David & Amy Sedaris

This past Sunday was January 5th, the anniversary of my dad's death. Not many people in my life remember the significance of the day for me, but I don't really expect them to. After all, it's been 47 years since my dad died. I think it's probably like that for a lot of you listening as well. Do you have dates on your calendar that you silently dread? Dates others in your life forgot long ago, or maybe never even knew? I mentioned earlier that I've been trying to spend a few minutes each day with the child I was when my dad died, talking to him, letting him know he isn't alone, and then I see him. Sunday I imagined that child, me curled up in my dad's lap, feeling his warmth. I tried to remember the sound of his voice and the feeling of safety and love I always had when I was with him. I continued to be kind of embarrassed saying this out loud, but it was comforting. Most of Sunday I spent with my kids, and when I put my youngest Sebastian to bed, "Yeah, everybody's sleeping." I sang him the same lullaby my dad sang to me. He'd make up words to Brahms' lullaby, so I tried to do the same. I'm even worse at singing and humming than he was, but it feels so remarkable, the cycles of life and families. I can't believe that I have two boys I can now love the way that he loved me and my brother, and it was a nice way to end the day that another year has so often ended into years. Welcome to all there is, I'm Anderson Cooper. Before we begin, I've opened up the voicemail box again, and would love to hear from you if there's something you've learned in your grief that might be helpful for others. We're going to keep it open for the next two or three weeks. The number to call is 404-692-0452. You can leave a message up to three minutes long, but if you get cut off, you can always call back and continue your message. We may use all or some of your message in a future podcast or video. Feel free to leave your name and number in case we might want to reach out to you. We obviously wouldn't include your number if we use your voicemail. Again, the number to call is 404-692-0452. I'll repeat it at the end of this podcast. My guest today are actress, author, comedian Amy Siddaris, and her brother, author David Siddaris. Early in her career, Amy starred in Strangers with Candy on Comedy Central. She's gone on to appear in a slew of TV shows and movies and ridden a number of funny and a reverend books on entertaining and crafting. David has published 14 books, barrel fever, holidays on ice, me talk pretty one day, just to name a few. They grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina with four other siblings, one of whom Tiffany died by suicide in 2013. She was 49. Her mom Sharon died in 1991 when she was 62, and their father, Lou, died in 2021 at the age of 98. I've gotten a lot of voicemails from listeners about grief after a pet dies, and Amy's pet rabbit died recently, so I started off our conversation with that. Amy, you actually recently experienced the death of your rabbit. My rabbit, Tina, so I've been bawling my eyes out, and I like the feeling of crying, because I'm not a big cryer either, but there's something about losing a rabbit. He just brings you down. I don't like losing a button. I don't like losing anything. You know what I mean? I have such a hard time with death, but yeah, I'm still sobbing about it. When did Tina die? It doesn't feel bad to do it. Tina died in Halloween. How long have you had? We had 10 great years together. I mean, that rabbit, jackpot, spoil, spolt rotten, both of us. We both hit the jackpot. I doubt that Tina, they said it was a girl, and then four years later, I found out Tina was a boy. So I just kept the name Tina, so he's a big raving queen in my apartment. You've had. This is your third rabbit. My third rabbit. What is a grief-like for you over Tina? Well, it's funny, because people do give me that look like, oh, like it doesn't count. They just think it's ridiculous, a little crazy to be sobbing over a seven pound rabbit. They just kind of roll their eyes a little bit. But it's sad because we were, you know, he's my roommate. We lived together. I spent a lot of time at home with my rabbit, a lot. It was just two of us. You slept with me, played with them, and also it's your responsibility. My dad used to say, "That damn rabbit holds you hostage." But they do kind of hold you hostage, most pets do, right, or play friends. So I've been really grieving about that. David found a urn for Tina like five years ago. Wait, you bought an urn for Tina five years ago? Yeah. Because I bought an urn for her last rabbit, too. So I've just always on the lookout for something that could hold rabbit ashes. You know, so it's small, but-- But my mother's ashes in just an old candle box. How do you feel about ashes? Do you feel a connection to the ashes? No. Not really. No. I bought a house on the coast of North Carolina. My mother loved it. It's where we used to go. It's children on vacation. So about four years ago, we were all there for Thanksgiving, and we said, "Let's scatter mom's ashes." My mother died in 1991, and my brother brought the can down, and we were behind the house, and we were just wrecks. And I didn't expect that, but it was like touching the ashes, and it was really a beautiful thing to