(12:54):
is very um it's not emotional, Like you sit down
and you have these meetings with these doctors and you're
talking about all the stuff, and it's like, at least
for me, like I was kind of relieved to have
all this work to do where I didn't have to
think about my feelings. Right, it was like I had
to make sure that he was taking care and make
sure he was okay, talk to the doctors, get him
from a point A to point B. Tests and this
(13:14):
is and that, and you know, when you're really busy,
you're not necessarily thinking about your feelings. But you know,
everyone comes to you and they feel sorry for you,
and they're so sad and like they are you okay?
Are you okay? And like, you know, they get a
you know, they had a whole team of social workers
who kept you know, who were like, we have the
social workers for to talk to if you talk to them,
And it was like I really didn't. I didn't want to.
(13:40):
It wasn't that I didn't need to, because I definitely
probably did, but I was I was like, I have
to keep I have to keep it together here because
there were so many conflicting feelings that I think I
was like, Nope, I will not engage. I will not
acknowledge anyone who's trying to like, you know, I didn't
want anyone to feel sorry for me. I was like,
were you just got to get through this? But I knew.
I knew that I only had to do it for
(14:01):
a certain amount of time. Like I knew that he
was going to die soon. His prognosis from the beginning
was that he was going to die soon. So for me,
knowing that there was an out, knowing that there was
an end to it meant that I could be the
wife that he needed at the time. If you were
to have gotten a diagnosis where he could live for
(14:23):
a year, two years, three years, five years, I could
not have been there for him in that way. And
I know women right now who are in that position,
who are with a dying or a very chronically ill partner,
and I don't want to be with them anymore, and
are doing it because they feel like they need to
(14:44):
and have to, and it's their job. And I think
women take on all the time, you know, the caretaker
role to people they don't want to take care of anymore.
You know, we raised kids for eighteen years, or you know,
we're still raising kids, and then you're doing it again.
And I think it's not just with a partner, but
with a parent, and I think when those parents, partners,
(15:07):
people die, there's a lot of fucking relief and that's
absolutely valid, Like it's so valid to feel relieved, and
there's really not you know, we don't we don't like
leave a lot of rooms to have those conversations in
a way that's supportive. It's really fucking hard to take
care of a dying person, whether they're dying for a
(15:27):
week or a month or year. You know, it's to me,
there's no harder thing. That's exhausting, exhausting, and it's relentless. Yes,
it's relentless. And you know, just as you were saying,
like you have I mean, you do have choice in
the matter, right, Like you can always say I'm not
doing this, but well that's the exactly who's going to
(15:49):
do this if I don't do this. So there are
all of these impossible decisions and it's like we don't,
we don't talk about this because there's that sort of
puritanical recoil of like you have to do this, like
if you loved them, you would really do it, like
you you would do it joyfully and cheerfully, Like this
requirement that we do hard things joyfully and cheerfully is
(16:09):
so not okay. And I think like when you're talking
about like the social workers are coming to me saying like,
let's talk this out about your feelings, and you're like, no, tactical,
only tactical only. I wonder what it would have been
like if if a social worker or somebody had come
to you and said, this seems really complicated. Do you
want to talk about what it's like to be caring
(16:31):
for a person you were ready to leave? Yeah? I
mean nobody they didn't know that, but yes, and and
that's but that's the thing is too. It's like the
the assumption is that this is the love of your life,
for this is something you know, it's assumed that you're
in deep grief or that you're deeply sad that this
person is is I mean obviously like yes, no one
(16:51):
wants it to see anyone in pain exactly. There's that
human element of it, right like for you snap into
the I am a human and caring for another human,
and I love them as a human. The person is
a different story, but the human is who I'm showing
up for right now. I just I wish that there
was a way too scream for that when married couples,
(17:16):
or if you're coming in taking care of a parent.
I wish there was a way to scream for what
was the relationship like before you walked in this store,
because if we have that conversation, then the social workers
and the doctors and the palliot of care teams, they
know the ground you're starting from and it doesn't cause
more suffering for the primary caretaker to be like now
I have to pretend that my mother was an abusive
(17:36):
for the last forty years of my life, right, which
is such a you know, and I think I think
probably the nurses, I'm sure pick up on that nurse. No,
nurses and nurses are not their nurses are always the
ones everyone else I had issues with the whole time,
and the nurses were uh sucking amazing. Like I'm still
friends with the nurses that I met when I was there,
(17:58):
and they get it, they see it, they see they
see the full humanity of their patients. And and a
lot of patients who are dying are awful. They're so mean.
They're in pain, yes, but they're also like there's all
sorts of stuff going on, and they're so mean, Like
they're so mean, so trying to be nice to someone
who's so mean to you all the time, Like they
get that, and they like, I feel like, you know,
(18:19):
they see you, they see you. But no, it's complicated,
and I would venture to guess that almost always it's
complicated that nobody goes into anything without having multiple you know,
no one goes into a death without having also a
range of feelings um and and that can include relief,
and I think it often does. When we don't talk
about that, we don't allow ourselves to have those feelings,
(18:42):
Like we're depriving ourselves of the space of the room,
right of this room for us to explore what it
is to be a human and what it means to
die and to live and to love. And then it
isn't just one thing, you know, we like we romanticize
love so like you know, marriage and love, and it's
(19:02):
like and and and the and happy ending. We want
happy endings and we want death to be beautiful and
loving and all these things that you know, it's we
like we've seen too many movies, right, Like there's no trope,
Like there's no widow relieved widow trope, Like certainly not
a slutty widow I was like, I was actually doing
(19:24):
research because I'm doing a column right now on on
dating as a widow, because it's like, you know, the
idea of being a widow who wants to fuck, especially
like soon after the death is like like all the
pearls are clutched, Like you can't go to like an
article or a forum or whatever and not hear people
just like it's too soon, Like what a slut? Like
(19:46):
it's whoa people were? People get that misogyny is showing.
It is yeah, wild, how it is wild? And the opinions.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Oh no, no, it's just like
how you're expected to just like just like to be
a celibate none, you know, for however many years. It's
like I don't know, like what socially acceptable? How many
(20:09):
months is that? I think if you google it because
you can and get an answer, I think that it's
like you can start dating a year later, like that's okay.
With like the acording to whom though, we've been talking
(20:30):
with Rebecca Wolf, author of the new book All of This,
a Memoir of Death and Desire. Let's get back into it.
It's a really fun show. Here's my question, though, So
the week of Matt's funeral, I had probably four or
five people come up to me and say, my wish
(20:51):
for you is that you get married again as soon
as possible, because you're so beautiful and you're so smart,
and Matt wouldn't want you to be alone. So we're like,
body hasn't even cool yet, right, And then I know
a lot of people who have either dated or had
hook up soon after their person died, and they get
judgment for that, like, you can't win, you can't please people,
(21:12):
So do whatever you want, right, like listen to your
own needs and ask yourself what you need. And I
love that about you that you're like, Okay, this was
not the marriage that I wanted. I was getting ready
to leave. I didn't get a chance to leave on
my own terms, and then I was forced into the
care river role, which I did with love and compassion
and humanity because I am a human and there was
relief after he died, and now I'm going to do
(21:33):
what I want. Right, Just a great summary, thank you.
But that's this is the thing, right that all of this,
the entire the entire house with all of its rooms
that we've seen, and we haven't seen. You get to
make choices about what you build and how you inhabit
those rooms, and we have to start talking about not
(21:56):
only that you have the right to design the rooms
you inhabit, it also we have to start talking about
what is actually behind all of that judgment. And as
you said, pearl clutching and I mean, misogyny is the answer.
But yeah, it's also God, I love I love this
house analogy and I'm gonna just like keep going with
it because we have so little imagination when it comes
(22:19):
to how we construct our our lives. Right. It's like,
there's a kitchen that looks like a kitchen, and a
dining room looks like a dining room, and the bedroom
looks like this, and this is where you put your
this and if it doesn't have a closet that it's
not considered a bedroom. And we just go along with
a sort of this is what it is, right, and
we don't think, like, is it possible to have a
(22:39):
bedroom here? To to to do you? Like, we we
just go along with like the traditional structure of a
home and this is what it is. There's so many
different ways to have a relationship, to build a life,
to raise children, and we just sort of we move
in to these homes that are pre fab or that
(23:02):
have been you know, that have that are are are
designed the way they've always been designed, with the materials
that have always been in there, and we just that's
what it is. We don't question any of it, right.
