August 21, 2023 • 59 mins
Sam Sanders is a well known and well loved radio and podcast host. He went a little extra-viral for a recent episode of his show, Vibe Check, in which he and his co-hosts openly discussed grief. This week on It’s OK, Sam joins us to talk about being open with his grief, and the ongoing relationships we have even after death.
In this episode we cover:
- What happens if you give grief a voice?
- The double-edged sword of church communities
- Why understanding context helps you treat yourself more kindly
- How men speaking honestly about grief helps everyone
- Throwing out the rule book on grief
Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
Train with Megan here: next course begins 9/04
Related episodes:
A Renaissance of our Own: Rachel Cargle
Coming Home to Yourself with Alex Elle
Follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @refugeingrief and @itsokpod on TikTok
Notable quotes:
“I wish churches would say, “Every emotion you feel is allowed and is in fact, holy, because God made them all.” - Sam Sanders
About our guest:
Sam Sanders is the host of Into It, the flagship culture podcast from Vulture, and the co-host of Vibe Check on Stitcher. He covered electoral politics for NPR, and was one of the original co-hosts of The NPR Politics Podcast. Sam also created and hosted the NPR news & culture podcast, It’s Been a Minute. Find him on social @samsanders
About Megan:
Psychotherapist Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world. Find her @refugeingrief
Additional resources:
Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What am I naming my grief today? Who is she?
We're gonna call her Sally today. She really wants to
watch reruns of Designing Women and then maybe put on
some old gospel records after that. And I think Sally
would like have some hagandash butter pecan ice cream with
me because my mother used to love that. And Sally
(00:22):
has a big laugh.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
This is it's okay that you're not okay? And I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show Somebody,
a lot of you DMed and emailed me about Sam Sanders,
co host of the podcast five Check and host of
Into It. Today, Sam and I are talking about grief
and love and church and the importance of friends. So
many good and important things settle in everybody. All of
(00:48):
that is coming up right after this first break before
we get started, one quick note. While we cover a
lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related
(01:11):
to your work. Hey friends, So, Sam Sanders has been
in the podcast and the radio world for a long time.
He was the creator and host of National Public Radios podcast.
It's been a minute, so you might have heard him there.
You might know him from his twelve years as a
reporter for NPR, where he covered electoral politics and was
(01:33):
one of the original co hosts of the NPR Politics podcast.
He's won awards as the best Radio and podcast host
from both the Ambies and the Los Angeles Press Club.
You probably know his voice, even if you might not
know his name. As I mentioned in the teaser, so
many of you sent me the Vibe Check episode in
which co host Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford, and Say Jones
(01:56):
discussed grief. Now, if you haven't heard that conversation, look
for vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts so you
can hear it. But you definitely don't need to have
heard that conversation with Sam and his co host already
in order to get into the episode today. This conversation
with Sam Sanders has everything you could possibly want in
(02:17):
a conversation about grief and love and taking care of
your people while also taking care of yourself. We've got
the good parts and the not so good parts of church,
so we're covering both community building and spiritual bypassing. We've
got expressions of grief that include ice cream and designing
women marathons. We have got the sheer goodness of men
(02:38):
supporting other men in their emotional and relational well being,
which is super important. And we've got ongoing relationships with
people who died years ago because we know that those
relationships never actually die. There's a lot here. You're gonna
hear Sam say towards the end of the show that
he felt fortified by our time together, and I hope
(03:02):
you do too. That's the beauty of these conversations, everybody.
They feed us. These conversations feed us if we let them,
if we make room for them. Now, just as so
many people sent me the original Vibe Check episode where
Sam and his friends discuss grief, I hope you will
(03:24):
share this episode with your friends and with strangers on
the internet. It is a great way to open up
conversations that feed you and make the whole world better
at the same time. Now, speaking of spreading the word
and making the world better, you all have been responding
to my pleas for reviews of the show, so thank
(03:45):
you for that. There have been several new ones lately.
I love reading them. Your reviews get people to listen
to the show, and if you leave a review for
a specific guest specific episode of the show, I tend
to pass those along to my guest. Yes, So, Alira,
thank you for your review of my conversation with Gina Rossero.
I passed your message along to Gina so that she
(04:07):
could hear what she means to you. So from both
of us, thank you. Thank you to everybody who has
left a review. If you haven't left a review yet,
please do so about the show in general or a
specific episode that moved you. All right on with today's
show with the kind, funny, wise and delightful Sam Sanders.
(04:32):
I'm so glad to have you here with me today,
and I have to say that everybody on the team
was so excited that we were going to get to
chat today, so you know you have some fans.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, Soscedens here, honored to be here and thank you
for doing this work. I think that I've been talking
about on my shows the last few weeks is how
we and Americans especially just don't talk about grief enough,
and so for people that do that intentionally, I'm grateful.
So thanks for what you do.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Absolutely, Yeah, it's neat to see how comfortable might not
be the right word, but how much more comfortable or
how much more frequently people are talking about grief? I
feel like when I started this work ten years ago,
no one was really talking about it. So there has
been a change, it's not quite enough of a change.
But before we jump into all that, I mean, the
(05:22):
obvious place for us to start here is with talking
about grief and talking about your recent episode on vibecheck
discussing your mom's death. Yeah, I would love to start
with could you introduce your mom to us?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah. My mother's name is Regina Sanders. She was the
second youngest of six raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She was
an elementary school teacher and a middle school vice principal
and a Pentecostal church organist and a mother of two.
And she was in wilvermin. I think the most energetically
(06:02):
charismatic person I've ever known in my life, I said
in vibe check. The thing about my mother was that
every room she entered, she won them all over. And
when it wasn't even a competition, or when there weren't
even stakes, you always wanted to find a way to
be on her side, because her side just seemed more fun.
She was a woman who taught me and my brother
(06:25):
and so many other people that you can be successful
and you can be professional and you can get a
lot of shit done, but you can like always find
time for laughter and joy and like whimsy. My mother
was like beautifully whimsical. She just she loved the weird joke,
she loved the crash joke, she loved laughing where you
(06:48):
shouldn't laugh, and till the very end, she was cracking
us all up. So that's her.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
She passed away June twenty first, so a little over
a month ago, and we miss her dearly.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Such a big presence. Now, something that you didn't mention
in your description of who she was and what she did.
She worked as a mortician when you were a kid,
right or something adjacent to that.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah. Yeah, This is also what has made dealing with
grief over her passing a multifaceted exercise because my family,
more than most other families, dealt with death a lot.
So my parents met after my mother had finished college
in South Texas and was teaching grade school, and she
(07:33):
met my father and they had a quick courtship. And
they'll never admit it but I think they were pregnant
with my brother when she was walking down the aisle.
Fine with it. But my father had had a multifaceted career.
He was trained as a farmer, and he had like
a master's degree in agriculture from Prairie View and a university,
(07:54):
and for many years he worked for the state. They
have what's called an extension service where a state life
Texas basically has farmers on the payroll to help other
farmers farm well. And so he was like a master
farmer who like taught farmers how to farm good shit.
So he did that. But when he left that, he
began managing like senior centers and he did some other shit.
(08:17):
But when he and my mother got married, he was like,
I've always wanted to have a funeral home. This is
a very reliable business in black communities because you'll notice
Black people only bury their loved ones at black funeral homes.
It's even more segregated than like Sunday Morning church in America.
The funeral business when it's like it's black, right. So
(08:38):
he was like, I want to do that, And then
my mother was like, you know, I kind of always
wanted to have a daycare. So they decided when we
were young that they were going to have both a
funeral home and a daycare, and they did. And I
worked one summer in the daycare with the infants, actually
two summers, and my brother did more of the funeral homework,
but he would work the funerals like as an usher
(08:58):
driving the car, and I did that for litle bit too.
But all through our childhood we were around death. My
parents had to work the funerals. My mother was trained
to embalm bodies. We were just like as kids hang
out at the funeral home all the time, which meant
that like we could run around the funeral home and
like play hide and go seek amongst the caskets, and
every now and then I would like, dare my brother
touch the body? Go touch the dead body. We could
(09:20):
just like get that close. So it was never weird
to me to be around a dead body, and it
was never weird for me to think about death, which
I realized in adulthood was a special kind of privilege,
a special kind of privilege. There's a lot less queasinous
about this shit with me.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
How was grief talked about in your household?
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Grief was not talked about, grief was performed.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
A black funeral is an exercise in performance art. And
I say that with love and with kindness. But it's
a fucking show. Have you you've been, You've been to
the least one. Yes, it's a show.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
It is.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It's a show. It's a concert. They go on for hours.
It's not just one emotion, it's all of them. So
my first experience with grief, just as a kid growing
up in a black church and as a kid with
two black parents who owned a black funeral home, was
understanding from a very early age that grief emotionally was multifaceted.
(10:19):
It was multifaceted. You go into a black funeral, there's
moments of sadness, there's moments of humor, there's moments of joy,
there's moments of reflection. But it's not just sad. Right,
you are the kid of parents who own a funeral home.
You see all sides of the death industry. Right. I
used to know how much caskets actually cost. Turns out
(10:40):
you're all getting scammed. Then you're all getting scammed, like
truly buy your casket at Costco, like save the money.
But I just always burials explore. Okay, well but yes, yes, yeah,
but I always just had a i guess, more well
rounded experience or understanding of what grief was and what
(11:03):
death was because I saw it through those ways, which
which was is prismatic is not the word, but there
was layers to it.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. It's interesting that when I ask you about grief,
we go to the funeral and the performance, the performance
aspect of that, you know, Like I hear from so
many people who either grew up or are still deeply
involved in church communities, and for them they feel like,
wait a second, Like we had this outpouring of love
(11:33):
and celebration and wailing and mourning during the funeral, and
then a week later everybody was over it, and I'm
still like, my dad just died.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I'm in that right now. Can I tell you what
I've been telling clothes Lease, Yes, we have the funeral.
It is a beautiful service. The church that we attended
most of our lives, they really showed up for us
and honored my mother with joy and humor and life,
and it was wonderful. The grave site was literally one
hundred and five degrees because it was a Texas heat
wave that week but like we did it. It was
(12:06):
it was a damn good funeral, and I've been doing
a bunch of funerals, so I appreciate my entire church
family for doing that for us. But a week or
two later, I started telling my friends, I was like,
you know what I wish. I kind of wish she
had also been cremated so I would have an excuse
to make a trip to toss her ashes somewhere. I
wanted something else to mark the death that was smaller
(12:29):
and quieter and more personal, and I've been seeking those
moments in the week since her passing. So just this
past weekend, I just quietly, without taking anybody with me,
not even my dog, snuck off the San Diego and
just walked along the beach for hours for the whole weekend.
And it felt like it was getting me to that
(12:49):
place that I want to be in. But I still
have this weird desire to go somewhere, either alone or
with just a few people, to honor her in the
way that you would go somewhere to spread a parents'
ashes and not weird like she's in the ground. I
know she's in the ground, but I still want that too.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
That's not weird at all. Nothing you do to honor,
explore and maintain a connection with someone you love is weird.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
That's the thing that I'm working through right now too,
because even though no one's telling you there's a script
on how to grieve, you're kind of always like, well,
am I doing it right?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Am I doing it right? You know? Before I talked
about my mother's death on vibe Check, a podcast I
host with two of my favorite people in the world,
it was like, well, am I allowed to do this?
