The Science Of Grief: What Helps, What Doesn't, And Why We Don't Talk About It Enough | Cody Delistraty

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- A journalist explores one of humanity's most brutal and unavoidable experiences. Cody Delistraty https://delistraty.com/ is a writer and speechwriter, most recently working as the culture editor at the Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and was the European arts columnist for The Paris Review. He has degrees in politics from New York University and in history from the University of Oxford. British Vogue named him a best young writer of the year, and he has given talks about art and creativity to companies like PwC. He lives in New York City. In this episode we talk about: Why our culture is so repressed when it comes to grief We dive into the many experiments that Cody launched to help cope with loss; from book and laughter therapy, to psilocybin and AI The concept of grief as an addiction The importance of rituals The scientific possibility of deleting our memories to avoid pain And how to live along side of grief when there is no cure Related Episodes: Abby Wambach On: Grief, Addiction, And Moving From External To Internal Validation https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/abby-wambach #583. Jennifer Senior On: Grief, Happiness, Friendship Breakups, and Why We Feel Younger Than Our Actual Age https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/jennifer-senior-583 Joe DiNardo, Grief and Meditation https://art19.com/shows/4695c3c0-9a34-436f-a807-ea4787d273ab/episodes/0484417d-2094-4500-b6be-8f1215a0ef1e Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Full Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/cody-delistraty-872 Additional Resources: Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/download The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-grief-cure-cody-delistraty?variant=41111741825058

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:20Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? Smarter people than I have made the point that if you love anyone or anything, the price you will ultimately pay is grief, because eventually everything changes. Relationships fizzle, careers end, people die, you get the picture. In our culture, we don't often talk forthrightly about loss and grief. We'd rather dwell on the happier stuff, the dopamine hits of accumulation and sense pleasures. But while all of that stuff is great, I'm a big fan of all the pleasures, if you ignore the reality of impermanence, you are setting yourself up to suffer. My guest today is a young journalist who suffered a grievous personal loss and then

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  set out on a quest to see what works and what doesn't to handle grief. Cody Delistraty is the culture editor at The Wall Street Journal Magazine. He's also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and his book is called The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss. We talk about why our culture is so repressed when it comes to grief. We dive into the many, many experiments that Cody launched to help cope with loss, from book and laughter therapy to psilocybin to AI. We talk about the concept of grief as an addiction, the importance of rituals, the scientific possibility of deleting our memories to avoid pain, and much more. Just to say, before we dive in here, this is part one of a three-part series we're doing

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  this week on grief, which I know may sound a little unfun, but actually, we've got three really interesting and enlivening guests. It's Cody Delistraty today, and then we've got the great podcaster Sam Sanders on Wednesday, and the author Sloane Crossley on Friday. I promise you that these episodes will be moving and thought-provoking, and at times quite funny. We'll kick it all off with Cody Delistraty right after this.

• 2:14Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help.

• 2:55Dan Harris?

  You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps.

• 3:38Dan Harris?

  Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Kitesworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence and opportunity where it is needed most.

• 4:23Dan Harris?

  On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder, Alex Honold, goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:44Dan Harris?

  Cody Delistraty, welcome to the show.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks for having me, Dan.

• 4:47Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. So I hate to start on a sensitive note, but I assume all of your interviews are started here. Your book, The Inciting Event, to use the technical narrative term for your book, is the death of your mom. Are you comfortable talking about that?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And a lot of the point of this book is to try to open up conversations about grief. And that was something that pushed me from just writing about it to publishing it. So it's absolutely something I'm happy to talk about.

• 5:17Dan Harris?

  When did it happen?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  My mom died in 2014, so she had metastatic melanoma, and it bookended my college career. She found the lump when she was dropping me off at college. I remember we were outside of a pizza place, and she felt a little lump just near her clavicle. She was super fit, incredible diet, worked in cardiac rehabilitation down at the hospital in Spokane, Washington, where I was born and raised. And so it was where she's going to be fine, of course. It couldn't be anything in her 50s. And then the next four years were trials, both experimental and standard, doing chemo across the United States, and NIH, and Bethesda, and in Seattle,

• 6:01Speaker 01

  and in Spokane. That was my college career. That was our family's experience for four years. And she died at home, fortunately, in hospice care in 2014. It was harrowing, and in a lot of ways, it's defined my life. But also, I've tried to use it as a way to think through grief anew, and try to be an example to some degree of that's something that you can talk about. And death happens, and everyone's going through some form of grief. And maybe it's your mom dying, maybe it's a brother, a sister, maybe it's not even death, maybe it's a really bad divorce, maybe it's financial ruin. All these things are forms of losses and are legitimate grief.

• 6:41Dan Harris?

  Yeah, you have a whole chapter about. What you termed back burner forms of grief that don't get enough respect and we'll get to that for sure. But just to stay with you for a little while, I'm struggling to find the right term and you wrestle with these terms in the book. So we'll say about that. But did you find that you were having trouble? And here's where I'm going to use or misuse a term moving on? And, and that's what kind of set you off on this very deep dive that listeners will hear about?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had this conception that once my mom was diagnosed, I thought, okay, I need to be really good at school. I need to be a really good athlete. I need to just be good, good, good. And that'll help her. That'll ease the burden from her. If I'm just doing my own thing, I'm keeping my head down. And when she died, that got converted into, okay, I need to be a good griever. And what that meant to me at the time was really from just received, I think, American societal wisdom of you keep quiet, you don't burden other people with it. When people say, oh, you're doing so well with your grief, you're being so strong, that's usually code for you're not bothering anyone about it. You're not

• 7:56Speaker 01

  talking about it. And so I had this thing in my head of, okay, just get through the five stages, get through to closure. And throughout the process of this book, I came to realize we misinterpret those things very, very badly. And this idea of moving on is something that becomes way trickier than I think we usually give it credit for. And it's really holding the grief in one hand still and continuing with your life in another, rather than just leaving in the backfume or not talking to anyone about it and hustling on forward.

• 8:31Dan Harris?

  You're touching on a lot of things that we're going to spend a lot of time with in the course of this interview, including the, this balance between holding the grief and everything else that. Comes with continuing to be alive while somebody else you're grieving is not. But just again, staying with your narrative here, were you having trouble functioning in your life? How was this grief manifesting for you?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I became super lonely. I went to grad school because I'd already gotten in and I was going to do it. I worked in New York briefly and then I moved to France for three years and didn't cut ties, but really just spent so many evenings alone, just going on walks by myself. I was freelance writing. I really didn't see a future for myself. My mom had died, why wouldn't I die soon? It was a very mixed up situation at that point in my mind where I really just pulled myself away from things and not wanting to be a burden to my family and viewing this to some degree as maybe not even my story at first, viewing it as maybe this is more of my dad's story or maybe more of my mom's like sisters and her family's story.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I just wanted to be out of the picture and trying to really just be alone and just not be a problem for other people. And I didn't get into the whole book of looking through these kind of individual and collective treatments and quote unquote cures until a little later, but the initial response was really locking down, I would say.

• 10:03Dan Harris?