We bend ourselves to those made environments, right, and then
we fill those rooms based on their size and and
and where the you know, we put our our bed
(23:24):
based on where the window is. It's like we we
really don't or don't they don't get ourselves a space
to imagine a different kind of home. It's just the
how you know. It's like when you're a kid, you
draw the like square with a triangle top and the
two windows in the door, no matter what you've grown up,
and that is what you draw. That's true. So it's
like we it's so deep in us to think that
(23:44):
this is what it's supposed to look like. And for me,
I think I've been doing so many exercises on like
what am I defaulting to? What am I automatically assuming
needs to this needs to look like, oh ship, this
isn't what I want? Why I am I seeking out
something that I don't want like what like because that's
what I think I want? And then I get there
(24:05):
and I'm like, wait, I don't want my house to
look like a square with a triangle and a little
I wanted to look different now like I lived in
this in this way, I don't want it anymore. Yeah,
what does that look like? Where do I get the materials? Oh? Ship?
Like this is It's like like that's where I'm at.
I'm like, how do we question everything? And how do
we build new paradigms and how do we find ways
(24:26):
to normalize all the different things that we've felt shame
about forever? And how do we talk about it in
a way that's not like we're not doing it to
be provocative. We're just having conversations because this is the
way it is. You're being curious about the structures of
your life, all of them, all of the things that
we don't think about we just sort of take for granted.
(24:49):
I mean, it wasn't that long ago that queer couples
or same gender couples like that was I mean obviously
still in some pockets, but like that was completely disrupting
our bedrock ideas of what relationships would look like and
what marriage is and all of these things. And we've
come made some progress since the fifties some but that
(25:10):
that isn't the revolutionary act that it used to be, right,
because those structures have changed because we kicked down those walls, right,
And it takes people being willing to kick down those
walls and question those walls. And it's it's interesting as
you're talking about this, I'm thinking about years and years
and years ago when I was in private practice before
Matt died. I saw a lot of people, um a
(25:33):
lot of women in their thirties and forties and fifties
who were sort of waking up to the things that
you're talking about. Like, I live in a life in
a house that I didn't really actively choose, and this
is not the life that I want. How do I
start extricating myself from this life? Right? I think you.
I think it was you. You had to you had
(25:54):
a post. I think it was you. If it wasn't you,
it was somebody normalize seeing divorce as a good thing.
That was your right. Yeah, normalize divorce is good news. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I think this is really tricky territory because I'm
also going to say, sometimes we can normalize death as
good news, and it's tricky because we don't want to
(26:16):
say someone died so that you could find your self,
because life is not a trade like that in our
in our best vision of reality here you would have
been able to leave how and get divorced and learn
these things about yourself, and he would get to be
on his own thing. Right, that's not the story that
(26:38):
we got. Yeah, it's okay. If there is relief and
gratitude after someone dies, that might not be your story.
And I think there's also even a middle ground in
there that for however long you are completely destroyed after
someone dies, for however long that takes, little green shoots
(27:03):
will eventually start to come back in and you get
to choose what kind of life of after you build
for yourself. It isn't the life that you chose, It
isn't the life that you wish you had. And since
you have to live this life, what do you want
to build for yourself? For sure? And also I think
when you go through a traumatic experience, you you kind
(27:26):
of I mean, at least for me, like when you're
with someone who's dying, so much of my of my
sort of after after life came from realizing to like
how finite it all is and how fast he went
from being a healthy person to a sick person. And
that could happen to me too, It could happen to anybody.
What am I doing with this with this one body? Right? Like,
(27:48):
it's not even about what am I doing with my life?
It's like what am I doing with my body? It
works right now, I could live to be a hundred,
but maybe my body only functions this way for like
the next ten years. I don't know, So what am
I doing with this body? So I also think it's
super like the idea and again like going back to
this like sort of invisible number where you've lost somebody
(28:10):
and you're supposed to just like close shop and lock
yourself in a room. Yeah, when if you've just witnessed
someone losing their life force, it's actually super normal to
be like so to be turned on and to like
want to fuck like immediately after. It's actually normal, Like
you're you're an animal and you've just been with an
(28:32):
animal who's died, and you're you are trying to feel alive,
right because you've just been around death, and so it's
actually it's super normal to have those feelings where you're
like that is something that I like, I started doing
like a deep dive on on death and sex and
how they're related, and they're actually very close. There are
(28:53):
a lot of there aren't a lot of experiences that
a human body has that are just complete. It's like
it's a kernal if it's a full body experience, right,
and feeling your life force, like that's sexually sexually, if
you're having a good experience, that's what you're feeling. And
I I think like there's you know, I think this
(29:15):
idea that we have to wait to have an experience
that for a lot of us is something that we're craving,
you know. It's also it's ridiculous, Like it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous,
like who gets to dictate what you're doing with this
life and this body? Right? Who gets to make those
(29:35):
decisions for you? And and that can even be internalized, right,
like it's bad for me to have these desires, it's
bad of me to go do this because that isn't
what's expected of me, And there's this whole internalized shaming
around that, Like shame is just trash like shame is
just trash, right, Like whether you're doing it to yourself
or you're you're hearing it from other people, that judgment
(29:56):
about who you are and what you're doing with your
life force Yeah, yeah, and who. And it's amazing to
me that people think that they have any that that's
their place at all. Like it makes me like, like, who,
I didn't know you were a part of my council
of internal beings telling me what I should do with
my life, Like I'm gonna boot you out. And it's
(30:17):
like what we're seeing with Roe v Wade. It's like
the fact that people think that they have the authority
of other people's agency and sexuality and experiences. It's like
the it comes from this place of internalized shame too,
Like people only shame other people who feel shame themselves.
(30:37):
So it's like as soon as we can strip that back,
we can really actually make big changes, like globally, because
so much of it, so much of all of the
all of this comes from shame. It's just like it's
it's perpetuating and everyone's just shaming each other and feeling shames,
so feeling like they need to shame, and it's a
giant shame of I love this because this actually pulls
something out that we were talking about earlier. You just
(30:59):
mentioned and correct me if I misunderstood what you said.
But the people who are controlling others bodies and shaming
predominantly women, but also anybody who is not a ciss
white male, they're carrying their own shame and their own
pain that is not explored, not supported, not addressed. And
(31:20):
as we've said before, hurt people, hurt people. And this
goes back through millennia of things, and I think where
it gets tricky is that we flip into that binary
of like you have to have compassion for the people
who are harming you, and we think that having compassion
and understanding the pain at the root of the oppressor
(31:42):
excuses them from their actions. And we go back to
what you've been talking about with your experience with how
it's like you showed up and took care of him
out of a shared humanity and because he's the father
of your kids and and for all of these other reasons.
And you can love someone and still hold them accountable
(32:03):
for their actions. You can still tell them to stop
and have them stop and make them stop, and you
can still be relieved when they stop. That doesn't make
you a bad person, It makes you human. And this
is how we get the world that we want right
where everybody is allowed to talk about what hurts and
they are not allowed to use what hurts to harm others. Yes, yes,
(32:25):
that was beautiful, thank you. And it's interesting because so
I talked to somebody about this yesterday who read the book,
and it was like they were commenting on the fact
that I wrote about how basically as a human that
he was, you know, that I had all us anger
and that we had this very toxic marriage, but there
was also a lot of love too, and I wrote
about all of that, and people don't know what to
(32:47):
do with that. Like people, right, you did not choose
one or the other, stay in your narrow lane. Will
really want a heroine a villain, and and they want
a complicated hero, which is the same thing as a hero, right,
Like everyone's complicated and they and a villain of all
villains are like we all are complicated. And I think
(33:08):
like people, you know again, like we have no imagination,
were so binary, we don't know how to carry more
than one thought or feeling at the same time. It's
because we were not able to articulate it. We don't
articulate it culturally, we don't hold space for all the
different feelings. You know that the person that the social
worker comes to me assuming that I'm sad, instead of
(33:28):
coming to me assuming that I'm feeling whole, not assuming
being curious, right, and being curious instead of assuming yes,
But this, this and then that was sort of the
experience that I was received, just like across the board
was just this like I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,
I'm so sorry. People just apologizing, apologizing, apologizing, and then
me feeling more and more shitty that I wasn't only sad, like, well,
(33:51):
my god, these people everyone feels sorry for me. I don't,
but I'm I don't know, I'm not a victim, like
I don't feel sorry for like you know, but but
speak saying that you know, and then you're dismissing everyone
else and you're just all these people are so lovely
and generous and they they feel sad for you, and
you don't want to disappoint them by telling them about
to feel sad that you're okay, Like whoa, But if
(34:12):
we were, if we weren't to assume every time something happened,
like we're just we assume because we've been told the
same stories over and over and over that this is
what it looks like to, you know, to lose someone,
this is what it looks like to have ex experience.
