May 8, 2026 • 59 mins
Danielle Crittenden joins Margaret Hoover to discuss her new book, “Dispatches from Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable,” which details the aftermath of her daughter’s unexpected death.
Miranda Frum, who once worked for “Firing Line,” died suddenly in 2024 at age 32 as she was preparing to celebrate the five-year anniversary of a successful surgery to remove a rare nonmalignant brain tumor.
Crittenden and her husband, writer David Frum, navigated frustrating levels of bureaucracy as they dealt with legal and logistical challenges following Miranda’s death, and she continues to experience “digital haunting” as her devices provide sometimes unwelcome reminders of her daughter.
While “Dispatches from Grief” is decidedly not a self-help book, Crittenden offers advice both for mourners and for those who find themselves interacting with parents who have suffered the loss of a child. She also reflects on what she has learned from suffering and how her grief has evolved over time, as well as what Miranda might have thought of her writing the book.
WARNING: This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide, help is available 24/7 at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (Call or Text 988).
Support for Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is provided by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Marc Haas Foundation, Katharine J. Rayner, Charles R. Schwab, Lindsay and George Billingsley, The Meadowlark Foundation, Jared Stone, Al and Kathy Hubbard, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
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(00:01):
Am IA more empathetic person? Yes.
I mean there are changes in me that have come from this and
taking many fewer things for granted.
It does make you I think a bigger and better person.
But as a gift, I would happily return it.
That's Danielle Crittenden responding to those who insist
(00:22):
grief is a gift. I'm Margaret Hoover.
This is the Firing Line podcast.Two years ago, Miranda Frum died
suddenly at age 32. One of her friends said he had
never met in real life a person who was so casually witty as in
(00:43):
a Thackery novel. I had known Miranda and her
parents, the writers David Frum and Danielle Crittenden, for
years, and Miranda was a Firing Line team member when this
program launched on PBS. There you are in your home and
your life as you know it, and a meteorite hits your house and
all that's left is a smoking ruin.
(01:04):
Danielle's new book, Dispatches from Grief, reports from the
front lines of grief. I felt like I needed to write
about what was happening to me, like a foreign correspondent
from this world that I had suddenly entered.
She offers hard won insight intohow loss reshapes life.
Even the most joyous things willbe accompanied by this sentence.
(01:24):
Sense of loss and sadness. And how to show up for those
living through the unthinkable. My feeling was you should always
lean into the grief, and not a way that people have a very
generous impulse to want to comfort you, but in fact what
you want are people to lean intothe suck.
(01:46):
Danielle Crittenden, welcome to Firing LINE.
So lovely to be with you, Margaret.
You wrote Dispatches from Grief,a mother's journey through the
unthinkable in the aftermath of your 32 year old adult
daughter's death. I first met your daughter
(02:07):
Miranda in 2008, when she was 16or 17 years old. 17.
Right. And I met her through you and
your husband, David Frum, who I have known for many years.
Miranda, she became a friend of mine and she was a founding
member of our team here at Firing Line.
(02:29):
That's right. And helped me launch this
program from 2018 to 2019 in ourfirst few seasons.
Miranda left Firing Line to haveserious treatment on a benign
but very rare brain tumor. Right.
In February of 2024, Miranda wasplanning a party to mark the
(02:53):
five year anniversary of her surviving her brain tumor. 2
days after Valentine's Day in 2024, you received the phone
call that every parent treads. Miranda had been found not
breathing on her floor of her apartment by her cleaning lady.
Her friend had called the policeand a medical examiner had fixed
(03:16):
her time of death at 3:00 AM. In your book you write about the
difference between knowing griefand needing grief.
You lost a parent previously, but losing it out child is
another order of magnitude. You write that it thrust you
(03:39):
into an alternative universe. What was the difference?
Well, as I say in the book, there you are in your home and
your life as you know it. And you get up in the morning
and you have coffee and you get up and you go to work and a
meteorite hits your house and all that's left is a smoking
(04:02):
ruin. That everything that was
familiar the day before is gone.And when I talked about other
types of grief, they were parental.
David's mother died prematurely at 54 after struggling for 19
years with leukemia. But when you grow up as a child,
(04:24):
you know at some point you're probably going to outlive your
parent. So unless they die suddenly and
tragically in some way, it's kind of in the natural order of
things. When your child precedes you,
just as you know, you not going to know what it's going to be
like to be a mother. Until you are.
(04:46):
And, and until you are and people look at all the negatives
of having children and then you have a child and you're like, Oh
my gosh, this is so incredible. And I could I never knew this
kind of love could exist. So it is when a child dies,
it's, it's nuclear. And I did the, the grief that I
(05:13):
felt was of such overwhelming pain and inescapability.
It wasn't just emotional pain. It was a, it was a physical
pain. It was a my heart exploding for
days and days and days and the thought that my brain did not
(05:38):
want to accept that Miranda was gone.
She was no longer on the end of my phone.
She was. She was not there.
You're right, Quote the person you were died with your child.
There is no healing. We've become entirely different
people with the same faces. Who are you now?
(06:00):
I think that's still a work in progress, probably like a very
messy Picasso, my facial and my moods all over the place.
I'm, I'm, I'm much, much stronger than I I was.
I mean, for months I was just total basket case and and I
(06:22):
mean, you knew me in the before and the sort of, I guess idea of
seeing this person that you knewuncapable of pulling herself up
from the bathroom floor, just retreating.
I gave up everything that gave me pleasure.
I I couldn't write. I couldn't, I could not read.
(06:45):
I couldn't listen to music because everything around you
was a trigger. There was just going into a
supermarket scene, the things I used to buy for her, you know,
I, I had to like, run out of thesupermarket turning my car on
(07:06):
and my car asking, do I want to connect to Miranda's iPhone?
You know, a stupid Facebook memory popping up and saying
remember where you were in 2018.Like passing her bedroom, you
know, coming across a pair of her shoes.
It, it, it's endless. And that's just not even the
role she played with in our family and the personalities
(07:30):
that we were with her and our personality or culture as a
family with her in it. I am so grateful that you wrote
this book and I want to be clearthat what this book is and what
this book isn't. You say this book is not a self
help book? Yeah.
(07:51):
This book you write is to quote,express pain and to make sense
of the senseless. And so many people are
devastated with shocking deaths,but so few who are devastated
with shocking deaths can imaginethe death of a child.
And I felt lost as a as a friendabout how to relate to someone I
(08:15):
knew who had a meteor hit their house.
Right who? Who had to tread along a path
that I wouldn't wish on my worstenemy.
And what your book did was give me some kind of peek into that
which you have experienced in the last two years, and
(08:39):
something to be able to attach my empathy too, even though
there's no way one could imaginehaving to endure what you and
your husband David have have endured for the last two years.
You know, sometimes people in our situation get resentful or
(08:59):
begrudge the fact that people can't imagine it or don't
understand the depths. And then I even begrudge they
just feel not understood, not seen.
And to what you're saying, I would just say, well, how could
you imagine it? Why would I expect you to
imagine it? And that was part of the book
(09:20):
was trying to describe it because a lot of the response
that well, David wrote this beautiful article for The
Atlantic at just after Miranda died.
About Miranda's dog. Ringo.
Ringo, who's a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel not unlike Lulu,
who's with you here? Yes, she's my now complete
(09:40):
support animal as Ringo was for Miranda.
Miranda adopted him as a little dog and he ended up going with
her through all her treatment atStanford.
He was Stanford was amazing. He they even let him in the, you
know, in, in, in. The recovery.
Room in the recovery room and but no, but I, I was just saying
(10:03):
that you can't imagine it. You don't want to imagine it,
but the oh, but the response to David's article was not just
this outpouring of people who were in a similar situation, but
it also spoke about their loneliness because so few people
can understand their pain. And then like other forms of
(10:25):
grief, they expect that person to get over their pain.
I mean, you know, there's these myths of the five stages of
grief. And, and, you know, shouldn't
you be at acceptance now? And, and the, the person who's
lost this child just learns to go quiet because they, they
can't express what they're really going through and, and
(10:49):
people understandably move on intheir lives.
So I was writing this book very much for myself because as a
writer and a actually mostly as a reporter, I felt like I needed
to write about what was happening to me, as if like a
foreign correspondent from this world that I had suddenly
(11:11):
entered. And the nice response I've been
receiving is from like other mothers who have said, thank
you. Thank you for articulating what
I haven't been able to articulate well.
That's the part I'm so grateful for, because you've been able to
articulate something maybe that other mothers in your position
haven't been able to articulate.But also very few people go
(11:32):
through the mental exercise of what if my child died, how would
I deal with the. Most.
Crippling and worse grief possible right?
But so so since since 1 doesn't have that butt external or even
having a sense of anyway. So that's, look, you say this
wasn't a self help book, but it helps me.
You write that one of your firstshocks was quote, to discover
(11:53):
how crowded this alternative universe is.
People I'd known for decades turned out to be fellow
citizens, their passports hiddenuntil I got mine.
Right. People came out of the woodwork.
Yeah. Well, aside from the community
that you just suddenly find your, you know, people say, oh,
my great aunt lost her child, maybe you'd want to talk to her
(12:16):
about it. So, you know, immediate
connections start happening. And actually, yes, you do want
to talk to those people. But what was strange to me was
people I'd known 20 years never,never knew that they had had
some equivalent type of tragedy in their lives.
Like I, I went to this hairdresser actually recommended
(12:36):
by Miranda and I went to him for, I don't know, 15 years.
And after Miranda died, he, he told me that he was from
Lebanon. And he told me he had watched
his father and older brother getshot point blank.
And it's like what this, this hairdresser, I've been sitting
(12:59):
in this chair for so long. Other people would just say,
yeah, when I lost my sister 15 years ago.
So they suddenly, I guess, felt much freer because now you
understood you had been deportedto the alternative universe with
them, and they could talk about it with you in ways that you
(13:20):
both found helpful to each other.
But why, You know, why would this hairdresser or these people
tell me if I hadn't been transported there?
Like, what am I going to say or do?
Like I just expressed sympathy and horror and oh, I'm so sorry,
but you, you don't it, it's not a, it becomes a deep and
(13:42):
precious fact that you over time, you just keep.
It's also kind of a nuclear bombto land on someone.
I, I, I get into these conversations very, the informal
conversations are the worst because you meet someone.
Maybe you haven't seen them for a long time.
It's another mother. And they say, oh, how are you
doing? How's Miranda or how many
(14:05):
children do you have? And they're the most natural
conversations in the world. You had them all the time.
