On Living (And Fumbling) With Kerry Egan

Well,

Kerry,

Welcome to Coming Back.

I am so excited to have you on the podcast.

My listeners don't know this,

But when the podcast was first being brainstormed in my head,

You were the first guest that I ever wanted to have on the show.

And so I'm so excited that this is finally coming to fruition.

I would absolutely love if you could start us off with your story of loss or grief in your life.

Well,

Thank you for having me on your show.

It's an honor,

So thank you.

I guess the first real loss I faced,

And I'm not sure you even know this from reading On Living,

But my first loss was my father.

He died when I was 25.

I had just turned 25.

And he had juvenile diabetes.

But of course,

He became a diabetic back in the time where they didn't have very good medication or protocols for people with type 1 diabetes.

So he was really sick my whole life.

I grew up with a very sick father who would go through these periods of hospitalization and surgeries,

Open heart surgery and vascular surgeries and kidney failure and all sorts of terrible side effects of juvenile diabetes,

Sort of interspersed with him being really well and really normal and just being my dad with these strange periods in between of terrible stress and not really understanding quite frankly,

What was happening.

I was a child and my mom had four of us.

She did an amazing job,

Quite frankly.

I realize that now as an adult,

Looking back on it now that I have my own kids.

And then he died.

He died when I was 25.

And in some ways,

It was such a shock,

Right?

It was such a shock because he had been sick my whole life.

He'd been in the hospital in and out terribly ill my whole life.

And I never thought he would actually die.

And then this time,

He did.

There was a shock to it.

And yet at the same time,

I had been sort of preparing for it my whole life.

My whole life I knew my father was going to – could die very soon.

And the last few years have been really difficult.

I think your early 20s is a difficult time to lose a parent.

I think anytime is a difficult time to lose a parent.

What am I saying?

I think anytime is terrible to lose a parent.

But I think there's some unique things about losing a parent in your early 20s,

Especially when there's been a lot of difficult times before that.

And so I really – that was my first real experience with grief,

With a real – like some of my grandparents had died before then.

But it's a little bit different when you have a first degree relative die.

It's a lot different actually.

How did you respond to his death?

I didn't really know how to handle it.

I was in my first year of divinity school.

I didn't handle it well.

And I decided to hike the Camino de Santiago.

I understand that for most people listening,

They don't see the connection.

But in my head,

It was perfectly clear that my father died and a year later,

I had a Camino.

And what is that?

What's the significance of that?

Well,

At the time,

I don't think I could have told you what the significance was.

I simply – I literally sort of held on to this idea of hiking the Camino almost like a security blanket.

I had no idea how to cope with my dad's loss.

And I think the idea of having something very solid,

Very certain really appealed to me.

That when you hike the Camino,

It's like hiking any long distance trail,

Right?

You wake up in the morning,

You eat some breakfast,

And then you walk all day,

And then you go to sleep at night.

And then you wake up the next morning,

And you walk all day,

And you go to sleep at night.

And that sounded really reassuring at a time where I felt like everything had been pulled out from under me.

And that was the experience of grief for me,

Was this feeling that everything I knew had been sort of pulled out from under me.

It was a totally disorienting feeling.

And I had terrible guilt.

I had terrible,

Overwhelming,

Crushing guilt.

I felt like I had not been a very good daughter,

Hadn't been a very good person at the end of my dad's life.

Interesting.

Why do you say that?

So my dad,

At the end of his life,

Was in kidney failure.

And part of that was that he had – they weren't able to really do good dialysis for him because he was so sick.

And so he had a lot of sort of poisons in his blood.

And this led to a lot of delirium and a lot of paranoia and a lot of violent outbursts.

And he was a very difficult man at the end,

A very mean man,

A very emotionally abusive man at the very end.

My younger brother was still living at home.

He died my brother's senior year of high school.

My sister was in college at the time,

So I had younger siblings that I worried about the impact of my father's illness on them,

The emotional impact,

Not simply because he was sick,

But because there was this added element of emotional abuse.

I would call it emotional abuse.

I don't know if they would,

But I would,

That went along with it.

So I was very angry at my father for how he treated my mother and my siblings,

Not me so much.

Because I think for me,

Anger felt like a shield.

I was very angry at him and that anger felt very powerful to me.

And I felt like I was not affected by his anger.

But that,

Of course,

Wasn't true.

I found that out years later as I grieved the loss.

He was still my dad.

He was my daddy.

And so to lose not just your dad,

But to lose him in the way that we did,

He had a truly horrible death.

Gosh,

It's so funny.

I didn't think I would be talking about this.

He had multi-system failure.

So he was in kidney failure.

He was in heart failure.

He was in vascular failure.

He had severe mental disturbances,

Obviously.

It was terrible.

It was truly a horrific,

Terrible death.

I don't know how he lived as long as he did to tell you the truth.

He finally died of sepsis.

He became septic and died.

That is horrendous.

That's such a good – that's such a fitting word for that too,

Because you didn't just lose him mentally in pieces.

Like a lot of people with Alzheimer's or dementia will mentally go in pieces,

But emotionally as well,

You lose that – it seems like a lot of caring and nurturing was stamped out of him.

Yeah.

I think the things that made him – the things that felt like a father were gone.

Yeah,

You still love him because he is your father.

And yet,

The damage he did was significant.

And I still feel it in my life in some ways.

That's not something you forget.

I still feel it in many ways in my life.

And yet,

I have a really great life.

I was actually just thinking about this weekend.

I have a wonderful life.

I really do.

I have wonderful parents.

I have a wonderful mother,

Wonderful siblings,

Wonderful husband.

I really do.

And yet,

You don't – it never – you learn to cope with it.

You learn to integrate it into yourself as a human being.

But there's still that sadness.

There's still that – there always will be that I lost my father the way I did.

That he lost himself the way he did.

I don't think he wanted to be that person.

I don't think it's who he truly was.

I think the disease process was truly terrible for him.

In what ways does his death continue to take up space in your life?

I actually wrote a book about it.

I wrote a book about Walking the Camino a long time ago,

12,

13 years ago.

It started as my master's thesis and it turned into a book.

It's not something I necessarily talk a lot about now.

And part of that is because I'm also a hospice chaplain.

I've worked with a hospice chaplain for many years.

And I can talk about how I got from my dad's death to being a hospice chaplain because they are very related.

But you know,

It's not something I talk about very much anymore because as a hospice chaplain,

You bring yourself fully to your patients.

You bring your whole self.

And of course,

I bring my past and I bring the grief I went through and how I made sense of that loss.

I bring all of that with me,

But I don't talk about it with my patients,

Right?

I'm not there to talk about my loss.

I'm there to help them find the tools that they already have to utilize those tools to deal with their own loss,

To deal with their own impending grief or their anticipatory grief.