Why experience instead of just recognizing that every experience is
(34:33):
a human experience and there's so many conflicting feelings that
are happening behind you know, and and we don't know
anything really, we don't know. Yeah, And just to be
able to hold space for each other, like that's the
whole Like hold space, Like if somebody like that's that's
really like my Like when people are like, oh, someone's
(34:53):
like what do I do my friends you know, going
through whatever, Like just give them the space to feel
all of their feelings, like tell them that you're here
to listen to all of it. Anger the rate, like
don't project your ship onto other people. Yeah, curiosity and
not condemnations. Oh my god, yes I love that taglines seriously,
(35:17):
but this is really the thing, right, Like we need
to be able to be comfortable with the complexity in us,
in the complexity in front of us, right like let
the person, let the let you in this whole story,
in this whole house, be the whole person that you are,
and let the dying person be the whole person that
they are. Right, this idea that once somebody has died,
(35:39):
they become canonized and you can't talk about the rough
parts of your relationship. Like Matt and I had a
great relationship and he was a pain in the ass, right,
and I get to be really glad that I don't
need to deal with that stuff anymore, at the same
time that I'm really heartbroken that he's not here, like multitudes,
Oh my gosh. And that's love too, exactly. Yeah, there's
(36:00):
another line in your book. It said you said, it's
heartbreaking to say that you can love someone and not
miss them when they're gone. That is that is human.
It is human. And I also think, you know, a
lot of grief, at least in my experiences, is not
just greeting the fact that the person has died, but
it's grieving the years that you spent with them, you know,
(36:23):
I guess in the same way you do with in
a divorce. I I've I have a lot of friends
who have been through divorce, and I've my experience was
very similar to theirs, and and that I you know,
really the initial grief that I felt was from my
kids and for my family and like that, you know,
it wasn't even about me. It was about them not
having a dad anymore. But after that, when it was
(36:44):
like time for me to really kind of dive into
my own feelings, my grief, the majority of my grief
came from the fact that I had been, you know,
unhappy for years and I was like, oh Jesus, like
I was grieving like my my um, you know, just
all of that. Like I didn't. You know, when someone dies,
(37:05):
you're not again. You don't you're not thinking about what
the years of you know, you're supposed to think about,
like the happy years and missing them. And I was
thinking a lot about like funk, I was miserable for
like a really long time, and like thought that I
could fake it till I make it kind of thing,
and like couldn't. And like, so, I you know, I
grieved for those years, and not just for me, but
(37:27):
for him that like he couldn't. I wanted us both
to be able to come on the other side of
that and have an afterlife, like I wanted him to
have one to write like and there's you know, there's
survivor skill as I'm sure you know you are very
familiar with, and and you know that is you know,
I've watched my kids grew up, but he's not here
to do that, and that's really hard and just you know,
(37:48):
the it makes I feel so lucky to be here,
and then I my, you know, the other side, right,
the shadow of feeling so lucky is feeling like, God,
I wish that he could that he's not missing this.
But at the same time, and then there's the other
side of that where I'm like, God, it's so nice
to just be able to be the only parent and
do this by myself. Yeah, not have to deal And
(38:10):
all of those things are true. All of it is true.
All of it is true, the full catastrophe of being human.
And also and also that I mean this this will
probably take us on another tangent that we don't necessarily
have time for today, but this idea that a quote
successful relationship is not necessarily till death to you part right,
that loving somebody is sometimes walking away. Oh yeah, right,
(38:34):
If we go back to what you were saying, like
it would have been preferable if he got to live
his after and you got to live and after as
not a widow. That's not the story that we have,
but that sometimes that separation is the most loving thing
in the world. I believe that wholeheartedly, like for you
(38:55):
and for your children, your for your whole family. That's
why that's the like divort normalized divorce as good news.
Like that's where they came from. It was this conversation
that I was having with people on Instagram, like they
were pouring in I kind of did it. I had
a hashtag called how I left for I was talking
about my experience and then I never really got to leave,
and that a part of me felt like, God, I
(39:16):
just want to break everyone out of their bad marriages
now because I'm on the other side of one and
I'm like, oh my god, God, this this is beautiful
over here. So it turned into this amazing sort of
like lawyers reached out offering pro bono work and they're
like people were all it was like this like behind
the scene, I was like cooking women up with other
people who had experienced and people were helping each other
(39:36):
figure out how to get out, and it was like
the same story over and over. Were like women telling
how they left and talking about how they had stayed
married for their kids, not realizing that it was an
act of love to leave and just to model to
their children this other other house, right, like this other
version of what it what it can look like to
(39:58):
be happy and to you know, like it doesn't have
to look this one way, like we're so afraid of,
like we're so afraid of moving from the the square
house so that with a triangle roof, but there's a
there's a really beautiful, fucking well imagined house on the
other side of that that. You know, I think I
(40:20):
feel so grateful that I get to dwell in now. Yeah,
we all deserve to be happy. Like it's very simple,
and I think a lot of women don't think that
we do, or think that the priorities our children and
are are significant other and that they're somehow going to
be happy when we're not, which is also not the
(40:40):
case at all. Yeah, this is actually a really good
place for us to talk about my my always closing
conversation for a season two. So knowing what you know,
knowing the houses that you've burned down, the houses that
you've rebuilt for yourselves, the curiosity about what houses might
come next? Like what does hope mean for you? I
(41:02):
think for me, hope it's so funny because hope for
me has always felt passive, right, like we can't like
it's what we want for ourselves, not necessarily what we're
doing for ourselves. And I think I lived sort of
with this want for myself and was very afraid to
(41:23):
actually do the work to get there. So for me,
hope is sort of again reimagining what it means to hope.
Rebuilding what hope looks like finding the extra room and
the idea of hope, or rather instead of finding the
extra room, building that room myself, because that's the thing too.
(41:44):
It's like we don't have to wait for the room
to appear. We can build it, right, we can build it.
And for me, that's been my experience these last four years.
How can I build? How can I build? How can
I redesign? How can I relearn? Unlearn? So I guess
(42:04):
for me, hope is finding new ways to unlearn and
create and rebuild and sort of reconstruct a life that
doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Yeah, I love that.
I love opening new rooms and hope right like this
for me This is what season two is all about,
(42:26):
is like, it is so awful in the world right now,
on so many different fronts, and it's so easy to
feel hopeless. I love your definition, your working definition of
hope there that this is something it's not wishful thinking,
it's not hoping for a specific outcome. It's building a
(42:46):
hope that belongs to you and that looks like you
and that you can live in. Yeah, being active in hope,
like taking it, taking it with you instead of sitting
with it somewhere. Yeah, don't camp out with your hope
in somebody else's needs to be renovated since the forties
place with a drop ceiling, don't don't do that to yourself.
(43:10):
Hope deserves better digs. All right, my friend, that is
a great place for us to end. So um, I'm
going to link to all the places and obviously to
your book in the show notes. But what do you
want to let people know? Where should they find you?
Where should they look for you? What do they need
to know? Well, they can find me on Instagram at
Rebecca Wolf with three oh s Um, I'm on Twitter
(43:31):
at girls gun Child, and they can also check me
out over on Rebecca wolf dot com, which links to
all my essays, columns, books, etcetera. I also have a book.