And suddenly it's like you're stepping on hot coals and you're
waiting. You're trying to dodge the
conversation away before. Sometimes you just have to blurt
out, well, actually, Miranda died.
(14:27):
And then, and then you feel bad,like you feel bad for them
because it's such a shocking thing and they don't know what
to do with it. And it's like hurling A grenade,
you know, in an otherwise pleasant, meaningless kind of
conversation. What is your?
Advice then, to people in that circumstance, the.
On the receiving end. On the receiving.
(14:48):
End Who learned Who learned thatyou experienced a nuclear
annihilation? I and I, I think this is common
because when I talk about it with other mothers, it's, it's
like, you know, if you, if you have an accident and suddenly
your leg doesn't work or you lose your eyesight or your
hearing and you develop little ticks and ways of coping.
(15:12):
So when these conversations comeup, you get very, very good at
dodging that. And then, you know, people are
very decent, like, like, but it's it's funny, you do feel
sorry for them having to hear this without any preparation,
(15:33):
you know, or coping like coming out of the blue.
What is? Your advice now, two years into
this new life, to friends or other adults who want to try to
comfort parents of a lost child.Yeah, I, I did a, a kind of
(15:54):
taxonomy in the book of the different types of people or
reactions that you would get amongst friends.
And I I, I wasn't doing this to be, you know, cruel or angry,
but, you know, just sort of examples of things that are
telling things are. And and there are kind of types
like people I began to call grief splainers who would come
(16:18):
up to you and they would tell you, yes, you know, when I lost
my cat, I, you know, like, like are just telling you you're
going to get over this, Danielle, you'll be fine.
You just have to get through it.You hear that so many times.
And then they'll be others who just are so not able to talk
(16:39):
about it with you. I described it like imagine
count. Myself as one of those no.
Well, imagine going to a gathering, you know, cocktail
party, anything parents meeting and, and everybody knows you
have this blood spreading over your shirt and, and they're
looking at you in the eye and they're not mentioning anything.
(17:02):
They said they're talking about their recent vacation.
They don't go near the topic like they because it's just, I
think for some people it's just too much.
The most helpful people, especially in the aftermath, my
feeling was you should always lean into the grief and not a
way that people have a very generous impulse to want to
(17:22):
comfort you, to want to help youor make you feel better, even if
they. Say the wrong things.
Oh. Yeah, like I, I don't blame
people for saying the wrong things because, you know, they
don't know. But I think in general, and this
is true when I've dealt with friends who've you lost parents
or something a little more, you know, natural that they they
(17:45):
want to give you hope and that'sthis is all a very nice thing.
But in fact, what you want are people to lean into the suck
just like this is how much this.Sucks.
Horrible, even if they can't. Imagine how awful it is.
Yeah, no, I mean, you say I can't imagine you're going like
great, I'm glad you can't because it sucks.
(18:09):
So it's it's more helpful and just to take your hand and you
wrote me this beautiful note telling me Miranda stories.
And that's the other thing people are can be afraid to talk
to you about the child or the the the dead person balm.
To hear stories of Miranda I heard.
(18:30):
It it, it was the best thing. And just because often you hear
stories you didn't even know things that were funny or
shocking or knowing Miranda But but just it just it keeps that's
the thing that keeps them alive is talking about them,
(18:51):
remembering them as they were not trying to deify them.
Like I think an impulse to, you know, don't speak I'll of the
dead is a good rule, but you want to remember them for all
their all the. Parts all.
The parts, all the quirky behaviors and funny things that
happen and and you know, as you know, Miranda went through a
(19:15):
period of teenage rebellion thatthat had my hair standing on end
24 hours. But then when we would talk
about it, like one time I tracked her down to a bar and
she was of course underage and she was sitting there with a
friend and she couldn't believe.I mean, this was before iPhones
(19:36):
and locations and I figured out where she was.
I. Remember this?
I swept in and and she just looked startled and I said,
Miranda, you're coming with me. I turned to the waiter.
This girl is underage and you could be fined for that.
And I threw a 20 on the table and I pulled her out.
And then after that, she was so angry with me, she called me the
(19:58):
CIAI remember. But then five years later, we
were laughing hysterically aboutit, you know, and she was
saying, I couldn't believe you found me Mom.
That was that was pretty impressive.
Well, there's. Something about motherhood that
also provides a sonar for your children.
You can find them anywhere. Look Miranda, I do want to just
spend a moment on Miranda. Miranda was a one off as your
(20:19):
stepfather Pete said. She was a total original.
When I met her at the age of when she was 17, I was 13 years
her senior or or double her age.Let's say I was.
My 17 year old self was intimidated by the 17 year old.
I mean, she was and even became in her adulthood as strikingly
(20:43):
physically beautiful, with a mind and a heart even more so.
And she, she really wasn't original.
I mean, she was witty and she was kind and she was a leader
and she was an adventurer and she was fearless and careful and
courageous and I, it's like she had all the brains of both you
(21:07):
and David together and then added to that all of your charm
and charisma. Well, she was very like her
father. She was, she was, she was
brilliant. She was she was one of one of
her friends said that he had never met in real life a person
who was so casually witty. You know, they like, as in a
Thackery novel, that she was just the thing she would come
(21:30):
out with were so searing and funny and perfect and.
True and. True, like she just got right to
the heart of it and and and she and her father shared that kind
of observational humor. But she also but she was not
academic. She read voraciously.
But you know, part of the issuesthrough adolescence was she just
(21:53):
had, if she didn't wasn't interested in math, why should
she study it? So this we're always, you know,
she said. She had a contentious
relationship with authority fromthe time she was in preschool.
Yeah, it's. Like a a regal indifference to
authority when she like when shewas in preschool.
If it was, you know, we're put, OK, put away the costumes.
We're going to do drawing. Miranda.
(22:14):
We just keep going with the costumes.
Not rebellious, not rude, but just, you know, she was going to
do what she was going to do. And that was true throughout her
her life. And she left.
She didn't want to go to university.
She lasted A semester before going and becoming a booking
(22:36):
person for a television network.And she loved.
She just wanted to be in the world and.
Be in the real world. She wanted to.
Be in the world. And I was like that, too.
I didn't go to college. I wanted to work in The
Newsroom. And she shared that, Yeah.
What you ultimately discovered is that as a result of the
devastating brain surgery that ultimately saved her life, at
(22:57):
least for those intervening fiveyears, 1 result of it was that
her pituitary gland was entirelycompromised and had to be
removed during the surgery. You.
You can replace the functions pituitary gland, but with
everything there are side effects, weight gain and
bloating and mood. And so I knew she was playing a
little with her doses and I actually got her to my
(23:19):
endocrinologist just to make sure that everything was OK, but
because the. Wrong amount of cortisol is
deadly, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Nobody told her that, and nobodysaid the surgeon.
Said go live your life the. Surgeon well, surgeons are
famously breezy, you know their job is done.
I think of them like car mechanics, cars picks goodbye.
(23:41):
And he said yes, you'll go on and live your life You'll you'll
be able to have children. Don't worry about it and.
Yet somehow the dosing was off enough that she couldn't tell
until it was way too late. She.
Thought she had a bad cold, which is how it can present.
And I knew she was weak and I was very worried about how pale
(24:01):
she looked and I told her so. But she's 32.
She's a grown woman and I knew she was she.
I mean, she wasn't planning to play with fire, but yeah, none
of her doctors with whom she checked in regularly said, oh,
by the way, if you get this cortisol wrong thing, you could
drop that. And that's what I later
(24:24):
exploring through the medical examiner and things that that
seems to have been the likely 'cause.
You spoke to Miranda frequently through the project of writing
the book. You say you say.
You talk to her in your in your mind.
What did she say? Well, what is interesting is
there are times I've had conversations where I'm saying,
(24:45):
OK, what would she say to this? And then there are other times
when her her voices just landed in my head like a like a
lightning bolt and that happened.
And again, talk to other mothersand they, they and people have
lost other people. That one of the things, one of
(25:07):
the very difficult and endless tasks that you have to do in
this situation, that each one islike a circle of hell that you
are entering. This one was going to her
apartment right after she died, or as soon as we could.
We had to get a court order to get in.
It was really ridiculously bureaucratic.
And her younger sister, Bea camewith me.
(25:29):
We were living in DC. We came up to Brooklyn and we
just absolutely dreading becausewe didn't know what we're going
to find. You know, I was worried there
was just like, rotting garbage on top of it, you know?
And so the morning I woke up, I just suddenly felt this huge
sense of calm come over me. And I heard her voice say, you
(25:53):
got this, mom. And I felt it and I did have it,
you know, And then B and I. And B was just so
extraordinarily brave about this.
And we did it. And but then they went into.
Her apartment we went into. Her apartment cleaned.
(26:13):
It up, yeah, her body had already been removed, but you
hadn't had a chance to clean up the apartment since her.
Her. I know and and I saw that she
had been so it would be two daysafter the last time I spoke to
her. She's going to this very
glamorous event before Valentine's Day.
And she texted me this image of her in this beautiful dress.
(26:34):
And when I walked into when we walked into the apartment, you
could see like it was a very glamorous scene.
Like they were beautiful shoes kicked off.
There was a coat heaped, elegantcoat heaped on the sofa and and
then her beautiful dress on the floor, which was not like her.
(26:54):
So it just meant she was much weaker than she was letting on.
But yes, to just have to go in and confront that scene and tidy
it up. It was it was really, really
obviously hard. And then, you know, and, and,
and these things, you just thesecircles of hell, you have to
keep going back because then youhave to go back and sell the
(27:17):
apartment. You have to sell her things.
You have to decide what to give away and what to keep.
And each object is wrenching. Yeah.
We've we've talked about grief, you have read all the great
books on grief and I think you're as well join the Canon of
of some of the best. But you found very few authors
(27:42):
who were truthful about some of the darkest parts that you had
to endure. You've said, quote, I couldn't
imagine the physical pain of grief.
I woke up every morning and it felt like an ice pick was being
hammered into my chest. You wrote that you felt
suicidal. You wouldn't find yourself
(28:04):
curled up moaning. You said I suddenly understood
suicide from the inside. And you wrote that books about
grief don't address the physicalpain and how severely one wants
to just be relieved of it. Why is your book the first to
(28:25):
deal with how devastating the feelings of grief and how common
the feelings of suicidal thoughts are?
Well, I think I, and I don't want to say categorically such
books don't exist. And I know especially as as one
moves along, people start saying, oh, here's a very moving
(28:46):
book about this person who lost their child or whatever.
I again wanted to approach mine as a reporter.