So I don't talk about my own loss with my dad much.

So while you bring your whole self and you bring your whole history and how you've learned to cope with these things to your patients and your families,

You don't talk about it.

It's not appropriate.

So it's interesting to talk about it now because I don't talk about it very much.

I don't know that I have talked about it actually in the context of this book really about my dad's loss.

But that was my first loss.

That was my first loss.

Can you take us deeper into the weeks,

Months,

Years that followed his loss?

I had a very complicated – I mean,

Not to be like all therapy-ized on you,

But what I would say is another one that I had was a complicated grief reaction.

It was a very complicated grief because of how he died and how he was at the end of his life through no fault of his own.

But the impact is lasting.

It's lasting on all of us family members.

It's been 20 years now.

He'll be gone 20 years in June.

Wow.

And can you just really quickly define complicated grief for people who may not know exactly what that is?

So I mean,

In some ways I don't even know that I like the term.

A complicated grief reaction is one in which you've lost someone and you are in bereavement,

You're grieving,

But there's something sort of complicating it.

It's not maybe – sometimes a complicated grief could be like my situation where there's a lot of anger.

There had been sort of an abusive situation.

Maybe you had been abandoned and so you're grieving the loss of this person and yet they had abandoned you.

So there's these conflicting and contradictory emotions that can be difficult to work through in the grieving process.

I mean,

Grief is difficult no matter what,

Right?

Grief is this experience of this great enormous love being gone in the physical world.

But learning how that change impacts your everyday life,

The everyday rhythms of your life is so difficult and so painful.

And to me,

That's what grief is,

Right?

How do I keep living without the physical presence of this person I love so much?

And that sounds like that should be easy and it's not.

It is overwhelmingly difficult.

So take us from the trail to – after the trail to getting into hospice because it sounds like this progression is linear but of course as we know with grief,

It's usually – Never.

It's kind of a scribble,

Scrabble like a pinball machine or like a spiral,

Like directions on the page.

I always say to people like,

Listen,

In my head,

From my father's death to the Camino makes perfect sense.

And I know that probably to people listening,

It doesn't make any sense at all.

But I think if you've been through grief,

You can hear that and be like,

Yeah,

I'm sure in her head it did make sense.

And there isn't a calling to make a journey.

For some people,

I don't think for everybody.

For some people,

I think there is.

So I did this Camino and I sort of expected or wanted to be fixed when I got back.

Of course,

It doesn't – it's not how it works.

I didn't – my grief wasn't over.

It wasn't fixed.

In some ways,

It had just really started.

I had been so wound so tightly before I did the Camino and it was really – I didn't cry at all when my dad died until I did the Camino.

So it was about a year later.

Wow.

Because again,

I was just so angry.

I was just so wound up with anger for how he died,

For how he was when he died,

For the impact he'd had on me and the rest of my family when he died.

Just very angry,

Very angry.

And like I said,

That anger felt like a shield to me.

It felt very safe.

But of course,

When you're just like a teaming ball of fury,

You can't turn it on and off.

If you're going to be a teaming ball of fury to protect you from grief,

Then you kind of have to be a teaming ball of fury all the time.

And that's exhausting.

It's really exhausting.

So obviously,

That was not a sustainable reaction to his death and I'm glad I had the opportunity in hindsight to be sort of cracked open from that anger.

Do you remember that moment?

Yeah.

Yeah,

I was standing in a wheat field in Spain and literally had like a fit.

You know,

Like when people say like,

Oh,

She had a fit,

Meaning she was so angry.

But then you also hear the term like,

Oh,

They had a fit,

Like some sort of neurological breakdown where you're having,

You know,

Almost a seizure type thing.

And I always thought that was sort of a poetic way to describe really great anger until I experienced it,

Right?

Until I experienced anger that was so overwhelming that I had,

Like physically,

I had a fit.

I mean,

I was literally like,

Shaking and sweating.

I remember like,

Spittle like flying from my mouth and being like,

That's pretty cool.

You know,

Like not just hearing.

Like I remember watching it so weird.

I'm like,

I remember watching it like in slow motion come flying out of my mouth.

And I was in a wheat field in Spain.

And it was really hot.

So the Camino is really,

Really hot.

You're hiking mostly through wheat fields and olive tree orchards and olive trees only grow to be about six feet tall.

And vineyards and vineyards too.

But it's hot.

There's no shade.

And Spain is hot in the summer,

Like really hot.

And when you're hiking the Camino,

It's this for large parts of it,

It's this white chalky road.

And I thought I knew where it was going.

And I thought it was going through this stand of trees every now and then,

In that part of Spain,

Northern Spain,

You'll have these wheat fields just as far as the eye can see.

And at that time of the year,

They were dotted by red flowers by poppies.

But every now and then there would be a stand of trees and they clearly had been planted,

You know,

Because they were perfectly in a row.

And maybe they were windbreaks.

I'm not sure what they were.

But I thought the Camino was going under the stand of trees.

And I just couldn't wait.

I just needed to be in the shade.

I couldn't wait to be in the shade.

The original title of the book was supposed to be Shade in the Heat,

Which was actually from a prayer.

It was from a 10th century prayer for people going on the Camino.

So I'm not the only one to have this experience.

So 1000 years ago,

There was this beautiful blessing for the Camino,

A 10th century blessing.

I am seeing my life,

I'm seeing my office.

I have a copy of the book.

And actually,

I'm going to pick it up.

And the prayer is right in the beginning.

See if I can find it.

Here it is.

So this is a blessing for those setting off on pilgrimage from 1038.

So 1000 years ago,

It says,

Be for them,

Lord,

A defense in emergency,

A harbor and shipwreck,

A refuge in the journey,

Shade in the heat,

Light in the darkness,

A staff on the slippery slope,

Joy amidst suffering,

Consolation and sadness,

Safety and adversity,

Caution and prosperity,

So that these your servants under your leadership may arrive where they are boldly going and may return unharmed.

I feel like that's like,

I actually feel like that's a really good description of grief,

You know,

Be for them a defense in the emergency and a refuge in the journey and shade in the heat,

Light in the darkness,

A staff on the slippery slope.

So in the Camino,

That's very physical,

You physically experience you,

You're craving shade in the heat,

You know.

And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't.

And I think that's true in grief,

You know,

When you're in the midst of a grieving process,

You yearn for a break,

You yearn to rest.

Sometimes you can and sometimes you don't get it.

And so I thought these trees,

I thought I was gonna walk under these trees,

I was yearning for shade,

It was like 106 degrees,

You know,

And I had broken out in prickly heat,

I had this rash all over my body and I'm really pale and I get no matter how much sunscreen I put on,

I would get burned and I was hot and I was sweaty.

And then the road didn't go under the trees.

It veered off.

