Amanda Peet: ‘There’s No Algorithm For Grief’

Welcome to all there is, wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Amanda P. She's an actress, a producer, and a writer. She's been in films like The Whole Nine Yards and some things got a give. She's currently starring in your friends and neighbors on Apple TV Plus. Amanda grew up here in New York City with her sister Alyssa, who's a doctor, her mom Penny, who's a psychotherapist, social worker, and her dad Charles, who was a lawyer. Amanda has three kids now with her husband David Benioff, who's probably best known for co-creating the TV series Game of Thrones. In late August of 2025, Amanda was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following day, her father died, and her mom died some four months later. I read a moving essay that Amanda wrote in The New Yorker about what happened, called my season of Adivan. We reached out to her and she kindly agreed to talk with me about it. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. Can you talk a little bit about the diagnosis that you got? I was just blindsided. I mean, it was just one of those things. It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and I guess they were watching a spot. I didn't really realize that somehow. And I said, if you were a bedding woman, what do you think? And she said, I think you have cancer. My doctor was able to call on the Saturday morning to say that, indeed, the quick biopsy had come back and that I had breast cancer. And it was a lobular breast cancer. And then that evening, my sister called to tell me that our stepmother had said that my dad was failing. And so I got on the plane, and it was too late the next morning. He passed away at six in the morning. How long had your dad been sick for? He had a hard time in the last two years, but he didn't get really sick until. He had a fall about six months before this, and then it was pretty quick. The end was really awful. He was very agitated and stuff. But I saw him two weeks before he died, and he was able to talk to me. We went to a restaurant. He was in a wheelchair, but he was able to talk a little bit and eat a little bit. By the time you got to your dad's place, he had died. Yeah, yeah. And she was very emotional. Your sister was? Who's your dad? Yeah, but then once we left the apartment, she was more able to be like his body as just his body. And I was much more like panicked about where his body was going and how it was so impersonal. That was just so impersonal how you're just taking his body. It's so weird. These people showed up, you described this as like the Blue's brother's dress and pants and with a body bag. Yeah, there was something just so rushed about it, and so impersonal about it that really was torturous for me. Even though I knew he was dead and it was just his body. It was, I think, much easier for my sister to be more clinical about it once his body left the building. I felt this weird sense of wanting to go save him. Who are these people? It was a weird sense of being possessive of him. Had you felt that before? No, and definitely not about him. I was much, much closer with my mom. In fact, I feel like now looking back, now that it's been a few months, I feel like my dad definitely got the short end of the stick in terms of my attentiveness. He was less sensitive and he was more unfazed, so if I couldn't make it to something, I always thought he was kind of like, "Yeah, whatever." Whereas my mom was more like, "Well, that'll hurt my feelings if you don't come to that." I want to ask you about a couple of specific things. You talked about your sister weeping, seeing your father's body, and you didn't. You said, "I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination. I had never seen a dead body up close before, let alone someone so familiar to me." I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live. I was really at a removed, like I was watching it from some kind of altitude. Maybe for both things, like the cancer and my dad's death, and also felt like a weird sense of like, "I'm stealing bases." I had one foot on the cancer, and I was trying to connect with the fact that my dad was dying and honor him by thinking about him, by being present. And then I was thinking a lot about Tim O'Brien, the writer, the things they carried. What about that book? It had a huge impact on me weirdly. Tim O'Brien had a little girlfriend when he was in like fifth grade, and she gets cancer, and she dies, and his dad takes him to see the body, which is crazy. And he then starts having these daydreams that he makes up purposely, so he can be with her more. At one point, he says to her, "What's it like to be dead?" And she's like, "It's not so bad. It's kind of like being a book on a shelf that nobody's reading." And that has stuck with me for years, and that's what I couldn't stop thinking about when I saw the hers, and we kept walking. Do you think that's what it's like? No, because I think it's even worse, because it's not even consciousness. This is when I feel really dark about death. It's that it's in perpetuity, lack of consciousness. I would rather be a book on a shelf that's like, "Hey, hey!" It's nothingness. It's nothingness. That's what I can't. And for infinity, somebody recently said, "Well, why aren't you upset that you weren't alive before? You never cared?" And I'm like, "That doesn't help me." We're going to take a quick break. Coming up, I talk to the man about the panic she felt as a mom facing her cancer diagnosis. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. Vijay Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician. We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interest, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts. By the time I was back in LA, I was back to panicking about the cancer and that took over everything until I knew that I wasn't in trouble, which took a little while. Was the panic the idea of leaving your children? Yes. The biggest thing was like, I will not do this to my children. I couldn't tolerate that feeling of like that I was going to be a source of grief like that when they were so young and I couldn't bear it, I couldn't bear it. I was never afraid of dying and put myself in situations where there was a very real possibility of it and perhaps intentionally flirting with that line. But now the idea of I was 10 when my dad died, the idea of dying around with my kids being that age is it's unthinkable to me. It's interesting because I know it's one of the ways I understand my dad more because now I know what he felt when he knew he was dying. I understand how horrible he must have felt about that. One thing I thought about was this woman when we lived in London, we did a carpool with these two daughters and the mother had cancer and I remember my mom made us go to their birthday party. It's one of the sisters. It was her birthday and I was 8 maybe and my sister was probably 10 and they were kind of nerdy and weird and we were really mad at my mom that she was making us go and she said well the mom is sick, which we didn't know. And at the birthday party there were all these balloons in the front room and the mom was just lying on the couch like somewhat corpse like with stockings that were like way too big and she was not the right color and had the wig was like slightly a skew. And I remember being so disturbed by it but when I thought about it when I had cancer and was thinking about my children I was like how beautiful how beautiful that the family had the strength to include her and come what may and not cheat her and the pain and the grief as something to be sectioned off like a cordoned off thing that's like not to be seen not to be talked about. I thought it was so beautiful even though as a child I felt almost repelled by it. It sounds like you had growing up this incredible level of communication with your mom. My whole life she taught me how to talk about my feelings. As a teenager you were in psychoanalysis at the same time she was in psychoanalysis training. Yes we were insufferable. So there was a lot of a lot of talk about feelings which is very much different than the way I grew up. Yes I know I know it's different from the way you grew up. And different from the way she grew up whereas I have always found it to be extremely comforting to be able to talk to someone who has been through the same thing or talk to someone who isn't gonna judge me. I can't keep it inside. Because as long as I could tell her something, I felt like the world sort of righted itself. So at first it was a very childlike sense that a lot of us have. When we just hold on to our mom's sleeve, when we feel unease, but later when we were both adults, it became our ability to really talk deeply about very uncomfortable things. My sister wasn't like this at all. It was kind of like my sister and my dad had a certain style of dealing with uncomfortable feelings. And then my mom and I had a certain style. And it's taking me a long time to realize there is beauty in both ways of handling things. She was diagnosed Parkinson's like right as my sister and I, we're having our own families and our careers were like in full swing. And she was in her late 50s. She told my sister and me that she was having trouble getting out of a car. There was something weird about the way she was making these certain transitions, I think, from sitting to standing or, and so we went up to Columbia and within 30 seconds the doctor was like, "Yo, she has Parkinson's." In the back of my mind, I knew once she had Parkinson's, like I was like, "I want to get pregnant right away. I want my children to know her." But she was extremely lucky. She had a very slow progression in the beginning. We still got her for a long time before she started to lose it. But there were still just so many times where I was so busy. Well, your mom was in hospice for a long time. Yes. She was in a cottage right beside your house. Yeah, I didn't realize that there was a difference between acute hospice and just hospice. So my mom's pediatrician said I think she should start hospice, but he sort of meant more like she was taking 30 pills a day. And I guess I thought it was going to be a precipitous thing. But it wasn't. What was that like for you? It was so many things. It was torture and to see her that way. And it was also really beautiful and filled me with many regrets. I wished I had been a better caregiver before she was so sick. The worst day when she was really dying, like the hospice person told me she's transitioning. And I just couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop crying. And I was like panicking about whether I'd sucked the marrow out of life with her. Like if I had done everything right, whether I had seized the day enough with her, included her enough, talked her enough, gone to enough movies, I got really scared. It was like a fever dream. It was a very strange and haunting feeling of like wanting to go back in time, like a child and spend time with her and talk to her. I have a wonderful therapist who told me like you don't have to rush over there and try to connect with her now. Like you don't have to do that. Like it's the sum total. She was trying to tell me that the bucket is full from many, many, many, many years of what transpired between us. I think that's very true. Yeah. I understand that feeling of regret that I spend the time with her. I should now that I have little kids, like, and how much I love to be with them. The idea of me being old and them being in their 20s and me only seeing them occasionally is just terrifying to me. Yeah. I couldn't get over this one incident. We came home from my daughter's but mitzvah and she was already with Jerome, my, our caregiver. And she couldn't walk or anything like that. I'm more diapers, but she had an accident in my new car. And I was such a bitch and was so shaming