And the one book that I found very helpful was by CS Lewis
classic The Grief Observed. And he and I found that early
on. And he wrote, he was of course,
(29:07):
the author of the Narnia series.He was also a journalist.
His wife died prematurely from cancer.
And he wrote like what it was like and kind of a pre Joan
Didion, that sense of the surrealism of it.
(29:29):
The the coffee cup left out thatis no longer going to be drunk
from going into his club and having people look at him
strangely like. And I thought that was super
helpful to me. That really got to the heart of
it. And so that's what I tried to do
with this because a lot of the grief books, they are focused on
(29:51):
healing. And, you know, Kubler Ross's
five stages of grief as my son cracked, you know, no one ever
tells them you can have them allat once, you know, and that and
it's and it's going to be tidy. And but the pain was so
overwhelming. And it was pain.
(30:11):
I mean, unless I wanted to overdose or put myself into a
kind of, you know, Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, like drug haze
all the time drink myself to death like my my grandmother did
when she lost her son and for eldest in war World War 2, she
(30:34):
sat in a corner and drank and was dead within five years.
There was nothing I could take to stop this pain.
And so I would be flipping through these grief books, you
know, OK, when, when, when is this pain going to stop?
Never. Oh, I'll get to healing.
(30:54):
When is that? And I just I, I, I, it was so
unhelpful. So I thought, OK, well, I better
get therapy. Maybe therapy will help and then
that alone was its own DC and journey of finding help for
this. You found it enormously
difficult to identify somebody go to help you.
People. Weren't available.
(31:14):
They told you to come back in 18months.
Oh, my gosh, yeah. I mean, you have a horrible
story, So. And you really do catalog this
like a reporter. Ultimately you found a PTSD
therapy, a post traumatic stresstherapy called EMDR, which
stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and
Reprocessing. I'm glad.
You said that because people saywhat does that stand for?
(31:37):
And unless I have it written outin front of me, I can't.
I can't pronounce it this. Has been used successfully with
returning returning soldiers from war.
This is a a serious PTSD treatment that you found helpful
to you, yes. Well, as you say, I think we
associate PTSD mainly with that classic image of somebody who's
(32:02):
fought in war, is found to Iraq.They're walking along the
street, a car backfires, and suddenly they're back in the war
and freaking out. And so in the late 80s, a
therapist theorized that traumatic memories aren't
processed like other memories. In fact, they stay kind of ever
(32:24):
present, unfilable. And so when you're triggered by
something, the whole thing is suddenly very real again.
It, it, it's as if it's happening all over again.
And so she, the, the first method they came up with was to
was a little dot. That's the I thing.
(32:44):
And you'd watch the dot. And she believed that the two
sides of the brain that should be filing the memories like
other memories you would repeat,you would go through in as
graphic detail as you could. What was it like when you walked
into Miranda's room? What was it like when you saw
(33:05):
her in the Funeral Home? Like so many different traumatic
moments in this. And you would I would be
talking. In my case, they use now hand
buzzers and they buzz back and forth and as you talk through it
and through it with the buzzing it the IT allowed.
(33:25):
And now they've proven this through Mris just very recently
in the past few years on Mris, it shows people suffering
traumatic memories and the brainthat go like the parts of the
brain that normally process the memories start lighting up and
acting wacky. And then when they did the, the
EMDR, the brain was able to settle and file it, you know, as
(33:49):
it would other memories. And what was strange was you go
through this and of course it can be very emotional.
But then you come out, you're, you're quite exhausted.
And what suddenly it's like an exorcism.
It's OK, I'm not obsessing aboutthat piece anymore.
(34:12):
So something got tucked away. But then of course with
something like this, it's not like a one time incident.
It's a it's. Over and over and over.
It's over. And over and everywhere.
So I mean I still, I am still doing it weekly.
And you still find it helpful I.Still find it helpful because,
you know, anniversaries come up sometimes and and and grief has
(34:36):
no well rhythm. It can just, it, it, it can just
attack you, you know, you can think I'm doing great.
And then a Facebook memory pops up in your to your.
Point, I mean, you wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently
that you know the the digital about the digital haunting that
you have faced since Miranda died.
The the emails and texts from her remain in your phone.
(34:59):
Every time you get in your car, it asks if you want to connect
to Miranda's iPhone. You write about the the irony
that Facebook won't give you access to her accounts but will
continue to bombard you with photos of the two of you
together. You and your husband have gone
to get court orders to get into her phone and her emails and her
social media accounts and you have been blocked.
(35:22):
Yeah, no, it's it's the craziestthing.
Like our our digital lives outlast our physical ones.
If we had known Miranda's password, all of this would have
been moved. We tried, believe me.
Many combos of Ringo her her prompt was roommate and best
(35:43):
friend so so we just tried hundreds and hundreds and and I
asked her friends. I of course asked her siblings.
Nobody knew you were locked. Out after three anyway, aren't
you? No, no.
Weirdly on getting into the computer, no.
Yeah, OK, but on other accounts,yeah, yeah.
And then of course her, you knowit.
It was in case of then they sendthe security notifications that
(36:04):
you can't access. But so we finally went and got
Apple requires its own speciallyworded court order.
Google require requires another yeah, Facebook everything.
And we finally got it took months and it's painful.
(36:25):
Like, you know, of all the things you're doing, you're just
trying to access your child's photos.
You're not trying to Snoop or hack her account, you know, and
finally we got Apple would release only the headers of her
emails and her photos, nothing else.
Google and and her phone companywould absolutely refuse to open
(36:48):
her phone and unlock her phone is.
There a policy fix here? I mean have you thought like I
just think you know we I go intoa DMV and I tell them I want to
donate my organs if I die. Couldn't Facebook just ask me?
I want to give my parents my photos if I die, Right?
You just have a series of security preferences for the
extraordinary set of circumstances that none of us
(37:10):
plan for. Yeah.
I, I, I don't know. I mean, you know, you've read
cases where a person's been murdered and Apple won't unlock
their phone, right? Because that is an invasion of
privacy in order to. Solve the.
Crime. OK, there's got to be a way to
deal with this on the front end.To prevent.
The continued suffering of a parent I would.
(37:30):
Just tell everybody, and no matter how old you are,
teenagers as well, keep your password somewhere and just, you
don't have to just let your parents or anybody know where it
is. But but yeah, not knowing I've,
I've now written down on my passwords.
David's written down that they're in a file, but it is, it
is a, it is a terrible nightmare.
And and then the other thing is like I could switch some of the
(37:53):
things I could control, like I could switch off my, I could
disconnect Miranda's phone from my car, but then that's an
actual conscious act and then. You're choosing to move on.
Yeah, and I don't want to. You don't want.
To yeah, I don't want your daughter.
I don't want. To lose that.
And now when she pops up, she sometimes pops up at very
opportune moments. And now I just sort of say, hi,
(38:15):
Miranda, good to see you. But I, I don't want to go
through the I don't want to cut her phone number is still in my
list of favourites. Am I going to delete that?
So you're put in these also weird quandaries that you
wouldn't have been when you lived in an age where everything
was like photos in boxes, you know, papers were in files.
(38:39):
You coined a term that I hadn't heard of before, but I knew
exactly what it was when I when I read it.
You write about all your frustrating and you've
referenced it in this interview somewhere.
You write about your frustratingencounters with the bureaucracy
of death. The second I read that, I knew
exactly what you meant. Anybody who has had to navigate
the process of closing up somebody's estate, delivering
(39:01):
death certificates to all the requisite places, kind of has a
sense of what you mean by the bureaucracy of death, right?
David, God bless him, took over all the all of the sort of legal
estate matters. Miranda was clever enough to
have left a will, because that also could have been a
nightmare. Not that she had so much
(39:21):
property, but it at least at least gave us control over what
property she had. Because then that would have
been another fight. But I was I was the one like
like when they because we didn'tget to Brooklyn quick enough.
So she died. She was found at 9:00 AM that
morning. We got the call maybe before 10.
(39:44):
We just started packing our bags, got on the earliest flight
we could. And the cop said, well, if
you're not here by X amount of time, we'll have to seal the
apartment. And I'm like, I don't know what
that means, but OK. But we're going to we're going
to get there. And by the time we get there, of
course, they've gone. And there's this sticker on her
(40:05):
apartment door. Do not enter, you know, and and
that was OK now to enter our daughter's apartment.
Was. A crime we.
Yeah, it was a crime and we had to get and that's what B and I
ended up having to wait a month because we had to get a court
order to enter are. There inanities in the
bureaucracy of death that are easily fixable.
(40:25):
Is this just something that we're all stuck with?
Yeah, I think so. I think the main thing is that
in you as an individual can makea lot of things easier.
Have a wealth in advance, have awill, have instructions, have
passwords. A lot of people you know, don't
want to think about their ends and so they kind of avoid doing
(40:50):
all of that. But it's it's so important to
the people you leave behind over.
The course of the original Firing Line, William F Buckley
Junior had several conversationswith Malcolm Muggeridge, the
British author, who of course began in in life as a young left
wing atheist and over time foundreligion.
(41:11):
And he appeared on the original Firing Line in several episodes
about religion, about faith, andabout death.
One of those discussions in 1980, he made an observation
about suffering that I'd love toget your action to take a look.
You know it's an old man, Bill. Looking back on one's life, it's
(41:32):
one of the things that strikes you most forcibly, that the only
thing that's taught one anythingis suffering.
Not success, not happiness. Not only like that.
The only thing that really teaches what my life's about the
joy of understanding, the joy ofcoming in contact with what it
rarely signifies is suffering isaffliction.
(41:53):
I. Think the point he's making
about grief here isn't that it'sa gift, but that somehow
suffering teaches us in some way.
Yeah. So I wrote about these.
Yeah, I called them happiness hucksters.
You see them on Ted Talks. And it is insane how many
people, and especially people inthis line of business will come
(42:16):
to you and say, you know, the worst thing that has ever
happened to you. You can be cut.
You can grow from that. This is a, this is an
opportunity for personal growth and fun that way, like is, is,
if you know, you're lucky your daughter died.
You know, what a gift to you to have this tragedy.
And, and you know, these people,nothing has ever happened to
(42:38):
them like this. Like they like maybe they got
fired from a job or a company failed.
And you know, we can all learn from our corporate failures.
That's how we grow. But then they apply it to
everything. And I, I, I know what Malcolm
and by the way, we were great, great friends, David and I with
his son and his wife and Roche Mudgridge, who was the one who
(42:59):
got Malcolm into Christianity. She was so but anyway and away
from communism and. Left wing politics.