Is it okay? What are the rules? And then you
think long and hard about it. It's like, there are
no rules around grief, and you shouldn't have any rules
(13:48):
around grief. You got to just live it. But yeah,
I'm so glad you raise that point, like what are
the rules? The rules are you're sad. The rules are
you're sad and you got to work. But the rules
are also like, sometimes you're not just saying you're cracking
up over a memory of that awful joke she told
in the most unopportune moment, or sometimes you are. You know,
(14:09):
there's just a range. So yes, like not accepting that
there's no rule book and just saying this feels right today.
I think is a work. That's the word. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
I think the challenge here is that we've been sold
a rule book. Oh yeah, right, we've been sold a
rule book with the you know, the five stages of
grief and then with prolonged grief disorder and then like
you know, you have six weeks to have your feelings
and then you should be back to normal. And this
whole idea that grief ends at the funeral instead of
it begins at the funeral, Like there is a set
(14:40):
of rules that we've inherited, like the fact that we're like, shit,
am I allowed to talk about this? Says there is
there's a line we feel like we're not supposed to cross. Yeah,
so much of the work and so like so many
people sent me your episode on vibechech exploring grief, talking
about grief, saying we have to talk about this stuff.
They were like, it's happening. This is so exciting that
(15:01):
people are talking about it, and it really is like
there there is no cage, right, We've been sold a cage,
but there is no cage. And what's normal in grief
is to feel how you feel and express how you
express and not know how to do this. Yeah, because
you've never had to live without your mom before. Yeah,
so anything that you do is like is new. Yeah, yeah,
(15:26):
is new and acceptable and like the only rule book
is I mean to be poetic about it here. The
only rule book is your own heart. That is the thing.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, it's funny. Thinking about rules a thing I was
thinking about doing last week, and I was like, this
might not be good for me. I was thinking a
lot about the things that my mother loved, and I
could always remember movies that she loved because we watched
a bunch of movies together, and I remember she loved
Still Magnolias and whenever it came on, like TBS in
my youth, we would just watch it to Magnolis is on,
(15:58):
We're watching it. And for a second I was like, Oh,
that movie's actually about grief. Julia Roberts' character dies in
that movie is very painful. Maybe watching that would like
help me, And then I was like, no, Sam, maybe
it won't. Maybe this Hollywood version of death and grief
is the opposite of what you need, because as watching
(16:18):
this going to make you think that you need to
perform your grief in a still Magnolia's kind of way.
So I haven't watched it yet, I might, I think
if I do, all watch it with the critical lens,
not a lens to which to inform myself. But yet
there are rule books everywhere.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
There really really are, And I like, this is all
an experiment, right, Like, you don't know, you think it
might be a great idea or maybe a caution to
watch Steal Magnolias. So you turn on Steal Magnoias and
you check in with yourself and you're like, how's this
feeling to me? This is actually not feeling good, So
I'm going to turn this off. This actually feels different
than I expected. Let me explore this, right, Like, it's
(16:55):
all an.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Experiments, Yeah, and relative exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
On one day, Steel Magnolia's might be the best thing ever,
and you might want to be like, let's throw a
Steel Magnolia's party because that sounds fascinating. I don't know,
I haven't done this before, but there really is so much,
like I think, Like, I think one of the reasons
that we try to put so many rules around grief
is we don't like the chaos. We don't like not knowing,
(17:19):
we don't like not knowing the answer, and it's like,
we're supposed to keep this whole buttoned up thing around
all the parts of being human, and it's just it's weird.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, Like, the thing that we know the least about
is what happens to us after we die. Some people
think they know, some people make up stories to feel
good about it. We don't fucking know. Yeah, So, of course,
in the absence of knowledge of what happens to your
loved one of yourself after this death, of course, it's
(17:50):
like human nature to want to put rules and norms
around it, to give this thing some semblance of order.
So I get it. But yeah, I think, like, can
we live our grief with the same amount of openness
that death itself is?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Death is an extreme openness because you actually don't fucking know.
I don't know where my mother is. I don't know
if she's looking at me. I don't know if she's like,
why the fuck are you talking about me? I don't know.
But I can still love her and her memory in
the I don't know of it all. And so it's like,
how can I take that same okay with the I
(18:30):
don't know that No, take that same feeling and apply
it to how I'm living out my grief.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yes, I love that you brought up the afterlife and
our ideas about that. I think one of the things
that happens for so many people, no matter what the
spiritual practice is or what their religious tradition is, a
lot of people feel like they get this shaming from
their community, like don't be sad. You're mother's with Jesus.
(19:00):
Don't be sad. It's all annot She's.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
In a better place. She's I don't know. Are you
fucking sure?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Are you are?
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Re's the zip code? You tell me? Where is she?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Exactly? It really is this. Do you know that term
spiritual bypassing?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
No, tell me so?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Spiritual bypassing right where we use religious ideas, spiritual ideas
to bypass the human condition. And that's what's happening when
you're saying something like you know your your mother wouldn't
wouldn't want you to be sad. She's in her better place,
she's gone to Jesus. Like whether or not all of
that stuff is true for the person, like not relevant
(19:36):
in this moment because right now I am missing her
here right It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that there
is something after this, if we're using that as a
way to invalidate the person who's right in front of
us and the way that they're feeling and the way
that we might care for them. Right. So, for a
lot of people in religious communities, they're like, I can't
(19:59):
I can't on my church community the way that I
used to, because all they want to do is see
me happy that my loved one is reunited with the
life force, and I don't feel that. And I can
be more than one thing. I can be really happy
that my person's body and spirit has rejoined the oneness
and really fucking want them still here. Yeah, both of
(20:20):
the like you contain multitudes, Like you can have all
of these feelings at once and they're all valid.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, And this is the thing. And I will say
I was a church kid. I love my church experience.
I have left the church, but I still think I
believe in God. But yeah, I think sometimes our faith
traditions are asking us or are giving us distraction. Sometimes
it's just distraction. It's saying I get it you having
some really negative feelings around this death right now, But
(20:48):
don't think of those negative feelings, think of these positive feelings.
Think about heaven. Isn't that cool? And on the face
you're like, isn't that such a nice offering for them
to give to me? But it's not getting rid of
the negative emotions. It's just distracting you from them temporarily.
They're still there, and they're there until they're gone. And
I think, like I would love for our faith traditions
(21:12):
to have a better language at helping us here in
this world sit with our feelings. I would love to
know that churches are doing the thing where they're telling
you about having if that makes you feel good, but
also saying to you very clearly and forthrightly, every emotion
you feel is allowed and is in fact holy because
God made them all. That's what I want to hear.
(21:35):
All of it's valid, and I want to And this
is not a theology conversation, because I really don't know
where I stand. But if I believe in a higher power,
a God, a Jesus, whatever, I believe that like that
higher power is always telling us that pretty much everything
about us is okay because we were made in the
(21:57):
higher powers image. And if I'm feeling today and sadness
is in me, it is holy. It's holy and how
can I respect it and not just distract myself by
thinking about who my mother is playing the tambourine with
in heaven. You know that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
And also this idea that there are negative emotions and
positive emotions, which just emotions and on or off. I
love that you just called them all holy, and I'm
with you on that one. There is no part of
the human experience that is not holy. It doesn't mean
that some people aren't jerks and that there's like not
(22:35):
mad behavior, that's not what we're talking about, but we're
talking about, like the way that you feel is the
way that you feel, and can we find a way
to surround that with love and curiosity and support and
connection instead of trying to shove people out of what
they feel by saying they're doing it wrong or this
is the right way to be or get out of this.
And like, I think this is why these conversations are
(22:57):
so important, because we have inherent those rules around goodness
and badness, positive and negative, what you're supposed to be
doing and what you're not supposed to be doing, and
how do you honor the debt? Like stop right, Like
let's just be in this moment in this humanness that
(23:18):
we're having and see each other. How rad would that be?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yeah? Well, and how can we respect these emotions as
multifaceted beings in and of themselves. What if a good
thought exercise is to even personify our grief and talk
to it.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
I love that you just said that, because there's a
course that I've been running for like ten years now
called Writing Your Grief, and one of the prompts in
there is personifying your grief. So it's this whole like
creative prompt around. Can you if grief has a voice,
If grief is a character, how does it move? What
does it where? How does it speak? Does it speak?
If it has a voice, let it like, let's listen.
(24:02):
I love that. So I love that you just brought
that up. Yes, there's just like a nice little yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, now I'm thinking, like, what am I naming my
grief today?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Who is she? We're gonna call her Sally today. She
really wants to watch reruns of Designing Women and then
maybe put on some old gospel records after that. And
I think Sally would like have some hagandash butter pecan
ice cream with me, because my mother used to love that,
and Sally has a big laugh. That's today for grief.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
See I love her.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I love her too. Oh my goodness, she's great. Oh Sally,
come on in the front door, Sally.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
We haven't got the ice cream getting to the proper
thawed texture. A speak. I love this and this is
this is what becomes available when you throw out the
inherited rule book.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah. Well, and throwing out the inherited rule book allows
me to just like see things that I once thought
were static as a multifaceted. One of the things I
talked about in the vibe Check episode with Zach and
Sayeed it was that, like, we are taught so much
from an early age that grief itself is an exercise
in scarcity and a practice in a scarcity mindset. But
(25:15):
what a grief is abundance. I've been trying to look
for in the ways since my mother has died, in
what ways my grief over her and grieving her has
expanded my world. So much of our default thought about
grief is that, like, it sucks, it's sad we lost something.
But my grief that I've been experiencing since my mother
passed away has been abundant in so many ways. When
(25:38):
people ask me how I'm feeling now, I say, my
mother died a few weeks ago. It's kind of weird.
And then you know what they tell me their grief story.
They tell me about someone who died, They tell me
about a loved one, and that story and that sharing
is abundance. It's a new connection, right. I was in
the bank cashing out the CD that we had tucked
(26:01):
away to cover my mother's funeral expenses, and nice bank
lady was like, so, what are you using this for?
And they expect like a down payment for a house. Sure,
my kid's going to college, and I was like, for
my mother's funeral. And then we just talked for twenty
minutes in the bank office and by the end she's
crying and I'm crying, and I know all about her
on something that's abundance, right, So how can I see
(26:25):
grief not just a scarcity but as abundance? SAYI Jones
on the podcast said one of the phrases he likes
to use and he's hurt from someone else is that
we are not just grieving, we are anointed with grief.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I loved that phrase from him.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, and if you look at anointing in the biblical sense.
Anytime any character in the Bible had a special anointing,
it meant that they had a gift that had to
be shared. You weren't making full and good use of
your anointance unless you were using it to help share
with other people. And so on some days, not all days.