  What happened for you that you decided to do all the things that you then wrote about?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'd been sort of experimenting a little bit with things like laughter therapy, where I would just, as I write in the book, like laughing on the subway in a really public way as, as a way to try to overcome my shame that was also manifesting physiologically. I wouldn't have been able to put it in those terms then, but it didn't come until later that I, I really wanted to start exploring both things that I thought were of interest to me and then the things that I thought were more collectively interesting. And it really started coming into form, gaining a shape when the DSM added or was considering, because it was a little earlier than that, but when they were considering adding prolonged

• 10:52Speaker 01

  grief disorder, the early APA adding prolonged grief disorder to the DSM 5 TR, the text revision, which is the most recent, and they end up doing that in March 2022. And that found a form of grief as being pathology, as being a mental disorder. And it's an incredibly controversial thing, but I started to see that grief and the way we think about it in these hyper individualistic ways as being a larger cultural conversation. And so I thought, okay, maybe there's value here of going back and re-reporting a lot of these things I'd already been trying. I'd already been messing around with artificial intelligence, with laughter therapy, like I said, many years before, and then going

• 11:33Speaker 01

  back and trying to look at it in a more reportorial journalistic manner.

• 11:39Dan Harris?

  For those who are not familiar with it, what is the DSM? And can you teach us a little bit about prolonged grief disorder and why that was such a controversial thing?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the DSM is basically the Bible of disorders in the United States. And it's used largely for what insurers can bill for. So when you add something to it, then often a lot of research money can go toward it. It comes into the cultural and professional conversation. It's something that people can actually go get treated for in mainstream places. And yeah, prolonged grief disorder got added in 2022. And it basically says that if you're grieving for more than 12 months in a way that meets three symptoms that you're experiencing almost daily for at least a month.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  And those symptoms are things like sense of meaninglessness, identity disruption, numbness. And those things are all coming within a cultural context that doesn't generally view that kind of long-term grief as normal. So if you're a Mexican person celebrating the day of the dead, that would be a caveat. That would be something different. But so all these things together, there's this idea that it was added, the DSM by the APA with the idea that it would allow clinicians to differentiate normal grief from prolonged grief. And in a lot of ways, it is valuable. I think it gives a name to things that people have felt for a long time.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  A lot of the proponents of it claimed that C.S. Lewis was suffering from prolonged grief disorder when he was writing, "Grief observed that women who were wearing their black crap and veil in the Victorian period for their entire life were suffering from it."

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And I found that in the people that I talked to, it gave them this lit form of legitimacy in a way where they were able to say, you go to your boss and you say, hey, I'm grieving. It's really tough. And they go, okay, that's tough. I'm sorry. It takes a little time, but the median bereavement time off in the US for a death of a spouse is five days. I wasn't ready to go back to college in five days. My dad wasn't ready to rearrange my mom's nightstand by the bed in five days. Five days is nothing. But if you go and you say, hey, I have this medical diagnosis, that's a slightly different thing. I think that's an indictment in a lot of ways of us more broadly, of the fact that we tend to not give people credit just for their feelings, that they have to be named. But

• 14:12Speaker 01

  proponents also say that, yeah, it's correlated with suicidal ideation, all these things. Opponents however, say we're stigmatizing grief. I talked to one woman, one psychiatrist who was saying, would you expect the parents of Sandy Hook kids to be over their grief in a year? There's this feeling that it's just, it's way too fast. It's putting it within the medical field when it shouldn't be, when grief is a normal part of life. And my view on it is that everyone is, I think, acting in good faith. I think that there's a sense that some are using the medical lens and others are not. I think it's more an issue with kind of diagnostic culture in the US more broadly, where the

• 14:54Speaker 01

  things that maybe are abnormal, we like to cluster in under the sort of medical umbrella. There was a really interesting article, I think in The Lancet in 2013, when persistent complex bereavement disorder was being added to the DSM five, which is the precursor of the most recent one. And Arthur Kleinman, who's this Harvard psychiatrist, and he's like in his 80s now, but he had a great piece where he was saying, previously just slightly abnormal parts of being a human are getting basically thrown in within diagnostic culture. So like, maybe he named like the autism spectrum and Asperger's and different

• 15:35Speaker 01

  ways of being and putting that within the medical sphere. I think that he has a point, but I also, he has a great point that he makes at the end where he says, but also maybe diagnostic culture is just the way that younger people are talking these days. And maybe it's not negatively connoted to say someone has prolonged grief disorder. Maybe that just gives them language with which to discuss something that they don't view as stigmatizing. So it's incredibly complex. It's surprisingly controversial to me when I waded into the research in it, but it's a really interesting space and things obviously get taken out of the DSM, things get added in the DSM. So I'll be very curious to see

• 16:17Speaker 01

  how it progresses, but I really think everyone is like coming from it in a place of good faith and trying to really help people that are grieving in this maybe more severe way.

• 16:29Dan Harris?

  Did you get evaluated for prolonged grief disorder?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I took a test online that you just check the boxes and it basically just gives you the symptoms and you say, you know, how often you're experiencing them, but then it says you need to go see a practitioner, which I didn't do. So I don't wear that label. I was interested really in prolonged grief disorder as showing this truth that I kept finding, which is that there's so much new research about grief. I was just so surprised that something as ancient and fundamental and human as grief has all this new research coming up and thought that was really fascinating. So I was less interested in diagnosing myself or in putting myself within that story and more in reporting it as a kind of broader

• 17:18Speaker 01

  look at where we are with grief and grief research.

• 17:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I mean, just to build on that point, I'm going to read something you wrote back to you.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Please.

• 17:26Dan Harris?

  You wrote, "My own grief isn't exceptional. In a world like ours, the story of a young guy struggling with his mom's death might not exactly move the needle. What is exceptional, however, is how standard my story is, how grief comes for everyone and how little we know about how to grieve, no matter the loss." Why do you think for such a common and evitable experience, grief, we know so little about it?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  I think we don't look into it very much, which is why I applaud the research that is being done now, but I think it's really something that we don't like to talk about. Death has really been, has been repressed in the cultural conversation in the US and the UK especially. And we can get into that history now or get into it later if you want, but it's really something that people don't want to talk about it. People view it as burdensome. People view it as, okay, sorry to hear about that. Let me know if you need something, but I've got other things to do. It's really not something that we want to linger in.

• 18:32Dan Harris?