Yeah. Yeah, she was she.
Had she had a really profound effect on his religion?
She I loved her. She was like a firecracker.
But, but no. But do we learn from suffering?
And as I wrote, like you know, have I joined the great chain of
(43:22):
humanity that that has been taught something by your
suffering? Suffering, you know.
Yes. Am IA more empathetic person?
Yes. I mean, there are changes in me
that have come from this and youknow, taking many fewer things
for granted. And also, I find if there's a
(43:44):
gift, it's the gift I've gotten from embodying Miranda.
And it's funny when some, when someone dies, I think part of
you wants part of the way you remember them and keep them with
you is to do the things that they would have done.
So, you know, I'm way, I'm way less impatient.
(44:09):
If somebody's having a hard day,I don't start, you know,
becoming a Karen in a supermarket line maybe once was
my impulse. I and and just, yeah, just that
sense all around you that peopleare having a hard time.
(44:29):
And and I, and also David and I call the night before Miranda
died, our last happy night. And it just so happened we'd
gone out to dinner post Valentine's Day because he was
away on Valentine's Day. So he took me out the next night
for a lovely dinner. And we were just, it was just
such a perfect moment. In our lives too, because.
(44:52):
Children were all kind of grown up.
They were settled. We were making plans, you know,
looking forward to maybe doing some travelling and just sort of
reorganizing our life post, you know, as the so-called empty
nesters. And then this happened the next
day and and we just look back onthat and think we will never be
(45:15):
that unequivocally happy. Like even the most joyous things
will be accompanied by this sense of loss and sadness.
And and that, you know, that does make you, I think, a bigger
and better person. But, you know, as a gift, I
would happily return it. It's a non returnable gift.
(45:39):
How has your? Experience with grief changed
through the course of writing this book.
It or has it? No, no.
People ask if it's cathartic andlike, like by somehow writing
this, I guess, I guess what theymean is have I been able to let
(45:59):
go? Have I healed?
Have I gotten through it? Has it been useful?
And so has the. Exercise been useful?
Has the exercise been useful? And I think it's what has been
gratifying to me is to the degree it's been useful, is the
reaction I've gotten from other grieving parents.
(46:19):
What it did do for me that was beneficial, I felt as long as I
was writing it, I was close to Miranda and make oddly doing
things like making her grave a garden, like putting planning
and thought into her gravesite so that it wasn't just a
(46:42):
headstone and a line of headstones, but it we had, we
created little benches and flower wildflowers.
So when I go to visit her, I canvisit her.
I can sit there and and talk to her and feel like I'm with her.
And as long I think as a mother,as long as I'm feeling I'm doing
something for her, I'm still hermother.
(47:05):
And the minute I stopped doing things for her, she's really,
really gone. And so even doing like a book
tour for this book and promotingthis book, which I've had
enormous trepidation about, although I did say to my
therapist, it is kind of like EMDR where you're repeating the
(47:27):
same fact over and over and overagain.
Maybe it will make me feel better.
I don't know. But it's a weird thing to
promote. It's, it's not a book I ever,
ever of course wanted to write, but I find it's given me, I, I
find like Miranda has been very much with me through this
process, like in a, in a more pronounced way than usual.
(47:49):
And that just as when David wrote that article for The
Atlantic, that was the first thing he could write returning
the, you know, crazy election of2024.
This was I, I mean, I haven't been able to write anything.
I haven't really cared about anything.
You have a a well. Read sub stack that you just
(48:11):
said goodbye to just just stopped.
And so I feel, I feel her pulling me back into life.
I feel by writing this and by talking about it and by getting
this really heartwarming reaction, she is bringing you
back. She's.
Bringing me back and. And I know that's what she would
(48:34):
want. I know.
That's what I know. That's what she would want to.
Almost 25 years ago, you wrote abook that was entitled What Our
Mothers Didn't Tell Us. And I wonder, as you reflect now
on motherhood, what do you know about motherhood now that you
didn't know that well? The point of that book?
(48:57):
It was written at a time sort ofjust post feminism, what do they
call it, second wave feminism, where we younger women very
ungratefully took for granted all the gains you had and.
No. The second wave and and and and
very. You know, kind of disbelief
(49:17):
that, you know, the Mad Men world existed and but but in
part. But it wasn't so much I was
taking issue with the gains. Not at all.
It was this idea that women weregoing to be much more fulfilled
by their careers than by motherhood.
Or marriage. Or.
Anything in their personal life.And I felt that was a lie.
(49:40):
And I, my mother who had worked,she was a journalist, you know,
back in the 50s, she had us, hertwo children.
She waited till we were in school and then she went back to
work. But she was always really
grateful to my mom for this. And who is still with us, that
she was the one who said motherhood has been the greatest
(50:03):
experience of my life. That she, she did have a
divorce, but she remarried to a person who was like, she had a
phenomenal marriage and kinship with.
And so at least I got to witnesshow important love is and
motherhood. And that's what I started to
write about. And I started to write that book
after I'd had Miranda and realizing what we said earlier,
(50:27):
that having this child, this newbeing in your life didn't shrink
me. It, it, it brought me to another
dimension of humanity. And I realized until I'd had a
child, and I think this is true for fathers as well, but until I
had a child, there was a whole side of me that had been locked
(50:51):
up. And I just like the Grinch's
heart at the end of the the you know your.
Heart, His heart grew. 3 sizes that they like your heart grows
and you become responsible for this person and protective for
this person. And in the book I write about
(51:12):
talking to a friend of mine who didn't have children.
He's gay. He he was able to get married
finally to his long time partner, but they never children
was never sort of something theywanted to pursue.
So he was talking to me one night a few months after Miranda
died and sort of probably quite horrified by looking at this
(51:34):
person that he knew who I was being utterly miserable and
stricken. And he asked me, he said, well,
Danielle, was it worth it? And he didn't say that like
callously well, was it worth it?Like he was struggling with the
idea that I could have this amount of pain and because I was
(51:56):
saying I would, I would trade mylife in an instant.
I envy people who have terminal cancer but whose children would
live. I really envy those people.
You were also saying you would easily.
Happily go instead of Miranda. Yeah, like in a heartbeat.
And and and he said, but you know, would you would it have
been better not to? And, and I, I, I said, no, like
(52:21):
to have loved like that is something I would never end, let
alone to have known Miranda for 32 years.
And he started to tear up. And he said to me, I have never
known a love that would make me want to give my life for that
other person. And that's what motherhood,
(52:45):
parenthood is. But it comes with this horrific
price if it goes wrong at. 3:00 AM Nat, your son, Miranda's
brother, awakened on the other side of the continent.
Yeah, he was in LA He was in LosAngeles, deeply disturbed and
had no idea why. This was roughly, as the coroner
(53:07):
later estimated, Miranda's time of death.
Yeah, well, I think everybody. Who loses someone?
Anyone that you're close to. You.
You. First of all, you're always
looking for signs, but pretty much everyone I've spoken to has
some story that is inexplicable and and can't be just sort of
(53:28):
written up. So.
So as you say, when Miranda diedat 3:00 AM Eastern Time, her
brother sat up bolt upright at midnight in LA time, West Coast
time, with the most horrible sense of dread.
And, and that I've subsequently found that's quite common with
(53:51):
siblings and others. Like somebody will be on the
other side of the continent and just say something's wrong,
something's wrong. But with Miranda, So she was
when she was for the summer after she was buried, she was
buried in February in frozen Canadian earth.
And I went and was a very small cemetery at that point.
(54:13):
We hadn't planned anything yet. We hadn't planned her garden.
We're just in the process of doing it.
And I went to find her grave andI, I couldn't find it.
And it's a, it just meant a flatgrass, not too big, a cemetery.
And I'm looking and looking and suddenly I see this riot of
(54:36):
yellow tall flowers in the exactrectangle where she's been
buried and nowhere else, just inher rectangle.
And as I approached the grave, alittle Bunny hopped away and I
just started to laugh. I said, Miranda, really like,
like this geyser of gold, like, I'm going to stand out.
(54:59):
This place is lame. You know, I, you know,
aesthetically, I don't love this.
So I'm going to make my section nice and, and that happened
again. So we have this cottage in
Canada where we've spent every summer and the kids ran it every
summer. And it's, it's got, you know,
(55:21):
wildflowers growing around it, but we never have lilies.
And we, we get tiger lilies, which are fairly common, but we
never had white lilies. And that was her favorite
flower. And I was walking by our dock
one day. I walked the same path every
morning with our dogs. And I was passing by.
(55:42):
It was about a week before her birthday.
And pushing up through the boards of the dock was what I
realized was a white Lily. And I started to watch it every
day. And then on her birthday, it was
perfectly, you know, open and I so I cut it and I went to our
(56:05):
like garden expert and I said, can you explain this?
And he said, well, have you everhad a white Lily there before?
And I said no. And he had previously dismissed
my yellow flowers, which turned out to be wild mustard, which I
thought spicy like Miranda. He said, well, you know, there's
(56:25):
probably some mustard seed in the ground.
And it just got, you know, it just started to grow.
And I said, well, his name was Ben.
I said, Ben. It didn't grow anywhere else in
the cemetery. He goes, oh, yeah, you know, I'm
sure it was just in the earth. And so I said, OK.
And then I told him about the white Lily and, and he said, so
there's never been white Lily. I said, Ben, you know that there
are no white lilies on lilies properties.
(56:47):
Well, there were these wild tiger lilies, orange lilies.
And he and he just started to laugh and he just said, OK,
Danielle, there are some things that can't just be explained.
And I felt because Miranda knew how much I love to garden and
how much I love flowers. If she was if she were going to
communicate to me, that is how she would communicate.
And, and, and that that Lily hascome up every summer since.
(57:11):
Oh, really? Yeah.
That's not in the book. There's a a moving.
Moment at the end of the book when your husband watches you
nuzzle the knack of your first born grandchild, Abigail, and he
says welcome back to the land ofthe living.
Has the joy of a new life in your family helped?
(57:33):
For sure. I mean.
One of the poignant aspects of this is Nat, our son, moved back
to Brooklyn to be close to Miranda because Nat was married
and they had this fantasy that he would push the stroller to
clamorous Aunt Mandy. And she loved babies and
(57:54):
children. And she actually helped him find
the place that he and his wife, Isabelle moved into.
And so when the baby was born and it's, it's like I said, with
every joy now, there's a mixed sadness that I was holding her
and just of course, all the loveyou feel for a grandchild.
I was also thinking of the time when I first held my own first
(58:18):
born. And then I was also thinking
that Miranda wasn't there to experience it.