and I couldn't believe how I had been. And Jerome was like, you should tell her. So I told her. She was really blank, but I just thought I'm really sorry. But I rejected her so much when she was sick because I was so busy with my kids. It was like a terrible, in my mind, there was a very unfortunate kind of timing with everything. Talking about your mom, you said, I was always waiting for glimpses of who she was in the past. Whereas he, talking about Jerome, embraced the person she had become. Sometimes I caught sight of the old her. She would raise one eyebrow, a scotch when I asked her if she wanted a glass of wine. The idea that she was still in there, but couldn't communicate, nod at me. She also said that you never told her she was in hospice and that you never asked if she knew that she was dying or if she was scared and you write, I was like Iliage's wife, told stories. I have an Iliage. I was like Iliage's wife, chirping about bullshit while he lay terrorists again. I would drop by her cottage and try to perk her up with some dessert or a few sips of wine on my visits would never more than fly by. You sound very hard on yourself. Well, I wasn't able to really completely be there for her, so that's a fact. And I think that if she had been in camp at Smentish, she would have been like go take care of your kids. Are you kidding me? Please don't worry. But I don't know exactly where she was mentally. And sometimes I felt guilty that I was presuming that she wasn't with it, especially if she like gave a suggestion of something like humor or something like that. I'd be like oh my god, she's totally with it. What am I doing? She's been alone for three days straight. I haven't gone over there. She wasn't alone. I mean, she. She was a duromia. But yeah. In a cottage right by your house, something you left her on a nice farm. Just flew somewhere. I went back and forth between thinking that it had all been good enough and beautiful enough and thinking that I had missed the boat somehow and wasted time not being over there. Yeah, you said it occurs to me looking back that I abandoned her because of the narcissism of small differences. Sometimes I always said that we were on canally similar and looks and temperament. I couldn't bear to see her until I knew that I wasn't going to die right along with her. Well, when I had the cancer diagnosis, I felt a conscious feeling of anger towards her. I can't do you. Like I'm going through this. I have to do my kids. I can't do you. Like a Sophie's choice thing. I can't give one ounce of my mental strength to thinking about you because I have to think about my kids and I have to think about if they tell me this on Monday, I'm going to tell them this. If they tell me this on Wednesday, we're going to tell Frankie and Molly, but then Molly has the sucker tournament. So we'll do it after. It was very strict in my head that I wanted to push her away and that the more information I got that I wasn't going to die, I was able to go visit her again and stop doing that. I was able to hold the whole all of us. It was very painful not to be able to tell her or if you're going to take off, you want to be able to say, like, hey, listen, I need space right now. I'm going to come back, but I need to go do this thing and that wasn't possible. I remember when I told Jerome that he was very sweet and loving and forgiving, very extraordinary relationship with that man. Your therapist said that you didn't have to appear strong or unfazed to your kids or have definitive answers. How did you handle telling them about your diagnosis? We waited to tell them until we were really fairly certain that it was a small-ish tumor and that it was hormone receptor positive, her too negative, which is like the best kind of breast cancer. And so I was much more confident about talking to them when I knew those things, and so we waited a long time and by the time we told Henry, it was probably almost confusing for him because I was like, you know, I had cancer, it was almost being like, I almost got hit by a car, but I didn't. What's he supposed to do with that? I don't know how I would have been if I had to really devise a much more difficult plan. I went to Miami to do this little film festival and it was right before she was about to really start to take it, nose dive, and Jerome called me and said, I think you should come back. I made him, please, promise me to tell me, because I do want to be there when she dies. And he called and said that she was having trouble breathing in the middle of the night. He had said, "Pen, do you want to die?" and that she went, "No!" She was really very full of life, very connected persons. It's so weird that it's just so weird, such she doesn't exist anymore. It's just, I know that sounds so childish, but it's just the finality of it is still just insane. She's gone. It's so insane. And how much she would hate it? Hate being gone. Yes. Or even when I got the thing with the app. Ashes and they deliver it. Your loved one is getting texts. Like your loved one is being cremated today. Your loved one is on the way. - You get texts about that, really? - Yes, texts, we have a group chat about it because it's so funny and not funny, but it's, I don't need the play-by-play, guys. First of all, and yet I do, I'd feel weird if they didn't tell me. It's just really my mind. - It's all weird. - It's all weird. - Yeah. - We also just had a lot of fun, you know, that was also part of it is just being very connected to someone in terms of humor. She used to, like, when I thought she was a pain in the ass, which was a lot of the time, she would shuffle in her Parkinson's shuffle across the kitchen, like, dropping crumbs from the cake she had stolen, and then, like, fart. In front of everybody, in front of my kids and stuff, and I just feel like, and she just go, another county heard from. (laughing) - Which is, (laughing) - Another county heard from, it's like an old voting thing. That's