do as a family. And it was really beautiful to have done it so long after she had died as well. When she died, there was so much emotion that it just would have been sort of lost in that. It's to actually touch the ashes and feel connected with her. We didn't speak. I mean, you can't shot anyone in my family up. We did not say a word. But it was a good group thing to do together. It was that's what I was reacting to mostly, but the actual ashes, I don't know how much they mean to me. There were six kids in the family. Your sister Tiffany, she died by suicide in May of 2013. How was that different than grief you felt in other ways? One thing I found very interesting, and I've gotten up great many letters from people who have had somebody in their family kill themselves, and people always want to assume that you feel guilty. And I felt no guilt over my sister's death. The tragedy wasn't her suicide. It was her mental illness, and there was nothing anyone could have done to change that. And so it's been fascinating to hear from other people who have gone through the same thing. Because again, people just want to project this thing, and it's already bad enough, and then they're trying to project something on top of that. The figure you must obviously feel like it was you are fault, but I didn't. And it's just a sorrow. I mean, I had a dream about Tiffany a while ago, but it was a Tiffany that I wished, like, she hadn't been mentally ill when she had a beautiful and successful life, and it was so nice to see that Tiffany. And then when I woke up, I was sad, and I thought, well, that's not the Tiffany that existed. She talked at you. So whenever you talked to Tiffany, you were just wiped out after the phone call, and you were just haunted by it for days. It was tough, and just stayed with you. My brother Carter died by suicide, and he killed himself in front of my mom. The thing that I still just can't kind of get over is the violence of it, and it is so different than the person he was. So it's interesting to hear you talk about Tiffany. There isn't this level of shock, and how could this possibly have happened? You didn't have those questions. I say my prayers every night, and I used to say all the time, there's nothing we can do for Tiffany. I would add that to end of my prayer, like, she was alive, and there's nothing we can do for her. I think we all knew, at one point, this was going to happen. We kind of knew that was how it was going to end. She tried the first time, and it didn't work, and then just to think about your sister taking all those pills, and the saddest room you can imagine in the saddest house on the saddest street, she left these notebooks behind, and the chaos on those pages. Like if that was your mind, I'd just surprised she'd lasted as long as she did. If those were your scrambled, paranoid, desperate, furious thoughts, I mean, I've been keeping a diary forever, and so this was her version of a diary, and also curious, was that she capitalized the letter B, but that was all she ever capitalized in those diary, in those notebooks. Yeah, every B was capitalized. But for me, it was strange, because she shared a house with two other people, and she had been dead for five days, and no one knew that she was in their debt. You went to her apartment? I did. My friend Paul Danello, we drove to Boston, and cleaned out her, she had a room in this house, and I was like, wow, this was, and she, it looked like she cleaned it up, and she had a bloody hand print on the wall, and her artwork was hanging up. A lot of the family photographs were torn in half. What was it like to go back there? Well, we didn't know Tiffany, so it was just like, this is where she was living, this is her stuff, this is the shoes that she wore, it's like I had no clue who she was. she'd become. Yeah. The rest of us all bathed in our mother's love and our mother didn't love Tiffany. Tiffany was like my mother. There were too much alike. Really? I think so. And she never knew what it was like to be loved by my mother. And when our mother died, Tiffany said, you know what, I'm glad she said. And to me, that was the worst was my mother dying. Like I don't know that life could ever be that awful again in the wake. So I couldn't hear it because I wasn't just in too much pain. Years later, I thought, well, every child, you have the same parents, but it's a different parent for every child, really. She didn't have the same mother that I had. And were you both aware of that as kids? And was she aware of that as a child? We knew that. Yeah. She was just wasn't loved. It was like there were six kids and five nipples. Go to me. And so and one didn't have Tiffany's name written on it. And think about it still every day. You do. I mean, don't you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mom, dad to people who die, friends, animals. I remember when my mom died, I divided people up. Oh, you both your parents are alive. You go stand on that side of the street because you don't know what it's like to lose a parent. It just changes everything and change. And I just divided people up like that. Like you have no idea. Really, both your parents are alive and happy. You just wait. You just wait. And you're getting more what for Christmas? You're getting your mom a CD for