It's called All of This, a Memoir of Death and Desire,
and you can find that where all books are sold
(43:52):
and and it's awesome. And last little note here, you
and I both did a shout out to ourselves in
our books. You. Our dedication is to you, and my
acknowledgements ends with me that yes, yes, yes, let's go.
I love it. Normalize that too, Normalize appreciating yourself for
(44:15):
surviving the ship. You've had to survive it. Alright, Everybody,
stick around. I will be right back after this last break.
Each week I leave you with some questions to carry
(44:35):
with you until we meet again. This season is all
about hope, and I have been both surprised and fascinated
to hear how many guests bring hope up before I
even get a chance to bring it up myself. But
you know, it really struck me in my conversation with
Rebecca is her complete lack of shame around things that
(44:56):
most people are really really hesitant to mention. There's something
really liberating in hearing somebody else claim their own liberation
that feels like a hopeful thing to me. I also
love how Rebecca said quote hope is finding new ways
to unlearn and create and rebuild and reconstruct a life
that doesn't have to look like anybody else's. I love
(45:20):
that we talked about how there's hope in discovering new
hope in yourself. I do love a personal agency moment.
What parts of this conversation stuck with you today? What
parts made you think or see something differently, whether that's
in your life or in somebody else's life. Which parts
of Rebecca's story made you feel seen in your own life.
(45:44):
Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but
I hope you do find something to hold onto. I'd
love to hear what you've taken from this episode. What
new rooms are unfolding in the house of your life.
Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or hear after
Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show,
and that's a good place to leave your thoughts or
(46:05):
your comments, or your reflections right there on those posts,
and be sure to tag us when you share the
show on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here
after Pod on all the platforms, really, really the whole
team loves to see your comments. We love to see
where this show takes you. And with this episode with
author Rebecca Wolf, we really did cover some taboo territory.
(46:28):
So let's get those conversation parties started and tagus. Let
us see where your conversations go. If you want to
tell us how today's show felt for you, or you
have a request or a question for upcoming explorations of
difficult Things, give us a call three two three six
four three s six eight and leave a voicemail. If
(46:50):
you missed it, you can find the number in the
show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O. If
you'd rather send an email, you can do that too.
Write on the website Megan Divine dot CEO. We want
to hear from you. I want to hear from you.
This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can
(47:12):
make things better even when they can't be made right.
You know how most people are going to scan through
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after and think I do not want to listen to
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(47:34):
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(47:56):
and keep on listening with friends want more Hereafter. Brief
education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
that we don't call grief, from those daily disappointments right
up through the losses that rearrange the world. Grief is everywhere.
(48:20):
Learning how to deal with it and talk about it
without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an
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plus the Guided Journal for Grief All at Megan Divine
dot c O Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and
(48:43):
produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown,
co produced by Elizabeth Fasio with logistical and social media
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Wave Crush, and background noise provided by both intermittent air
conditioning and the general sounds of living in a city.
I think when you go through a traumatic experience, you
you kind of I mean, at least for me, like
when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my
of my sort of after afterlife came from realizing to
like how finite it all is and how fast he
went from being a healthy person to a sick person.
And that could happen to me too, It could happen
(00:21):
to anybody. This is Here After, and I'm your host,
Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay
that You're Not Okay. And it might seem like a
weird thing to say, but I really enjoy interesting conversations
about difficult things. Real talk about the hard parts of
being human is what makes us human. Hereafter is the
(00:43):
show where everyone is allowed to talk about what's real,
the good, the bad, the joyful, and the horrible, all
in the service of a more hopeful and connected world.
This week on Hereafter, my guest is author and advice
columnist Rebecca will Her new book All of This explores
what actually happens when the person you were going to
(01:06):
divorce get sick and eyes settle in. Everybody, this is
a really wild conversation. We'll be right back after this
first break. Before we get started, one quick note, well,
(01:28):
we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each
and every episode. This show is not a substitute for
skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for
professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, okay, so listen.
What do you do when you're just about to get
divorced but your partner gets sick? After years and years
(01:52):
of conflict and abuse, Rebecca Wolfe was ready to divorce
her husband. How they had already talked about it, they
read to it, and the only thing left was the leaving,
and then how it got sick, like really sick, like
very soon to be dying kind of sick, and Rebecca
(02:13):
was thrown into the position of caregiver and caretaker for
the man she had been excited to leave behind. What
followed was a crash course in performative grief and the
dismantling of one life in order to build the next.
In this episode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions,
(02:34):
and personal agency. It is quite the conversation I told you,
Rebecca is a lot of fun too. If we can
say that about a conversation where we also discuss terrible things. Honestly,
this episode really opens up the doors to how complex
human relationships are, how desire and grief and liberation can
(02:55):
all be intertwined. That's something we don't talk about very often.
But sometimes your own personal freedom comes as a result
of something bad happening. Now you know me, everybody, There
will not be a pretty bow stuck on death, no
transformation narrative where it all worked out for the best.
But just listen to this show content notes. This episode
(03:21):
explores sex and sexuality, and it definitely includes more than
a fair amount of swearing. Let's get into it, Rebecca.
It is so good to have you here now. I
was reading through a lot of your work yesterday to
get ready for our conversation today, and there was this
(03:42):
one line that actually stopped me. He wrote. It felt
a bit like the dreams I sometimes have where after
years of living in the same house, I discover another
room that had been there all along. That particular line
is from an essay on Refinery twenty nine on Queerness,
which we will link in the show notes. But I
have those like mysterious room dream all the time. And
(04:05):
I was reading it and I was like, oh my god,
somebody else has those dreams. Like, so, friends, if you
don't know what we're talking about, Like you have a
dream you're in a house that usually recognize or at
least often I recognize, and then there's a door and
it goes into this whole room or sometimes for me,
an entire wing that opens up. It's usually very elaborate. Yeah,
(04:25):
I love it to have those dreams too, because it's
that's probably like the since I was a young person,
the most like that has been the most recurring dream
I've had. And it's so awesome, Like it's such a
great dream. It's like this this idea that we have
that there's so much more that we're not aware of it,
Like that's going on inside of us and in our
(04:46):
like in all the inner cracks and crevices, like there's
stuff lurking there and that we have no idea what's
coming and what even exists in our space. Like yeah, yeah,
I mean it's that's life, right, Like there are dreams
you don't know, are rooms that you don't know where they're.
They're rooms that you wish you never had to go into.
There are rooms that you spend a lifetime trying to
get out of. I think for me, in those dreams,
(05:08):
I don't recall any of them feeling uncomfortable, more of
the like, holy crap, this was in my house right
this bathrooms that have waterfalls in them, or like this this,
Oh my gosh, it's been here all along, and like
for me, the one I had recently was like, oh
my god, my kids have been sharing a room and
they could have had their own room, or like I
couldn't have had my own office. Like all along there
(05:30):
was a space and I've been you know, I've been
unable to to take advantage of it, to use it,
and and there's like this sadness so like I've missed
out on years of of taking advantage of the space
that I didn't know was there. Which is a really
great place to start a conversation today, right, like can
you talk a little bit about the rooms that you
(05:53):
find yourself in now? Yeah? I mean I think really
it's it was it was more of finding a new
room after how died and more like understanding what I
could do with all the rooms I already had. And
actually it's funny because I just was thinking about this
(06:15):
yesterday because I was I was answering some questions for
someone else, and there was a question about cheating and affairs.
And as I was writing about what my feelings are
now like in retrospect about having affairs in my marriage,
it occurred to me that the affairs themselves were mundane
(06:37):
in comparison to the fact that my entire marriage was
really built on performance and lies. And in every capacity
I was lying to him, I was lying to myself.