What I thought from standing on top of a little hill where I thought the road went,

I was wrong.

And it was and I could see the trees off in the distance and I was walking past them,

They were receding.

And I just lost it.

I just lost it.

And I just stomped out into the wheat fields like a crazy person.

And I just started kicking the wheat and cursing like,

And I'm not a person who usually curses,

Although I curse more after this.

And I just unleashed just every curse word I had ever heard at God.

And just screaming,

Screaming and kicking the wheat and I was kicking,

I kicked so hard.

I saw the backpack on,

I kicked so hard that I knocked myself over.

When I remember lying on the ground and like almost not being able to control my body and pulling the backpack off and trying to throw the backpack and scrambling around and screaming and wailing,

Like making almost these animal sounds.

So yeah,

I do remember the moment I lost it.

It's not something I'll ever forget.

Oh my gosh,

I'm laughing because I have this own moment in my story and on my podcast,

On social media and things like that.

I call it my version of throwing an adult temper tantrum.

And it's literally while my mom was dying,

It was so cold outside that I couldn't go for a run.

I didn't really want to drive anywhere.

Everybody's home for the holidays and I locked myself in the cab of my dad's truck that was parked in the garage and just like screamed and started hitting the dashboard,

Which you probably shouldn't do because then the airbags would come out.

But for some reason they didn't.

But I was like hitting the dashboard and I was like wailing and I was crying.

I was cursing at God and I was cursing at my dad and cursing at my mom and cursing my whole family.

And I was like,

This is the moment.

Sometimes I literally felt my entire body breaking in half.

And I'm like,

Other people in the world have to have had these moments.

I'm like,

They have to have had them.

But the crazy thing is outside of like,

Movies about insane asylums,

You really never like hero or see people behaving this way.

And so finding work like yours,

Finding other authors who have shared these experiences of like,

Being in this kind of level of darkness and I know this,

The trail story is not in On Living,

But you have other stories in On Living that are this level of breaking.

I was like,

Oh my God,

There was a relief in that.

Like,

Okay,

I'm not crazy.

I'm just grieving.

Or maybe I'm crazy and I'm grieving.

But either way,

They're connected with each other.

What happened after that?

Like,

How did you take your experience from this hike from this pilgrimage back into the world?

Because I imagine it was kind of jarring to just like show up in the world again and be like,

Oh,

I'm not fixed.

The grief isn't gone.

I have to still carry this.

You're like,

What the hell?

Oh my God,

Like,

Not only is it not over,

Like it just began.

That was the beginning.

And so I came back and there is,

It's kind of fun to talk about fumbling.

I never talk about this book.

It came out,

I'll tell you why,

Because it came out,

Because of when it came out.

So I came back and one of the things you get to do on the Camino,

You can have an intention when you hike the Camino.

You can say,

I'm hiking the Camino for this reason and it's your prayer.

It's what you pray for,

Your intention as you hike.

And some people made their intention very sort of more what we classically spiritual,

What we might think.

They wanted a better relationship with God,

Which I didn't even know what that meant at that time.

I was like,

Whatever,

Sure.

But there were lots of other people,

Those were my people who wanted like very solid physical things.

One guy I met,

He wanted to like find a wife.

That's what he wanted.

That was his intention.

He wanted to get married.

He wanted to find a wife.

One guy wanted a really good high paying job when he got back.

He wanted a good job that he liked that had a high salary.

He was very specific.

So you could have an intention.

You could have whatever intention you wanted.

And so my intention was I was in Divinity School,

I thought I wanted to get a PhD in religion because I really,

What I loved about studying religion is that it really is the study of humanity,

Right?

I mean,

Because God is God,

Right?

We talk about God being ineffable and then we immediately say all sorts of things about God and we talk about God being unknowable and then we immediately try to say all sorts of things about God.

And ultimately religion is really about the human desire to know more about this oceanic feeling of wonder,

Right?

That most people,

Most people I've talked to as a chaplain have had 99%,

Not all,

Should I even say that?

I don't even know.

I have to think about that.

The vast majority,

Maybe a hundred percent,

But I'm not sure,

Have had in their life some experience of what we might call the numinous,

Right?

There's some experience of this realization that there's something in the world bigger than yourself and that you are part of this feeling.

You know,

People use the term,

You know,

The transcendent other,

You know,

A sense of transcendent wonder,

You know,

A sense of overwhelming beauty,

Something that pulls you out of yourself and you can't understand it.

And that's really what religion is,

Right?

And I would call that experience,

I would call those experiences of God.

And that's what religion is.

It's this attempt to understand that and then to translate it into your everyday life,

Right?

How do you empty the dishwasher,

You know,

With this oceanic sense of wonder?

How does that happen?

And that's what I wanted to study.

And I wanted to study religion.

And I thought the only way to do that was,

You know,

To stay in school and study it.

So I got back from the Camino and I began to realize that I did not want to be in school.

And maybe because my dad had just died,

But it was my second year.

So remember,

I had done two years in divinity school by the time I did the Camino.

The first year my dad died,

Then I did another year very badly.

And I really didn't think I wanted to get a PhD.

I didn't want to be in school anymore,

But I had no idea what I did want to do.

So that was my intention on the Camino was,

Please God,

Help me know what to do.

What do I do next?

I don't even know.

I mean,

That's so much of the experience of grief is like,

You don't even know what to do next.

Like,

What do you do?

What do you do next?

How do you even get through the next day?

You just don't know what comes next.

You can't even conceive that there is a next.

So when I got back from the Camino,

At least half a dozen different people had done this really amazing field education experience as a student chaplain at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

And they all said,

And what is really amazing about it is the supervisor,

Walter Moczynski,

Who is just an amazing supervisor.

And I thought,

Well,

Maybe it just appealed to me.

And I was in this very strange place,

Which is one of the gifts of grieving.

One of the gifts,

If there are gifts,

And I'm not wishing it on anybody,

But we're all going to go through it.

So one of the gifts is for me,

At least the times I've been through grief,

You sort of stop the rational mind that dominates at most times recedes.

It's tired.

It's tired.

It can't make sense of what's happening.

And so it loses my experience.

Some of its prominence in the thought process.

And so when the rational mind recedes a little bit,

Takes a little bit of a step back,

There's this different part of the brain,

Right?

This very intuitive part of the brain that has its own reason.

That is not the reason we're taught in school,

But is its own thing.

And this very intuitive mind for me came to the forefront.

And so I was really sort of moving on intuition at that point.

I did the Camino based on nothing but intuition.

And when I came back,

I had heard about this guy,

Walter Moczynski,

And based on literally nothing but intuition,

Based on nothing but a feeling,

Based on nothing but the fact that his name made me feel good.

Walter Moczynski.

I thought,

I'm going to call this Walter Moczynski.

So I did.