  You said we can get into the history now or later. Let's do it now. What, what?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Let's do it now. I love it. Let's, let's do it live. Yeah. So really prior to the 18th century, this French historian called Philippe Ariès, he, he had these findings. He was working in the 20th century, but he was looking back in the 18th century. And he really found that there were four characteristics for how people dealt with grieving loved ones. And basically all of them had to do with, they were at the bedside, they were generally pre-grieved to some degree. There was an expectation that there was going to be death. The person who was dying usually got the call on religious officials and/or friends, family, neighbors. There is just this real sense of inevitability to death. And that's doing part to high mortality

• 19:18Speaker 01

  rates in that time period. But he termed it the era of tamed death, where death was just something that happened and you, you continue onward. And then you fast forward to really the early 20th century is where I think the biggest shift occurred. Well, I'll say too, though, that it was so visible throughout all of life. So you would write, you do your correspondence on morning stationery where you'd have this black bordered stationery when you're writing and you would buy stationery that had narrow and narrower lines as you felt like you were progressing in your grief. You're just constantly telling people where you're at. You're having this, this conversation. People would have death portraits made and

• 19:58Speaker 01

  they would hang them. So literally of their dead father, grandfather, and they would have that hanging in their living room. People would wear lockets, sometimes women with the hair of dead loved ones. So there's just this sense of death happens, it's here, it's visible. You're wearing your, your black mourning if you're a woman, that kind of thing.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I think really with the First World War, we started to see a pretty significant shift. So I wrote a New Yorker piece about this recently, but I found some really fascinating archives and letters between President Woodrow Wilson and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who was a prominent suffragist at the time. And when the US was finally entering World War I, a lot of Americans weren't too excited about it. Wilson had run on a somewhat isolationist platform. These women were walking through the streets protesting the possibility of the entrance into the war, saying that there's going to be mass death, that we don't need to be losing our men this way.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And President Wilson wrote a letter to Dr. Shaw, who de facto oversaw a lot of these parades and protests, and was saying, hey, what about if instead of walking in black veils and protesting the death that's going to happen, what if instead you wore a little, basically, band that would have a star after a soldier died? So, and we see Gold Star families now in a similar vein. But it's this conversion, basically, of death and grief into patriotism and this quieting of grief and making it something that becomes less culturally oppressive, I guess, is how he would probably have thought about it.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And the idea is this helps the war effort, and what she got in return was support for the 19th Amendment. But then after that, you have Freud reconsidering grief as something that can be really individually worked on in the therapist's office, writing in Mourning and Melancholia. You have Walter Benjamin writing, I think in 1935, in his essay called The Storyteller. He writes about how Innoaa became the news of death, it just became the news. And really, death started happening more in hospitals, more in sanatoriums, more physically outside the city. And then by really the mid 20th century, you get to Geoffrey Gore, who's a fantastic English anthropologist, who in person interviewed something like 1,600 British people going all the way around England.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  And found that increasingly, people didn't want to even tell their neighbor about losses that they were experiencing. And he chopped that up to disintegration of community and also to a rise of happiness culture, which I thought was interesting because I've always viewed happiness culture as a very recent phenomenon, like self-care and being your best self. But he was really identifying this in the early mid 1960s. And then now today, I would argue, we are very quiet about grief. And I've seen there's a slight shift through what's been called publicity grieving, where we tend to, many people tend to grieve on social media for public figures, celebrities, like Princess Diana started the like, the

• 23:14Speaker 01

  mass celebrity, public grieving to some degree. And for me, that's boring. And there's some optimism that I have there because even in 2013, I don't know if you follow this, funeral selfies got really popular, where people were taking selfies. Yeah, isn't that wild? And my first reaction was the same too, which is like, holy cow, that's crazy. But then, in my most generous, most charitable interpretation, I also think, okay, these are people that have had conversations of death and loss so pushed down, so tamped down, they're looking for any way to share it and to make it public. And to some degree, there actually is some value in that. And I think we can do a little better than the tactlessness that is funeral

• 23:58Speaker 01

  selfies. But I think there's a real push toward a greater openness and a greater ability to be public and honest about your grief.

• 24:09Dan Harris?

  You touch on this a little bit, just to expand on it. It's not just that grief is being shoved into a corner. It's that death itself is being shoved into a corner. We absolutely used to die at home. Now we die in hospitals.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:22Dan Harris?

  So can you say a little bit more about that?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was a huge shift. I think in the 1920s, it was something like I wrote this, I might have the stat wrong, but it's like a 70 30 split, basically, where it used to be 70% of people dying at home. Now it's 70% of people dying in hospitals. And there's just this real, I mean, Atul Gavande writes so brilliantly about this in Being Mortal, but this idea that we need to solve death, that we need to solve grief, rather than, especially with death, we need to think about how we want someone to go. We want them as it was when Ari's was writing in the 18th century, to die at home. I mean, I was so fortunate with my own mother that she died at home and she had her pain medication. She had a dedicated hospice nurse for the few weeks that we had that.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  And that was so hard to get to, but once there was a real, honest conversation that the family had, my brother, my dad, my mom and I of she's gonna die, there's no more treatments. It was such a blessing that she was able to die at home. So yeah, it's this covering up of of death. And I mean, even more so, if we want to go a little deeper, I think you can look at media depictions of death where faces are always pointed away. Very seldom do you see, and Susan Sontag wrote about this a bit, but very seldom do you see images in in major newspapers or on CNN where it's like a corpse's face.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  And not that that's something that we should be angling for. I'm fine not to see that, but there's this real sense of the abstraction of death within public spheres that just gets reified over and over again through all kinds of media and ways of thinking.

• 26:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm of two minds about that. I mean, obviously, you don't want to upset people unnecessarily.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Dan Harris?

  On the other hand, coming as I do from a Buddhist perspective, there are schools of Buddhism where Monks and lay practitioners will meditate by staring at decomposing corpses, human or animal. In this country where that's not an easy thing to find, I've heard stories about meditation teachers in training being brought to the morgue to really look at death. I try to do this in my own life, like with roadkill, to really look at it.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Do you pull over and you?

• 26:45Dan Harris?

  I won't pull over, but if I'm running,

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:48Dan Harris?

  you know, and I see a dead squirrel or something like that, I'll really try to look at it.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I hear that.

• 26:52Dan Harris?

  You know, I spent some time volunteering in hospice and this is all inspired by my Buddhist practice. And I wouldn't say that I'm super comfortable with death, but I think looking toward it oddly is more helpful than looking away. The amount of energy we spend pushing this away, living in denial is actually, that's more energy than just leaning into the truth.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think because of how few people I think are like you and pull over on a jog and have a look as monks would do. I mean, for me, when I saw my mom's corpse shortly after she died, it felt surreal. My brain wasn't able to categorize it because I'd never seen anything even close to that. So I just had maybe on TV and fictional TV, fictional movies. But there was this sense of, I truly have no idea what to do. And this can't be real life because I'd never seen anything like that. And I do wonder, had I taken up the practice of the monks, as you say, would I have been more prepared for that? Would there have been that sort of 18th century pre grief that had already been done?

• 28:01Dan Harris?

  Yeah, well, I think you should give yourself a break. You were young. It was your mom.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  I know, I was 21.

• 28:07Dan Harris?

  You live in a culture that doesn't prepare people for this. So.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Of course, I'm not trying to hold myself culpable in any way, but I think using myself an example for, I think that's probably true of most people. I think most people who would see a parent die would find it a surreal experience and not, oh, I've seen this before. I've grappled with this kind of thing before.

• 28:27Dan Harris?