So everything's a mixed bag. It's yeah, I mean there's.
Unmitigated joy about the birth of Abigail and the future
relationship with Abigail and and B and I are very determined
(58:38):
in that that she will know her aunt Mandy yeah but there's also
attend and sadness with every new.
Joy. No.
Yeah. Yeah, there is.
Yeah. Danielle Crittenden, thank you
for joining me on Firing Line and thank you for joining me to
honor Miranda's memory in this episode.
Well, thank you for being such. A friend to her and a mentor and
(59:02):
I know how much she loved and admired you, so thank you for
that.
Am IA more empathetic person? Yes.
I mean there are changes in me that have come from this and
taking many fewer things for granted.
It does make you I think a bigger and better person.
But as a gift, I would happily return it.
That's Danielle Crittenden responding to those who insist
(00:22):
grief is a gift. I'm Margaret Hoover.
This is the Firing Line podcast.Two years ago, Miranda Frum died
suddenly at age 32. One of her friends said he had
never met in real life a person who was so casually witty as in
(00:43):
a Thackery novel. I had known Miranda and her
parents, the writers David Frum and Danielle Crittenden, for
years, and Miranda was a Firing Line team member when this
program launched on PBS. There you are in your home and
your life as you know it, and a meteorite hits your house and
all that's left is a smoking ruin.
(01:04):
Danielle's new book, Dispatches from Grief, reports from the
front lines of grief. I felt like I needed to write
about what was happening to me, like a foreign correspondent
from this world that I had suddenly entered.
She offers hard won insight intohow loss reshapes life.
Even the most joyous things willbe accompanied by this sentence.
(01:24):
Sense of loss and sadness. And how to show up for those
living through the unthinkable. My feeling was you should always
lean into the grief, and not a way that people have a very
generous impulse to want to comfort you, but in fact what
you want are people to lean intothe suck.
(01:46):
Danielle Crittenden, welcome to Firing LINE.
So lovely to be with you, Margaret.
You wrote Dispatches from Grief,a mother's journey through the
unthinkable in the aftermath of your 32 year old adult
daughter's death. I first met your daughter
(02:07):
Miranda in 2008, when she was 16or 17 years old. 17.
Right. And I met her through you and
your husband, David Frum, who I have known for many years.
Miranda, she became a friend of mine and she was a founding
member of our team here at Firing Line.
(02:29):
That's right. And helped me launch this
program from 2018 to 2019 in ourfirst few seasons.
Miranda left Firing Line to haveserious treatment on a benign
but very rare brain tumor. Right.
In February of 2024, Miranda wasplanning a party to mark the
(02:53):
five year anniversary of her surviving her brain tumor. 2
days after Valentine's Day in 2024, you received the phone
call that every parent treads. Miranda had been found not
breathing on her floor of her apartment by her cleaning lady.
Her friend had called the policeand a medical examiner had fixed
(03:16):
her time of death at 3:00 AM. In your book you write about the
difference between knowing griefand needing grief.
You lost a parent previously, but losing it out child is
another order of magnitude. You write that it thrust you
(03:39):
into an alternative universe. What was the difference?
Well, as I say in the book, there you are in your home and
your life as you know it. And you get up in the morning
and you have coffee and you get up and you go to work and a
meteorite hits your house and all that's left is a smoking
(04:02):
ruin. That everything that was
familiar the day before is gone.And when I talked about other
types of grief, they were parental.
David's mother died prematurely at 54 after struggling for 19
years with leukemia. But when you grow up as a child,
(04:24):
you know at some point you're probably going to outlive your
parent. So unless they die suddenly and
tragically in some way, it's kind of in the natural order of
things. When your child precedes you,
just as you know, you not going to know what it's going to be
like to be a mother. Until you are.
(04:46):
And, and until you are and people look at all the negatives
of having children and then you have a child and you're like, Oh
my gosh, this is so incredible. And I could I never knew this
kind of love could exist. So it is when a child dies,
it's, it's nuclear. And I did the, the grief that I
(05:13):
felt was of such overwhelming pain and inescapability.
It wasn't just emotional pain. It was a, it was a physical
pain. It was a my heart exploding for
days and days and days and the thought that my brain did not
(05:38):
want to accept that Miranda was gone.
She was no longer on the end of my phone.
She was. She was not there.
You're right, Quote the person you were died with your child.
There is no healing. We've become entirely different
people with the same faces. Who are you now?
(06:00):
I think that's still a work in progress, probably like a very
messy Picasso, my facial and my moods all over the place.
I'm, I'm, I'm much, much stronger than I I was.
I mean, for months I was just total basket case and and I
(06:22):
mean, you knew me in the before and the sort of, I guess idea of
seeing this person that you knewuncapable of pulling herself up
from the bathroom floor, just retreating.
I gave up everything that gave me pleasure.
I I couldn't write. I couldn't, I could not read.
(06:45):
I couldn't listen to music because everything around you
was a trigger. There was just going into a
supermarket scene, the things I used to buy for her, you know,
I, I had to like, run out of thesupermarket turning my car on
(07:06):
and my car asking, do I want to connect to Miranda's iPhone?
You know, a stupid Facebook memory popping up and saying
remember where you were in 2018.Like passing her bedroom, you
know, coming across a pair of her shoes.
It, it, it's endless. And that's just not even the
role she played with in our family and the personalities
(07:30):
that we were with her and our personality or culture as a
family with her in it. I am so grateful that you wrote
this book and I want to be clearthat what this book is and what
this book isn't. You say this book is not a self
help book? Yeah.
(07:51):
This book you write is to quote,express pain and to make sense
of the senseless. And so many people are
devastated with shocking deaths,but so few who are devastated
with shocking deaths can imaginethe death of a child.
And I felt lost as a as a friendabout how to relate to someone I
(08:15):
knew who had a meteor hit their house.
Right who? Who had to tread along a path
that I wouldn't wish on my worstenemy.
And what your book did was give me some kind of peek into that
which you have experienced in the last two years, and
(08:39):
something to be able to attach my empathy too, even though
there's no way one could imaginehaving to endure what you and
your husband David have have endured for the last two years.
You know, sometimes people in our situation get resentful or
(08:59):
begrudge the fact that people can't imagine it or don't
understand the depths. And then I even begrudge they
just feel not understood, not seen.
And to what you're saying, I would just say, well, how could
you imagine it? Why would I expect you to
imagine it? And that was part of the book
(09:20):
was trying to describe it because a lot of the response
that well, David wrote this beautiful article for The
Atlantic at just after Miranda died.
About Miranda's dog. Ringo.
Ringo, who's a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel not unlike Lulu,
who's with you here? Yes, she's my now complete
(09:40):
support animal as Ringo was for Miranda.
Miranda adopted him as a little dog and he ended up going with
her through all her treatment atStanford.
He was Stanford was amazing. He they even let him in the, you
know, in, in, in. The recovery.
Room in the recovery room and but no, but I, I was just saying
(10:03):
that you can't imagine it. You don't want to imagine it,
but the oh, but the response to David's article was not just
this outpouring of people who were in a similar situation, but
it also spoke about their loneliness because so few people
can understand their pain. And then like other forms of
(10:25):
grief, they expect that person to get over their pain.
I mean, you know, there's these myths of the five stages of
grief. And, and, you know, shouldn't
you be at acceptance now? And, and the, the person who's
lost this child just learns to go quiet because they, they
can't express what they're really going through and, and
(10:49):
people understandably move on intheir lives.
So I was writing this book very much for myself because as a
writer and a actually mostly as a reporter, I felt like I needed
to write about what was happening to me, as if like a
foreign correspondent from this world that I had suddenly
(11:11):
entered. And the nice response I've been
receiving is from like other mothers who have said, thank
you. Thank you for articulating what
I haven't been able to articulate well.
That's the part I'm so grateful for, because you've been able to
articulate something maybe that other mothers in your position
haven't been able to articulate.But also very few people go
(11:32):
through the mental exercise of what if my child died, how would
I deal with the. Most.
Crippling and worse grief possible right?
But so so since since 1 doesn't have that butt external or even
having a sense of anyway. So that's, look, you say this
wasn't a self help book, but it helps me.
You write that one of your firstshocks was quote, to discover
(11:53):
how crowded this alternative universe is.
People I'd known for decades turned out to be fellow
citizens, their passports hiddenuntil I got mine.
Right. People came out of the woodwork.
Yeah. Well, aside from the community
that you just suddenly find your, you know, people say, oh,
my great aunt lost her child, maybe you'd want to talk to her
(12:16):
about it. So, you know, immediate
connections start happening. And actually, yes, you do want
to talk to those people. But what was strange to me was
people I'd known 20 years never,never knew that they had had
some equivalent type of tragedy in their lives.
Like I, I went to this hairdresser actually recommended
(12:36):
by Miranda and I went to him for, I don't know, 15 years.
And after Miranda died, he, he told me that he was from
Lebanon. And he told me he had watched
his father and older brother getshot point blank.
And it's like what this, this hairdresser, I've been sitting
(12:59):
in this chair for so long. Other people would just say,
yeah, when I lost my sister 15 years ago.
So they suddenly, I guess, felt much freer because now you
understood you had been deportedto the alternative universe with
them, and they could talk about it with you in ways that you
(13:20):
both found helpful to each other.
But why, You know, why would this hairdresser or these people
tell me if I hadn't been transported there?
Like, what am I going to say or do?
Like I just expressed sympathy and horror and oh, I'm so sorry,
but you, you don't it, it's not a, it becomes a deep and
(13:42):
precious fact that you over time, you just keep.
It's also kind of a nuclear bombto land on someone.
I, I, I get into these conversations very, the informal
conversations are the worst because you meet someone.
Maybe you haven't seen them for a long time.
It's another mother. And they say, oh, how are you
doing? How's Miranda or how many
(14:05):
children do you have? And they're the most natural
conversations in the world. You had them all the time.
And suddenly it's like you're stepping on hot coals and you're
waiting. You're trying to dodge the
conversation away before. Sometimes you just have to blurt
out, well, actually, Miranda died.
(14:27):
And then, and then you feel bad,like you feel bad for them
because it's such a shocking thing and they don't know what
to do with it. And it's like hurling A grenade,
you know, in an otherwise pleasant, meaningless kind of
conversation. What is your?
Advice then, to people in that circumstance, the.
On the receiving end. On the receiving.