I called him up and I told him about who I was and that I wasn't even an MDiv at the time.

I was at Divinity School with a different master's program.

And he said,

Why don't you come and we can meet?

And so I went and it was actually my first time back at any hospital since my dad had died.

I remember standing outside and back then there were no cell phones.

This is 1998,

I guess.

No cell phones or I didn't have a cell phone back then.

And I took the bus and I'm standing in front of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and there are these big windows right in front of it.

And I sort of had a little nervous breakdown,

Like a little mini panic attack.

And I thought,

I cannot go in this building.

Oh my God,

I was just being outside of a hospital again.

It was really difficult,

Really difficult.

And I was shaking and crying and trying to pull myself together.

And I knew that I had to go in there and tell the man,

I'm so sorry,

I made a mistake.

This is a terrible mistake.

I'm leaving.

But I didn't have a cell phone,

Right?

So I couldn't call him.

There was no pay phone.

So I had to at some point get myself under control enough that I could at least go in and tell him,

I'm sorry,

I will not be doing this interview.

Because I didn't feel like I could just leave.

So little did I know the window I'm standing in front of was his office.

And he was watching me this whole time.

And he said to me when I came in,

He said,

I was wondering if I should go out there and like say something to you.

And then somehow at the end of the hour,

I had signed up to be a chaplain.

He was a very good chaplain.

He is a very good chaplain.

So I owe him a lot.

So somehow at the end of that hour,

I went from having a panic attack and standing in front of a hospital and trying to figure out how to tell him I'm so sorry,

I wasted his time to signing up to do a field education to be a chaplain.

And then when I realized in that first experience,

That first unit of chaplaincy was that what I wanted to study in the study of religion,

Right,

I wanted to study how do people make sense?

How do they make sense of their worlds?

Right?

How do you make sense of the world?

How do you create meaning from chaos?

Because that's what religion does mean it religion,

You know,

Religions are a way to make meaning of chaos.

They're a way to try to understand what is not understandable,

And yet that we are so attracted to.

You don't have to study that in school.

There's a job,

There's a job where you can do that every single day with real life people.

It's very thrilling.

And that's the job of being a chaplain.

That's what you do as a chaplain,

Find out how they make sense of the world every day,

How they make sense of the good things and the terrible things that have happened to them,

And where God fits in all that.

And it's thrilling.

It's the most thrilling job.

It's like going on an adventure every day.

Every day,

Something thrilling happens when you're a chaplain.

Because you get to hear about other people's lives and everybody has a thrilling life.

That's one of the things I've learned.

Nobody at the end of their life ever said,

You know,

Nothing really ever happened to me.

Nobody's ever said that.

Nobody's ever been like,

No,

It was all fine.

Nobody's ever said that.

Something has happened to everyone.

It's very comforting to realize that.

It's very thrilling to get to hear their stories and to get to see how people get through it.

It's very thrilling and it's very comforting and it's very exciting and sad sometimes.

But it's wonderful.

It's wonderful to get to see that we have the ability.

Some of us more than others.

Some people do.

Some people,

It's easier for them.

Not what they went through is easier,

But the coping and the making sense and the integrating these experiences into their hearts is easier for some people than it is for other people.

But everybody has the ability to do it.

It's very exciting to see that.

It's very comforting to see that.

That people have the ability to do this.

It's very exciting.

Well,

Back when I became a chaplain and that was in hospital chaplaincy,

The Camino,

I ended up writing my master's thesis about it and that got turned into a book.

Very unexpectedly,

I met an editor in a chocolate shop in Harvard Square and we both really love chocolate and that's how we met.

And then it got turned into a book and it became my first book called Fumbling.

And I wrote that book while I was first doing CPE and then I was working as a staff chaplain at a hospital.

And then I got pregnant and I had my first child.

And the day before I was overdue,

I was two weeks overdue,

The day before I went in to be induced for a C-section,

I turned in the final galley proofs of the book.

So I literally turned in the final,

Final,

Final,

Final changes to the book the day before I had my son,

Went into the hospital the next day and promptly went crazy.

And this is the story that I know from On Living.

You were talking before about how sometimes things feel sort of more full of meaning.

That felt very full of meaning.

The timing on that one was really quite something to turn in the final copy of your book and then the next day to lose everything.

Yes.

I didn't lose everything.

I lost my mind,

But I was very lucky I didn't lose my child and I didn't lose my life.

But when you're in that space,

That feels like everything.

Oh,

It does feel like everything at the time.

I can say that now.

Thank you for pointing that out.

In retrospect,

I can say,

Oh,

I didn't lose everything.

But at the time,

I felt like I lost everything.

Yeah,

I had drug-induced psychotic disorder,

Which is so funny since the book has come out.

So many physicians specifically are very upset about hearing this.

They don't believe me and they don't want it to be true.

What is it?

What is the experience like for somebody that's never heard of this before?

Because I had never heard of it when I picked up the book either.

I was like,

I imagine that something that could happen,

But I had never seen it.

Like always very open about being like totally honest about this.

I have heard from at least a dozen women who think they've had the same experience.

So I had a C-section.

Baby was very big.

He was 10 pounds,

Two ounces.

And he got stuck.

And so they had to do an emergency C-section.

I had an epidural.

In the midst of that epidural,

Probably what happened,

No one can really say,

Probably what happened was that when they were trying to pull the baby out,

Because remember he's stuck.

His head is stuck in my hip bones.

They pulled out the epidural,

Which is the big giant needle in your spine,

So that it stopped providing anesthesia.

And so I ended up feeling the C-section wall cut open.

And I thought I was saying,

I'm feeling this.

I'm feeling this over and over again.

But my husband was there and he said,

You didn't say a word.

So in my head I was saying it,

But I wasn't actually saying it.

I went into shock and that's how they figured out my blood pressure went very,

Very high.

And I started moving.

So my husband does remember this,

That at one point the obstetrician said,

Hey,

He's moving down here.

She's kicking,

Which is obviously very,

Very dangerous when you're cut open all the way down through your uterus and your hemorrhaging because the baby was so big and now you're kicking.

This is a pretty terrible situation.

Wow.

They had to knock me out fast.

And usually,

This is the big mystery,

Usually in those situations I've been told,

Because I've talked to many anesthesiologists since,

Usually in those situations you'd be given general anesthesia and it knocks you out really fast.

They didn't.

The anesthesiologist did not in this case.

I don't know why.

He gave me something instead called ketamine.

Some people might know it as like a party drug.

Some people might know it as a veterinary drug.

Some people might know it as like Special K,

The party drug.

But if you take a large enough dose,

It works as what's called a dissociated anesthesia.

Basically creates a psychotic break.

I mean,

That's what it's supposed to do,

Right?

It severs the mind-body connection.

I'll just make you think you don't have a body is what I'll do.