I was trying to fit inside a room right that
did not feel comfortable for me. I was trying to
figure out how to decorate that room with ship that
(06:58):
I didn't like. I think for me, like coming out
the other side of that, I know what I want now,
and I'm not willing to take the things that I
think that I need and fill the rooms that I
am and have been uncomfortable. And for years, I think
it's like I'm I'm really sort of at a point
where I have been for the last few years, where
(07:19):
I'm just burning down the house and building a new one,
and I'm questioning all of the materials that I used
to build the original house, and like, were those even
actual materials? Like I don't think they were, Like there
was so much to my old life that I think
was just me trying to figure out how to just
be good and make everyone else happy and like do
(07:42):
the things that I was supposed to do. And I'm like,
fuck it, like the opposite, like you want me, you
want me here, I'm gonna go over there. You want
me to talk about this, I'm going to talk about that.
So I think the rooms for me are are still
under construction, but they look so they look very difference
than the ones that I walked around and before. Yeah,
(08:04):
I love that idea of burning the old burning the
old life to the ground. There's a poem which I
will also link in this in the show notes, about
burning the old year, right and just burning that to
the ground and letting the smoke of that be your
prayers from what's coming next. Right, And you've had to
do that so many times. It's so interesting because and
I write about this in my book, like I the
(08:25):
reason we got married was because I got pregnant. Like
everything that happened in our relationship was a surprise, right,
Like surprise you're pregnant, Surprise you're dying. Like that, There's
this this really kind of incredible like full circle um
aspect to our relationship, which was like we were sort
of thrown together. You know, we ended we be married
(08:47):
because I was pregnant, and we stayed together because he
was dying, which is sort of amazing. Like if you
think about what, it's very me. It's like, I don't
I never make plans. It's like things happened and I
respond to them. So it's like I got pregnant, I
guess I'm gonna marry you. You're dying, I guess I'm
gonna stick this out. Like it's for someone who feels
(09:09):
like I feel like I'm a very like active with
like person of with agency, like I've actually everything sort
of happened to me, and it's been very passive in
this way that I think for me has has made
me feel like I need to sort of exert exert
some sort of authority over the situation or some agency
(09:31):
over the situation because I'm like, wait, I was going
to leave. I swear like this whole experience for me
has been sort of this way. But I don't feel
like a widow. Wait, but I was miserable and I
was about to leave, Like he left me first, I
was going to leave him finally and I finally got
the guts to do it, and I was ready and
like I was making plans, and a little bit a
(09:54):
part of me was like mad at him because I
felt robbed of finally doing the thing that I've been
like psyching myself up to do for so many years.
Which sounds crazy, like to be mad at someone for dying,
but I think, like there's a lot of times when
we lose somebody that we do feel anger, and a
lot of that comes from, you know, unresolved feelings, unresolved
(10:18):
that you know, the things that we we wanted to
do or wanted to say, regardless of what they are,
even if they were, like even if they were a divorce,
Like I was resenting him that he could he died
before I was able to get a divorce, Like how
could you? Like now I'm a widow. Now I'm I'm
stuck with you for life, Like I have to write
on all my on all my paperwork, widowed, right, Like
I'm not a single woman or a divorce woman. I'm widowed.
(10:41):
I love that though, that the complexity, I mean, everything
you write is about complexity, right. The Jenny Lawson's review
of your book, she described your book as a profound
work on the complexities of grief, desire, and being human,
which is an awesome blurb for the jacket of your
book and also correct. But that that complexity of like
I love how you phrase that, I just worked myself
(11:02):
up to take my power back for myself and make
a decision about my life, and then the bastard got sick. Now,
if you all are listening and thinking like you you
don't speak ill of the dead. Like we talked about
what's true here, right, and and this is something that
I want to talk about with you, that that experience
that you had, So before hell I got sick, you
(11:26):
had made the decision to leave. You were feeling empowered
around that and like taking your agency and your power back,
and then he got his diagnosis. Were there times during
that whole illness where you felt like you had to
perform as the happy wife? Oh? For sure. I mean
I was in survival mode for sure. So my priority
was like making sure that I was there to be
(11:47):
this advocate. Like that's something that I knew I had
to do and something that I was very okay with doing.
But yeah, like when you're when you're the primary caretaker
of someone who's dying, like you're like I I wasn't
even really able to explore my own feelings as it
was happening, because for me, it was like I had
to take care of him. I had to go. You know,
we're basically living in the hospital for four months. I
(12:09):
had to make sure my kids were okay. I wasn't
even in a place where I could really you know,
my own feelings and we're not I didn't even know
what they were yet. I was just like, oh my god,
this is happening, Like I have to be I have
to be on my a game. And I was like
very stoic, and I wasn't emotional in a way that
(12:31):
like I'd never been before. Like I cried everything, and
I think I was, you know, I was like a
little soldier. I was like, you know, doing everything I
was supposed to do, doing everything right. You know, there's
sort of a relief when you're when you're so when
someone's really sick and your your job is to do
sort of all of the like all the medical stuff
(12:54):
is very um it's not emotional, Like you sit down
and you have these meetings with these doctors and you're
talking about all the stuff, and it's like, at least
for me, like I was kind of relieved to have
all this work to do where I didn't have to
think about my feelings. Right, it was like I had
to make sure that he was taking care and make
sure he was okay, talk to the doctors, get him
from a point A to point B. Tests and this
(13:14):
is and that, and you know, when you're really busy,
you're not necessarily thinking about your feelings. But you know,
everyone comes to you and they feel sorry for you,
and they're so sad and like they are you okay?
Are you okay? And like, you know, they get a
you know, they had a whole team of social workers
who kept you know, who were like, we have the
social workers for to talk to if you talk to them,
And it was like I really didn't. I didn't want to.
(13:40):
It wasn't that I didn't need to, because I definitely
probably did, but I was I was like, I have
to keep I have to keep it together here because
there were so many conflicting feelings that I think I
was like, Nope, I will not engage. I will not
acknowledge anyone who's trying to like, you know, I didn't
want anyone to feel sorry for me. I was like,
were you just got to get through this? But I knew.
I knew that I only had to do it for
(14:01):
a certain amount of time. Like I knew that he
was going to die soon. His prognosis from the beginning
was that he was going to die soon. So for me,
knowing that there was an out, knowing that there was
an end to it meant that I could be the
wife that he needed at the time. If you were
to have gotten a diagnosis where he could live for
(14:23):
a year, two years, three years, five years, I could
not have been there for him in that way. And
I know women right now who are in that position,
who are with a dying or a very chronically ill partner,
and I don't want to be with them anymore, and
are doing it because they feel like they need to
(14:44):
and have to, and it's their job. And I think
women take on all the time, you know, the caretaker
role to people they don't want to take care of anymore.
You know, we raised kids for eighteen years, or you know,
we're still raising kids, and then you're doing it again.
And I think it's not just with a partner, but
with a parent, and I think when those parents, partners,
(15:07):
people die, there's a lot of fucking relief and that's
absolutely valid, Like it's so valid to feel relieved, and
there's really not you know, we don't we don't like
leave a lot of rooms to have those conversations in
a way that's supportive. It's really fucking hard to take
care of a dying person, whether they're dying for a
(15:27):
week or a month or year. You know, it's to me,
there's no harder thing. That's exhausting, exhausting, and it's relentless. Yes,
it's relentless. And you know, just as you were saying,
like you have I mean, you do have choice in
the matter, right, Like you can always say I'm not
doing this, but well that's the exactly who's going to
(15:49):
do this if I don't do this. So there are
all of these impossible decisions and it's like we don't,
we don't talk about this because there's that sort of
puritanical recoil of like you have to do this, like
if you loved them, you would really do it, like
you you would do it joyfully and cheerfully, Like this
requirement that we do hard things joyfully and cheerfully is
(16:09):
so not okay. And I think like when you're talking
about like the social workers are coming to me saying like,
let's talk this out about your feelings, and you're like, no, tactical,
only tactical only. I wonder what it would have been
like if if a social worker or somebody had come
to you and said, this seems really complicated. Do you
want to talk about what it's like to be caring
(16:31):
for a person you were ready to leave? Yeah? I
mean nobody they didn't know that, but yes, and and
that's but that's the thing is too. It's like the
the assumption is that this is the love of your life,
for this is something you know, it's assumed that you're
in deep grief or that you're deeply sad that this
person is is I mean obviously like yes, no one
(16:51):
wants it to see anyone in pain exactly. There's that
human element of it, right like for you snap into
the I am a human and caring for another human,
and I love them as a human. The person is
a different story, but the human is who I'm showing
up for right now. I just I wish that there
was a way too scream for that when married couples,
(17:16):
or if you're coming in taking care of a parent.