(27:05):
Thinking about grief in that way helps me. It's abundance,
it's building community, it's sharing stories, it's bigger, it's not
just scarcity.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I love that we lay that down, that idea that
grief can be an anointing and grief is abundance. We
lay that down after our conversation about none of this
is about talking you out of your grief. I think
sometimes we can like conflate abundance with celebration, and then
we're right back to where we started again with like, yeah,
hold on positive vibes only, and if it's abundance, it's
(27:38):
a celebration and we're only going to talk like we
can like derail that so quickly. Yes, yes, hey, before
we get back to my conversation with Sam Sanders, you know,
Sam created that character for his grief, the glorious Sally
(27:58):
who eats butter Bacan ice cream and watches a marathon
of designing women. I love how that unfolded. That was
completely unscripted, everybody. The Writing your Grief course that I
mentioned in that part of the show is truly one
of the best things I've ever created, and it includes
that prompt on personifying grief that Sam ran with to
(28:21):
find the voice of Sally. So if you want to
explore your grief in creative and truly helpful ways, check
it out Writing your Grief. You can find it at
refuge in grief dot com backslash wyg, which is for
Writing your Grief, or click the link in the show notes.
All right, everybody, back to my conversation with co host
(28:42):
of Bye Check, Sam Sanders. What I love in that
story about your conversation with the woman at the bank.
I remember when I was first when we were first
shopping my book around to publishing houses, people were like,
this is so great, it's so necessary, it's so needed,
but nobody wants to talk about grief. So we pass,
and I'm like, you know, nobody ever wants to talk
(29:04):
about grief if you talk about it as this finite
thing that if you do the steps correctly, you're over
it and you never talk about it again. Nobody wants
to talk about that. But if you open up opportunities
for people to tell the real truth about their grief
and connect in that without being hijacked or bypassed or
talked out of it or cheered up or any of
those things, then everybody wants to talk about it. And
(29:26):
I think, you know, this is something that we see
coming out of that Vibe Check episode, is that when
you talk about grief in unbounded ways, not as a
measure of psychological health as to how quickly you can
snap back to normal and be positive, but when you
talk about it like a human, everybody wants in on
(29:47):
that conversation.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yes, yeah, well, and like that was the least scripted
and pre planned episode of Vibe Check we've ever taped.
So one of the EPs of the show is dear
friend of mine and he lives like a mile down
the street. It's hanging out with him. We both have dogs,
a walk our dogs other. Sometimes we're talking about life whatever,
And I was like, Brandon, hear me out. All I
(30:11):
want to talk about right now is my mother's death.
And Vibe Check is a show where the three of
us talk about our feelings. Would it be weird to
do that? He's like, do it. Then we tell the
rest of the team and they're just like do it.
And then we're all like, well, just stop there. We're
not going to script this. We're not going to research this,
we're not going to have bulleted talking points and try
to stick a certain landing. We're just going to talk
about it. So everything in that episode was off the cuff,
(30:35):
and I think that is what our grief conversations maybe
need more of. I'm over twelve steps for anything. I'm
over a playbook or a grief one on one for dummies.
I need to hear myself think out loud about this
and allow others to hear that too, so that they
know that they can do it as well. And that's
(30:57):
what I think the episode accomplished. It was a goal,
you know.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, and I think we've covered this a lot already,
but like one of the things that you said in
that episode was like, this is so important because I
feel like there's shame around grief and I want to
pull one thing in just to make sure that he's mentioned. So,
your dad died when you were a kid eighteen yeah, eighteen.
Interesting intersections. So my partner died the day before his
(31:22):
son's eighteenth birthday. So like this like loss of your
dad at this like really pivotal, just graduating from high school,
just turned eighteen, all of this stuff, and then here
is this person who disappears, right, So I wanted to
bring him into into our spare, into our conversation. And
(31:45):
also when you talked in the in the Vibe Chech
episode about we need to be able to talk about
this without shame, it made me curious as to how
have you experienced that shame previously and what was it
like being a young man losing your dad and navigating
(32:05):
all of those things that are inherent in being a
young adult, a young adult black man in this culture. Yeah,
I guess my question in all of that soup is
like where did you intersect with that shame that you
mentioned in this episode?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It was compounded And I'll tell you I but first
I'll say, like the circumstances of his death just it
was wild. So my father died December fifteenth, two thousand
and two, so winter of two thousand and two. I
had finished high school the first week of June. In
two thousand and two, I had graduated. I was set
to go off to California to college. I ended up
not going because my mother had her stroke which paralyzed
(32:44):
her in September of that year, two thousand and two,
and then right after that, my father was hospitalized with
in stage kidney failure which would kill him by the
time we got to December of that year. So basically
June I graduate for my mother's paralyzed, my father's already
in the hospital, and by December he dies. I deferred
(33:07):
a year from college just to take care of them,
and then I ended up staying in San Antonio to
go to undergrad to care for my mother. But over
the course of that year before my father died, that
summer to fall, it was probably the most depressing time
in my life. I'll never forget my Aunt Alta, my
mother's sister. She and I had Thanksgiving dinner in the
(33:29):
hospital cafeteria, and my mother was on one floor of
that hospital and my father was on another. And this
is after I had turned down the chance to go
to Stanford to be there with them, After I had,
as an eighteen year old, had to close down the
family businesses, and I was just like, I don't see
(33:50):
how things get worse than this, right, So I experienced
the loss of my father in just more of a
low point in life period. You know, my mother died
last month, But my life outside of that is pretty good.
I like my two jobs, I just bought a house.
I'm love in La right, like, life was okay. So
(34:11):
that was the biggest difference from the start. But I
also think I had a lot more shame around grieving
my father, and it was all compounded by being closeted
at that moment in time. I really didn't start to
come out until my mid twenties, and my father died
not knowing that I was gay, or I hadn't told
(34:32):
him that I'm gay. I think he knew, and there
were moments, especially when in his last several months of
life when I was this primary caregiver, where I could
just see in his eyes that he knew, you know
what I'm saying. But we never had that conversation. And
so I think had I been out of the closet
the way that I dealt with my grief and talked
about my grief, a big part of it would have
(34:53):
been a conversation about how to make peace with knowing
that I hadn't come out to him before he died.
Because I wasn't out. I just didn't have that conversation
with anybody, not even myself. So my grief, the totality
of my grief, was not truncated. What's the word I'm
looking for. I couldn't have all of the grief conversations
(35:14):
I wanted to have around my father's death because I
wasn't out of the closet, and so I did not
grieve as holistically or as fully as I'm able to
grieve now with my mother's death. Right. I also think
that life was just in such disarray. I was just
trying to keep my head above water and really try
(35:36):
to not think about grieving. I was still taking care
of my mother, who was bedridden. I was still figuring
out if I might go to college or not. I
was still figuring out how to live as an eighteen
year old with no functioning parents. My father had died.
My mother was there, but she couldn't be a parent
to me anymore. So all of a sudden, I'm eighteen,
(35:57):
not in school. One parent is dead, I'm taking care
of the other. There's really no supervision my church was
there to support, but they weren't going to tell me
what to do. So I was just trying to figure
out how to make sense of this very new life
that was thrust upon me. And I think making sense
of that meant that, like I maybe didn't give myself
enough time to just live grief holistically. Now at thirty eight,
(36:22):
with my mother passing one, she had been sick and
bedridden for twenty years, so we knew it was going
to happen at some point. I don't think we expected
it to happen now because she had lived twenty years.
We all thought she was going to live to be
like eighty five, just bedridden, So I wasn't ready for it,
but I knew that death was coming. But I also
think that I'm in a place in my life where
things feel more settled and I'm able to just take
(36:45):
more time to think about my grief. The fact that
last weekend I drove down to San Diego, It's been
a weekend on the beach and think about grief. That
was a luxury I was not able to afford myself
when I was eighteen. So my life is more comfortable now,
which means I have more space to just let the
grief be, if that makes sense, But also so much
(37:06):
these conversations are easier because I can talk about being gay,
having a mother, and growing up in a church that
was anti gay until it kind of wasn't, and having
a mother where I think the last person in my
life close to me who accepted them that I'm actually
gay was my mother, and I don't think it clicks
to her until I brought a man home for Thanksgiving
(37:28):
two years ago. So a lot of my grief is
working through that. My mother is the love of my life.
I don't think she actually accepted the totality of my
life until the end of hers What the fuck is
that about? But even being able to say that, that's
part of the conversation. I couldn't do that when I
was eighteen and my father died. Sorry, that was a
(37:48):
very long answer.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I love that answer because this is the reality here.
Like we don't grieve in a vacuum, we don't love
in a vacuum. There are cultural issues, there are communal issues,
there are interpersonal issues, and they all have to do
with how fully are we allowed to know ourselves and
(38:10):
how fully are we allowed to let other people know us,
And that's not always an easy answer, right. It's not
always safe to be seen as who you are or
to be loved as who you are. And sometimes the
people we love aren't capable of loving the totality of
your life the way that you just said, right, And
there's just so much to grieve in all of that.
(38:33):
There's so much to grieve in all of that. Like,
it's just like, it's ridiculous to me that we think
that grief is this siloed thing that happens at this
very specific time when a person dies and it's over
really quickly. Like, grief is like the backdrop of the world, right,
it is everywhere, And until we make space for that
(38:54):
and open conversations about that, then we're not gonna get
the full abundance that we're longing for.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, thinking more on
like the difference between grieving my father and my mother,
and I talked about this a little bit on vibe check,
but in a Twitter threat a few months ago, I
want to sit actually, few weeks ago, round Father's Day.
One of the things I had to make peace with
allowing myself to do well some of the world building
we do around dead loved ones. My father was a
(39:24):
very present father. He was always there and because he
actually was the parent who did like pick up and
drop off for everything, So every band practice, every meet,
every whatever, my dad was the one there. He was
a constant in our lives. But like many straight male fathers,
he was physically present and emotionally distant. You know, they're
very good at that, those men. And so I found
(39:48):
myself after his death continuing to hold down to his
hold on to his memory in my heart and my mind.
But I made his memory this character that grew on
my and in the twenty one years that he's been gone,
I felt the memory of my father become a fully
(40:08):
formed character who changes and lives and breathes. And there's
some moments in my life or I feel like he
and I are like throwing back cocktails and shit talking.
There are some moments in my life where he is
my champion or my hero, or there's some moments in
life where he is like the prankster. But like the
memory of my father has become its own being. That
(40:34):
is almost what I need him to be when I
need it. And I used to get mad at myself
for building him up in that way in my heart
and in my mind. But now I'm kind of like
it's allowed. It's my dad and it's my mind. And
this helps. And so part of this whole idea of
like grief as abundant, some of that abundance is like
(40:56):
you get to do with your dead loved ones memory
whatever you need to do with it, and you get
to build that world. And that actually has been so cool.
And my father's memory has been able to sustain me
and parent me in ways that my father when he
was here might not have been able to do. So
(41:18):
I like it.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
I love it, I love and I love what you
just said there that like whatever you grow that relationship
into or imagine into for that relationship like that is yours.
It's sort of like staking this claim to your own life.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Honestly, every conversation that I've had for the last year,
like we always come back to agency and sovereignty, right,
like this is your life.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yes, your heart, your mind, your love, your life.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yes, and that other people get to have theirs as well,
and that other people's love, life, grief, all of these
things are not a threat to yours.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
You get to love as you love, and explore as
you explore, and grieve as you grieve. And can we
acknowledge that in each other and share that with each
other and not see it as one of you is
doing it right and one of you is doing it wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
And acknowledge is just going to be different. You know,
my brother and I are ten months apart in age.