I'm not going to knock you out.

I'm just going to totally take away the fact that you think you have a body.

Right.

So you're still feeling the pain.

You just don't know you have a body.

You're just totally severed from your body.

You're just hallucinating so hard.

It was really,

Really funny because when I came out of all this,

I had these hallucinations for hours.

The next day,

I couldn't stop crying.

I couldn't stop weeping.

Some nurse in the hospital,

She was like,

You just have the baby blues.

It was actually a lot more than that.

But the single most helpful person was my little brother,

Dan.

He at the time was a trail builder.

You know when you go hiking and you see these trails on the side of a cliff and you're like,

Who built this crazy hiking trail?

My brother,

Dan,

Was one of those men who would build those crazy hiking trails.

He just led this really such a different life than me,

Like a crazier kind of life than me.

The next day,

Maybe two days later,

I'm still in the hospital and he calls and he says,

Hey,

I heard you had a really rough time.

I said,

Yeah,

I did.

I couldn't stop crying.

He said,

I heard you had a tough time on the ketamine.

I said,

Yeah.

He goes,

Okay,

Tell me what you saw.

I said,

Well,

I'm crying.

I was in this swirling pink tunnel and there was a light at the end.

He goes,

Okay,

So you went down the K hole.

I said,

I did what?

He goes,

You went down the K hole.

That's what that's called.

That's supposed to happen on ketamine.

I said,

It is?

He's like,

Yeah,

Yeah,

That's totally supposed to happen.

He's like,

What happened next?

I said,

I thought I met God and I was talking to God.

He was like,

Yep,

Totally normal.

I said,

This is normal.

He goes,

Yeah,

Yeah,

This is going down the K hole.

This is what happens when you take ketamine.

He goes,

Come on.

Haven't you ever been at some party and there's a dude lying on the floor and he's screaming,

I'm dying.

I'm dying.

I said,

No.

That's not the life I lead.

I've never been to a party like that.

He's like,

Yeah,

It happens all the time.

That's what happens when you take ketamine.

He's like,

Totally normal.

This was the single most reassuring thing anyone could have said to me.

Then I said,

Have you ever gone down the K hole?

He was like,

No.

He's like,

I don't take that shit.

He's like,

That stuff makes you crazy.

He's not the one to take that.

No.

He's like,

But come on.

I've been to a million parties where that's happening and nobody ever told me that.

Nobody ever said what you experienced for ketamine.

Ketamine is normal.

Nobody really can explain why.

I don't have an answer as to why either,

But I do vividly remember when I was waking up from these hallucinations and I thought I met God and God was saying,

I'm the only thing that's real.

I don't actually call them hallucinations.

I would call them this experience.

I remember saying,

But the world is real.

I've been to the world and God said,

You people just made that up to make yourselves feel better.

I'm the only thing that's real.

Wow.

Yeah.

I remember waking up from this and this reality and unreality,

Is this real?

Is this not real?

Which is the central question of psychosis.

I remember saying to the young anesthesiologist who was there sitting with me,

Her name was Monica.

I remember saying,

I don't think you understand.

I am the single worst person in this entire hospital you could have given this drug to.

Because I've studied world religions and I fully understand.

You keep telling me it meant nothing.

It meant nothing.

It meant nothing.

It was just a drug.

It was just a drug.

And I kept saying to them,

Yes,

It was a drug.

That's true.

But I also know that there are cultures all over the world who take psychotropic drugs to go on astral journeys and that in their religious traditions,

Those astral journeys have every bit of reality and importance.

Probably,

Oftentimes they're considered to have more reality than the world we live in.

That those astral journeys are real experiences where you gain real knowledge and real insight and meet real entities.

And yes,

They may be caused by a drug,

By a psychotropic substance,

But that doesn't take away from the reality and the importance of the experience you have on that drug.

And I remember being crazy trying to explain this to the person,

To the anesthesiologist who like,

Anesthesiologist,

This is not how they think.

This is not the kind of person who goes into anesthesiology,

The type of person who wants to talk about the reality beyond that you discover an astral journey.

And she was like,

But it wasn't real.

And I was like,

You're not listening to me.

You're not listening to what I'm saying.

She's like,

It was just the drug.

And I was like,

I understand it was caused by the drug.

But that doesn't rule out its being important and real to me because of my training and because of the experiences I've had,

Quite frankly,

As a hospital chaplain.

Right?

I have experienced so much crazy stuff.

Like as a chaplain,

You just experience a lot of crazy stuff.

Every chaplain does.

Stuff that sort of defies explanation.

And now you've given me this drug and I've had an astral journey and you're going to tell me just to pretend it didn't happen and it's not real.

And so,

You know,

They kept saying,

Well,

The half-life of ketamine supposed to wear off after I don't remember what it was 24 hours,

48 hours.

And the very,

Very active hallucinations,

The tunnel hallucinations,

The K-hole hallucinations did wear off.

But I ended up developing.

So what it was called,

Right,

And it's really hard.

I'm actually so not attached to labels anymore about this.

I was for a very long time.

I needed to have a label and now I just don't really care.

At some point it was called postpartum psychosis.

Basically,

The effects of the drug didn't wear off for me.

Why?

I don't know.

And I was told that this was exceedingly rare,

That this was a once in a lifetime thing,

That this almost had never happened to anyone else.

And I kept trying to tell people there's something wrong with my brain and no one would listen to me.

It sounds like there was massive invalidation in this.

Oh,

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Very much so.

You know,

And I was seeing a psychiatrist through all this and they kept telling me I had postpartum depression,

Which maybe I did,

But they kept raising my level of Zoloft and it kept not doing anything because I wasn't depressed,

I was psychotic.

There were different symptoms,

Something different was going on.

And so it was finally my mother who diagnosed this over Christmas.

Jimmy was born in June.

There's my mother over Christmas,

My mother who had been a psychiatric public health nurse.

So she knew what she was talking about.

She was the one who said,

Carrie,

Do I have your permission to call your doctor?

I just want to explain to her the symptoms I'm seeing.

She said,

Because this is not what postpartum depression looks like.

She didn't tell me what she thought it was.

She just said,

This is not,

I don't think this is postpartum depression.

And my mom is so smart.

My mom's like,

I want to hang up and like call my mom now.

She called the psychiatrist and explained what she was seeing.

And that's when I finally was diagnosed with,

First they said it was postpartum psychosis.

And then they thought,

Well,

Maybe,

You know,

They were trying to figure out what could be causing this.

They didn't want to admit that it was the drug,

Right?

They'd given me,

Right,

They'd given me a drug that makes you psychotic.

They knew this,

Not only did they give it to me,

They gave me a lot of it.

They gave me one bolus and apparently it didn't take.

So a bolus is like a huge chunk of this drug.