(14:48):
End Who learned Who learned thatyou experienced a nuclear
annihilation? I and I, I think this is common
because when I talk about it with other mothers, it's, it's
like, you know, if you, if you have an accident and suddenly
your leg doesn't work or you lose your eyesight or your
hearing and you develop little ticks and ways of coping.
(15:12):
So when these conversations comeup, you get very, very good at
dodging that. And then, you know, people are
very decent, like, like, but it's it's funny, you do feel
sorry for them having to hear this without any preparation,
(15:33):
you know, or coping like coming out of the blue.
What is? Your advice now, two years into
this new life, to friends or other adults who want to try to
comfort parents of a lost child.Yeah, I, I did a, a kind of
(15:54):
taxonomy in the book of the different types of people or
reactions that you would get amongst friends.
And I I, I wasn't doing this to be, you know, cruel or angry,
but, you know, just sort of examples of things that are
telling things are. And and there are kind of types
like people I began to call grief splainers who would come
(16:18):
up to you and they would tell you, yes, you know, when I lost
my cat, I, you know, like, like are just telling you you're
going to get over this, Danielle, you'll be fine.
You just have to get through it.You hear that so many times.
And then they'll be others who just are so not able to talk
(16:39):
about it with you. I described it like imagine
count. Myself as one of those no.
Well, imagine going to a gathering, you know, cocktail
party, anything parents meeting and, and everybody knows you
have this blood spreading over your shirt and, and they're
looking at you in the eye and they're not mentioning anything.
(17:02):
They said they're talking about their recent vacation.
They don't go near the topic like they because it's just, I
think for some people it's just too much.
The most helpful people, especially in the aftermath, my
feeling was you should always lean into the grief and not a
way that people have a very generous impulse to want to
(17:22):
comfort you, to want to help youor make you feel better, even if
they. Say the wrong things.
Oh. Yeah, like I, I don't blame
people for saying the wrong things because, you know, they
don't know. But I think in general, and this
is true when I've dealt with friends who've you lost parents
or something a little more, you know, natural that they they
(17:45):
want to give you hope and that'sthis is all a very nice thing.
But in fact, what you want are people to lean into the suck
just like this is how much this.Sucks.
Horrible, even if they can't. Imagine how awful it is.
Yeah, no, I mean, you say I can't imagine you're going like
great, I'm glad you can't because it sucks.
(18:09):
So it's it's more helpful and just to take your hand and you
wrote me this beautiful note telling me Miranda stories.
And that's the other thing people are can be afraid to talk
to you about the child or the the the dead person balm.
To hear stories of Miranda I heard.
(18:30):
It it, it was the best thing. And just because often you hear
stories you didn't even know things that were funny or
shocking or knowing Miranda But but just it just it keeps that's
the thing that keeps them alive is talking about them,
(18:51):
remembering them as they were not trying to deify them.
Like I think an impulse to, you know, don't speak I'll of the
dead is a good rule, but you want to remember them for all
their all the. Parts all.
The parts, all the quirky behaviors and funny things that
happen and and you know, as you know, Miranda went through a
(19:15):
period of teenage rebellion thatthat had my hair standing on end
24 hours. But then when we would talk
about it, like one time I tracked her down to a bar and
she was of course underage and she was sitting there with a
friend and she couldn't believe.I mean, this was before iPhones
(19:36):
and locations and I figured out where she was.
I. Remember this?
I swept in and and she just looked startled and I said,
Miranda, you're coming with me. I turned to the waiter.
This girl is underage and you could be fined for that.
And I threw a 20 on the table and I pulled her out.
And then after that, she was so angry with me, she called me the
(19:58):
CIAI remember. But then five years later, we
were laughing hysterically aboutit, you know, and she was
saying, I couldn't believe you found me Mom.
That was that was pretty impressive.
Well, there's. Something about motherhood that
also provides a sonar for your children.
You can find them anywhere. Look Miranda, I do want to just
spend a moment on Miranda. Miranda was a one off as your
(20:19):
stepfather Pete said. She was a total original.
When I met her at the age of when she was 17, I was 13 years
her senior or or double her age.Let's say I was.
My 17 year old self was intimidated by the 17 year old.
I mean, she was and even became in her adulthood as strikingly
(20:43):
physically beautiful, with a mind and a heart even more so.
And she, she really wasn't original.
I mean, she was witty and she was kind and she was a leader
and she was an adventurer and she was fearless and careful and
courageous and I, it's like she had all the brains of both you
(21:07):
and David together and then added to that all of your charm
and charisma. Well, she was very like her
father. She was, she was, she was
brilliant. She was she was one of one of
her friends said that he had never met in real life a person
who was so casually witty. You know, they like, as in a
Thackery novel, that she was just the thing she would come
(21:30):
out with were so searing and funny and perfect and.
True and. True, like she just got right to
the heart of it and and and she and her father shared that kind
of observational humor. But she also but she was not
academic. She read voraciously.
But you know, part of the issuesthrough adolescence was she just
(21:53):
had, if she didn't wasn't interested in math, why should
she study it? So this we're always, you know,
she said. She had a contentious
relationship with authority fromthe time she was in preschool.
Yeah, it's. Like a a regal indifference to
authority when she like when shewas in preschool.
If it was, you know, we're put, OK, put away the costumes.
We're going to do drawing. Miranda.
(22:14):
We just keep going with the costumes.
Not rebellious, not rude, but just, you know, she was going to
do what she was going to do. And that was true throughout her
her life. And she left.
She didn't want to go to university.
She lasted A semester before going and becoming a booking
(22:36):
person for a television network.And she loved.
She just wanted to be in the world and.
Be in the real world. She wanted to.
Be in the world. And I was like that, too.
I didn't go to college. I wanted to work in The
Newsroom. And she shared that, Yeah.
What you ultimately discovered is that as a result of the
devastating brain surgery that ultimately saved her life, at
(22:57):
least for those intervening fiveyears, 1 result of it was that
her pituitary gland was entirelycompromised and had to be
removed during the surgery. You.
You can replace the functions pituitary gland, but with
everything there are side effects, weight gain and
bloating and mood. And so I knew she was playing a
little with her doses and I actually got her to my
(23:19):
endocrinologist just to make sure that everything was OK, but
because the. Wrong amount of cortisol is
deadly, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Nobody told her that, and nobodysaid the surgeon.
Said go live your life the. Surgeon well, surgeons are
famously breezy, you know their job is done.
I think of them like car mechanics, cars picks goodbye.
(23:41):
And he said yes, you'll go on and live your life You'll you'll
be able to have children. Don't worry about it and.
Yet somehow the dosing was off enough that she couldn't tell
until it was way too late. She.
Thought she had a bad cold, which is how it can present.
And I knew she was weak and I was very worried about how pale
(24:01):
she looked and I told her so. But she's 32.
She's a grown woman and I knew she was she.
I mean, she wasn't planning to play with fire, but yeah, none
of her doctors with whom she checked in regularly said, oh,
by the way, if you get this cortisol wrong thing, you could
drop that. And that's what I later
(24:24):
exploring through the medical examiner and things that that
seems to have been the likely 'cause.
You spoke to Miranda frequently through the project of writing
the book. You say you say.
You talk to her in your in your mind.
What did she say? Well, what is interesting is
there are times I've had conversations where I'm saying,
(24:45):
OK, what would she say to this? And then there are other times
when her her voices just landed in my head like a like a
lightning bolt and that happened.
And again, talk to other mothersand they, they and people have
lost other people. That one of the things, one of
(25:07):
the very difficult and endless tasks that you have to do in
this situation, that each one islike a circle of hell that you
are entering. This one was going to her
apartment right after she died, or as soon as we could.
We had to get a court order to get in.
It was really ridiculously bureaucratic.
And her younger sister, Bea camewith me.
(25:29):
We were living in DC. We came up to Brooklyn and we
just absolutely dreading becausewe didn't know what we're going
to find. You know, I was worried there
was just like, rotting garbage on top of it, you know?
And so the morning I woke up, I just suddenly felt this huge
sense of calm come over me. And I heard her voice say, you
(25:53):
got this, mom. And I felt it and I did have it,
you know, And then B and I. And B was just so
extraordinarily brave about this.
And we did it. And but then they went into.
Her apartment we went into. Her apartment cleaned.
(26:13):
It up, yeah, her body had already been removed, but you
hadn't had a chance to clean up the apartment since her.
Her. I know and and I saw that she
had been so it would be two daysafter the last time I spoke to
her. She's going to this very
glamorous event before Valentine's Day.
And she texted me this image of her in this beautiful dress.
(26:34):
And when I walked into when we walked into the apartment, you
could see like it was a very glamorous scene.
Like they were beautiful shoes kicked off.
There was a coat heaped, elegantcoat heaped on the sofa and and
then her beautiful dress on the floor, which was not like her.
(26:54):
So it just meant she was much weaker than she was letting on.
But yes, to just have to go in and confront that scene and tidy
it up. It was it was really, really
obviously hard. And then, you know, and, and,
and these things, you just thesecircles of hell, you have to
keep going back because then youhave to go back and sell the
(27:17):
apartment. You have to sell her things.
You have to decide what to give away and what to keep.
And each object is wrenching. Yeah.
We've we've talked about grief, you have read all the great
books on grief and I think you're as well join the Canon of
of some of the best. But you found very few authors
(27:42):
who were truthful about some of the darkest parts that you had
to endure. You've said, quote, I couldn't
imagine the physical pain of grief.
I woke up every morning and it felt like an ice pick was being
hammered into my chest. You wrote that you felt
suicidal. You wouldn't find yourself
(28:04):
curled up moaning. You said I suddenly understood
suicide from the inside. And you wrote that books about
grief don't address the physicalpain and how severely one wants
to just be relieved of it. Why is your book the first to
(28:25):
deal with how devastating the feelings of grief and how common
the feelings of suicidal thoughts are?
Well, I think I, and I don't want to say categorically such
books don't exist. And I know especially as as one
moves along, people start saying, oh, here's a very moving
(28:46):
book about this person who lost their child or whatever.
I again wanted to approach mine as a reporter.
And the one book that I found very helpful was by CS Lewis
classic The Grief Observed. And he and I found that early
on. And he wrote, he was of course,
(29:07):
the author of the Narnia series.He was also a journalist.
His wife died prematurely from cancer.
And he wrote like what it was like and kind of a pre Joan
Didion, that sense of the surrealism of it.
(29:29):
The the coffee cup left out thatis no longer going to be drunk
from going into his club and having people look at him
strangely like. And I thought that was super
helpful to me. That really got to the heart of
it. And so that's what I tried to do
with this because a lot of the grief books, they are focused on
(29:51):
healing. And, you know, Kubler Ross's
five stages of grief as my son cracked, you know, no one ever
tells them you can have them allat once, you know, and that and
it's and it's going to be tidy. And but the pain was so
overwhelming. And it was pain.