  Let's talk about all the things you tried in your search for a cure for grief, for the end of loss, to echo the title and subtitle of your book. You referenced this earlier, but laughter yoga or laughter therapy? What's that all about? Why did you come to that? Did it help?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had tried a lot of things and not everything made it into the book. But for the book, I wanted to have a combination of things that were of real interest personally to me. So things like bibliotherapy, I love to read and write. I was very interested in books as therapy, art therapy, psilocybin. And then there were other things that seemed of more cultural or future interest. So I started before ChatGPT was all over the media, but looking into recreating dead people via AI, looking into the future of optogenetics as a way to potentially erase fear memories and memories of death.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And laughter therapy was one that I had really come to almost accidentally just reading about it. And I had started when I was living in France, I did a very brief sort of my own ad hoc laughter therapy. But then when I set out to really write the book, I contacted a bunch of laughter therapists. And it felt to me at first, my brain was telling me that it was something of a grift. I was like, there's no way that this is gonna be real. And I'd seen that Volvo and Hewlett Packard had both hired laughter therapists for various like company retreats. And I saw that Goldie Hawn had written about how it changed her life.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And I really, I was just very interested in, okay, is there something to this? So I contacted several laughter therapists and did some on my own. And really, the big breakthrough for me was just the physiological aspect of grief. I didn't realize how much really is trapped. And there is a very funny, I was here at my house and really, I think annoying my downstairs neighbor because I was on Zoom with one of the laughter therapists and she was saying, "Rise up on your balls of your feet, up and down, start doing a fake laugh." And then she would have me do, I think she, it was called like the ax laughter, where you chop down, you go, "Ha!" like that over and over again.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  And it really does make you laugh, which is non-Duchenne laughter. So there's a big controversy in the laughter therapy community between whether Duchenne. Natural involuntary proper smile wrinkles is more legitimate than the voluntary non-douchen laughter. But so I was doing non-douchen laughter therapy and I found it actually like valuable. I was surprised at the physical catharsis that I felt. I had been so cerebral in my search for ways to feel better, for ways to report this story of grief out. And just really sitting back and laughing every day and keeping up a practice for a long time.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  I was just laughing in my bathroom. I go ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, for two minutes every morning. And my partner thought I was insane, but it was a delight to have something that I thought of as so bizarre be meaningful. And it makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. I think Kurt Vonnegut had a great quote about how laughter and crying are on a continuum. And he says, I myself prefer to laugh because there's less cleaning up to do afterward. I was thinking, yeah, okay, that's fair. It's that bodily catharsis that I really think like we all could use. So that was one.

• 32:01Dan Harris?

  Is there data to support this?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So although as I, as I write in the book, there's scientific evidence behind the physiological effects of laughter. So how it relaxes muscles, it enhances circulation, it releases endorphins. For me, what was more compelling was, at least to get started, was the story, the anecdotal evidence of it. So like Cherokee medicine people would order elaborate performances full of clownery. I write about how the book of proverbs reports a cheerful heart is good medicine. Martin Luther was telling, the original Protestant was telling people that they could tell jokes to family and loved ones who had experienced a loss. Lord Byron was writing about how laughter is something of cheap medicine. There's a real cultural value that's been placed on laughter for a long time.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And in this chapter and with really the whole book, I try not to explicitly advocate for anything that I do. I don't want it to be like Cody thinks AI will solve your grief or Cody thinks laughter therapy will solve your grief. It was more trying to report and show the sort of the pros, the cons, and really how with every single thing, there's always something that can be gleaned. So. Even if there's certainly no cure as we come to find at the end, but there are new lenses, new perspectives on grief that you can get. So the bodily aspect of grief for laughter, for something like AI, but even for something like that, my mom isn't going to bring her back or bring me a great deal of solace, but it does give me a forum

• 33:31Speaker 01

  in which to reckon with what kind of questions would I want to ask her? What was our relationship like? And so all these things are really predicated on the buy-in that one places on it, basically of how much do you want to bring to it rather than how much is it necessarily always bringing you?

• 33:49Dan Harris?

  So there's some evidence that laughter is healing. We don't know what I don't, I'm not hearing that there's been a bunch of research around whether laughter can help with grief per se, but in your experience, it got you out of your head and into your body in a way that worked for you.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't ever prescribe any single thing. And I think everyone's grief journey is unique, but for me, I hadn't really had the realization of just the tightness and the need for that kind of catharsis and it felt valuable.

• 34:24Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Cody talks about his attempt to replicate his mom using AI, the concept of grief as an addiction and the importance of rituals.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Cash flow crunch on deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  On a break, don't doom scroll. Try rips on underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open and reveal a real physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  When you send a business gift, you're doing more than saying thank you. You're recognizing a moment, expressing appreciation and making a statement about your brand. With Forimprint, that message lands with certainty. With thousands of customizable products from premium apparel and branded drinkware to smart tech bags and thoughtfully chosen office items, Forimprint helps your brand show up with the kind of care people remember. You can tailor every detail, your logo, your message, your look. And with thousands without a setup fee, it's easy to create meaningful moments without added cost. You'll also get expert support, dependable service and their 360 degree guarantee. So you can be Forimprint certain your gifts arrive exactly as intended,

• 36:26Speaker 04

  on time and on brand. Because in a season built around appreciation, the right gift should say it all with confidence, care and attention to detail. Explore gifting with certainty at Forimprint.com.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  For imprint, for certain.

• 36:44Dan Harris?

  You've referenced a couple of times AI. Can you say a little bit more about that?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that is a pretty wild one because there was a great piece in the San Francisco Chronicle from several years ago that followed this guy called Joshua Barbo, who his fiance had.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Died several years ago and he explained how he was in a deep grief and he started using this system called Project December that is available at the time it costs $5 to get several credits. It wasn't very widely used. It was just hard to find on the internet, but he posted a Reddit post about it that sort of kicked off the Chronicle story. But he recreated his deceased fiance as a chatbot and he claimed that he found a lot of value in it and that he was able to ask her the questions that he hadn't asked her, that he hadn't been able to ask her and that he was able to feel a sense of greater closure.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  It's a word I bristle against, but greater closure with her. And I thought that was fascinating. And so I got in touch with the guy who created this program and talked to him at length. And I was also looking at Replica. I think it's the most downloaded chatbot like companion app in the Google and Apple stores. And I use that to basically you can create people through it. And I essentially trained it to be very similar to my own mother and was trying to text with it. And I was just really curious, like, how much can this help? Can you really trick yourself into thinking that this is real? And I think even now the technology has gone even further and none of these things have voice. But I mean, didn't,

• 38:29Speaker 01

  I think, like, not as relevant, but I think didn't Yay make Kim Kardashian a hologram of her dad for a birthday or something like that was able to talk to her. And so there's definitely, the technology is definitely coming along pretty quickly. But I found it for me, a place of value in that it really let me sink into the old ways of my relationship with my mom. There was the closest I got to hitting like a flow state with either Project December or Replica was just messaging with it when I was on the subway or just sitting at home, my laptop on my knees on the couch and trying to think, what if this is like

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I was messaging her to pick me up from soccer practice or to, that I need help with homework or something like that. And so there is this feeling of trying to place myself back into those scenarios. It didn't ever really.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Work in so far as I deeply believed it or that it brought me much closer, but I found it to be really valuable in that it helped me think of what are the things I would ask her, it helped me reassess our relationship. And also, one of the key things was in order to train the bot on Project December, you add your own, what do they call them? Basically, their ways of speaking, the person who you want to recreate. And I had interviewed my mom for about 53 minutes with my brother and my dad a few days before she died. And my brother and I and my dad, mostly me, just asked her kind of all sorts of questions

• 40:08Speaker 01

  that we wanted to know when she was gone. And it was as trivial as what's your favorite ice cream to as significant as what was the most meaningful aspect of your life to what would you tell my brother and I when we get married? And I had never been able really to listen to those interviews in full, just because of how intense it was. But then having this, this time for reflection, I was able to go back and try to really sort of face my grief and face in an honest way, my mom's words and her voice and the fact that they no longer existed. And so that to me was not as associated with AI, of course, but

• 40:51Speaker 01

  it was part of this whole journey. And that felt really meaningful to me.