They gave me one chunk of this drug during the surgery,

And I guess it didn't take fast enough.

So they gave me another.

So they've given me this huge amount of this drug.

And finally,

It wasn't really until I moved away from Iowa,

All this happened in Iowa City.

And it wasn't until two years later,

I moved to Massachusetts and went to a new psychiatrist who basically said,

Kind of if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck,

It's a duck.

It's drug induced psychotic disorder.

And maybe we don't see that very much from anesthesia,

But there's nothing else that can be.

And so that's the diagnosis I was given.

And now,

You know,

I don't even really care.

Now I don't even really care what the diagnosis is.

Now I actually wonder if it was PTSD.

Maybe,

You know,

You can have psychotic symptoms for PTSD.

Now I wonder if I just had really,

Really terrible PTSD with these sort of psychotic symptoms.

I don't know.

I don't know what I had.

I don't actually care anymore.

I actually really don't care anymore.

I don't worry about it.

It was just this experience I had.

So when the first book about the Camino,

About my dad's death,

About grief,

I wanted to call it Shade in the Heat.

And it was a good little book.

I still think it's a good little book.

But it came out when my son was three months old and I was like basically floridly psychotic.

Totally crazy.

I didn't do anything for it.

I certainly didn't promote it at all.

And every now and then,

Every now and then,

It's out of print,

But every now and then someone will find a copy and they'll send me an email.

And I get lots of emails about On Living and those mean a lot to me.

But the emails I get about fumbling mean the most.

They mean the most.

And I don't get them very often.

But every now and then,

If someone finds that book and says it was helpful to them,

That means a lot to me.

Is that because it's more about your personal journey as opposed to the stories of others?

Because I feel about that book that it was this sort of lost little orphan book.

There's an old saying I've heard among women writers and it says,

Every child you have is a book you will never write.

And I think that's true,

Right?

The experience,

The intensity of having children,

Of bringing them up,

It doesn't leave room for writing a book.

Because in some ways,

Writing a book feels not,

In some ways,

Not at all.

But in some strange way,

I have trouble articulating.

There's something about writing a book,

About putting it down on paper and sending it off into the world that feels a little bit,

Well,

It is your creation,

Right?

Your child is your creation,

And so is your book.

You're sort of sending this book out into the world and you hope it will be loved.

And fumbling was not,

It didn't have a chance.

It was sort of the child that got forgotten.

Like what's sad about that?

Because I think it was a good little book.

So I think that's why.

I think it was sort of this child that didn't have a chance in the world because of what happened to me.

I think I feel like I was a bad book mother.

I'm getting a visual for that.

And that's actually,

That's quite fitting.

Needing to be away from it for a while and then,

You know,

The book flounders and goes away.

And then when you see somebody pick it up and be like,

Oh,

This is actually a little treasure.

You're like,

Yes,

It is.

Yes,

It is.

I'm glad to hear it gets some love.

Because I feel like I didn't love it the way it should have been loved.

And you hear that right as a hospice chaplain,

You hear that from people that with their real children,

They say I didn't love my child the way I was supposed to love my child.

And I feel like that way about the book,

I feel I didn't love it the way it should have deserved to be loved.

So that book came out.

And so that's sort of how I became both a writer and a chaplain.

And then I was sick.

I was sick for a long time.

I was told by a psychiatrist back in Iowa along the way,

Where actually they told my husband,

Like,

She's permanently disabled,

Right?

She will never work again,

Like get used to your new life with this permanently disabled wife.

And I didn't think I'd ever work again.

I didn't see how in the world I'd ever go back to work as a chaplain.

Right?

I mean,

How would I bring all of this baggage with me?

Because again,

Like I said,

When you are someone's chaplain,

You don't talk about your own life and your own story,

But you bring your entire self with you.

Right?

That is the relationship.

You bring your entire humanity with you,

So that they can be with someone as they do their human work,

Right?

This work of being a human,

You know,

Figuring out what is this relationship to this,

To myself and to this world and to the fact that I'm leaving this world.

So I didn't understand how I could bring that with me.

I thought I was very damaged.

I thought I was broken in a way that would never be fixed.

I mean,

Part of the experience of psychosis is that your mind is broken.

Your mind is broken.

And when you're no longer psychotic,

Right,

When you get on the right medication,

It's not like you forget being psychotic.

You remember what it feels like to have your mind be broken.

And then there's a fear,

Of course,

That it will come back.

Of it happening again.

Of course.

So I didn't think I'd ever work again.

And so I was a stay at home mom and I sort of threw myself into being a stay at home mom and I wanted to be a really good stay at home mom.

And I think I'm a good mother.

I think I'm a loving mother,

But I'm a terrible housekeeper.

Right?

I'm not good at it.

Like,

I feel like there were always like piles of clutter everywhere.

And I was always late for everything.

And,

You know,

I go to like mom's groups,

You know,

They would start like 930 in the morning,

And I would inevitably be late.

But you know,

You go to some mom's house and they'd have like fresh baked scones.

And I'd be like,

What?

How did you make scones?

Like I haven't brushed my teeth.

Like,

You know,

I think I changed them.

Like,

You know what,

I didn't do that.

I'm like,

You know what,

I changed the baby's diaper.

Baby's still in his pajamas.

So I was just not a very good housekeeper.

That's a real skill,

And I don't have it.

But I wanted to be a great stay at home mom.

I threw myself into that.

And I didn't think I'd ever go back to work.

I believed that doctor in Iowa when they said,

You know,

You will never work again.

I believed that.

And it wasn't true,

Of course.

But it took me a long time to come to the realization that they were wrong.

And then I applied for a job.

I applied for a job as part of my therapy.

I went to weekly therapy with two very brilliant people for a very long time.

And they were very brilliant.

And they were the people who walked with me as I walked through this.

And one of them is Bernie,

Actually,

Who said,

My husband came home from work,

And he said,

Oh,

Someone I work with saw this job listing for hospice.

And hospice and hospital chaplaincy are quite different.

They feel very different to me.

And I thought,

Oh,

I don't know if I could do hospice.

That's like,

Almost like one step beyond hospital chaplaincy.

I mentioned this to Bernie,

And he said,

Why don't you apply?

And I said,

Well,

I don't want the job.

I'm in the state.

The kids are,

She's not even in school yet.

The youngest,

I had another child after all this.

And he said,

Well,

You're not going to take the job,

Right?

You're just going to practice applying.

Like,

Just practice.

Like,

See what it feels like.

Just practice.

You're not going to take the job.

Just send it off the application.

And I said,

Okay,

I can do that.

So I sent that off,

You know,

These little baby steps.

And I didn't hear anything.

And you know,

Thank God,

Because I wasn't interested in taking a job.

But then,

You know,

Maybe three or four months later,

They called and they said,

Hey,

You know,

We got your,

Your resume.