Christmas. She's going to die. You know? And then you're getting your that thoughtless. It isn't. You say that because I sometimes feel like I'm the only one walking around thinking about them all the time. All the time. Yeah. I think of Tiffany every day. Yeah. And I say goodbye to her every day. You do? How do you mean? I say it out loud. Absolutely not a single day that I don't think of her. But again, the tragedy was somebody who doesn't take their medication. There's there's nothing you can do. You know, or if somebody refuses their diagnosis or I wish oh my goodness, like the Tiffany that I had a dream about. That that was Tiffany's life. Do you still dream about her? Yeah, it's always nice when you had a really nice dream about my mom while ago. You know, just a visit with somebody. And that's what it feels like. You could feel her your mom in the dream. I feel her alive. Yeah, it wasn't like I dreamt that we were cleaning fish together and watching Donnie here. It's a visit. It's an event. I have a lot of deaf people visit me. They're still around in a different way. It's a hard thing to describe. But yes, they are dead. You can't call them up. But they're alive. Like even with Tina, I still hear Tina galloping down the hallway. Or you know, with my mom or like Tiffany or dad even and I do feel them all the time. It's very comforting. Or you think you've seen from the corner of your eye. I'm always like you did. For you was your mom's death as David was saying it was the worst thing. It was. I cannot believe I lived through my mother's death. I can't believe it. In what way? Because I just thought I wouldn't be able to live without her. Or we just without her love. Without her love, yeah. I mean, anything may be different with other people because they'd say, well, I still have my father's, but I never had that. So when my mother died, it was like he was mom's boy. I'm alone. I don't have anybody in my corner that way. What just adored her? Just adored her. And it happened really fast. She called and said she had cancer. And then three months later, she was dead. And I feel like my job as a writer is to get the world to love my mother as much as I did. And when I'm signing books and people come up and say, oh, I love your mother. That means the world to me. And I don't know why it's so important to me. But I felt like she deserved the world's love. Were you able to be with her at the end? No, they took her to the hospital. My dad took her to the hospital and she died of pneumonia. She just started chemo. But I remember. And so then afterwards, we all went home. And I remember her chemo medication and stuff. We were so mad at it. Do you know what I mean? And just throwing it into a trash can and my father's pulling it out because he wants to get a refund. He wants to take it to the drug store and get a refund on it. Wow. Now wait a minute. I remember the priest came to the house and my mother had a jigsaw table on them. And so we were just throwing, oh, I see you're finishing that in honor of your mother. And it's like, get out of here. Who led him in here? Just some dumb like, what do you have to even ruin it by saying? Like, don't then we're going to frame it. You know, and then we're going to. And we laughed so hard. Like, yeah, we just laughed so hard. Our aunt came. My mother had a sister who looked just like her and who lived in New York state. And so we didn't see Aunt Joyce that often. Man, she was Mary Poppins and she came in and said, this is what you do. Let's get this house cleaned up. And we're going to have people over. And this is what you say when they get here. And. And we cracked the little things. Afterwards, I started a relationship with my aunt that lasted until her death. We saw each other and we talked on the phone and we wrote each other. And it was a nice little lesson that it's never too late to begin a relationship with someone in your family. And I saw so much of my mother in her. And it was, it was a good lesson to think, oh, I can be that person one day, you know, for somebody else, like to just fly in and say, okay, here's what we're going to do. And just kind of guide everybody through it because in their grief, they can't see. I'm very grateful like with my father's dad that was more complicated like my mother's even though that was awful going through it, it was pure. Don't mean it was pure grief. And when it's complicated, then it's different. Like I don't call what I felt about my father grief in any way. We're going to take a short break when we come back more of my conversation with Amy and David Zidaris. 