Our parents literally had us back to back, and I
took care of my mother for about the first five
years after she had her stroke, and my brother took
care of her the last five years and the last
five years or so she had debnia. So his experience
(42:40):
caring for her was different than my experience caring for her,
And so I know that the way she lives in
his head after she's gone is going to be different
than what it was for me. That's okay, right, Like
that's okay. And now it's like, you know, I'm still
just weeks out from her death, and I don't think
her memory has come back to me me and the
(43:01):
way my father's has yet, but I'm waiting for her
to show up. I'm like, all right, Regina, when you
come back into my heart and my mind in this
like new form post death form for just for me,
what you're gonna be Like, I'm excited to see, if
that makes sense, I'm excited to see. I'm excited to
(43:21):
see what the character of my dead mother becomes in
me and how I talk to that.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I love that. I could talk to you for hours,
but I want to I want to, like at least
start turning in the direction of the door. So there
are two questions that I want to get into. So
thinking about that difference between being able to tell yourself
the whole truth before you can tell others the whole truth,
and the difference between the aftermath of your dad's death
(43:53):
and the aftermath of your mom's death. Like, one of
the things that I've seen in my inbox, in my
comment and my DMS stemming from your episode is how
thankful people are that a bunch of men are sitting
down and having this conversation, right, that there is something
so special to hear any people, a group of people,
(44:15):
but specifically a group of men come together and really
make space for each other and listen to each other
and hear each other. And this isn't something that comes
out of the blue, right like this, like my mom
died and I decided to start having deep, vulnerable conversations
with people in my life that doesn't just arrive. It's
reminded me of when I was getting ready for our
(44:36):
time here together. I remember reading about an incident with
your male friends in grad school. I don't know if
it was grad school or undergrad where it was an
interview I read with you a while ago where you
were talking about you hadn't come out yet, and your
straight male friends were like, dude, stop hurting yourself by
pretending to be something else, please please be who you are.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, this was the thing. It's like, one of the
biggest catalysts, like coming out journey was not gay people
being like, come out, girl, because my straight friends being like,
we already know when we see you struggling, what the hell?
That's what it was like. That was a catalyst. And like, yeah,
my dear friend Desmond Surrette love him dearly, sat me
down well after midnight in an I hop in Harvard Square.
(45:24):
It was like, we're here for you, dude, Like we know. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
I for sure cut you off, go ahead, finish your thought.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
No you didn't. I was hoping you would pick that
up and tell that story a little bit, but there's
there's something in there. And then also sort of looking
at your career and being known as a person who
actually somebody writing about your career with NPR, somebody wrote
surfacing uncommon pathways from emotional sincerity has long been the
object of sanders work. It isn't that sweet?
Speaker 1 (45:54):
I love this, appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
So there's this connection there or this sort of call
and response that I saw as I was learning about
you and reading what you've said about yourself and what
others have said about you and listening to you obviously
that there's this long standing, deeply rooted interest in what
is below the surface. Yeah, and how do we connect there?
(46:17):
And how do we talk about that? And I wonder
if that assessment that that person wrote, surfacing uncommon pathways
for emotional sincerity has long been the object of Sanders' work.
Does that feel accurate? And if so, like, how do
you see that showing up in not just your grief?
(46:38):
And this is a super long, complicated question, apologies, welcome
to my brain, but like, if it does feel accurate,
how does that relate not just to your grief but
the way that you are connecting with the people in
your life through that vulnerability, depth, and honesty. That is
the longest, most convoluted question ever in the world. And
(46:58):
if you heard a real question, let me know.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yeah. I think the question is like, how'd you get
cool with talking about feelings? And talking about feelings a
lot and in different ways. I talk about feelings as
they relate to entertainment and popular culture. When I covered politics,
I talked about the way our emotions inform our political lives.
(47:22):
When I was a news reporter, a lot of the
work was like, this thing just happened, how do people
feel about it. I've always liked looking at the journalism
I do through the lens of emotion, like stories or
facts and figures and numbers and whatever, But they're also
stories about how people feel, and how they feel always
drives the action for any news story, So that's always
(47:43):
undergird how I approach like my professional work. And then
I think personally, maybe part of why I'm so eager
to have these kind of conversations in adulthood is because
in childhood I just really didn't have them. I was
surrounded by a loving family and a loving church and
people who cared for me, but there were two things
that kept me from being truly emotionally honest as a kid.
(48:06):
I was gay in South textasn't very closeted. And two,
I had a really bad stutter. It was very hard
for me to talk for a very long time. I
don't think I really worked through it fully until my twenties.
So I remember this yeourney in aching to be better
able to express myself as a kid and say all
these things I wanted to say. I think part of
(48:28):
why I gravitated to music and playing the saxophone was
because that was a way that I could express something
without a stutter on it, right. So I think that's
the second reason why I'm so into having these kind
of conversations as a grown up. I'm one of those
people who like loves talking to strangers. I love it.
(48:48):
I'm in a long line waiting for something. Oh, we're talking.
We're talking. I'm at the CBS, we're talking. Don't put
me in an uber where the ride is longer than
half an hour, because by the end I'm walking out
the car being like, I think it's all gonna work out.
You're gonna get custody. Keep me posted on Blair like
I get in there right exactly, And I think all
(49:11):
of that is like from this, it's like feeding and
nurturing this child too. For a few reasons, just didn't
get to have all the conversations he needed to have
as a kid. So now I probably overconversate and I
found ways to get paid to conversate, which isn't even
a real word, but I like it conversate. But yeah,
I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
I love the play on overco over conversate and overcompensate.
Love that. But this is also like medicinal time travel, right, like,
oh yeah, here is my life and it is an
answer to what I longed for as a child, Like
we're always doing that.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yeah. I tell folks that Vibe Check, which is on
purpose a show hosted by three black gay men. I
tell folks Vibe Check is having the podcasts and cultivating
the friendships that I wish I could have had as
a young queer black kid in South Texas. I didn't
have that. I didn't have a sight in Zach when
(50:12):
I was a kid. I would have loved to have
those friends as a kid. I get to have them
now as an adult. And my favorite letters we get
from listeners are younger queer folks, saying, listening to y'all
is like hearing my gay elders. I'm the elder, sure,
all aloud, whatever, but take it. Yeah, if we are
modeling something that people don't get enough of, especially queer folks,
(50:37):
let me do that. I love doing that. I love
doing that exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I mean, this is the whole reason for this podcast, right,
is to have the conversations that we long to have,
that we need to have personally, interpersonally collectively, to give
people conversation starters, to give them something to live into,
to give them something that says it is okay to
(51:01):
do this. Yes.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Well, it's like, I mean, not to totally overuse the
most overused quote of all time, which is incorrectly attributed
to Nelson Mandela, but that Mary and Williamson quote. You
know when I let my light shine, it shines right
on you. Whatever. It's so, it feels corny, but it's true.
Modeling this kind of behavior helps other people start doing
(51:24):
it themselves. Modeling a grief conversation, Modeling a mature and
friendly conversation between queer men between black men that allows
other people and inspires him to do it themselves, and
if just one person leaves this episode or that vibe
(51:44):
check episode and says to themselves, I want to talk
about grief with the loved one today. All of it
was worth it. All of it was worth it. That
was actually the point.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah, that is a great setup for closing question. Okay,
what you know and living what you have lived? What
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Hope looks like my dog laid on me. My dog,
Zora is the sweetest dog ever, an old, lovely pit bull.
She has been with me through every major milestone of
my last twelve years. She's moved across the country with
me twice. She was in the room when I introduced
(52:31):
my mother to my boyfriend and she finally got it
that I was like actually gay. Like forever, Zora was
with me and with my aunt Paulette as she died
of cancer. She has been in the room and in
the space as I've navigated friendships and relationships. She's just
been there for it all. She has been the forest
gump of my life, just kind of like always there
(52:52):
for all the big moments. And when I see her,
I see the entirety of what she's lived with me,
and I also see an ending coming. She will die.
She is old, she's grayer this year than she was
last year. She's on our medication, she's on arthritis medication.
(53:15):
She's had in the last six months two major surgeries.
She will die. And what I get to do every
day was the other dog is make peace with that juxtaposition.
I've lived a whole life with her, and it feels
so big, and I know she's going to die. What
do you do in the face of that? Like we
know that everything we love will leave us, but a
(53:36):
dog is a very present reminder of that. And what
do we do when we have a dog in our lives,
even knowing that they're going to leave us before we
want them to, We love them even harder. I love
her more every day. I love her more today. Sorry,
great with you. I love her more today with her
scars and her arthritis and her crotchy old bones. And
(54:02):
I have to pick her up and get her in
the bed now. And I love her more today than
when she was a little bitty puppy. Isn't that hope?
That's hope, you know? So like for me, it's like
that is hope. Knowing all of this will end, and
loving it anyway. You got me, I'm crying. My dog
(54:24):
is hope. My dog is hope she will leave me,
and so what, I still love her? Goddamn. I don't
think there's going to be the dog that set.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
Me off, right, It's always the dog. I can do
such a good emotional callous to most things, but the
second it's a.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Dog, I mean, I mean every time, yeah, every.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Time, every single time. All Right, thank you so much
for being here, for both being on this show, for
being on your shows, and for being in the world
in all the ways that you are in the world.
I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
This was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for
the work you do. I feel fortified after this conversation.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Thank you, Thank you. All Right. We are going to
link to vibe Check in the show notes. Obviously, anything
else you want people to know about or places they
can look for you, or any other missions.
Speaker 1 (55:29):
I'm on social channels at Sam Sanders. My other show
for Vulture is not really in the spirit of the
Vibcheck conversation or your show, but it is a pop
culture podcast I host, so if you wanted to mention it, cool,
but like, no need to you know, different worlds, But yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
That's it all right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions
to carry with you. I'm going to go compose myself.
We'll be right back each week. I leave you with
some questions to carry with you until we meet again.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
One thing that really struck me in this conversation was
how much fun it was. There are a lot of
ways to be playful, even when you're talking about difficult things. Right,
Playfulness is healing. I think you learn a lot about
who you are and what you need when you allow
yourself to be freed from that cage and play a
little bit right. I also really liked how Sam looks
(56:30):
back on his grief soon after his dad died and
sees it in context. What was available to him then
is different than what's available to him now, and one
way of grieving one context isn't more correct than the other. Right.
There's such kindness and such honoring in that view of
(56:52):
the past self and the current self. So maybe that's
something you might play with in your own life. Who
were you back to and what kind of emotional life
or emotional expression was available to you? And who are
you now? Today, knowing what you know and what is
available to you at this time. I think that kind
(57:13):
of respectful questioning or curiosity, I think that can apply
to any pivotal part of our lives, not just death. Yeah,
how about you, what stuck with you from this conversation.
Everybody's going to take something different from the show, but
I do hope you found something to hold on to.
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
(57:34):
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. And while you're at it, you could also
tag at Sam Sanders let him know how his story
affected you. Spread your reflections around, follow the show at
(57:55):
It's Okay Pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere
else to see video clips from the show, and use
the hashtag It's okay pod on all the platforms, so
not only I can find you, but others can too.
None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we
start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're
not okay. You're in good company. That's it. For this week.