We didn't call you then.

We hired somebody else,

But we kept your resume on file.

And now we have another job opening.

Do you want to come in for an interview?

And this was like in June.

And I said,

Okay,

So I came in for the job interview,

And I just loved these chaplains.

I was interviewed by probably,

It was a big department,

Probably 10 chaplains.

And it was just,

You know,

The best thing about being a chaplain is you get to work with other chaplains.

Like,

That's honestly the best part about it.

I mean,

The patients are awesome,

But your co workers are awesome,

Just as awesome.

But I still was like,

Well,

It's the summer and I'm home with the kids over the summer.

And,

And I didn't get the job,

Which,

You know,

Thank God,

Because I wouldn't have taken it,

I would have said no.

And then finally,

In September,

They called again.

And they said,

Well,

You know,

We gave the job to somebody else.

But I don't remember if that fell through if they had another opening,

Or they were growing very,

Very fast.

The census of this hospice is growing.

They said,

We need to hire another person.

Are you still interested?

And I remember talking to my psychiatrist,

He said,

Just give it a shot.

You know,

Your youngest is three,

She's starting nursery school,

She can put her full time,

Just do orientation.

Like just do orientation.

I can do that.

I can do orientation.

That was my thought process.

I'll do orientation and quit on them.

I did orientation.

And I found out that I actually really love hospice.

Why?

What do you love about hospice?

Hospice is very different than hospital chaplaincy.

Hospital chaplaincy in my experience of it has a lot of emergency situations.

The emergency room,

Somebody has just received a terrible diagnosis up on the floor.

You know,

Somebody has come in with a stroke,

And they've just woken up and they can't move half their body.

You know,

Sort of these sort of,

It feels more emergent.

Emotions are very,

Very high.

You know,

Someone is in the ICU,

They signed a DNR,

And they're going to extubate them,

Take the breathing tube out of them,

And the family doesn't want the breathing tube removed.

And everybody's all worked up.

And there's yelling and screaming and crying.

And that's a lot of that happens in hospital chaplaincy,

In my experience of it.

Some people say,

No,

That's not true at all.

Like,

Well,

You must be in a much calmer hospital than the hospitals.

Are you sure you're in a hospital?

I worked in were extremely the emergency rooms were pretty intense places.

Hospice isn't like that,

Right?

By the time you're on hospice,

You know,

You have a prognosis and a diagnosis that will end your life.

Right?

You know,

You are in the dying process.

We're all in the dying process,

But you're hospice,

Like you really know it.

And so it and in the hospital,

You don't tend to have a relationship with people,

Right?

Most people,

Especially nowadays,

Are in the hospital less than four days,

Less than three days.

You see them once,

Maybe twice,

Maybe three times,

Maybe.

In hospice,

It's a relationship.

People are on hospice,

Hopefully.

Hopefully,

They get onto hospice early enough that they're able to really take advantage of all the amazing opportunities.

One of the saddest things in hospice is when people sign up too late.

Right?

People know that they have a prognosis of six months or less.

They know they're going to die and they don't sign up for hospice until they've got,

You know,

48 hours.

Well,

In 48 hours,

Hospice can't really do that much for you.

If you sign up for hospice at the six month mark,

Holy cow,

Like your quality of life just explodes.

Your quality of life improves so rapidly because those hospice nurses are so amazing.

But they need time,

Right?

They need time to do this.

They need more than 24 hours to get you,

You know,

To figure out what medications you do and don't need to figure out your pain medication.

To get you the spiritual support you need to get you the psychosocial support you might need from a social worker.

That would be if people listening to this takeaway anything,

It's sign up for hospice sooner than later.

We're not the boogeyman.

You know,

We're not the grim reaper.

We're not coming in to kill you.

Like we're coming in to give you more life,

Right?

We're coming in to give you abundant life,

More life that the time you have left is lived to its fullest.

I wish people would sign up for hospice sooner as soon as they know they have a life limiting diagnosis.

Look into it.

Don't we're not terrible.

We're like really awesome,

Actually.

Like really awesome.

You're gonna like us a lot.

Like a lot.

And so hospice,

You have relationships with people,

Hopefully for months,

Maybe even years.

You see them,

You know,

Twice a month.

You really,

It's more sort of who I am as a person.

It gels better with me.

And that's how your book got started.

It was one of your hospice patients that I've always wanted to meet a writer.

Yeah,

She always wanted to meet a writer.

She really wanted to meet Pat Conroy.

She's disappointed in me.

She had to make do with me.

She's like,

Well,

I guess you're it.

I guess you're the best I can get.

And I'm like,

Well,

I guess so.

I really love that woman.

So yeah,

So I became a hospice chaplain.

And what I realized is that,

You know,

I had healed so much from my loss of my mind,

Which is its own,

Right?

It's its own psychosis is its own incredible psychiatric emergency,

Right?

It's a medical emergency,

But it's also a spiritual emergency.

Psychosis literally means soul sickness,

Right?

Your soul is sick because you do not know what is real and what is not real in this world.

You've lost,

You've lost your North star.

The medicine did an amazing job healing me physically,

Right?

Whatever physically was going on in my brain,

Whatever that drug induced psychotic disorder disrupted in my brain,

Zyprexa fixed,

Which is an anti psychotic that I finally got on.

And the therapy,

The therapy from some of the most wonderful people I'll ever know,

Fixed in large part a lot of the trauma I had,

The PTSD type symptoms I had.

And the psychological symptoms,

Right?

The psychological struggle.

But there was always this missing piece,

Right?

There was always this missing piece.

And it was the spiritual piece.

How do you spiritually heal from this?

How do you make meaning?

What does this mean?

How do you come back to God after this,

Right?

What I call God,

How do you come back to a place of love and trust and of your center,

Right?

Of your,

You know,

That small still voice in each of our hearts.

How do you come back to that?

How do you trust it again?

When you've lost your mind,

How do you trust your heart again?

And it was my patients who taught me how to do that.

It was my patients who taught me how to do that.

And so my hope in On Living is that I tell their story and I tell it along with my story.

And my hope is that just as my patients modeled for me how you take the terrible things that happen in your life and how you make meaning of it,

They taught me how to do that with my terrible thing.

And I hope that the reader will read how my patients did it with their terrible things.

And they'll read how I did it with my terrible thing.

And they'll think,

Hmm,

I could learn something from this.

I could,

Maybe I could apply some of this to my terrible thing.

Maybe I could learn how to make meaning out of what I went through.

Maybe I can see,

I can learn from them the way I learned from my patients.

Maybe the reader can learn from my patients and learn from me how listening to other people's stories can teach you how to make meaning of your own story.

That's my hope with On Living.