(30:11):
I mean, unless I wanted to overdose or put myself into a
kind of, you know, Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, like drug haze
all the time drink myself to death like my my grandmother did
when she lost her son and for eldest in war World War 2, she
(30:34):
sat in a corner and drank and was dead within five years.
There was nothing I could take to stop this pain.
And so I would be flipping through these grief books, you
know, OK, when, when, when is this pain going to stop?
Never. Oh, I'll get to healing.
(30:54):
When is that? And I just I, I, I, it was so
unhelpful. So I thought, OK, well, I better
get therapy. Maybe therapy will help and then
that alone was its own DC and journey of finding help for
this. You found it enormously
difficult to identify somebody go to help you.
People. Weren't available.
(31:14):
They told you to come back in 18months.
Oh, my gosh, yeah. I mean, you have a horrible
story, So. And you really do catalog this
like a reporter. Ultimately you found a PTSD
therapy, a post traumatic stresstherapy called EMDR, which
stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and
Reprocessing. I'm glad.
You said that because people saywhat does that stand for?
(31:37):
And unless I have it written outin front of me, I can't.
I can't pronounce it this. Has been used successfully with
returning returning soldiers from war.
This is a a serious PTSD treatment that you found helpful
to you, yes. Well, as you say, I think we
associate PTSD mainly with that classic image of somebody who's
(32:02):
fought in war, is found to Iraq.They're walking along the
street, a car backfires, and suddenly they're back in the war
and freaking out. And so in the late 80s, a
therapist theorized that traumatic memories aren't
processed like other memories. In fact, they stay kind of ever
(32:24):
present, unfilable. And so when you're triggered by
something, the whole thing is suddenly very real again.
It, it, it's as if it's happening all over again.
And so she, the, the first method they came up with was to
was a little dot. That's the I thing.
(32:44):
And you'd watch the dot. And she believed that the two
sides of the brain that should be filing the memories like
other memories you would repeat,you would go through in as
graphic detail as you could. What was it like when you walked
into Miranda's room? What was it like when you saw
(33:05):
her in the Funeral Home? Like so many different traumatic
moments in this. And you would I would be
talking. In my case, they use now hand
buzzers and they buzz back and forth and as you talk through it
and through it with the buzzing it the IT allowed.
(33:25):
And now they've proven this through Mris just very recently
in the past few years on Mris, it shows people suffering
traumatic memories and the brainthat go like the parts of the
brain that normally process the memories start lighting up and
acting wacky. And then when they did the, the
EMDR, the brain was able to settle and file it, you know, as
(33:49):
it would other memories. And what was strange was you go
through this and of course it can be very emotional.
But then you come out, you're, you're quite exhausted.
And what suddenly it's like an exorcism.
It's OK, I'm not obsessing aboutthat piece anymore.
(34:12):
So something got tucked away. But then of course with
something like this, it's not like a one time incident.
It's a it's. Over and over and over.
It's over. And over and everywhere.
So I mean I still, I am still doing it weekly.
And you still find it helpful I.Still find it helpful because,
you know, anniversaries come up sometimes and and and grief has
(34:36):
no well rhythm. It can just, it, it, it can just
attack you, you know, you can think I'm doing great.
And then a Facebook memory pops up in your to your.
Point, I mean, you wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently
that you know the the digital about the digital haunting that
you have faced since Miranda died.
The the emails and texts from her remain in your phone.
(34:59):
Every time you get in your car, it asks if you want to connect
to Miranda's iPhone. You write about the the irony
that Facebook won't give you access to her accounts but will
continue to bombard you with photos of the two of you
together. You and your husband have gone
to get court orders to get into her phone and her emails and her
social media accounts and you have been blocked.
(35:22):
Yeah, no, it's it's the craziestthing.
Like our our digital lives outlast our physical ones.
If we had known Miranda's password, all of this would have
been moved. We tried, believe me.
Many combos of Ringo her her prompt was roommate and best
(35:43):
friend so so we just tried hundreds and hundreds and and I
asked her friends. I of course asked her siblings.
Nobody knew you were locked. Out after three anyway, aren't
you? No, no.
Weirdly on getting into the computer, no.
Yeah, OK, but on other accounts,yeah, yeah.
And then of course her, you knowit.
It was in case of then they sendthe security notifications that
(36:04):
you can't access. But so we finally went and got
Apple requires its own speciallyworded court order.
Google require requires another yeah, Facebook everything.
And we finally got it took months and it's painful.
(36:25):
Like, you know, of all the things you're doing, you're just
trying to access your child's photos.
You're not trying to Snoop or hack her account, you know, and
finally we got Apple would release only the headers of her
emails and her photos, nothing else.
Google and and her phone companywould absolutely refuse to open
(36:48):
her phone and unlock her phone is.
There a policy fix here? I mean have you thought like I
just think you know we I go intoa DMV and I tell them I want to
donate my organs if I die. Couldn't Facebook just ask me?
I want to give my parents my photos if I die, Right?
You just have a series of security preferences for the
extraordinary set of circumstances that none of us
(37:10):
plan for. Yeah.
I, I, I don't know. I mean, you know, you've read
cases where a person's been murdered and Apple won't unlock
their phone, right? Because that is an invasion of
privacy in order to. Solve the.
Crime. OK, there's got to be a way to
deal with this on the front end.To prevent.
The continued suffering of a parent I would.
(37:30):
Just tell everybody, and no matter how old you are,
teenagers as well, keep your password somewhere and just, you
don't have to just let your parents or anybody know where it
is. But but yeah, not knowing I've,
I've now written down on my passwords.
David's written down that they're in a file, but it is, it
is a, it is a terrible nightmare.
And and then the other thing is like I could switch some of the
(37:53):
things I could control, like I could switch off my, I could
disconnect Miranda's phone from my car, but then that's an
actual conscious act and then. You're choosing to move on.
Yeah, and I don't want to. You don't want.
To yeah, I don't want your daughter.
I don't want. To lose that.
And now when she pops up, she sometimes pops up at very
opportune moments. And now I just sort of say, hi,
(38:15):
Miranda, good to see you. But I, I don't want to go
through the I don't want to cut her phone number is still in my
list of favourites. Am I going to delete that?
So you're put in these also weird quandaries that you
wouldn't have been when you lived in an age where everything
was like photos in boxes, you know, papers were in files.
(38:39):
You coined a term that I hadn't heard of before, but I knew
exactly what it was when I when I read it.
You write about all your frustrating and you've
referenced it in this interview somewhere.
You write about your frustratingencounters with the bureaucracy
of death. The second I read that, I knew
exactly what you meant. Anybody who has had to navigate
the process of closing up somebody's estate, delivering
(39:01):
death certificates to all the requisite places, kind of has a
sense of what you mean by the bureaucracy of death, right?
David, God bless him, took over all the all of the sort of legal
estate matters. Miranda was clever enough to
have left a will, because that also could have been a
nightmare. Not that she had so much
(39:21):
property, but it at least at least gave us control over what
property she had. Because then that would have
been another fight. But I was I was the one like
like when they because we didn'tget to Brooklyn quick enough.
So she died. She was found at 9:00 AM that
morning. We got the call maybe before 10.
(39:44):
We just started packing our bags, got on the earliest flight
we could. And the cop said, well, if
you're not here by X amount of time, we'll have to seal the
apartment. And I'm like, I don't know what
that means, but OK. But we're going to we're going
to get there. And by the time we get there, of
course, they've gone. And there's this sticker on her
(40:05):
apartment door. Do not enter, you know, and and
that was OK now to enter our daughter's apartment.
Was. A crime we.
Yeah, it was a crime and we had to get and that's what B and I
ended up having to wait a month because we had to get a court
order to enter are. There inanities in the
bureaucracy of death that are easily fixable.
(40:25):
Is this just something that we're all stuck with?
Yeah, I think so. I think the main thing is that
in you as an individual can makea lot of things easier.
Have a wealth in advance, have awill, have instructions, have
passwords. A lot of people you know, don't
want to think about their ends and so they kind of avoid doing
(40:50):
all of that. But it's it's so important to
the people you leave behind over.
The course of the original Firing Line, William F Buckley
Junior had several conversationswith Malcolm Muggeridge, the
British author, who of course began in in life as a young left
wing atheist and over time foundreligion.
(41:11):
And he appeared on the original Firing Line in several episodes
about religion, about faith, andabout death.
One of those discussions in 1980, he made an observation
about suffering that I'd love toget your action to take a look.
You know it's an old man, Bill. Looking back on one's life, it's
(41:32):
one of the things that strikes you most forcibly, that the only
thing that's taught one anythingis suffering.
Not success, not happiness. Not only like that.
The only thing that really teaches what my life's about the
joy of understanding, the joy ofcoming in contact with what it
rarely signifies is suffering isaffliction.
(41:53):
I. Think the point he's making
about grief here isn't that it'sa gift, but that somehow
suffering teaches us in some way.
Yeah. So I wrote about these.
Yeah, I called them happiness hucksters.
You see them on Ted Talks. And it is insane how many
people, and especially people inthis line of business will come
(42:16):
to you and say, you know, the worst thing that has ever
happened to you. You can be cut.
You can grow from that. This is a, this is an
opportunity for personal growth and fun that way, like is, is,
if you know, you're lucky your daughter died.
You know, what a gift to you to have this tragedy.
And, and you know, these people,nothing has ever happened to
(42:38):
them like this. Like they like maybe they got
fired from a job or a company failed.
And you know, we can all learn from our corporate failures.
That's how we grow. But then they apply it to
everything. And I, I, I know what Malcolm
and by the way, we were great, great friends, David and I with
his son and his wife and Roche Mudgridge, who was the one who
(42:59):
got Malcolm into Christianity. She was so but anyway and away
from communism and. Left wing politics.
Yeah. Yeah, she was she.
Had she had a really profound effect on his religion?
She I loved her. She was like a firecracker.
But, but no. But do we learn from suffering?
And as I wrote, like you know, have I joined the great chain of
(43:22):
humanity that that has been taught something by your
suffering? Suffering, you know.
Yes. Am IA more empathetic person?
Yes. I mean, there are changes in me
that have come from this and youknow, taking many fewer things
for granted. And also, I find if there's a
(43:44):
gift, it's the gift I've gotten from embodying Miranda.
And it's funny when some, when someone dies, I think part of
you wants part of the way you remember them and keep them with
you is to do the things that they would have done.