(58:19):
Remember to subscribe to the show leave a review as
I requested earlier. I love to read your reviews. I
love to pass them along to our guests too. Coming
up next week on the show, Tamblock, author of the
book From Scratch and the very very popular Netflix show
by the same name, and just a lovely all around
(58:40):
human being. Follow It's Okay on your favorite platform so
you do not miss an episode. It's okay that You're
not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me
Meghan Devine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by
Elizabeth Fozzio, with logistical and social media support from Micah.
Post production and editing by his Antilli. Music provided by
(59:01):
Wave Crush and very quiet background noise provided by Luna
gently pawing at me to go get her some snacks.
What am I naming my grief today? Who is she?
We're gonna call her Sally today. She really wants to
watch reruns of Designing Women and then maybe put on
some old gospel records after that. And I think Sally
would like have some hagandash butter pecan ice cream with
me because my mother used to love that. And Sally
(00:22):
has a big laugh.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
This is it's okay that you're not okay? And I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show Somebody,
a lot of you DMed and emailed me about Sam Sanders,
co host of the podcast five Check and host of
Into It. Today, Sam and I are talking about grief
and love and church and the importance of friends. So
many good and important things settle in everybody. All of
(00:48):
that is coming up right after this first break before
we get started, one quick note. While we cover a
lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode,
this show is not a substitute for skilled support with
a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related
(01:11):
to your work. Hey friends, So, Sam Sanders has been
in the podcast and the radio world for a long time.
He was the creator and host of National Public Radios podcast.
It's been a minute, so you might have heard him there.
You might know him from his twelve years as a
reporter for NPR, where he covered electoral politics and was
(01:33):
one of the original co hosts of the NPR Politics podcast.
He's won awards as the best Radio and podcast host
from both the Ambies and the Los Angeles Press Club.
You probably know his voice, even if you might not
know his name. As I mentioned in the teaser, so
many of you sent me the Vibe Check episode in
which co host Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford, and Say Jones
(01:56):
discussed grief. Now, if you haven't heard that conversation, look
for vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts so you
can hear it. But you definitely don't need to have
heard that conversation with Sam and his co host already
in order to get into the episode today. This conversation
with Sam Sanders has everything you could possibly want in
(02:17):
a conversation about grief and love and taking care of
your people while also taking care of yourself. We've got
the good parts and the not so good parts of church,
so we're covering both community building and spiritual bypassing. We've
got expressions of grief that include ice cream and designing
women marathons. We have got the sheer goodness of men
(02:38):
supporting other men in their emotional and relational well being,
which is super important. And we've got ongoing relationships with
people who died years ago because we know that those
relationships never actually die. There's a lot here. You're gonna
hear Sam say towards the end of the show that
he felt fortified by our time together, and I hope
(03:02):
you do too. That's the beauty of these conversations, everybody.
They feed us. These conversations feed us if we let them,
if we make room for them. Now, just as so
many people sent me the original Vibe Check episode where
Sam and his friends discuss grief, I hope you will
(03:24):
share this episode with your friends and with strangers on
the internet. It is a great way to open up
conversations that feed you and make the whole world better
at the same time. Now, speaking of spreading the word
and making the world better, you all have been responding
to my pleas for reviews of the show, so thank
(03:45):
you for that. There have been several new ones lately.
I love reading them. Your reviews get people to listen
to the show, and if you leave a review for
a specific guest specific episode of the show, I tend
to pass those along to my guest. Yes, So, Alira,
thank you for your review of my conversation with Gina Rossero.
I passed your message along to Gina so that she
(04:07):
could hear what she means to you. So from both
of us, thank you. Thank you to everybody who has
left a review. If you haven't left a review yet,
please do so about the show in general or a
specific episode that moved you. All right on with today's
show with the kind, funny, wise and delightful Sam Sanders.
(04:32):
I'm so glad to have you here with me today,
and I have to say that everybody on the team
was so excited that we were going to get to
chat today, so you know you have some fans.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, Soscedens here, honored to be here and thank you
for doing this work. I think that I've been talking
about on my shows the last few weeks is how
we and Americans especially just don't talk about grief enough,
and so for people that do that intentionally, I'm grateful.
So thanks for what you do.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Absolutely, Yeah, it's neat to see how comfortable might not
be the right word, but how much more comfortable or
how much more frequently people are talking about grief? I
feel like when I started this work ten years ago,
no one was really talking about it. So there has
been a change, it's not quite enough of a change.
But before we jump into all that, I mean, the
(05:22):
obvious place for us to start here is with talking
about grief and talking about your recent episode on vibecheck
discussing your mom's death. Yeah, I would love to start
with could you introduce your mom to us?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah. My mother's name is Regina Sanders. She was the
second youngest of six raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She was
an elementary school teacher and a middle school vice principal
and a Pentecostal church organist and a mother of two.
And she was in wilvermin. I think the most energetically
(06:02):
charismatic person I've ever known in my life, I said
in vibe check. The thing about my mother was that
every room she entered, she won them all over. And
when it wasn't even a competition, or when there weren't
even stakes, you always wanted to find a way to
be on her side, because her side just seemed more fun.
She was a woman who taught me and my brother
(06:25):
and so many other people that you can be successful
and you can be professional and you can get a
lot of shit done, but you can like always find
time for laughter and joy and like whimsy. My mother
was like beautifully whimsical. She just she loved the weird joke,
she loved the crash joke, she loved laughing where you
(06:48):
shouldn't laugh, and till the very end, she was cracking
us all up. So that's her.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
She passed away June twenty first, so a little over
a month ago, and we miss her dearly.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Such a big presence. Now, something that you didn't mention
in your description of who she was and what she did.
She worked as a mortician when you were a kid,
right or something adjacent to that.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah. Yeah, This is also what has made dealing with
grief over her passing a multifaceted exercise because my family,
more than most other families, dealt with death a lot.
So my parents met after my mother had finished college
in South Texas and was teaching grade school, and she
(07:33):
met my father and they had a quick courtship. And
they'll never admit it but I think they were pregnant
with my brother when she was walking down the aisle.
Fine with it. But my father had had a multifaceted career.
He was trained as a farmer, and he had like
a master's degree in agriculture from Prairie View and a university,
(07:54):
and for many years he worked for the state. They
have what's called an extension service where a state life
Texas basically has farmers on the payroll to help other
farmers farm well. And so he was like a master
farmer who like taught farmers how to farm good shit.
So he did that. But when he left that, he
began managing like senior centers and he did some other shit.
(08:17):
But when he and my mother got married, he was like,
I've always wanted to have a funeral home. This is
a very reliable business in black communities because you'll notice
Black people only bury their loved ones at black funeral homes.
It's even more segregated than like Sunday Morning church in America.
The funeral business when it's like it's black, right. So
(08:38):
he was like, I want to do that, And then
my mother was like, you know, I kind of always
wanted to have a daycare. So they decided when we
were young that they were going to have both a
funeral home and a daycare, and they did. And I
worked one summer in the daycare with the infants, actually
two summers, and my brother did more of the funeral homework,
but he would work the funerals like as an usher
(08:58):
driving the car, and I did that for litle bit too.
But all through our childhood we were around death. My
parents had to work the funerals. My mother was trained
to embalm bodies. We were just like as kids hang
out at the funeral home all the time, which meant
that like we could run around the funeral home and
like play hide and go seek amongst the caskets, and
every now and then I would like, dare my brother
touch the body? Go touch the dead body. We could
(09:20):
just like get that close. So it was never weird
to me to be around a dead body, and it
was never weird for me to think about death, which
I realized in adulthood was a special kind of privilege,
a special kind of privilege. There's a lot less queasinous
about this shit with me.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
How was grief talked about in your household?
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Grief was not talked about, grief was performed.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
A black funeral is an exercise in performance art. And
I say that with love and with kindness. But it's
a fucking show. Have you you've been, You've been to
the least one. Yes, it's a show.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
It is.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It's a show. It's a concert. They go on for hours.
It's not just one emotion, it's all of them. So
my first experience with grief, just as a kid growing
up in a black church and as a kid with
two black parents who owned a black funeral home, was
understanding from a very early age that grief emotionally was multifaceted.
(10:19):
It was multifaceted. You go into a black funeral, there's
moments of sadness, there's moments of humor, there's moments of joy,
there's moments of reflection. But it's not just sad. Right,
you are the kid of parents who own a funeral home.
You see all sides of the death industry. Right. I
used to know how much caskets actually cost. Turns out
(10:40):
you're all getting scammed. Then you're all getting scammed, like
truly buy your casket at Costco, like save the money.
But I just always burials explore. Okay, well but yes, yes, yeah,
but I always just had a i guess, more well
rounded experience or understanding of what grief was and what
(11:03):
death was because I saw it through those ways, which
which was is prismatic is not the word, but there
was layers to it.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. It's interesting that when I ask you about grief,
we go to the funeral and the performance, the performance
aspect of that, you know, Like I hear from so
many people who either grew up or are still deeply
involved in church communities, and for them they feel like,
wait a second, Like we had this outpouring of love
(11:33):
and celebration and wailing and mourning during the funeral, and
then a week later everybody was over it, and I'm
still like, my dad just died.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I'm in that right now. Can I tell you what
I've been telling clothes Lease, Yes, we have the funeral.
It is a beautiful service. The church that we attended
most of our lives, they really showed up for us
and honored my mother with joy and humor and life,
and it was wonderful. The grave site was literally one
hundred and five degrees because it was a Texas heat
wave that week but like we did it. It was
(12:06):
it was a damn good funeral, and I've been doing
a bunch of funerals, so I appreciate my entire church
family for doing that for us. But a week or
two later, I started telling my friends, I was like,
you know what I wish. I kind of wish she
had also been cremated so I would have an excuse
to make a trip to toss her ashes somewhere. I
wanted something else to mark the death that was smaller
(12:29):
and quieter and more personal, and I've been seeking those
moments in the week since her passing. So just this
past weekend, I just quietly, without taking anybody with me,
not even my dog, snuck off the San Diego and
just walked along the beach for hours for the whole weekend.
And it felt like it was getting me to that
(12:49):
place that I want to be in. But I still
have this weird desire to go somewhere, either alone or
with just a few people, to honor her in the
way that you would go somewhere to spread a parents'
ashes and not weird like she's in the ground. I
know she's in the ground, but I still want that too.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
That's not weird at all. Nothing you do to honor,
explore and maintain a connection with someone you love is weird.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
That's the thing that I'm working through right now too,
because even though no one's telling you there's a script
on how to grieve, you're kind of always like, well,
am I doing it right?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Am I doing it right? You know? Before I talked
about my mother's death on vibe Check, a podcast I
host with two of my favorite people in the world,
it was like, well, am I allowed to do this?
Is it okay? What are the rules? And then you
think long and hard about it. It's like, there are
no rules around grief, and you shouldn't have any rules
(13:48):
around grief. You got to just live it. But yeah,
I'm so glad you raise that point, like what are
the rules? The rules are you're sad. The rules are
you're sad and you got to work. But the rules
are also like, sometimes you're not just saying you're cracking
up over a memory of that awful joke she told
in the most unopportune moment, or sometimes you are. You know,
(14:09):
there's just a range. So yes, like not accepting that
there's no rule book and just saying this feels right today.