And that is so my hope here on coming back as well,

Which is why I'm trying as best I can to bring on as many stories and diversity and stories and things like that because I acknowledge that my story is not the only one that we can learn from and the only one that's important or the only one that needs to be heard.

And I think what I personally got most out of On Living was these exercises or these moments where you really emphasized presence.

There was a part in the beginning of the book about the bubble exercise surrounding you and your patient in a bubble,

But also just this mentality of being able to sit either with yourself or with somebody else in the midst of really,

Really hard stuff and just continue sitting to not jump in,

To not need to offer an opinion,

To not need to try to start fixing or start another process,

But just the practice of being.

And that is incredibly powerful.

I think that was the biggest takeaway I took from From On Living and it's something that I'm always trying to spread here on the show.

Yeah,

And that practice of being present with someone is a lot harder than people give anyone credit for.

The ability to just sort of sit silently and like you did,

Quite frankly,

When I was speaking,

Right?

To sit silently and let someone unspool their story and let them figure out what it means.

Let them come to a place of understanding to figure out,

You know,

Every now and then maybe you want to ask a helpful question,

But honestly,

Probably not,

Unless you're really good at asking those helpful questions,

You're almost even better off just being silent.

And that sounds so easy and it's so not,

So not easy because we want to fix things,

Right?

We want to,

We want to fix it because it's difficult to sit with the pain.

But what I have learned is that if you are willing to sit with someone's pain,

Then they get a little bit more courage to sit with their own pain.

When they can sit with it,

When they can see you sitting with it and you're not afraid of it,

They can say,

Okay,

Well,

I don't need to be afraid of it either.

And then once they are able to sit with it,

That's when they're able to think,

Well,

What does this mean to me?

Because the meaning somebody makes of their life story is almost inevitably different than the meaning I would make or you would make,

Right?

The meaning needs to come from them.

You can't give someone the meaning of their life.

You can't tell someone what the death of their child means.

Only they get to decide what it means.

If it has any meaning at all.

And if someone says it has no meaning,

Then that's okay.

That's where they are.

And that is an incredibly painful place for them.

Number one,

Recognize that that is an incredibly painful place for them to be.

And recognize number two,

That right now,

That death has no meaning.

And there's nothing you can say or do to give it meaning.

And that it can be really offensive when people try to assign meaning to your loss.

You need to let the person who's lost someone find the meaning,

If there is any.

And if there's no meaning,

Listen to them.

It's a hangable in this case.

And at this moment,

There is no meaning to this.

And I'm going to stay with you and sit with you in the pain of meaninglessness.

And that's in some ways the greatest pain of all is that there's no meaning.

And meaninglessness is sometimes the greatest pain of all.

Kaitlin Luna Because when people just thrust,

You know,

Everything happens for a reason or like these other cliches on you,

You're like,

I'll probably learn that in time.

But right now,

You're an asshole for telling me that.

And you're like,

This is ridiculous.

Heather Teitel You know which one I hate the most?

Kaitlin Luna Oh,

Which one?

Heather Teitel God never gives you more than you can bear.

Kaitlin Luna Bluck,

Because of course he does.

Or not even that.

That's not even the point.

Heather Teitel Well,

God,

Number one,

God didn't give it to you.

God doesn't wake up and say,

Oh,

You know what?

You today,

You,

I'm going to give you some shit today.

That's not how the world works.

God doesn't give it.

Number one,

It implies God gave it to you,

Which what does that make God that makes God an asshole.

And number two,

It implies that you if you have a nervous breakdown,

If you become addicted to alcohol or drugs,

If you fall into a deep depression,

You commit suicide,

If you there are all sorts of people who have more than they can handle.

And they respond in all sorts of really tragic ways.

And you're basically saying to them,

This tragedy,

Well,

It's because you weren't strong enough.

Kaitlin Luna Yeah.

How and how insulting is that too?

Heather Teitel It's really insulting.

You know,

Your child's suicide?

Well,

They weren't strong enough.

It's awful.

It's an awful thing to say.

It's truly a terrible thing to say to another human being.

And it's a terrible thing to say about God.

I feel like it's an insult to God too.

Kaitlin Luna Yeah,

And I've never had it skewed that way before.

I've always just taken it as a personal insult.

But now I'm looking at God and being like,

Oh,

You've been catching a lot of flack for this,

Haven't you?

I have one really big question before I let listeners know where they can get in touch with you and find both of your books,

Even though Fumbling is no longer in print.

I hope libraries and things have it somewhere.

But I wrote down this question that said,

How can we make ourselves safe places for our own stories and for the stories of others?

Heather Teitel Well,

I think in terms of making yourself a safe place for yourself,

I don't think the experience of being human is a very safe experience.

I'm not sure you can make yourself a safe place.

I'm not sure that's what we're called to.

I'm not sure we're called to safety.

I think we're called to fullness.

And sometimes fullness,

The fullness of human experience,

The fullness of love is not safe.

Sometimes it is dangerous.

Sometimes it hurts.

You know what grief is?

Grief is extraordinary pain because of extraordinary love.

Because I don't know that we're called to safety.

I think we're called to fullness.

I think we're called to the fullness of love.

And that isn't always safe.

In terms of being a safe place for other people's stories,

Again,

I don't know if I would use the word safe.

I think we can be a place of peace.

I go back to that blessing,

That blessing at the very frontispiece of fumbling.

What is this person praying for in a blessing?

They're asking God to be a harbor and shipwreck,

To be a refuge in the journey,

To be shade in the heat,

To be a light in the darkness.

I love this one,

A staff on the slippery slope.

If you can be that for another person,

If another person is in the midst of terrible grief or terrible anger,

Terrible sadness,

Of terrible longing,

Of terrible anguish,

Longing for the one they loved who's now not in this world anymore,

If you can just be a little bit of peace for them,

If you can be shade in the heat,

If you can be a staff as they're slipping,

If you can be a staff on the slippery slope,

If you can be something solid to hold onto as you're falling down a mountainside.

I mean,

Think about what it means to be a staff on a slippery slope.

You know that person is falling,

They're falling and they're being bashed by the rocks.

If you can be something strong to hold onto,

If you can be that,

If you can just be present,

If you can be present with someone and not be afraid of their pain,

If you cannot flinch,

And that's hard to not flinch,

If you cannot flinch in their pain.

I think that's probably the greatest gift we can give each other,

Just to be,

Just to be in a place of peace.

And it's not easy,

I'm not always a place of peace.

Ask my children,

Like,

I wish I was a serial ball child.

I mean,

How many times am I like,

Who left their serial ball there?

But if we can do it sometimes,

If we can just sometimes be that shade in the heat,

You know,

For someone who's burning up with pain,

I think that's the best we can do for each other.

That's really lovely and I think such a great,

That's a great takeaway.

That's what I'll leave that,

That is a great takeaway.