like, (laughing) - I don't know what it is. - Oh, you know what it means, okay. - But, it's so funny. That's what she would have heard of. A fart would be, like, another county has been heard from. - Like, I'm John King of the Magic Wall. - Yeah. (laughing) - It's a line in Clifford O'Dets in Awakening. There's a lot of humor, actually. - In what way? - Like, my sister is really funny, and David's really funny, and I think that having a sense of humor, it can be really saving grace. We watched my mom die. It was, like, four hours of stopping breathing, and then starting again, and then stopping, which was also kind of funny. But we're like, (laughing) I mean, it was really, really scary, too. I mean, it was everything. It was everything. It was, like, we ran the gamut, I feel like. - I just wanna read this, you're talking about your mom. She wouldn't stop moaning, and we tried to give her liquid morphine, but she kept biting down on the syringe. So I finally pulled her lip down, and inserted the dropper through a gap, where she was missing a tooth. Even though Jerome promised me that the biting was just a reflex, it seemed like her last line of defense and made me think she didn't wanna go. This idea was unbearable, but watching her gas-free air was worse. The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision. We locked eyes, and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes. I thought of my teen improv class, which she had found for me when we moved back to New York from London, in improv, even if the given circumstances defy logic, you and your scene partner have to stick to them. I wasn't sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me, or whether I was just a constellation of interesting disembodied shapes. I said, "How do you doodle?" That's how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and besides, I had to already told her everything. It's beautiful. Thank you. How do you doodle? Always. Yeah. I was with my mom when she died, and I found it incredible. I mean, I've seen a lot of bodies in a lot of different ways. I've been in a hospital ward where children die in front of me and stuff, but I was holding my mom's hand, and it was just. I don't know, I just found it to be this incredible thing. And I'm so glad I was there. I think the fact that we weren't religious, and my parents weren't religious, was really difficult in some ways. And I understand why the rituals exist. We do Shabbat, and I didn't have any of that growing up, but the idea that you're saying words and doing a ritual that your forefathers did, and therefore forefathers, and so on and so on, is like, it gives me chills. It's a way to maybe feel comforted that there's something bigger than you. I think it's the truth, you say about the rituals, though, and I do think there's something incredibly valuable about some sort of faith tradition, and the ritual of it. I've started to collect stuff from my mom's family that comes up in weird estate sales, and frame a lot of photographs of my dad's ancestors, and tell my kids the stories of them. Because I want my kids to feel like they're not just floating in space that they are grounded in a family, and a tradition, and a history. And I feel that in grief, we're living through these cycles, which generations of people in our families have lived through before. I'm working out stuff that my mom was trying to work out as well, and I'm now reading all my dad's old letters. I'm now reading all the things that were he was worrying about, concerned about, and you know, it's. You're getting to know him. Yeah, I'm getting to know him in a whole new way. I have had some similar things happen. I think one of the most extraordinary things that happened was that when the essay got published, people reached out to me. In particular, there was a woman who worked at my dad's law firm and talked about the kind of bro culture and how oppressive that was and how my dad would talk to her about Shakespeare and theater and that he was what she would call a true mench. And that was extraordinary to me. That there was something he had done that was so moving to someone that I didn't know about. It's such a beautiful and strange revelation. And even with my mom, I just got a letter from her freshman roommate who told me that my mom was such a keen field hockey player. She would do her practice with her stick on the floor past lights out. And that just tickled me so deeply to know that. And she sort of implied that my mom was like a little bit naughty and got in trouble sometimes, but that she was fun in a really endearing way. And so it was just wild. It was wild to hear a story about her as a teen. My mom was so sick for so long and all her friends are all over the world. So we didn't have a memorial or a celebration of life for either of them, but it's been trickling in as such. I did not have one memorial or a celebration of life for my mom either. I mean, I did what I normally do, which is like I just threw myself back into work. And it wasn't until I started going through her things two years later once I was finally ready to like go through her apartment and stuff that it really started to hit me. I had this whole idea from a memorial service for her because I wanted it to be really like at the cafe Carlisle where we used to go and listen to Bobby Short saying. And I imagined it opening up with like somebody dressed in one of her fortuni gowns dancing under a spotlight with either another woman in a fortuni gown. It looked like her as well or like some, you know, guy who's like masked or something, I just wanted to be this really kind of unusual, interesting, beautiful, strange thing, which is what she was into me. Yeah, I worried like I could never produce this thing in a way that would really do justice to her and the task of it just started to feel overwhelming. And then I just never got around to it. A beautiful things that happened with my mom's death is