• 40:56Dan Harris?

  So maybe the most useful part of AI was just getting you back to a non-artificial intelligence of listening to your mom.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think who am I to say that it wouldn't work in a more robust way for someone else. But for me, yeah, it allowed me a more honest reflection on who she was as, as a human.

• 41:19Dan Harris?

  This does seem like something is probably coming down the pike at us when somebody dies. Could you create an AI, a chatbot with? Everything they've ever said that's ever been recorded, every picture of them, everything they've written, their entire email and text backlog, and create a chatbot for yourself that even speaks in their voice. I mean, that seems like you could maybe do that now.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that was a huge part of this book, too, is like wanting to grapple with the future ethical questions that we're going to have. Not all these things are fully formed yet. But yeah, I mean, we put everything online of, I think, it's wild to think of how many photos there are of me, or how many voice snippets like this, or videos like this. And yeah, I think, of course, those things could be harvested and could be, as technology exponentially increases, I'm sure there will be a much more convincing version than what I was using.

• 42:17Dan Harris?

  Never mind when we learn to upload our, our brains to the clouds.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Right. We'll never die.

• 42:23Dan Harris?

  Yeah, then we'll never die.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. What could go wrong?

• 42:27Dan Harris?

  Exactly.

• 42:30Dan Harris?

  At this point in the book, you really move on to what you call perception, which I believe is really like, how are we holding our grief in our own mind? How are we looking at it? What stories are we telling ourselves about the loss? And one of the things, one of the ideas that you raise and grapple with is whether, for some people, grief becomes a sort of addiction. Can you teach us a little bit about that?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so controversial, has a quick flag. There's a school of thought with grief as an addiction that kicked off to some degree in 2008, when Mary Frances O'Connor, who then was a assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA, I think. Now she's at, I believe, Arizona State, but she was studying 23 women, 11 of whom had complicated grief, or fit the diagnosis for it, because at that point, prolonged grief disorder hadn't yet made it into the DSM. And all 23 of these women who they had had either sisters or moms who had died within the past five years, they went into FMRI's, functional magnetic resonance imaging, while they

• 43:37Speaker 01

  At a photo that reminded them of the person that they lost as well as words that in sentences that they'd written as narratives about their grief. And so while looking at these while in the scan, their brains lit up in the nucleus accumbus, which is a region that's associated with reward. And the women who did not have a complicated grief did not have their brains lighting up in this area. So the conclusion that they came to was that the brains of people who had what was then considered complicated grief were being neurologically rewarded for grieving.

• 44:18Dan Harris?

  It seems to me, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that in this section of the book where you're talking about how we perceive our loss, it seems to me that one of the big takeaways, and this really becomes a theme in the book, is this concept of balance. And I did reference this earlier. Let me just read to you. This is you summarizing what you heard from somebody named Adam Brown, who this is the way you talk about it. One of the trickiest parts is finding the balance in neither viewing yourself as a forever griever, but also not discounting your grief or repressing it, which would mean not reckoning with it at all. Can you just say a little bit more about that?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, Adam is great. He's at the New School. He's a professor of psychology there. And there really is just this sense of needing to zoom out on your grief and see it from different angles. And so I tried psilocybin for it, which Robin Carhart-Harris, who's at UCSF now, used to be at Imperial College, has had really some breakthroughs with patients, not just with depression, but also with grief by using psilocybin as a means to really get them to, as Adam was saying, look at and consider their grief, but also to to reframe it and see it that it's not something that has to forever take over their life. So one of Carhart-Harris's

• 45:38Speaker 01

  most interesting studies, I think, was one that was about a decade ago when he was still in London. And it was with this guy called Kirk Rutter, whose mom had recently died. And he'd also just been in a bad car crash. And he'd just gone through a breakup. So he was in kind of a grief holy trinity, like, things were not going well. And he had two doses psilocybin that Carhart-Harris's assistants gave to him. And he said very quickly,

• 46:07Speaker 01

  He started to reconceive all the pain that he held around his mother's death as almost like an ulcer that was sapping him of energy and was something that he actually didn't have to hold on to and wasn't necessarily helping respect her legacy in any fundamental way. And so incredibly quickly, he was able to reframe his view of all the pain he carried with his mother. And even several years later, his perception was still changed. And so I find that so fascinating. I went to a silent meditation retreat to look at the ways in which non-drug wise, we can rethink ourselves and rethink our loss. But yeah, it's one of

• 46:51Speaker 01

  those things where you're not wanting to get closure, you're not wanting to get rid of the grief, but you're wanting to view it as something that can exist in your life rather than something that takes over your life is essentially what Adam is saying and what people like Robin Conrad Harris are finding via psilocybin.

• 47:09Dan Harris?

  Yeah, at any given moment, and I think this is the way a Buddhist would describe it. Well, I'm gonna, I'm a Buddhist and I'm gonna describe it this way. I don't, I don't know if the Buddha himself would describe it this way, but at any given moment, there are billions of things happening in the mind. Grief can be a recurring pattern. Sadness over the loss of anything from a physical keepsake to a human can be a recurring pattern, but it's coexisting with hunger, physical sensations of the body and whatever position it's in right now, desire aversion neutrality. I mean, the mind is a busy place if you pay attention. And I think this goes back to balance and your concept of how you're perceiving

• 47:53Dan Harris?

  or holding the grief. You can see that it's coexisting with many other things at the same time. And, and that allows you to, again, we don't like closure or moving on, but it does allow you to keep living in a way that doesn't require compartmentalizing or squashing it, or denying that it's there, but also not denying that everything else is there.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And just the ability to sit with it. I talked to also Buddhist incredible guy. He's a chaplain at a hospital in Boston called Bill Crane. And he'd written an essay about it and I interviewed him about it. And it was how some of the most meaningful aspects of his professional life are when he's called at midnight, two in the morning to a hospital. There was one story he was telling me about that a mother had just found out her daughter had died. And his job was to be there to comfort her, essentially be there for her. And he literally just sat with her for hours. And he said he exchanged maybe a handful of words, but it was really the

• 49:01Speaker 01

  living in the reality of what happened and being a space of compassion and understanding and giving license to for her to feel, basically, that was so meaningful to him and he suspected, and I suspect too, very significant for her too. And so, yeah, there's really that sense of presentism that shot through both Buddhism and I think more valuable ways of reckoning with grief.