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. BJ 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. And now back to all there is. David and Amy's father Lucidaris died in 2021 when he was 98. David wrote an essay in the Guardian newspaper about it and I asked him to read part of it. When a mother died, my siblings and I fell head first into a dark pit. Those first few days were the blackest. It was the same after our sister Tiffany's suicide. With her father, though, it was different. By the time the check arrived at the island grail that night, we were talking about other things, gas stoves versus electric ones, a funny TV show about vampires. The time Lisa ate an entire gallon of ice cream with her bare hands while driving home from the grocery store, clawing it out of the cart and with her increasingly numb fingers. Perhaps we strayed so easily on to other topics because at my father's advanced age, this moment was expected. Then too, he was Lucidaris. By the second half of his 97th year, the man was a pussycat, a delight. Unfortunately, there were all those years that preceded it. The world didn't slow down for his death much less stop, not even for us, his family. To me, that's pretty much the worst thing that you could say could be said about you. Is that the world didn't stop for people who were in your family or people who were talking about other things like 20 minutes later? Do you think that was because he was 98 and was expected or just the nature of who he was? It was who he was. How you felt about him? It was who he was. I mean, with our mother, that never would have happened. Goodness, that never would have happened. Like I had my father, I'm saying, you're not a writer, you're a loser, and you know what you are, a big fat zero, like just constant, constant. Maybe it was like one of those you reap what you sell kind of things. Now it might have been different. I mean, Amy wasn't there. Yeah. I had a different relationship with my dad the day that I was close to my dad and growing up. He lived by example. I think if we lived to be that old, we're going to be like, this is what he was going through. He was still in extension ladders with electric saws, you know, at 94. He never really complained about being uncomfortable or joint pain or muscle pain. That didn't do that. I just wrote this essay about going through my address book, an increasing number of people in and are dead, but I can't erase their address because I'll be on tour and I'll be at a hotel in Chicago with a stack of postcards thinking I'm going to send some postcards to people and I go through my address book and I think, "Oh, Melissa Bank died in 2022 and I think of her for a moment." And so it keeps them alive in a way, but when you think about someone in my dad's age, everyone in his address book was dead. Now, he wasn't a good friend to any of them. After my mother died, this old work colleague of my dad's, he and his wife thought, "Well, we'll take Lou in when come over to the house for dinner, Lou." And then my father went over to the house for dinner one night and he tripped on some wet leaves in their driveway and he sued them. Oh, my God. And he said, "It's not them paying a tea insurance company." Yes. Yeah. Wow. Was it strange to hit 63 and to realize you lived longer than your mother? Yeah. It is weird. I'm like, "This is the age she died, really?" I thought I was going to die at 62. At the age your mom died? Yeah. But I remember when my dad turned 65. We were in the car somewhere and he said, "I'm 65, but I got the mind of a 20-year-old." And I wrote it down in my diary. And then when I turned 65, I thought, "Yeah, I have the mind of a 20-year-old too." Like, I guess, you only thought when you heard you would have old man thoughts. But you're still fantasized, you're walking down the street and you're fantasizing on the most ridiculous things. And so it's a shot, just how age sneaks up on you. Yeah, totally. And there comes a day and you look in the mirror of the store and you think, "Who's that old man?" And you realize, "It's me." How you know you're an old man is that people call you young man. There was someone at the airport, security a few weeks ago. Step right through young man and I created the people behind me and I said, "Don't you hate her?" And the woman said, "I'm happy to be called a young woman today." And she was like around my age and then I thought, "Okay, you're dead to me." And I just had to put my fingers in my ear. Come on, three young man. You know, it's thinking you know the world doesn't stop. You want the world to stop for a second when you lose somebody important. But the world just goes on and then the fast lane and you're like, "You just want to scream." And you're like, "My mother just died." Or, you know, my dad just died. Can't we just take a second? But no, everything just, even when some famous people die and it's on Instagram for a second, then it's done. I remember coming back from mom's funeral and seeing people breaking leaves and seeing people riding bikes. Yeah, living their life. They didn't make any sense to me. It didn't seem the biggest insult to me that the world didn't stop for her dad. I ask everyone in the podcast, "Is there something that you've learned in grief or from the death you've experienced that would be helpful for others?" You kind of have to assume everybody's grieving all the time. When you're grieving, you kind of learn like, just assume everybody's grieving and treat them in that way. Like, not too many questions. Like, I remember after my sister Tiffany died, I was finding an exercise band and I had cash. But it was like, "What's your phone number? What's your email? Are you paying with credit?" And I just snapped and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm grieving." Like, I know the questions. I'm just going to pay cash, you know, your seven bucks, give me the band. But that's when I learned, like, "Oh, just assume everybody is all the time." I just finished this tour, so