that I have a very old friend who I've known since I was six. We had a big fight and we broke up for nine years and then we got back together and her mom was very sick at the exact same time that my mom was very sick. Both of our moms were single and broke. We were just in such a bizarrely similar situation. And one of the things we talked a lot about is that there's no algorithm for grief that there's no right way to do it or wrong way to do it. And it's a beautiful daydream for you to have this curated idea of a memorial for her and to say it in this podcast and there's value in that. And maybe it doesn't actually have to be done. There's something even in just you just saying that. Is grief different than you thought it would be? I don't know yet. It's so new, I don't know yet. I have a friend who is like if you see a butterfly, like it could be her and she's very spiritual and she believes in reincarnation and the afterlife and she thinks my mom is looking down on me and all this stuff and I wish I could believe that but I don't really. So if I see a butterfly, I just say hi, Penn. It's a way of stopping for a minute. It's a way of being with her. Even though I don't really believe it, which I think is what the writing was too. It was my way of being with her and harnessing her and my dad. You were saying that you feel like you are closer to your dad now or you feel him? I don't know if I feel that exactly. It's weird sometimes coming to New York because they were both here for so long, even though I was living in LA and when I come in and I see the skyline there's a funny kind of emptiness and weirdness that neither of them are here and a child-like feeling of like. being untethered. Like an orphan. Like where's the person who had walked through fire for me? I think untethered is really interesting word and I use the word "unmoured" a lot. Like I used to feel "unmoured" living in the city that I grew up in. I find it very hard to be like the last from my little family because it all felt so real and I don't know all that stuff happened but I'm the only one who remembers it. Right, yeah. Once a day I am shocked that she's not here. That's all. I just can't get my brain around. She was so present when she was present and so alive and it's so crazy and bizarre. I don't know. I don't even know. Is there something you've learned in grief that you think would be helpful for others? There's no right way to do it. There's no algorithm. There's no timetable and I think that was really helpful for me to not be like I should be doing it this way. I should be feeling this. I should be that was really huge for me and also I feel like my mom is talking through me but talking about it. I think talking about it helps and so giving people sometimes the benefit of the doubt they do care that they get it. It was so funny when Amy Starris was like your parents are still alive. Get out of here. You don't understand anything. I had a little bit of that where I was like even towards my husband. I was like, June talked to me. Your parents are still alive and they're still together and they're still healthy like out of my face. I don't even want to see you or talk to you. Yeah. And humor. Life saver. Another county heard from. By the way, you looked up when you were talking to your mom. Yes, I know. I know. I know. It's I don't know what that is. I don't know. She's in a cardboard thing or dinger in my closet. Is she? I don't know if it's like almost like a weird sense of not wanting to be toxically positive with myself or something. I don't know why but I do look up. I do. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know. And when I look at the sky. A little positive. Another wrong, a little positive. Yeah. Doesn't have to be toxic. Yeah. I also have a little like thing with flowers with pictures of my parents. Like a little altar. A little altar. I like that. I do. So not me. It was really weird. It was like, I was like, I am doing this. Who am I? Like it was so weird. And I go and refresh the flowers. I mean, my kids just like walk by the altar and they don't, you know, they're busy. They're teenagers. The fact that you have that they will come to at some point. Yeah. And if not, I still feel like my relationship with her is something they witnessed. Mm. It was lovely to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. You can read Amanda Pete's essay, "My Season of Atevan in the New Yorker." She's starring the second season of your friends and neighbors streaming now on Apple TV Plus. If you have thoughts you want to share with us about the conversation with Amanda or your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on our grief community page at synan.com/allthere is or leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, June 18th, I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. from my streaming show "All There Is Live." You can watch it on synan.com/allthere is. It streams live there for free. It'll also be free to stream on our community page for a week. Also next Thursday, June 18th, just before Father's Day, which is a day I've long avoided acknowledging, there'll be a new podcast episode, a conversation with Michaela Schifrin. She's a three-time Olympic gold medalist and an eight-time world champion Alpine Schier. In February of this year, Michaela won her first Olympic gold medal in eight years. It was also her first win at the Olympics since her father, Jeff Sutton, death in 2020. I just felt like it was hard to feel the will to live, not that I didn't want to be alive, but just that I really was searching for a reason to get out of bed and didn't really have that. I didn't feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist. And I didn't feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore. So it was more like maybe this guilt that you have things that inspire you, the things that drive you in life that feel very meaningless when something like this happens.