I think is a work. That's the word. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
I think the challenge here is that we've been sold
a rule book. Oh yeah, right, we've been sold a
rule book with the you know, the five stages of
grief and then with prolonged grief disorder and then like
you know, you have six weeks to have your feelings
and then you should be back to normal. And this
whole idea that grief ends at the funeral instead of
it begins at the funeral, Like there is a set
(14:40):
of rules that we've inherited, like the fact that we're like, shit,
am I allowed to talk about this? Says there is
there's a line we feel like we're not supposed to cross. Yeah,
so much of the work and so like so many
people sent me your episode on vibechech exploring grief, talking
about grief, saying we have to talk about this stuff.
They were like, it's happening. This is so exciting that
(15:01):
people are talking about it, and it really is like
there there is no cage, right, We've been sold a cage,
but there is no cage. And what's normal in grief
is to feel how you feel and express how you
express and not know how to do this. Yeah, because
you've never had to live without your mom before. Yeah,
so anything that you do is like is new. Yeah, yeah,
(15:26):
is new and acceptable and like the only rule book
is I mean to be poetic about it here. The
only rule book is your own heart. That is the thing.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, it's funny. Thinking about rules a thing I was
thinking about doing last week, and I was like, this
might not be good for me. I was thinking a
lot about the things that my mother loved, and I
could always remember movies that she loved because we watched
a bunch of movies together, and I remember she loved
Still Magnolias and whenever it came on, like TBS in
my youth, we would just watch it to Magnolis is on,
(15:58):
We're watching it. And for a second I was like, Oh,
that movie's actually about grief. Julia Roberts' character dies in
that movie is very painful. Maybe watching that would like
help me, And then I was like, no, Sam, maybe
it won't. Maybe this Hollywood version of death and grief
is the opposite of what you need, because as watching
(16:18):
this going to make you think that you need to
perform your grief in a still Magnolia's kind of way.
So I haven't watched it yet, I might, I think
if I do, all watch it with the critical lens,
not a lens to which to inform myself. But yet
there are rule books everywhere.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
There really really are, And I like, this is all
an experiment, right, Like, you don't know, you think it
might be a great idea or maybe a caution to
watch Steal Magnolias. So you turn on Steal Magnoias and
you check in with yourself and you're like, how's this
feeling to me? This is actually not feeling good, So
I'm going to turn this off. This actually feels different
than I expected. Let me explore this, right, Like, it's
(16:55):
all an.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Experiments, Yeah, and relative exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
On one day, Steel Magnolia's might be the best thing ever,
and you might want to be like, let's throw a
Steel Magnolia's party because that sounds fascinating. I don't know,
I haven't done this before, but there really is so much,
like I think, Like, I think one of the reasons
that we try to put so many rules around grief
is we don't like the chaos. We don't like not knowing,
(17:19):
we don't like not knowing the answer, and it's like,
we're supposed to keep this whole buttoned up thing around
all the parts of being human, and it's just it's weird.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, Like, the thing that we know the least about
is what happens to us after we die. Some people
think they know, some people make up stories to feel
good about it. We don't fucking know. Yeah, So, of course,
in the absence of knowledge of what happens to your
loved one of yourself after this death, of course, it's
(17:50):
like human nature to want to put rules and norms
around it, to give this thing some semblance of order.
So I get it. But yeah, I think, like, can
we live our grief with the same amount of openness
that death itself is?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Death is an extreme openness because you actually don't fucking know.
I don't know where my mother is. I don't know
if she's looking at me. I don't know if she's like,
why the fuck are you talking about me? I don't know.
But I can still love her and her memory in
the I don't know of it all. And so it's like,
how can I take that same okay with the I
(18:30):
don't know that No, take that same feeling and apply
it to how I'm living out my grief.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Yes, I love that you brought up the afterlife and
our ideas about that. I think one of the things
that happens for so many people, no matter what the
spiritual practice is or what their religious tradition is, a
lot of people feel like they get this shaming from
their community, like don't be sad. You're mother's with Jesus.
(19:00):
Don't be sad. It's all annot She's.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
In a better place. She's I don't know. Are you
fucking sure?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Are you are?
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Re's the zip code? You tell me? Where is she?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Exactly? It really is this. Do you know that term
spiritual bypassing?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
No, tell me so?
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Spiritual bypassing right where we use religious ideas, spiritual ideas
to bypass the human condition. And that's what's happening when
you're saying something like you know your your mother wouldn't
wouldn't want you to be sad. She's in her better place,
she's gone to Jesus. Like whether or not all of
that stuff is true for the person, like not relevant
(19:36):
in this moment because right now I am missing her
here right It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that there
is something after this, if we're using that as a
way to invalidate the person who's right in front of
us and the way that they're feeling and the way
that we might care for them. Right. So, for a
lot of people in religious communities, they're like, I can't
(19:59):
I can't on my church community the way that I
used to, because all they want to do is see
me happy that my loved one is reunited with the
life force, and I don't feel that. And I can
be more than one thing. I can be really happy
that my person's body and spirit has rejoined the oneness
and really fucking want them still here. Yeah, both of
(20:20):
the like you contain multitudes, Like you can have all
of these feelings at once and they're all valid.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, And this is the thing. And I will say
I was a church kid. I love my church experience.
I have left the church, but I still think I
believe in God. But yeah, I think sometimes our faith
traditions are asking us or are giving us distraction. Sometimes
it's just distraction. It's saying I get it you having
some really negative feelings around this death right now, But
(20:48):
don't think of those negative feelings, think of these positive feelings.
Think about heaven. Isn't that cool? And on the face
you're like, isn't that such a nice offering for them
to give to me? But it's not getting rid of
the negative emotions. It's just distracting you from them temporarily.
They're still there, and they're there until they're gone. And
I think, like I would love for our faith traditions
(21:12):
to have a better language at helping us here in
this world sit with our feelings. I would love to
know that churches are doing the thing where they're telling
you about having if that makes you feel good, but
also saying to you very clearly and forthrightly, every emotion
you feel is allowed and is in fact holy because
God made them all. That's what I want to hear.
(21:35):
All of it's valid, and I want to And this
is not a theology conversation, because I really don't know
where I stand. But if I believe in a higher power,
a God, a Jesus, whatever, I believe that like that
higher power is always telling us that pretty much everything
about us is okay because we were made in the
(21:57):
higher powers image. And if I'm feeling today and sadness
is in me, it is holy. It's holy and how
can I respect it and not just distract myself by
thinking about who my mother is playing the tambourine with
in heaven. You know that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
And also this idea that there are negative emotions and
positive emotions, which just emotions and on or off. I
love that you just called them all holy, and I'm
with you on that one. There is no part of
the human experience that is not holy. It doesn't mean
that some people aren't jerks and that there's like not
(22:35):
mad behavior, that's not what we're talking about, but we're
talking about, like the way that you feel is the
way that you feel, and can we find a way
to surround that with love and curiosity and support and
connection instead of trying to shove people out of what
they feel by saying they're doing it wrong or this
is the right way to be or get out of this.
And like, I think this is why these conversations are
(22:57):
so important, because we have inherent those rules around goodness
and badness, positive and negative, what you're supposed to be
doing and what you're not supposed to be doing, and
how do you honor the debt? Like stop right, Like
let's just be in this moment in this humanness that
(23:18):
we're having and see each other. How rad would that be?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yeah? Well, and how can we respect these emotions as
multifaceted beings in and of themselves. What if a good
thought exercise is to even personify our grief and talk
to it.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
I love that you just said that, because there's a
course that I've been running for like ten years now
called Writing Your Grief, and one of the prompts in
there is personifying your grief. So it's this whole like
creative prompt around. Can you if grief has a voice,
If grief is a character, how does it move? What
does it where? How does it speak? Does it speak?
If it has a voice, let it like, let's listen.
(24:02):
I love that. So I love that you just brought
that up. Yes, there's just like a nice little yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, now I'm thinking, like, what am I naming my
grief today?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Who is she? We're gonna call her Sally today. She
really wants to watch reruns of Designing Women and then
maybe put on some old gospel records after that. And
I think Sally would like have some hagandash butter pecan
ice cream with me, because my mother used to love that,
and Sally has a big laugh. That's today for grief.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
See I love her.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I love her too. Oh my goodness, she's great. Oh Sally,
come on in the front door, Sally.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
We haven't got the ice cream getting to the proper
thawed texture. A speak. I love this and this is
this is what becomes available when you throw out the
inherited rule book.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah. Well, and throwing out the inherited rule book allows
me to just like see things that I once thought
were static as a multifaceted. One of the things I
talked about in the vibe Check episode with Zach and
Sayeed it was that, like, we are taught so much
from an early age that grief itself is an exercise
in scarcity and a practice in a scarcity mindset. But
(25:15):
what a grief is abundance. I've been trying to look
for in the ways since my mother has died, in
what ways my grief over her and grieving her has
expanded my world. So much of our default thought about
grief is that, like, it sucks, it's sad we lost something.
But my grief that I've been experiencing since my mother
passed away has been abundant in so many ways. When
(25:38):
people ask me how I'm feeling now, I say, my
mother died a few weeks ago. It's kind of weird.
And then you know what they tell me their grief story.
They tell me about someone who died, They tell me
about a loved one, and that story and that sharing
is abundance. It's a new connection, right. I was in
the bank cashing out the CD that we had tucked
(26:01):
away to cover my mother's funeral expenses, and nice bank
lady was like, so, what are you using this for?
And they expect like a down payment for a house. Sure,
my kid's going to college, and I was like, for
my mother's funeral. And then we just talked for twenty
minutes in the bank office and by the end she's
crying and I'm crying, and I know all about her
on something that's abundance, right, So how can I see
(26:25):
grief not just a scarcity but as abundance? SAYI Jones
on the podcast said one of the phrases he likes
to use and he's hurt from someone else is that
we are not just grieving, we are anointed with grief.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I loved that phrase from him.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, and if you look at anointing in the biblical sense.
Anytime any character in the Bible had a special anointing,
it meant that they had a gift that had to
be shared. You weren't making full and good use of
your anointance unless you were using it to help share
with other people. And so on some days, not all days.
(27:05):
Thinking about grief in that way helps me. It's abundance,
it's building community, it's sharing stories, it's bigger, it's not
just scarcity.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I love that we lay that down, that idea that
grief can be an anointing and grief is abundance. We
lay that down after our conversation about none of this
is about talking you out of your grief. I think
sometimes we can like conflate abundance with celebration, and then
we're right back to where we started again with like, yeah,
hold on positive vibes only, and if it's abundance, it's
(27:38):
a celebration and we're only going to talk like we
can like derail that so quickly. Yes, yes, hey, before
we get back to my conversation with Sam Sanders, you know,
Sam created that character for his grief, the glorious Sally
(27:58):
who eats butter Bacan ice cream and watches a marathon
of designing women. I love how that unfolded. That was
completely unscripted, everybody. The Writing your Grief course that I
mentioned in that part of the show is truly one
of the best things I've ever created, and it includes
that prompt on personifying grief that Sam ran with to
(28:21):
find the voice of Sally. So if you want to
explore your grief in creative and truly helpful ways, check
it out Writing your Grief. You can find it at
refuge in grief dot com backslash wyg, which is for
Writing your Grief, or click the link in the show notes.