I wish there was a way to scream for what
was the relationship like before you walked in this store,
because if we have that conversation, then the social workers
and the doctors and the palliot of care teams, they
know the ground you're starting from and it doesn't cause
more suffering for the primary caretaker to be like now
I have to pretend that my mother was an abusive
(17:36):
for the last forty years of my life, right, which
is such a you know, and I think I think
probably the nurses, I'm sure pick up on that nurse. No,
nurses and nurses are not their nurses are always the
ones everyone else I had issues with the whole time,
and the nurses were uh sucking amazing. Like I'm still
friends with the nurses that I met when I was there,
(17:58):
and they get it, they see it, they see they
see the full humanity of their patients. And and a
lot of patients who are dying are awful. They're so mean.
They're in pain, yes, but they're also like there's all
sorts of stuff going on, and they're so mean, Like
they're so mean, so trying to be nice to someone
who's so mean to you all the time, Like they
get that, and they like, I feel like, you know,
(18:19):
they see you, they see you. But no, it's complicated,
and I would venture to guess that almost always it's
complicated that nobody goes into anything without having multiple you know,
no one goes into a death without having also a
range of feelings um and and that can include relief,
and I think it often does. When we don't talk
about that, we don't allow ourselves to have those feelings,
(18:42):
Like we're depriving ourselves of the space of the room,
right of this room for us to explore what it
is to be a human and what it means to
die and to live and to love. And then it
isn't just one thing, you know, we like we romanticize
love so like you know, marriage and love, and it's
(19:02):
like and and and the and happy ending. We want
happy endings and we want death to be beautiful and
loving and all these things that you know, it's we
like we've seen too many movies, right, Like there's no trope,
Like there's no widow relieved widow trope, Like certainly not
a slutty widow I was like, I was actually doing
(19:24):
research because I'm doing a column right now on on
dating as a widow, because it's like, you know, the
idea of being a widow who wants to fuck, especially
like soon after the death is like like all the
pearls are clutched, Like you can't go to like an
article or a forum or whatever and not hear people
just like it's too soon, Like what a slut? Like
(19:46):
it's whoa people were? People get that misogyny is showing.
It is yeah, wild, how it is wild? And the opinions.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Oh no, no, it's just like
how you're expected to just like just like to be
a celibate none, you know, for however many years. It's
like I don't know, like what socially acceptable? How many
(20:09):
months is that? I think if you google it because
you can and get an answer, I think that it's
like you can start dating a year later, like that's okay.
With like the acording to whom though, we've been talking
(20:30):
with Rebecca Wolf, author of the new book All of This,
a Memoir of Death and Desire. Let's get back into it.
It's a really fun show. Here's my question, though, So
the week of Matt's funeral, I had probably four or
five people come up to me and say, my wish
(20:51):
for you is that you get married again as soon
as possible, because you're so beautiful and you're so smart,
and Matt wouldn't want you to be alone. So we're like,
body hasn't even cool yet, right, And then I know
a lot of people who have either dated or had
hook up soon after their person died, and they get
judgment for that, like, you can't win, you can't please people,
(21:12):
So do whatever you want, right, like listen to your
own needs and ask yourself what you need. And I
love that about you that you're like, Okay, this was
not the marriage that I wanted. I was getting ready
to leave. I didn't get a chance to leave on
my own terms, and then I was forced into the
care river role, which I did with love and compassion
and humanity because I am a human and there was
relief after he died, and now I'm going to do
(21:33):
what I want. Right, Just a great summary, thank you.
But that's this is the thing, right that all of this,
the entire the entire house with all of its rooms
that we've seen, and we haven't seen. You get to
make choices about what you build and how you inhabit
those rooms, and we have to start talking about not
(21:56):
only that you have the right to design the rooms
you inhabit, it also we have to start talking about
what is actually behind all of that judgment. And as
you said, pearl clutching and I mean, misogyny is the answer.
But yeah, it's also God, I love I love this
house analogy and I'm gonna just like keep going with
it because we have so little imagination when it comes
(22:19):
to how we construct our our lives. Right. It's like,
there's a kitchen that looks like a kitchen, and a
dining room looks like a dining room, and the bedroom
looks like this, and this is where you put your
this and if it doesn't have a closet that it's
not considered a bedroom. And we just go along with
a sort of this is what it is, right, and
we don't think, like, is it possible to have a
(22:39):
bedroom here? To to to do you? Like, we we
just go along with like the traditional structure of a
home and this is what it is. There's so many
different ways to have a relationship, to build a life,
to raise children, and we just sort of we move
in to these homes that are pre fab or that
(23:02):
have been you know, that have that are are are
designed the way they've always been designed, with the materials
that have always been in there, and we just that's
what it is. We don't question any of it, right.
We bend ourselves to those made environments, right, and then
we fill those rooms based on their size and and
and where the you know, we put our our bed
(23:24):
based on where the window is. It's like we we
really don't or don't they don't get ourselves a space
to imagine a different kind of home. It's just the
how you know. It's like when you're a kid, you
draw the like square with a triangle top and the
two windows in the door, no matter what you've grown up,
and that is what you draw. That's true. So it's
like we it's so deep in us to think that
(23:44):
this is what it's supposed to look like. And for me,
I think I've been doing so many exercises on like
what am I defaulting to? What am I automatically assuming
needs to this needs to look like, oh ship, this
isn't what I want? Why I am I seeking out
something that I don't want like what like because that's
what I think I want? And then I get there
(24:05):
and I'm like, wait, I don't want my house to
look like a square with a triangle and a little
I wanted to look different now like I lived in
this in this way, I don't want it anymore. Yeah,
what does that look like? Where do I get the materials? Oh? Ship?
Like this is It's like like that's where I'm at.
I'm like, how do we question everything? And how do
we build new paradigms and how do we find ways
(24:26):
to normalize all the different things that we've felt shame
about forever? And how do we talk about it in
a way that's not like we're not doing it to
be provocative. We're just having conversations because this is the
way it is. You're being curious about the structures of
your life, all of them, all of the things that
we don't think about we just sort of take for granted.
(24:49):
I mean, it wasn't that long ago that queer couples
or same gender couples like that was I mean obviously
still in some pockets, but like that was completely disrupting
our bedrock ideas of what relationships would look like and
what marriage is and all of these things. And we've
come made some progress since the fifties some but that
(25:10):
that isn't the revolutionary act that it used to be, right,
because those structures have changed because we kicked down those walls, right,
And it takes people being willing to kick down those
walls and question those walls. And it's it's interesting as
you're talking about this, I'm thinking about years and years
and years ago when I was in private practice before
Matt died. I saw a lot of people, um a
(25:33):
lot of women in their thirties and forties and fifties
who were sort of waking up to the things that
you're talking about. Like, I live in a life in
a house that I didn't really actively choose, and this
is not the life that I want. How do I
start extricating myself from this life? Right? I think you.
I think it was you. You had to you had
(25:54):
a post. I think it was you. If it wasn't you,
it was somebody normalize seeing divorce as a good thing.
That was your right. Yeah, normalize divorce is good news. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I think this is really tricky territory because I'm
also going to say, sometimes we can normalize death as
good news, and it's tricky because we don't want to
(26:16):
say someone died so that you could find your self,
because life is not a trade like that in our
in our best vision of reality here you would have
been able to leave how and get divorced and learn
these things about yourself, and he would get to be
on his own thing. Right, that's not the story that
(26:38):
we got. Yeah, it's okay. If there is relief and
gratitude after someone dies, that might not be your story.
And I think there's also even a middle ground in
there that for however long you are completely destroyed after
someone dies, for however long that takes, little green shoots
(27:03):
will eventually start to come back in and you get
to choose what kind of life of after you build
for yourself. It isn't the life that you chose, It
isn't the life that you wish you had. And since
you have to live this life, what do you want
to build for yourself? For sure? And also I think
when you go through a traumatic experience, you you kind
(27:26):
of I mean, at least for me, like when you're
with someone who's dying, so much of my of my
sort of after after life came from realizing to like
how finite it all is and how fast he went
from being a healthy person to a sick person. And
that could happen to me too, It could happen to anybody.