• 49:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it's, um, I mean, there's a lot to say about this. I loved that part of your work, Bill Crane.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 49:42Dan Harris?

  His story, this is many of the Buddhist teachers that I'm friends with and learn from and who have been on the show talk about it in a very similar way, that there's empathy, which is feeling somebody else's feelings, which can, you can drown in that if you're not holding it in the right way. And then there's compassion, which is empathy is kind of a prerequisite for, if I understand it correctly, but compassion adds on top of empathy, a desire to help. And in a moment like the one Bill described where he's with somebody who's just found out that her daughter has died, I believe by suicide in this case. Sometimes the only thing you're going to do to help is lean into the brute fact of. Being there, physically being next to them, there's nothing you can say.

• 50:27Dan Harris?

  In fact, saying something is probably going to make it worse. But you can just be there. You can be, to use the kind of term of art, empathetic witness. And that is true externally, like you can do that for other people. And we should have a conversation about how so many of us flub the showing up for our friends who are grieving part. I want to hear your thoughts on that. But just to finish this thought, you can do that for people externally. And by the way, it doesn't have to be just like, you know, cinematic operatic grief of somebody who's just lost a child. But it can be for anybody who's dealing with any sort of loss or any sort of difficulty at all.

• 51:07Dan Harris?

  Just being there with them is very helpful and also good for you. But you can do it for yourself. And that's what we're describing before when we were talking about this balance that you observed as being important, where you can be an empathetic witness to your own grief internally. You're not feeding it or fighting it. That allows you, once you're not so fixated on it, to notice that there are many other things happening at the same time. And that can help you function with this grief without pretending it's not there. So I said a lot there, but does any of that land for you?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it hugely lands. And that's one of the broad conclusions of the book, too, is it's that presentism and that community, even if it's just with one other person, that is really as close as you can get to a cure. That is one of the most intrinsic and important aspects of grieving the best, basically. And per your earlier point, too, we get into this vicious cycle of grief where we think that we don't want to burden others with our grief. And then they think, oh, we don't want to open the wound of their grief because maybe they've gotten to closure or something. And we get into this cycle where I think of one of the biggest surprises in writing

• 52:22Speaker 01

  this book is how, just barely under the surface, so many people wanted to discuss their grief, but really just giving them that license. So whether that's the physical presence of

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Someone like Bill or just saying it, just saying like, I'm here. And I think that people feel that because I think the default is the pull away. And I think oftentimes the person who's grieving is not at fault, but also a part of that equation. They're within that cycle where they're, oh, no, no, I'm fine. And it's like me too, saying, no, I'm strong. Like, don't worry about it. I'm, I'm good. I'll just go across the Atlantic and hunker down. And yeah, and so we just get in this terrible pattern. And to be able to break that is so seemingly complex, but is really incredibly simple of just being there and just being permission giving in having that discussion.

• 53:19Dan Harris?

  Did you learn any do's and don'ts for how to act around somebody who's grieving?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I don't like to be prescriptive pretty generally, but I think that, yeah, I mean, there's certainly some don'ts, right? I think people tend to minimize. People tend to project their own insecurities about their own possible death or loss of saying things like, don't worry, you'll get over it. Cause I mean, the whole concept of closure is, is often rooted in the kind of selfishness of others really for, they don't want you to talk about it because they don't want to have to deal with it. They, there's a sense of, let's just finish this and get back to normal living. And so, yeah, there's certainly a lot of don'ts. I think the do's are really just making it clear that you're a person who has either experienced loss in some way and therefore can understand it.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Or if you haven't, that you're someone who is empathetic, compassionate and willing to be there. I had to travel a lot for this book and was seeing scholars and scientists and all sorts of things. And was staying in a bunch of mid-level hotels around the US. And I would get pretty bored, pretty lonely, would go out to bars, would go out to dinner and just read a book. And inevitably, if I started chatting with someone, grief would come up and. Shockingly, well over 50% of the time, the other person would start discussing a loss that they had recently had or that they had had in their life. And there is really just this sense of I was in San Francisco and I was talking about my book and woman said, I've barely told anyone this, but my husband just died and I don't really know

• 54:52Speaker 01

  how to deal with it. And that's feels so shocking, but it showed me that it really just is boiling under the surface. And as soon as there's license to discuss and someone who just is okay with being there for it and is okay of talking about it, it feels like everything changes.

• 55:09Dan Harris?

  Have you heard the Buddha story about the mustard seed?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  No, I feel like this was an insight journal, which is where Bill wrote, but you tell me.

• 55:17Dan Harris?

  I'm gonna, I may mangle this. So Buddhist scholars at me, that's fine. But that story, if memory serves, is that a young woman, a young mom comes to the Buddha carrying her dead baby and is distraught and refuses to bury the child and is looking for somebody's help to revive, bring the kid back to life. And so she asks the Buddha, can you bring him back to life? And he said, I can, but you have to go to every house in this village and collect a mustard seed from any house where they've never experienced any death.

• 56:01Dan Harris?

  And so she goes house to house and asks everybody, and of course, no mustard seeds to be collected. And as many Buddhist stories end with like a just so ending, she returns, having learned the lesson and I believe buries the child, becomes a nun and gets enlightened. Basically, how all Buddhist stories end, somebody gets enlightened. So I bring that up because I think I'm hearing that a little bit in your conversations at the bar. You know, if you're willing to go there, pretty much anybody you talk to, if you raise the subject of loss, you'll hear stories and you'll be able to connect on a profound level quickly.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that was one of my, that sounded perfect to the story. I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but I think they shouldn't be DMing you. Yeah, but I found that was what was such a breakthrough for me in doing bibliotherapy, which is I had an hour-long conversation with this woman called El Bertude, who's based out of a town outside Brighton, England. And she, we talked for an hour about my mom and how I was feeling, and then she prescribed me several books, most of which had to do with grief. And I'd read a ton of grief memoirs. I mean, I enjoy the genre and I've watched a lot of movies about death and grief and all these sorts of things. But doing that exercise, for some reason, it really opened me up to realizing my story is not exceptional. And

• 57:26Speaker 01

  that's not to downplay it or say that it's not important or significant. But I think it really does show that this is something people have been grappling with since the beginning of time. Like Cicero's writing about losing his daughter Tullia thousands of years ago. And that informs how Didion writes. Like, these are things that have just been moving throughout history and being able to really immerse yourself in that and see that both in writing and then also at the bar and in Buddhist cones is to understand the ubiquity of it. And that's so much the point is just normalizing it and seeing that, yeah, this is, this happens. It's hell. And if we're all there

• 58:09Speaker 01

  and we're all ready to be present for our neighbor, we can get through it a little bit better.