All right, everybody, back to my conversation with co host
(28:42):
of Bye Check, Sam Sanders. What I love in that
story about your conversation with the woman at the bank.
I remember when I was first when we were first
shopping my book around to publishing houses, people were like,
this is so great, it's so necessary, it's so needed,
but nobody wants to talk about grief. So we pass,
and I'm like, you know, nobody ever wants to talk
(29:04):
about grief if you talk about it as this finite
thing that if you do the steps correctly, you're over
it and you never talk about it again. Nobody wants
to talk about that. But if you open up opportunities
for people to tell the real truth about their grief
and connect in that without being hijacked or bypassed or
talked out of it or cheered up or any of
those things, then everybody wants to talk about it. And
(29:26):
I think, you know, this is something that we see
coming out of that Vibe Check episode, is that when
you talk about grief in unbounded ways, not as a
measure of psychological health as to how quickly you can
snap back to normal and be positive, but when you
talk about it like a human, everybody wants in on
(29:47):
that conversation.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yes, yeah, well, and like that was the least scripted
and pre planned episode of Vibe Check we've ever taped.
So one of the EPs of the show is dear
friend of mine and he lives like a mile down
the street. It's hanging out with him. We both have dogs,
a walk our dogs other. Sometimes we're talking about life whatever,
And I was like, Brandon, hear me out. All I
(30:11):
want to talk about right now is my mother's death.
And Vibe Check is a show where the three of
us talk about our feelings. Would it be weird to
do that? He's like, do it. Then we tell the
rest of the team and they're just like do it.
And then we're all like, well, just stop there. We're
not going to script this. We're not going to research this,
we're not going to have bulleted talking points and try
to stick a certain landing. We're just going to talk
about it. So everything in that episode was off the cuff,
(30:35):
and I think that is what our grief conversations maybe
need more of. I'm over twelve steps for anything. I'm
over a playbook or a grief one on one for dummies.
I need to hear myself think out loud about this
and allow others to hear that too, so that they
know that they can do it as well. And that's
(30:57):
what I think the episode accomplished. It was a goal,
you know.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, and I think we've covered this a lot already,
but like one of the things that you said in
that episode was like, this is so important because I
feel like there's shame around grief and I want to
pull one thing in just to make sure that he's mentioned. So,
your dad died when you were a kid eighteen yeah, eighteen.
Interesting intersections. So my partner died the day before his
(31:22):
son's eighteenth birthday. So like this like loss of your
dad at this like really pivotal, just graduating from high school,
just turned eighteen, all of this stuff, and then here
is this person who disappears, right, So I wanted to
bring him into into our spare, into our conversation. And
(31:45):
also when you talked in the in the Vibe Chech
episode about we need to be able to talk about
this without shame, it made me curious as to how
have you experienced that shame previously and what was it
like being a young man losing your dad and navigating
(32:05):
all of those things that are inherent in being a
young adult, a young adult black man in this culture. Yeah,
I guess my question in all of that soup is
like where did you intersect with that shame that you
mentioned in this episode?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
It was compounded And I'll tell you I but first
I'll say, like the circumstances of his death just it
was wild. So my father died December fifteenth, two thousand
and two, so winter of two thousand and two. I
had finished high school the first week of June. In
two thousand and two, I had graduated. I was set
to go off to California to college. I ended up
not going because my mother had her stroke which paralyzed
(32:44):
her in September of that year, two thousand and two,
and then right after that, my father was hospitalized with
in stage kidney failure which would kill him by the
time we got to December of that year. So basically
June I graduate for my mother's paralyzed, my father's already
in the hospital, and by December he dies. I deferred
(33:07):
a year from college just to take care of them,
and then I ended up staying in San Antonio to
go to undergrad to care for my mother. But over
the course of that year before my father died, that
summer to fall, it was probably the most depressing time
in my life. I'll never forget my Aunt Alta, my
mother's sister. She and I had Thanksgiving dinner in the
(33:29):
hospital cafeteria, and my mother was on one floor of
that hospital and my father was on another. And this
is after I had turned down the chance to go
to Stanford to be there with them, After I had,
as an eighteen year old, had to close down the
family businesses, and I was just like, I don't see
(33:50):
how things get worse than this, right, So I experienced
the loss of my father in just more of a
low point in life period. You know, my mother died
last month, But my life outside of that is pretty good.
I like my two jobs, I just bought a house.
I'm love in La right, like, life was okay. So
(34:11):
that was the biggest difference from the start. But I
also think I had a lot more shame around grieving
my father, and it was all compounded by being closeted
at that moment in time. I really didn't start to
come out until my mid twenties, and my father died
not knowing that I was gay, or I hadn't told
(34:32):
him that I'm gay. I think he knew, and there
were moments, especially when in his last several months of
life when I was this primary caregiver, where I could
just see in his eyes that he knew, you know
what I'm saying. But we never had that conversation. And
so I think had I been out of the closet
the way that I dealt with my grief and talked
about my grief, a big part of it would have
(34:53):
been a conversation about how to make peace with knowing
that I hadn't come out to him before he died.
Because I wasn't out. I just didn't have that conversation
with anybody, not even myself. So my grief, the totality
of my grief, was not truncated. What's the word I'm
looking for. I couldn't have all of the grief conversations
(35:14):
I wanted to have around my father's death because I
wasn't out of the closet, and so I did not
grieve as holistically or as fully as I'm able to
grieve now with my mother's death. Right. I also think
that life was just in such disarray. I was just
trying to keep my head above water and really try
(35:36):
to not think about grieving. I was still taking care
of my mother, who was bedridden. I was still figuring
out if I might go to college or not. I
was still figuring out how to live as an eighteen
year old with no functioning parents. My father had died.
My mother was there, but she couldn't be a parent
to me anymore. So all of a sudden, I'm eighteen,
(35:57):
not in school. One parent is dead, I'm taking care
of the other. There's really no supervision my church was
there to support, but they weren't going to tell me
what to do. So I was just trying to figure
out how to make sense of this very new life
that was thrust upon me. And I think making sense
of that meant that, like I maybe didn't give myself
enough time to just live grief holistically. Now at thirty eight,
(36:22):
with my mother passing one, she had been sick and
bedridden for twenty years, so we knew it was going
to happen at some point. I don't think we expected
it to happen now because she had lived twenty years.
We all thought she was going to live to be
like eighty five, just bedridden, So I wasn't ready for it,
but I knew that death was coming. But I also
think that I'm in a place in my life where
things feel more settled and I'm able to just take
(36:45):
more time to think about my grief. The fact that
last weekend I drove down to San Diego, It's been
a weekend on the beach and think about grief. That
was a luxury I was not able to afford myself
when I was eighteen. So my life is more comfortable now,
which means I have more space to just let the
grief be, if that makes sense, But also so much
(37:06):
these conversations are easier because I can talk about being gay,
having a mother, and growing up in a church that
was anti gay until it kind of wasn't, and having
a mother where I think the last person in my
life close to me who accepted them that I'm actually
gay was my mother, and I don't think it clicks
to her until I brought a man home for Thanksgiving
(37:28):
two years ago. So a lot of my grief is
working through that. My mother is the love of my life.
I don't think she actually accepted the totality of my
life until the end of hers What the fuck is
that about? But even being able to say that, that's
part of the conversation. I couldn't do that when I
was eighteen and my father died. Sorry, that was a
(37:48):
very long answer.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I love that answer because this is the reality here.
Like we don't grieve in a vacuum, we don't love
in a vacuum. There are cultural issues, there are communal issues,
there are interpersonal issues, and they all have to do
with how fully are we allowed to know ourselves and
(38:10):
how fully are we allowed to let other people know us,
And that's not always an easy answer, right. It's not
always safe to be seen as who you are or
to be loved as who you are. And sometimes the
people we love aren't capable of loving the totality of
your life the way that you just said, right, And
there's just so much to grieve in all of that.
(38:33):
There's so much to grieve in all of that. Like,
it's just like, it's ridiculous to me that we think
that grief is this siloed thing that happens at this
very specific time when a person dies and it's over
really quickly. Like, grief is like the backdrop of the world, right,
it is everywhere, And until we make space for that
(38:54):
and open conversations about that, then we're not gonna get
the full abundance that we're longing for.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, thinking more on
like the difference between grieving my father and my mother,
and I talked about this a little bit on vibe check,
but in a Twitter threat a few months ago, I
want to sit actually, few weeks ago, round Father's Day.
One of the things I had to make peace with
allowing myself to do well some of the world building
we do around dead loved ones. My father was a
(39:24):
very present father. He was always there and because he
actually was the parent who did like pick up and
drop off for everything, So every band practice, every meet,
every whatever, my dad was the one there. He was
a constant in our lives. But like many straight male fathers,
he was physically present and emotionally distant. You know, they're
very good at that, those men. And so I found
(39:48):
myself after his death continuing to hold down to his
hold on to his memory in my heart and my mind.
But I made his memory this character that grew on
my and in the twenty one years that he's been gone,
I felt the memory of my father become a fully
(40:08):
formed character who changes and lives and breathes. And there's
some moments in my life or I feel like he
and I are like throwing back cocktails and shit talking.
There are some moments in my life where he is
my champion or my hero, or there's some moments in
life where he is like the prankster. But like the
memory of my father has become its own being. That
(40:34):
is almost what I need him to be when I
need it. And I used to get mad at myself
for building him up in that way in my heart
and in my mind. But now I'm kind of like
it's allowed. It's my dad and it's my mind. And
this helps. And so part of this whole idea of
like grief as abundant, some of that abundance is like
(40:56):
you get to do with your dead loved ones memory
whatever you need to do with it, and you get
to build that world. And that actually has been so cool.
And my father's memory has been able to sustain me
and parent me in ways that my father when he
was here might not have been able to do. So
(41:18):
I like it.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
I love it, I love and I love what you
just said there that like whatever you grow that relationship
into or imagine into for that relationship like that is yours.
It's sort of like staking this claim to your own life.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Honestly, every conversation that I've had for the last year,
like we always come back to agency and sovereignty, right,
like this is your life.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yes, your heart, your mind, your love, your life.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yes, and that other people get to have theirs as well,
and that other people's love, life, grief, all of these
things are not a threat to yours.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
You get to love as you love, and explore as
you explore, and grieve as you grieve. And can we
acknowledge that in each other and share that with each
other and not see it as one of you is
doing it right and one of you is doing it wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
And acknowledge is just going to be different. You know,
my brother and I are ten months apart in age.