What am I doing with this with this one body? Right? Like,
(27:48):
it's not even about what am I doing with my life?
It's like what am I doing with my body? It
works right now, I could live to be a hundred,
but maybe my body only functions this way for like
the next ten years. I don't know, So what am
I doing with this body? So I also think it's
super like the idea and again like going back to
this like sort of invisible number where you've lost somebody
(28:10):
and you're supposed to just like close shop and lock
yourself in a room. Yeah, when if you've just witnessed
someone losing their life force, it's actually super normal to
be like so to be turned on and to like
want to fuck like immediately after. It's actually normal, Like
you're you're an animal and you've just been with an
(28:32):
animal who's died, and you're you are trying to feel alive,
right because you've just been around death, and so it's
actually it's super normal to have those feelings where you're
like that is something that I like, I started doing
like a deep dive on on death and sex and
how they're related, and they're actually very close. There are
(28:53):
a lot of there aren't a lot of experiences that
a human body has that are just complete. It's like
it's a kernal if it's a full body experience, right,
and feeling your life force, like that's sexually sexually, if
you're having a good experience, that's what you're feeling. And
I I think like there's you know, I think this
(29:15):
idea that we have to wait to have an experience
that for a lot of us is something that we're craving,
you know. It's also it's ridiculous, Like it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous,
like who gets to dictate what you're doing with this
life and this body? Right? Who gets to make those
(29:35):
decisions for you? And and that can even be internalized, right,
like it's bad for me to have these desires, it's
bad of me to go do this because that isn't
what's expected of me, And there's this whole internalized shaming
around that, Like shame is just trash like shame is
just trash, right, Like whether you're doing it to yourself
or you're you're hearing it from other people, that judgment
(29:56):
about who you are and what you're doing with your
life force Yeah, yeah, and who. And it's amazing to
me that people think that they have any that that's
their place at all. Like it makes me like, like, who,
I didn't know you were a part of my council
of internal beings telling me what I should do with
my life, Like I'm gonna boot you out. And it's
(30:17):
like what we're seeing with Roe v Wade. It's like
the fact that people think that they have the authority
of other people's agency and sexuality and experiences. It's like
the it comes from this place of internalized shame too,
Like people only shame other people who feel shame themselves.
(30:37):
So it's like as soon as we can strip that back,
we can really actually make big changes, like globally, because
so much of it, so much of all of the
all of this comes from shame. It's just like it's
it's perpetuating and everyone's just shaming each other and feeling shames,
so feeling like they need to shame, and it's a
giant shame of I love this because this actually pulls
something out that we were talking about earlier. You just
(30:59):
mentioned and correct me if I misunderstood what you said.
But the people who are controlling others bodies and shaming
predominantly women, but also anybody who is not a ciss
white male, they're carrying their own shame and their own
pain that is not explored, not supported, not addressed. And
(31:20):
as we've said before, hurt people, hurt people. And this
goes back through millennia of things, and I think where
it gets tricky is that we flip into that binary
of like you have to have compassion for the people
who are harming you, and we think that having compassion
and understanding the pain at the root of the oppressor
(31:42):
excuses them from their actions. And we go back to
what you've been talking about with your experience with how
it's like you showed up and took care of him
out of a shared humanity and because he's the father
of your kids and and for all of these other reasons.
And you can love someone and still hold them accountable
(32:03):
for their actions. You can still tell them to stop
and have them stop and make them stop, and you
can still be relieved when they stop. That doesn't make
you a bad person, It makes you human. And this
is how we get the world that we want right
where everybody is allowed to talk about what hurts and
they are not allowed to use what hurts to harm others. Yes, yes,
(32:25):
that was beautiful, thank you. And it's interesting because so
I talked to somebody about this yesterday who read the book,
and it was like they were commenting on the fact
that I wrote about how basically as a human that
he was, you know, that I had all us anger
and that we had this very toxic marriage, but there
was also a lot of love too, and I wrote
about all of that, and people don't know what to
(32:47):
do with that. Like people, right, you did not choose
one or the other, stay in your narrow lane. Will
really want a heroine a villain, and and they want
a complicated hero, which is the same thing as a hero, right,
Like everyone's complicated and they and a villain of all
villains are like we all are complicated. And I think
(33:08):
like people, you know again, like we have no imagination,
were so binary, we don't know how to carry more
than one thought or feeling at the same time. It's
because we were not able to articulate it. We don't
articulate it culturally, we don't hold space for all the
different feelings. You know that the person that the social
worker comes to me assuming that I'm sad, instead of
(33:28):
coming to me assuming that I'm feeling whole, not assuming
being curious, right, and being curious instead of assuming yes,
But this, this and then that was sort of the
experience that I was received, just like across the board
was just this like I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry,
I'm so sorry. People just apologizing, apologizing, apologizing, and then
me feeling more and more shitty that I wasn't only sad, like, well,
(33:51):
my god, these people everyone feels sorry for me. I don't,
but I'm I don't know, I'm not a victim, like
I don't feel sorry for like you know, but but
speak saying that you know, and then you're dismissing everyone
else and you're just all these people are so lovely
and generous and they they feel sad for you, and
you don't want to disappoint them by telling them about
to feel sad that you're okay, Like whoa, But if
(34:12):
we were, if we weren't to assume every time something happened,
like we're just we assume because we've been told the
same stories over and over and over that this is
what it looks like to, you know, to lose someone,
this is what it looks like to have ex experience.
Why experience instead of just recognizing that every experience is
(34:33):
a human experience and there's so many conflicting feelings that
are happening behind you know, and and we don't know
anything really, we don't know. Yeah, And just to be
able to hold space for each other, like that's the
whole Like hold space, Like if somebody like that's that's
really like my Like when people are like, oh, someone's
(34:53):
like what do I do my friends you know, going
through whatever, Like just give them the space to feel
all of their feelings, like tell them that you're here
to listen to all of it. Anger the rate, like
don't project your ship onto other people. Yeah, curiosity and
not condemnations. Oh my god, yes I love that taglines seriously,
(35:17):
but this is really the thing, right, Like we need
to be able to be comfortable with the complexity in us,
in the complexity in front of us, right like let
the person, let the let you in this whole story,
in this whole house, be the whole person that you are,
and let the dying person be the whole person that
they are. Right, this idea that once somebody has died,
(35:39):
they become canonized and you can't talk about the rough
parts of your relationship. Like Matt and I had a
great relationship and he was a pain in the ass, right,
and I get to be really glad that I don't
need to deal with that stuff anymore, at the same
time that I'm really heartbroken that he's not here, like multitudes,
Oh my gosh. And that's love too, exactly. Yeah, there's
(36:00):
another line in your book. It said you said, it's
heartbreaking to say that you can love someone and not
miss them when they're gone. That is that is human.
It is human. And I also think, you know, a
lot of grief, at least in my experiences, is not
just greeting the fact that the person has died, but
it's grieving the years that you spent with them, you know,
(36:23):
I guess in the same way you do with in
a divorce. I I've I have a lot of friends
who have been through divorce, and I've my experience was
very similar to theirs, and and that I you know,
really the initial grief that I felt was from my
kids and for my family and like that, you know,
it wasn't even about me. It was about them not
having a dad anymore. But after that, when it was
(36:44):
like time for me to really kind of dive into
my own feelings, my grief, the majority of my grief
came from the fact that I had been, you know,
unhappy for years and I was like, oh Jesus, like
I was grieving like my my um, you know, just
all of that. Like I didn't. You know, when someone dies,
(37:05):
you're not again. You don't you're not thinking about what
the years of you know, you're supposed to think about,
like the happy years and missing them. And I was
thinking a lot about like funk, I was miserable for
like a really long time, and like thought that I
could fake it till I make it kind of thing,
and like couldn't. And like, so, I you know, I
grieved for those years, and not just for me, but
(37:27):
for him that like he couldn't. I wanted us both
to be able to come on the other side of
that and have an afterlife, like I wanted him to
have one to write like and there's you know, there's
survivor skill as I'm sure you know you are very
familiar with, and and you know that is you know,
I've watched my kids grew up, but he's not here
to do that, and that's really hard and just you know,
(37:48):
the it makes I feel so lucky to be here,
and then I my, you know, the other side, right,
the shadow of feeling so lucky is feeling like, God,
I wish that he could that he's not missing this.