So, you know, I'm way, I'm way less impatient.
(44:09):
If somebody's having a hard day,I don't start, you know,
becoming a Karen in a supermarket line maybe once was
my impulse. I and and just, yeah, just that
sense all around you that peopleare having a hard time.
(44:29):
And and I, and also David and I call the night before Miranda
died, our last happy night. And it just so happened we'd
gone out to dinner post Valentine's Day because he was
away on Valentine's Day. So he took me out the next night
for a lovely dinner. And we were just, it was just
such a perfect moment. In our lives too, because.
(44:52):
Children were all kind of grown up.
They were settled. We were making plans, you know,
looking forward to maybe doing some travelling and just sort of
reorganizing our life post, you know, as the so-called empty
nesters. And then this happened the next
day and and we just look back onthat and think we will never be
(45:15):
that unequivocally happy. Like even the most joyous things
will be accompanied by this sense of loss and sadness.
And and that, you know, that does make you, I think, a bigger
and better person. But, you know, as a gift, I
would happily return it. It's a non returnable gift.
(45:39):
How has your? Experience with grief changed
through the course of writing this book.
It or has it? No, no.
People ask if it's cathartic andlike, like by somehow writing
this, I guess, I guess what theymean is have I been able to let
(45:59):
go? Have I healed?
Have I gotten through it? Has it been useful?
And so has the. Exercise been useful?
Has the exercise been useful? And I think it's what has been
gratifying to me is to the degree it's been useful, is the
reaction I've gotten from other grieving parents.
(46:19):
What it did do for me that was beneficial, I felt as long as I
was writing it, I was close to Miranda and make oddly doing
things like making her grave a garden, like putting planning
and thought into her gravesite so that it wasn't just a
(46:42):
headstone and a line of headstones, but it we had, we
created little benches and flower wildflowers.
So when I go to visit her, I canvisit her.
I can sit there and and talk to her and feel like I'm with her.
And as long I think as a mother,as long as I'm feeling I'm doing
something for her, I'm still hermother.
(47:05):
And the minute I stopped doing things for her, she's really,
really gone. And so even doing like a book
tour for this book and promotingthis book, which I've had
enormous trepidation about, although I did say to my
therapist, it is kind of like EMDR where you're repeating the
(47:27):
same fact over and over and overagain.
Maybe it will make me feel better.
I don't know. But it's a weird thing to
promote. It's, it's not a book I ever,
ever of course wanted to write, but I find it's given me, I, I
find like Miranda has been very much with me through this
process, like in a, in a more pronounced way than usual.
(47:49):
And that just as when David wrote that article for The
Atlantic, that was the first thing he could write returning
the, you know, crazy election of2024.
This was I, I mean, I haven't been able to write anything.
I haven't really cared about anything.
You have a a well. Read sub stack that you just
(48:11):
said goodbye to just just stopped.
And so I feel, I feel her pulling me back into life.
I feel by writing this and by talking about it and by getting
this really heartwarming reaction, she is bringing you
back. She's.
Bringing me back and. And I know that's what she would
(48:34):
want. I know.
That's what I know. That's what she would want to.
Almost 25 years ago, you wrote abook that was entitled What Our
Mothers Didn't Tell Us. And I wonder, as you reflect now
on motherhood, what do you know about motherhood now that you
didn't know that well? The point of that book?
(48:57):
It was written at a time sort ofjust post feminism, what do they
call it, second wave feminism, where we younger women very
ungratefully took for granted all the gains you had and.
No. The second wave and and and and
very. You know, kind of disbelief
(49:17):
that, you know, the Mad Men world existed and but but in
part. But it wasn't so much I was
taking issue with the gains. Not at all.
It was this idea that women weregoing to be much more fulfilled
by their careers than by motherhood.
Or marriage. Or.
Anything in their personal life.And I felt that was a lie.
(49:40):
And I, my mother who had worked,she was a journalist, you know,
back in the 50s, she had us, hertwo children.
She waited till we were in school and then she went back to
work. But she was always really
grateful to my mom for this. And who is still with us, that
she was the one who said motherhood has been the greatest
(50:03):
experience of my life. That she, she did have a
divorce, but she remarried to a person who was like, she had a
phenomenal marriage and kinship with.
And so at least I got to witnesshow important love is and
motherhood. And that's what I started to
write about. And I started to write that book
after I'd had Miranda and realizing what we said earlier,
(50:27):
that having this child, this newbeing in your life didn't shrink
me. It, it, it brought me to another
dimension of humanity. And I realized until I'd had a
child, and I think this is true for fathers as well, but until I
had a child, there was a whole side of me that had been locked
(50:51):
up. And I just like the Grinch's
heart at the end of the the you know your.
Heart, His heart grew. 3 sizes that they like your heart grows
and you become responsible for this person and protective for
this person. And in the book I write about
(51:12):
talking to a friend of mine who didn't have children.
He's gay. He he was able to get married
finally to his long time partner, but they never children
was never sort of something theywanted to pursue.
So he was talking to me one night a few months after Miranda
died and sort of probably quite horrified by looking at this
(51:34):
person that he knew who I was being utterly miserable and
stricken. And he asked me, he said, well,
Danielle, was it worth it? And he didn't say that like
callously well, was it worth it?Like he was struggling with the
idea that I could have this amount of pain and because I was
(51:56):
saying I would, I would trade mylife in an instant.
I envy people who have terminal cancer but whose children would
live. I really envy those people.
You were also saying you would easily.
Happily go instead of Miranda. Yeah, like in a heartbeat.
And and and he said, but you know, would you would it have
been better not to? And, and I, I, I said, no, like
(52:21):
to have loved like that is something I would never end, let
alone to have known Miranda for 32 years.
And he started to tear up. And he said to me, I have never
known a love that would make me want to give my life for that
other person. And that's what motherhood,
(52:45):
parenthood is. But it comes with this horrific
price if it goes wrong at. 3:00 AM Nat, your son, Miranda's
brother, awakened on the other side of the continent.
Yeah, he was in LA He was in LosAngeles, deeply disturbed and
had no idea why. This was roughly, as the coroner
(53:07):
later estimated, Miranda's time of death.
Yeah, well, I think everybody. Who loses someone?
Anyone that you're close to. You.
You. First of all, you're always
looking for signs, but pretty much everyone I've spoken to has
some story that is inexplicable and and can't be just sort of
(53:28):
written up. So.
So as you say, when Miranda diedat 3:00 AM Eastern Time, her
brother sat up bolt upright at midnight in LA time, West Coast
time, with the most horrible sense of dread.
And, and that I've subsequently found that's quite common with
(53:51):
siblings and others. Like somebody will be on the
other side of the continent and just say something's wrong,
something's wrong. But with Miranda, So she was
when she was for the summer after she was buried, she was
buried in February in frozen Canadian earth.
And I went and was a very small cemetery at that point.
(54:13):
We hadn't planned anything yet. We hadn't planned her garden.
We're just in the process of doing it.
And I went to find her grave andI, I couldn't find it.
And it's a, it just meant a flatgrass, not too big, a cemetery.
And I'm looking and looking and suddenly I see this riot of
(54:36):
yellow tall flowers in the exactrectangle where she's been
buried and nowhere else, just inher rectangle.
And as I approached the grave, alittle Bunny hopped away and I
just started to laugh. I said, Miranda, really like,
like this geyser of gold, like, I'm going to stand out.
(54:59):
This place is lame. You know, I, you know,
aesthetically, I don't love this.
So I'm going to make my section nice and, and that happened
again. So we have this cottage in
Canada where we've spent every summer and the kids ran it every
summer. And it's, it's got, you know,
(55:21):
wildflowers growing around it, but we never have lilies.
And we, we get tiger lilies, which are fairly common, but we
never had white lilies. And that was her favorite
flower. And I was walking by our dock
one day. I walked the same path every
morning with our dogs. And I was passing by.
(55:42):
It was about a week before her birthday.
And pushing up through the boards of the dock was what I
realized was a white Lily. And I started to watch it every
day. And then on her birthday, it was
perfectly, you know, open and I so I cut it and I went to our
(56:05):
like garden expert and I said, can you explain this?
And he said, well, have you everhad a white Lily there before?
And I said no. And he had previously dismissed
my yellow flowers, which turned out to be wild mustard, which I
thought spicy like Miranda. He said, well, you know, there's
(56:25):
probably some mustard seed in the ground.
And it just got, you know, it just started to grow.
And I said, well, his name was Ben.
I said, Ben. It didn't grow anywhere else in
the cemetery. He goes, oh, yeah, you know, I'm
sure it was just in the earth. And so I said, OK.
And then I told him about the white Lily and, and he said, so
there's never been white Lily. I said, Ben, you know that there
are no white lilies on lilies properties.
(56:47):
Well, there were these wild tiger lilies, orange lilies.
And he and he just started to laugh and he just said, OK,
Danielle, there are some things that can't just be explained.
And I felt because Miranda knew how much I love to garden and
how much I love flowers. If she was if she were going to
communicate to me, that is how she would communicate.
And, and, and that that Lily hascome up every summer since.
(57:11):
Oh, really? Yeah.
That's not in the book. There's a a moving.
Moment at the end of the book when your husband watches you
nuzzle the knack of your first born grandchild, Abigail, and he
says welcome back to the land ofthe living.
Has the joy of a new life in your family helped?
(57:33):
For sure. I mean.
One of the poignant aspects of this is Nat, our son, moved back
to Brooklyn to be close to Miranda because Nat was married
and they had this fantasy that he would push the stroller to
clamorous Aunt Mandy. And she loved babies and
(57:54):
children. And she actually helped him find
the place that he and his wife, Isabelle moved into.
And so when the baby was born and it's, it's like I said, with
every joy now, there's a mixed sadness that I was holding her
and just of course, all the loveyou feel for a grandchild.
I was also thinking of the time when I first held my own first
(58:18):
born. And then I was also thinking
that Miranda wasn't there to experience it.
So everything's a mixed bag. It's yeah, I mean there's.
Unmitigated joy about the birth of Abigail and the future
relationship with Abigail and and B and I are very determined
(58:38):
in that that she will know her aunt Mandy yeah but there's also
attend and sadness with every new.
Joy. No.
Yeah. Yeah, there is.
Yeah. Danielle Crittenden, thank you
for joining me on Firing Line and thank you for joining me to
honor Miranda's memory in this episode.
Well, thank you for being such. A friend to her and a mentor and
(59:02):
I know how much she loved and admired you, so thank you for
that.
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