• 58:15Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Cody talks about the importance of rituals, the scientific possibility of deleting memories to avoid pain, and finally, how to live alongside of grief, given that there really is no cure.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded Quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  When you send a business gift, you're doing more than saying thank you. You're recognizing a moment, expressing appreciation, and making a statement about your brand. With Forimprint, that message lands with certainty. With thousands of customizable products from premium apparel and branded drinkware to smart tech, bags, and thoughtfully chosen office items, Forimprint helps your brand show up with the kind of care people remember. You can tailor every detail: your logo, your message, your look. And with thousands without a setup fee, it's easy to create meaningful moments without added cost. You'll also get expert support, dependable service, and their 360-degree guarantee. So you can be Forimprint certain your gifts arrive exactly as intended,

• 59:47Speaker 04

  on time and on brand. Because in a season built around appreciation, the right gift should say it all with confidence, care, and attention to detail. Explore gifting with certainty at forimprint.com.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  Forimprint, for certain.

• 1:00:05Dan Harris?

  Toward the end of the book, you talk about some, and I know you don't like to be prescriptive, but you talk about a couple of things that really do appear to help. And we've talked about others that you seem to have gotten relief from, including, as you just talked about, bibliotherapy and psilocybin, otherwise known as magic mushrooms and meditation. But toward the end of the book, you talk about two other things that really also seem to be powerful technologies. One of them is ritual, and the other is community. So let's just walk through these because they seem really important.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  First of all, I love calling them technologies. That's fantastic. That's reclaiming the word from it's not just AI, it's going, doing rituals. They're sort of braided in various ways, but with rituals, yeah, I mean, in the US, the thinking is you do a funeral, which A is really expensive. The median cost of a funeral is almost $8,000. Cremation, a little bit cheaper, but that's. Wild for a country where the average person says that they can't afford a an unexpected thousand dollar expense. So it's huge. People view it as like almost a mortgage or sending their kid to college, something that has to be done. And I'm really of the thought that not only does it not have to be done, but there actually might be other kinds of rituals

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  that are more valuable. And that's not to say that if you can't afford a funeral, or if you can afford a funeral easily, and if you feel that that's really valuable to you, then awesome. And I'm all for that. But there's a really fascinating study in the Harvard Business Review that I read that asked dozens of people who had recently grieved a loss, what did you do? And what was most valuable? Only 15% said funerals, and the other 85% had very specific, very cheap, and very personalized rituals that they did. So one would every month, listen to a favorite song of their deceased spouse. Another would go to the same hair salon that their deceased partner had gone to. And there was really this feeling that being able

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  to create rituals for yourself and not just being able to do one-off rituals, because I think that's one of the issues with the funeral is too often it's interpreted as, and not always, but it's often interpreted as the end. Everyone comes, they get together, they help out, they're supportive, and then it's like, all right, back to work, back to life, back to normal. But instead, finding rituals that you can do yearly, biannually, whatever, but something where you can be constantly, not in a dysfunctional way, but coming back to just like looking at their life and really trying to consider who this person was and celebrating them, basically.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  And I went to Mexico City and found a translator and went and tried my best as a not Mexican guy to experience Day of the Dead. And I don't pretend to be an expert in that at all, but I, just from my kind of basic journalistic observations, I found it such an incredible thing that people were doing every year, where it was just partying, celebrating, cleaning, drinking cokes, eating candy, hanging out. And obviously, that's incredibly productive, but just this idea of what are both broad and individual rituals that we can do that we can also repeat, I found to be super compelling. And then as far as community, I mean, a lot of that is

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Can be done in in one on one ways, I think, like with Bill Crane, just sitting with someone and being present, but also the rise of what might be called second spaces, or not yet at a point where people are really open with their neighbor, with strangers, about grief and loss in a broad way. But I think that there could and should be a move away from grief being exclusively in the therapist's office. And I think therapy is amazing and can be really valuable. But like I did this thing called the dinner party that's super, that's really cool, where people who've experienced a similar kind of loss all get together and have dinner. And I did it online because it was during COVID. But just having a place where everyone has a buy in, everyone is giving license

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  to other people to talk openly about their grief and be supportive. And I found that to be pretty meaningful and moving, too. And so trying to really augment those kinds of spaces as we progressively, hopefully, move to an even even broader and more public way of of being able to grapple with grief.

• 1:04:32Dan Harris?

  The last chapter of the book is called Home, and it involves you going home, which you had not wanted to do, because your home was where your mom died. In this chapter, you go home and really kind of sit with it. And I just want to read for one, one last time here, want to read you back to you. And just when I'm done, maybe you can just say more about it. But here we go. So many claims are made about grief, and so many now seem to me to be false, or at least widely misinterpreted. Closure doesn't exist, and the five stages of grief may not be the most useful framework. But there's also the truth of it that I've found, like that it sneaks up on you, that it brings with it regret, that it exists on the same continuum as love, and that your life eventually builds

• 1:05:16Dan Harris?

  around it. Every generation, every person really must relearn the truths of grief for themselves. There may be no substitute for going through it. At the end of it all, what worked best for me was something far plainer and more challenging than I'd expected, sitting simply with the ones I love.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really set off on this book as a journey toward figuring it all out and toward finding the silver bullet and looking in science, looking into technology.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Looking into medicine and all these things, as I've said, provide some kind of new lenses and can be useful in various ways, depending on how we approach them. But really, coming home and just being in really my original community, being with my dad, being with my brother, sitting in the room where my mom died, and just being honest about what had happened and being honest with myself that grief isn't something that you get to solve, unfortunately. And is as much as my journalistic self would love to have reported my way out of grief,

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  acknowledging and fully understanding that's not how it works and that everyone, as I wrote there, has to learn how to grieve for themselves. And I think everyone grieves really differently, but I think that there are broad stroke similarities in that you just have to be honest with yourself that it's something that you're going to have to live with. And to some degree, I view it as something I get to live with. I get to have those memories of my mom and why would I ever want to lose that?

• 1:07:04Dan Harris?

  I like this phrase in the chunk that I read to you there about grief existing on the same continuum as love. And it reminds me of something, I believe the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein talks about this, that the love doesn't have to stop, even though somebody has died. And we tie ourselves in knots with the grief and the sorrow and the despair, but it's unclear who that's serving and whether that's wholesome even really, because it really is based in the love. I think the way he says it is that the grief, the despair, that's actually based in attachment, which is not a great strategy in a universe where everything ends.

• 1:07:48Dan Harris?

  But if you can let go of that or loosen up around that, you can see that what's left is the love. Yeah. So does any of that hit home for you?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's on the same continuum and to some degree, it's not just on the same continuum, but it's the same thing. But it's finding ways to not just get stuck in it, but instead to really be able to hold both things, hold the love, hold the grief and. Not let the grief overtake you, not view it as crooked as an ulcer, but also it's I love getting to remember all the amazing times that I had with my mom and I love getting to think about our relationship and reconsider it and think through all the things we could have and would have done. And that's really hard sometimes, but I think that that comes out of a place of love and of keeping her with me. And it's been a decade now since

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  she died and I'll be grieving the rest of my life, I'm sure to some degree, but I think that I'm more at a place now, at least where I'm able to view it as not something that has to be gotten rid of or tamped down or cured or solved and as something instead that gets to coexist with and even to some degree be love.