But at the same time, and then there's the other
side of that where I'm like, God, it's so nice
to just be able to be the only parent and
do this by myself. Yeah, not have to deal And
(38:10):
all of those things are true. All of it is true.
All of it is true, the full catastrophe of being human.
And also and also that I mean this this will
probably take us on another tangent that we don't necessarily
have time for today, but this idea that a quote
successful relationship is not necessarily till death to you part right,
that loving somebody is sometimes walking away. Oh yeah, right,
(38:34):
If we go back to what you were saying, like
it would have been preferable if he got to live
his after and you got to live and after as
not a widow. That's not the story that we have,
but that sometimes that separation is the most loving thing
in the world. I believe that wholeheartedly, like for you
(38:55):
and for your children, your for your whole family. That's
why that's the like divort normalized divorce as good news.
Like that's where they came from. It was this conversation
that I was having with people on Instagram, like they
were pouring in I kind of did it. I had
a hashtag called how I left for I was talking
about my experience and then I never really got to leave,
and that a part of me felt like, God, I
(39:16):
just want to break everyone out of their bad marriages
now because I'm on the other side of one and
I'm like, oh my god, God, this this is beautiful
over here. So it turned into this amazing sort of
like lawyers reached out offering pro bono work and they're
like people were all it was like this like behind
the scene, I was like cooking women up with other
people who had experienced and people were helping each other
(39:36):
figure out how to get out, and it was like
the same story over and over. Were like women telling
how they left and talking about how they had stayed
married for their kids, not realizing that it was an
act of love to leave and just to model to
their children this other other house, right, like this other
version of what it what it can look like to
(39:58):
be happy and to you know, like it doesn't have
to look this one way, like we're so afraid of,
like we're so afraid of moving from the the square
house so that with a triangle roof, but there's a
there's a really beautiful, fucking well imagined house on the
other side of that that. You know, I think I
(40:20):
feel so grateful that I get to dwell in now. Yeah,
we all deserve to be happy. Like it's very simple,
and I think a lot of women don't think that
we do, or think that the priorities our children and
are are significant other and that they're somehow going to
be happy when we're not, which is also not the
(40:40):
case at all. Yeah, this is actually a really good
place for us to talk about my my always closing
conversation for a season two. So knowing what you know,
knowing the houses that you've burned down, the houses that
you've rebuilt for yourselves, the curiosity about what houses might
come next? Like what does hope mean for you? I
(41:02):
think for me, hope it's so funny because hope for
me has always felt passive, right, like we can't like
it's what we want for ourselves, not necessarily what we're
doing for ourselves. And I think I lived sort of
with this want for myself and was very afraid to
(41:23):
actually do the work to get there. So for me,
hope is sort of again reimagining what it means to hope.
Rebuilding what hope looks like finding the extra room and
the idea of hope, or rather instead of finding the
extra room, building that room myself, because that's the thing too.
(41:44):
It's like we don't have to wait for the room
to appear. We can build it, right, we can build it.
And for me, that's been my experience these last four years.
How can I build? How can I build? How can
I redesign? How can I relearn? Unlearn? So I guess
(42:04):
for me, hope is finding new ways to unlearn and
create and rebuild and sort of reconstruct a life that
doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Yeah, I love that.
I love opening new rooms and hope right like this
for me This is what season two is all about,
(42:26):
is like, it is so awful in the world right now,
on so many different fronts, and it's so easy to
feel hopeless. I love your definition, your working definition of
hope there that this is something it's not wishful thinking,
it's not hoping for a specific outcome. It's building a
(42:46):
hope that belongs to you and that looks like you
and that you can live in. Yeah, being active in hope,
like taking it, taking it with you instead of sitting
with it somewhere. Yeah, don't camp out with your hope
in somebody else's needs to be renovated since the forties
place with a drop ceiling, don't don't do that to yourself.
(43:10):
Hope deserves better digs. All right, my friend, that is
a great place for us to end. So um, I'm
going to link to all the places and obviously to
your book in the show notes. But what do you
want to let people know? Where should they find you?
Where should they look for you? What do they need
to know? Well, they can find me on Instagram at
Rebecca Wolf with three oh s Um, I'm on Twitter
(43:31):
at girls gun Child, and they can also check me
out over on Rebecca wolf dot com, which links to
all my essays, columns, books, etcetera. I also have a book.
It's called All of This, a Memoir of Death and Desire,
and you can find that where all books are sold
(43:52):
and and it's awesome. And last little note here, you
and I both did a shout out to ourselves in
our books. You. Our dedication is to you, and my
acknowledgements ends with me that yes, yes, yes, let's go.
I love it. Normalize that too, Normalize appreciating yourself for
(44:15):
surviving the ship. You've had to survive it. Alright, Everybody,
stick around. I will be right back after this last break.
Each week I leave you with some questions to carry
(44:35):
with you until we meet again. This season is all
about hope, and I have been both surprised and fascinated
to hear how many guests bring hope up before I
even get a chance to bring it up myself. But
you know, it really struck me in my conversation with
Rebecca is her complete lack of shame around things that
(44:56):
most people are really really hesitant to mention. There's something
really liberating in hearing somebody else claim their own liberation
that feels like a hopeful thing to me. I also
love how Rebecca said quote hope is finding new ways
to unlearn and create and rebuild and reconstruct a life
that doesn't have to look like anybody else's. I love
(45:20):
that we talked about how there's hope in discovering new
hope in yourself. I do love a personal agency moment.
What parts of this conversation stuck with you today? What
parts made you think or see something differently, whether that's
in your life or in somebody else's life. Which parts
of Rebecca's story made you feel seen in your own life.
(45:44):
Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but
I hope you do find something to hold onto. I'd
love to hear what you've taken from this episode. What
new rooms are unfolding in the house of your life.
Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or hear after
Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show,
and that's a good place to leave your thoughts or
(46:05):
your comments, or your reflections right there on those posts,
and be sure to tag us when you share the
show on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here
after Pod on all the platforms, really, really the whole
team loves to see your comments. We love to see
where this show takes you. And with this episode with
author Rebecca Wolf, we really did cover some taboo territory.
(46:28):
So let's get those conversation parties started and tagus. Let
us see where your conversations go. If you want to
tell us how today's show felt for you, or you
have a request or a question for upcoming explorations of
difficult Things, give us a call three two three six
four three s six eight and leave a voicemail. If
(46:50):
you missed it, you can find the number in the
show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O. If
you'd rather send an email, you can do that too.
Write on the website Megan Divine dot CEO. We want
to hear from you. I want to hear from you.
This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can
(47:12):
make things better even when they can't be made right.
You know how most people are going to scan through
their podcast app looking for a new thing to listen to,
and they're going to see the show description for here
after and think I do not want to listen to
difficult things, even if cool people are talking about them. Well,
(47:34):
here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know
it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk
about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making
things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread
the word in your friend groups, your professional circles on
social media, and click through to leave a review. You
could do that right now. Subscribe to the show, download episodes,
(47:56):
and keep on listening with friends want more Hereafter. Brief
education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief
that we don't call grief, from those daily disappointments right
up through the losses that rearrange the world. Grief is everywhere.
(48:20):
Learning how to deal with it and talk about it
without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an
important skill for everyone. Find tip sheets, trainings, professional resources,
and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay,
plus the Guided Journal for Grief All at Megan Divine
dot c O Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and
(48:43):
produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown,
co produced by Elizabeth Fasio with logistical and social media
support from Micah edited by Houston Tilly, music provided by
Wave Crush, and background noise provided by both intermittent air
conditioning and the general sounds of living in a city.
Host
Megan Devine
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