Our parents literally had us back to back, and I
took care of my mother for about the first five
years after she had her stroke, and my brother took
care of her the last five years and the last
five years or so she had debnia. So his experience
(42:40):
caring for her was different than my experience caring for her,
And so I know that the way she lives in
his head after she's gone is going to be different
than what it was for me. That's okay, right, Like
that's okay. And now it's like, you know, I'm still
just weeks out from her death, and I don't think
her memory has come back to me me and the
(43:01):
way my father's has yet, but I'm waiting for her
to show up. I'm like, all right, Regina, when you
come back into my heart and my mind in this
like new form post death form for just for me,
what you're gonna be Like, I'm excited to see, if
that makes sense, I'm excited to see. I'm excited to
(43:21):
see what the character of my dead mother becomes in
me and how I talk to that.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
I love that. I could talk to you for hours,
but I want to I want to, like at least
start turning in the direction of the door. So there
are two questions that I want to get into. So
thinking about that difference between being able to tell yourself
the whole truth before you can tell others the whole truth,
and the difference between the aftermath of your dad's death
(43:53):
and the aftermath of your mom's death. Like, one of
the things that I've seen in my inbox, in my
comment and my DMS stemming from your episode is how
thankful people are that a bunch of men are sitting
down and having this conversation, right, that there is something
so special to hear any people, a group of people,
(44:15):
but specifically a group of men come together and really
make space for each other and listen to each other
and hear each other. And this isn't something that comes
out of the blue, right like this, like my mom
died and I decided to start having deep, vulnerable conversations
with people in my life that doesn't just arrive. It's
reminded me of when I was getting ready for our
(44:36):
time here together. I remember reading about an incident with
your male friends in grad school. I don't know if
it was grad school or undergrad where it was an
interview I read with you a while ago where you
were talking about you hadn't come out yet, and your
straight male friends were like, dude, stop hurting yourself by
pretending to be something else, please please be who you are.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, this was the thing. It's like, one of the
biggest catalysts, like coming out journey was not gay people
being like, come out, girl, because my straight friends being like,
we already know when we see you struggling, what the hell?
That's what it was like. That was a catalyst. And like, yeah,
my dear friend Desmond Surrette love him dearly, sat me
down well after midnight in an I hop in Harvard Square.
(45:24):
It was like, we're here for you, dude, Like we know. Yeah, yeah, anyway,
I for sure cut you off, go ahead, finish your thought.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
No you didn't. I was hoping you would pick that
up and tell that story a little bit, but there's
there's something in there. And then also sort of looking
at your career and being known as a person who
actually somebody writing about your career with NPR, somebody wrote
surfacing uncommon pathways from emotional sincerity has long been the
object of sanders work. It isn't that sweet?
Speaker 1 (45:54):
I love this, appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
So there's this connection there or this sort of call
and response that I saw as I was learning about
you and reading what you've said about yourself and what
others have said about you and listening to you obviously
that there's this long standing, deeply rooted interest in what
is below the surface. Yeah, and how do we connect there?
(46:17):
And how do we talk about that? And I wonder
if that assessment that that person wrote, surfacing uncommon pathways
for emotional sincerity has long been the object of Sanders' work.
Does that feel accurate? And if so, like, how do
you see that showing up in not just your grief?
(46:38):
And this is a super long, complicated question, apologies, welcome
to my brain, but like, if it does feel accurate,
how does that relate not just to your grief but
the way that you are connecting with the people in
your life through that vulnerability, depth, and honesty. That is
the longest, most convoluted question ever in the world. And
(46:58):
if you heard a real question, let me know.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yeah. I think the question is like, how'd you get
cool with talking about feelings? And talking about feelings a
lot and in different ways. I talk about feelings as
they relate to entertainment and popular culture. When I covered politics,
I talked about the way our emotions inform our political lives.
(47:22):
When I was a news reporter, a lot of the
work was like, this thing just happened, how do people
feel about it. I've always liked looking at the journalism
I do through the lens of emotion, like stories or
facts and figures and numbers and whatever, But they're also
stories about how people feel, and how they feel always
drives the action for any news story, So that's always
(47:43):
undergird how I approach like my professional work. And then
I think personally, maybe part of why I'm so eager
to have these kind of conversations in adulthood is because
in childhood I just really didn't have them. I was
surrounded by a loving family and a loving church and
people who cared for me, but there were two things
that kept me from being truly emotionally honest as a kid.
(48:06):
I was gay in South textasn't very closeted. And two,
I had a really bad stutter. It was very hard
for me to talk for a very long time. I
don't think I really worked through it fully until my twenties.
So I remember this yeourney in aching to be better
able to express myself as a kid and say all
these things I wanted to say. I think part of
(48:28):
why I gravitated to music and playing the saxophone was
because that was a way that I could express something
without a stutter on it, right. So I think that's
the second reason why I'm so into having these kind
of conversations as a grown up. I'm one of those
people who like loves talking to strangers. I love it.
(48:48):
I'm in a long line waiting for something. Oh, we're talking.
We're talking. I'm at the CBS, we're talking. Don't put
me in an uber where the ride is longer than
half an hour, because by the end I'm walking out
the car being like, I think it's all gonna work out.
You're gonna get custody. Keep me posted on Blair like
I get in there right exactly, And I think all
(49:11):
of that is like from this, it's like feeding and
nurturing this child too. For a few reasons, just didn't
get to have all the conversations he needed to have
as a kid. So now I probably overconversate and I
found ways to get paid to conversate, which isn't even
a real word, but I like it conversate. But yeah,
I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
I love the play on overco over conversate and overcompensate.
Love that. But this is also like medicinal time travel, right, like,
oh yeah, here is my life and it is an
answer to what I longed for as a child, Like
we're always doing that.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yeah. I tell folks that Vibe Check, which is on
purpose a show hosted by three black gay men. I
tell folks Vibe Check is having the podcasts and cultivating
the friendships that I wish I could have had as
a young queer black kid in South Texas. I didn't
have that. I didn't have a sight in Zach when
(50:12):
I was a kid. I would have loved to have
those friends as a kid. I get to have them
now as an adult. And my favorite letters we get
from listeners are younger queer folks, saying, listening to y'all
is like hearing my gay elders. I'm the elder, sure,
all aloud, whatever, but take it. Yeah, if we are
modeling something that people don't get enough of, especially queer folks,
(50:37):
let me do that. I love doing that. I love
doing that exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I mean, this is the whole reason for this podcast, right,
is to have the conversations that we long to have,
that we need to have personally, interpersonally collectively, to give
people conversation starters, to give them something to live into,
to give them something that says it is okay to
(51:01):
do this. Yes.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Well, it's like, I mean, not to totally overuse the
most overused quote of all time, which is incorrectly attributed
to Nelson Mandela, but that Mary and Williamson quote. You
know when I let my light shine, it shines right
on you. Whatever. It's so, it feels corny, but it's true.
Modeling this kind of behavior helps other people start doing
(51:24):
it themselves. Modeling a grief conversation, Modeling a mature and
friendly conversation between queer men between black men that allows
other people and inspires him to do it themselves, and
if just one person leaves this episode or that vibe
(51:44):
check episode and says to themselves, I want to talk
about grief with the loved one today. All of it
was worth it. All of it was worth it. That
was actually the point.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Yeah, that is a great setup for closing question. Okay,
what you know and living what you have lived? What
does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
Hope looks like my dog laid on me. My dog,
Zora is the sweetest dog ever, an old, lovely pit bull.
She has been with me through every major milestone of
my last twelve years. She's moved across the country with
me twice. She was in the room when I introduced
(52:31):
my mother to my boyfriend and she finally got it
that I was like actually gay. Like forever, Zora was
with me and with my aunt Paulette as she died
of cancer. She has been in the room and in
the space as I've navigated friendships and relationships. She's just
been there for it all. She has been the forest
gump of my life, just kind of like always there
(52:52):
for all the big moments. And when I see her,
I see the entirety of what she's lived with me,
and I also see an ending coming. She will die.
She is old, she's grayer this year than she was
last year. She's on our medication, she's on arthritis medication.
(53:15):
She's had in the last six months two major surgeries.
She will die. And what I get to do every
day was the other dog is make peace with that juxtaposition.
I've lived a whole life with her, and it feels
so big, and I know she's going to die. What
do you do in the face of that? Like we
know that everything we love will leave us, but a
(53:36):
dog is a very present reminder of that. And what
do we do when we have a dog in our lives,
even knowing that they're going to leave us before we
want them to, We love them even harder. I love
her more every day. I love her more today. Sorry,
great with you. I love her more today with her
scars and her arthritis and her crotchy old bones. And
(54:02):
I have to pick her up and get her in
the bed now. And I love her more today than
when she was a little bitty puppy. Isn't that hope?
That's hope, you know? So like for me, it's like
that is hope. Knowing all of this will end, and
loving it anyway. You got me, I'm crying. My dog
(54:24):
is hope. My dog is hope she will leave me,
and so what, I still love her? Goddamn. I don't
think there's going to be the dog that set.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
Me off, right, It's always the dog. I can do
such a good emotional callous to most things, but the
second it's a.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Dog, I mean, I mean every time, yeah, every.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Time, every single time. All Right, thank you so much
for being here, for both being on this show, for
being on your shows, and for being in the world
in all the ways that you are in the world.
I'm so glad you're here.
Speaker 1 (55:08):
This was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for
the work you do. I feel fortified after this conversation.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Thank you, Thank you. All Right. We are going to
link to vibe Check in the show notes. Obviously, anything
else you want people to know about or places they
can look for you, or any other missions.
Speaker 1 (55:29):
I'm on social channels at Sam Sanders. My other show
for Vulture is not really in the spirit of the
Vibcheck conversation or your show, but it is a pop
culture podcast I host, so if you wanted to mention it, cool,
but like, no need to you know, different worlds, But yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
That's it all right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions
to carry with you. I'm going to go compose myself.
We'll be right back each week. I leave you with
some questions to carry with you until we meet again.
Speaker 1 (56:06):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
One thing that really struck me in this conversation was
how much fun it was. There are a lot of
ways to be playful, even when you're talking about difficult things. Right,
Playfulness is healing. I think you learn a lot about
who you are and what you need when you allow
yourself to be freed from that cage and play a
little bit right. I also really liked how Sam looks
(56:30):
back on his grief soon after his dad died and
sees it in context. What was available to him then
is different than what's available to him now, and one
way of grieving one context isn't more correct than the other. Right.
There's such kindness and such honoring in that view of
(56:52):
the past self and the current self. So maybe that's
something you might play with in your own life. Who
were you back to and what kind of emotional life
or emotional expression was available to you? And who are
you now? Today, knowing what you know and what is
available to you at this time. I think that kind
(57:13):
of respectful questioning or curiosity, I think that can apply
to any pivotal part of our lives, not just death. Yeah,
how about you, what stuck with you from this conversation.
Everybody's going to take something different from the show, but
I do hope you found something to hold on to.
If you want to tell me how today's show felt
(57:34):
for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
affected you. And while you're at it, you could also
tag at Sam Sanders let him know how his story
affected you. Spread your reflections around, follow the show at
(57:55):
It's Okay Pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere
else to see video clips from the show, and use
the hashtag It's okay pod on all the platforms, so
not only I can find you, but others can too.
None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we
start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're
not okay. You're in good company. That's it. For this week.
(58:19):
Remember to subscribe to the show leave a review as
I requested earlier. I love to read your reviews. I
love to pass them along to our guests too. Coming
up next week on the show, Tamblock, author of the
book From Scratch and the very very popular Netflix show
by the same name, and just a lovely all around
(58:40):
human being. Follow It's Okay on your favorite platform so
you do not miss an episode. It's okay that You're
not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me
Meghan Devine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by
Elizabeth Fozzio, with logistical and social media support from Micah.
Post production and editing by his Antilli. Music provided by
(59:01):
Wave Crush and very quiet background noise provided by Luna
gently pawing at me to go get her some snacks.
Host
Megan Devine
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