I went to 45 cities and this man was supposed to get me at the airport in Washington and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting and then 15 minutes after he's supposed to be there, I get a call and I'm outside in a black escalade and I go out there and I said, "I don't know what cars look like." And he said, "They would let me park." And I said, "How was I supposed to know that?" And he threw my bag in the back of the car and then we get into the car and it's just this awful feeling in the car. And then I said, "Can we start over again?" I said, "Hello." Like that. Anyway, he went for it, which is good because it turned out we had to spend six hours together. And in that six hours, I learned that like 10 days ago his son had committed suicide and I thought, "Can you imagine your son commit suicide?" We were you. I needed to be at the fore-season. I needed to be at the fore-season exactly 10 minutes. I'm going to have lunch with my boyfriend. You're killing me. You're killing me. But that was a good reminder that you don't know. You have to give people a break. I always say to people and it really helps us like, again, if you see them, something from the corner of your eye or a sign, just pay more attention. Like little signs that pop up. That could be comforting. They're out there. And you'll see them or feel it. And you'll know that they're still with you. And it is like you and Colbert were talking about it. It's kind of a gift, which is another thing it's hard to tell somebody. You do feel that. I do feel that. It's like it just gives. And then you know what to do for somebody else or to say to somebody else or you just the way you just see the world. It's different. When Stephen Colbert said that to me in like 2019 and then again on the podcast a year or so later, I did not. I've just found it incomprehensible. It blew my mind. I'd never even considered that idea. Yeah. And I've certainly now come to that. It's not that you wish this happened. But the empathy for other people to go through that and it's a pretty special thing to feel, I think. I'm a big one at writing everybody and say today's mom's anniversary or today. I do that a lot just to take a second because I not write everything down in my calendar or if I have friends who mom died on a certain day. I'm thinking of you today. I think the only thing I learned is that it's not too late. Sometimes somebody dies and you don't send a letter or you don't say anything. And then you're embarrassed and then you almost don't want to see them because you didn't do that. But it's never too late. Years could have passed and it's never too late. Well, David Siddharz, Amy Siddharz, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ed. Thank you. Next week on all there is we look at how grief has changed in the last hundred or so years in America from something that used to be experienced communally to something we now hide away and rarely speak of. My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kerns Goodwin who did something remarkable with her husband before he died. You did something which I wish I had done with my mom while she was live, which is you went through the boxes of your husband's things while he was still alive. This was a project you did together. What an incredible thing to do. And it almost didn't happen for 40 years of our married life. I wanted to open those boxes. I knew there were a time capsule of the sixties, diaries and letters and memorabilia. He was a speech writer and advisor. He was with Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy when he was a assassin. He had become his best friend Martin Luther King had died. He'd been close to him. But he didn't want to open them because the sixties had ended so sadly. And then finally finally when he turned 80 he said all right it's going to happen. It's now or never. I was so happy. But I had no idea what it was going to mean. I don't think I thought about the emotions of it. It was the last great adventure of our life. It changed him and it made him feel better about his whole life and it changed me and I'm so glad it happened. That's next week on all there is. And a reminder the voicemail box is once again up and running. If there's something you learned in your grief that would help others please call and leave a message. The number is 404-692-0452. You can leave a message up to three minutes long but if you get cut off you can always call back. We may use all or sum up your message in a future podcast episode or video or posted at our online grief community. Feel free to leave your name and number so we can contact you but we wouldn't include your number if we use your voicemail. Again the number to call is 404-692-0452. Join me next week for all there is. Remember you're not alone in your grief. All there is is a production of CNN audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director and Steve Licktie is our executive producer. Support from Nick Gotsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Ruben, Kerry Pritchard, Shimmery Cheetreet, Ronald Betis, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, John DeAnora, Laney Steinhart, James Andrest, Nicole Pessarou, and Lisa Namero. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. Check now, visit CNN.com/allaccess.