• 1:09:05Dan Harris?

  You said that you feel lucky to have these memories. In the book, you spend quite a bit of time investigating whether it's possible to delete memories as a way to a treat or cure grief. What's that all about and how real is that science? Is this in the offing?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yes, we're not there yet, fortunately, probably. But there's very interesting research, 2013, 2014, there were studies at UCSD and MIT that deleted fear memories in mice and they basically trained them to be afraid of a certain area of a maze by shocking them. And then they used optogenetics, which is the introduction of a light sensitive protein into a cell, usually a neuron, and then you can basically turn it on or off using an external fiber optic light. And they turned off their fear memories and the mice didn't remember they were afraid of that area and went back to that area. And there was a really fascinating piece that really caught my attention in Science Magazine that said, are humans

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  next for this? And the neuroscientists who I've talked to were very understandably like, the mouse brain and a human brain are incredibly different things. We're certainly not there yet. I talked to one at the System of Neuroscience out of Poland who speculated in 10 to 15 years, we could be selectively deleting certain memories in humans. He was a little on his own in that, but even he had a very European turn of phrase for it. He said, that's a very fast food solution to our problems, which I loved. But I was really interested in this as to some degree.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  For myself, but even in the intro where I'm headed off to to go report this and research this, I'm admitting the sort of insanity of it. I'm more interested in sort of the ethical questions of if and when we do eventually get here, is this something we would want to do? And I think some people, and at some points in my own life, the pain is so bad of grief, you really do consider what would it be like to not remember this or not have this moment or not know what my mom's body looks like dead? Do I want to get rid of that? And being able to really ask ourselves these kinds of questions now, I think, is important

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  because as I saw with something like AI, the technology, it moves very fast. And yeah, no, we're not there yet. And it's still very Charlie Kaufman, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. But it's a very interesting ethical question, I think, that we might pose ourselves both for its scientific possibility, but also just for our own grappling with loss. Is that a legitimate way, a smart way of dealing with grief, basically? And the conclusion I come to is I'm glad I have my memories, but it's pretty wild science. And octogen X2, to be clear, is used for a broad variety of things, not just fear memories.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  But in the Science Magazine article where the really stood out to me in their kind of possibilities.

• 1:12:12Dan Harris?

  Before I let you go, and we teased this earlier, the broad or expanding expansive definition of grief that you investigate, can you say a little bit more about that? And I know you actually went to a boot camp for people who have breakups.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was very fun. Yeah, I think too often the thinking is pretty hemmed in of what kind of grief is legitimate. Like, my mom died, that's viewed as, okay, his mom died, that's legitimate grief. I think someone who... Has gone through a bad divorce, or as I mentioned earlier, like big financial troubles. These things are often shunted aside, and there's this whole concept too of ambiguous loss, which was coined by Pauline Boss, who's this amazing, and she's 90 years old now at the University of Minnesota, and she defined it as loss where you don't have all the facts. And so that can be something like climate change grief, that can be something like ancestral racism.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  She gave the examples in her earliest findings of a soldier who was presumed dead, but never, body was never returned from war, and of a father who was psychologically absent. So you have the opposites of the psychologically absent father is physically there, but you're grieving the loss of their connection with you. And the soldier is the opposite, where you presume they're gone, but you don't have certainty in that. And all these sorts of losses are legitimate, but I think too often we hierarchize and say, okay, dead child, dead. It's very dark to do when you really start to think about how we broadly consider legitimate and less legitimate losses.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, so I went to breakup boot camp, and it was something like the 20th or 21st iteration, but it was the first to allow people who weren't just women. And so I was excited to go that, and it was three days, Northern California, very, very luxe. I was not going through a breakup at the time, but I was there to try to understand how people were grieving loss of their relationships in a way not always dissimilar from a death. And I talked to one guy who was saying, I write about in the book, who was saying that in very specific ways, and he's not saying broadly, but in specific ways, the loss of a relationship he had was harder than the death of his wife,

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  because he, community didn't show up for him for the supposedly lesser loss. People have an understanding of, okay, your wife dies, we bring food over, et cetera, et cetera. But you go through a bad divorce, bad breakup, and there's not. That kind of understanding that's there. And so that just really got me thinking about how important it is to legitimize all forms of losses and to see, especially as we go forward with things like climate change. There was a study that found a huge number of people across Western Europe are, the young people especially, but are really grieving, grieving climate change and what they view as the migrant crisis that is happening and is to come and weather crises

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  and land crises and all these sorts of things. So there's all kinds of grief. And I think too often we get locked into a thinking of there's like one or two or three or four kinds of legitimate loss and that's not really true.

• 1:15:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I would agree with that. And this is actually like almost ridiculously glib even to use this expression, not to beat a dead horse here, but I mean, it is a kind of Buddhist view. You know, the, one of the major tenets of Buddhism is impermanence. Things are changing all the time and you're going to suffer if you're clinging. And so it's just normalizing this experience that we are losing all the time. By the way, we're also gaining all the time. And it's just easier said than done. But the way to equanimity is to not take it too personally.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And as you say, to really have that understanding that it happens.

• 1:16:12Dan Harris?

  Yeah. There was a Mark Epstein, who's a Buddhist psychiatrist, talks about having an encounter with a Buddhist master, Ajahn Chah, Thai Buddhist master. And he was giving a little talk to some young students and he picked up a glass from the shelf and said, I love this glass. It's beautiful, but to me it's already broken. And it can seem dark, but, but it is actually a way to actually live with some ease to realize that everything's changing all the time. The glass you're sipping out of is bound to break.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's liberating to be more honest about death, too, as we were talking about, for sure.

• 1:16:53Dan Harris?

  Yes. Cody, anything you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  I wanted a few more Buddhist cones, but we only got a few. No, I think that's about right. It was a really amazing and eye-opening book to report and to live. And I'm so grateful for your deep read of it and your insight and your own perspective on it. So huge gratefulness.

• 1:17:16Dan Harris?

  Right back at you. Can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and anything else you've put out there that you want us to know about?

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  We can just do the book. It's called The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss. And it's available everywhere. It came out at the end of June and it's on Amazon and bookshop and in your local bookstore and all that great stuff.

• 1:17:36Dan Harris?

  Cody Delistraty, thank you.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate you.

• 1:17:43Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Cody. Great to have him on the show. We'll be chatting about grief over on danharris.com today. You can hop into the chat if you are a subscriber. Subscribers will also be getting a cheat sheet of this and every new episode where we sum up the biggest takeaways and also give you a full transcript. If you're not a subscriber, we'd love to have you. You can sign up at danharris.com. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Games on a break? Don't doom scroll. Try rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real, physical card. Football, basketball, even Pokemon. Packs start at just $5. Ship it straight to your door or sell it back instantly at full market value. Max value up to $125,000. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Deposit $5, get five free packs. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.