Grief Is Not A Problem To Be Solved

Welcome to All There Is, wherever you are in the world, and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. You're not alone. My guests today are David From and Danielle Criedenden. They're both journalists and writers who've been married for 38 years. They've had three children together, Miranda, Nathaniel, and Beatrice. Miranda, their Elvis, works as a journalist and model before she died unexpectedly. She was diagnosed with an advanced brain tumor in 2018. She'd had surgery which was successful, but in 2024 she died from complications relating to it. She was 32 years old. David From is a staff writer at the Atlantic. Weeks after Miranda died, he published a piece titled Miranda's Last Gift, about his daughter in caring for the dog she left behind, Ringo. Danielle has just published a moving memoir, dispatched from grief, a mother's journey through the unthinkable. I sat down with David and Danielle and her service dog Lulu in New York. You write that you thought you knew grief. What did you not know? Well, David and I both lost parents. David lost his mother early at age 54 to leukemia. I've lost a father, I've lost a stepfather, but parental death feels in the natural order of things. As a child, at some level, you know you're going to outlive your parents. So when you lose a child, it not only upends the universe and your universe, but it was a grief with a capital G, I had no idea I could be in such pain, physical and emotional. We don't often talk about the physicality of grief and how it was like waking up with an isopic going into my chest every morning. Your thoughts are just overcome of the non-acceptance of the child not being there anymore. And that is very hard to process and I don't think as a mother or father you ever do process that. And two days before she died unexpectedly, she was getting ready to go out to an event. She self-feed me a very glamorous outfit that she was going to wear. And that was the last text I got from her. And three days after that, I'm sitting in front of a computer online with a funeral director saying, "Which coffin do you want for your daughter?" And the surrealism of it cannot be underscored. And you thought you had won the race with Miranda? She had been diagnosed as very seriously ill with a non-cancerous but dangerous brain tumor. This was identified at the end of 2018. It was a very rare, rare tumor when we discovered. And the operation took place in April 2019 and it was very grueling. We were there for hours at 10 hours, Stanford Medical Center, with a little wringo Miranda's dog wearing our faces in his fur. But she came out. It had consumed her pituitary gland. But the surgeon was like, "You can medicate for this, you can live a full life." But you know, you then go to the endocrinologist and it's not so. The cocktails of hormones and things that you have to take and their side effects. She had reactions. Finally, she got to a point where she thought she had it right. And she had it catastrophically wrong. But none of her doctors told her was, "Hey, if you low-dose too much in your cortisol, you could drop dead." Like, no one said that to her. Before she died, she was looking very, very pale to me. And I told her so and she said, "Yeah, well, I've had this cold for two weeks." She seemed perfectly normal. It obviously never occurs to you that one day you could wake up and they'd just be gone. The call came at 10 minutes to 10 on a Friday morning. Wait. Who are you? Why are you in Miranda's apartment? They say, "Well, she's been found unconscious." The medical examiner was just very blunt. We estimate her time of death at 3 a.m. And they're saying, "If you're not here by what four o'clock up to take her away." And I said, "Where are you taking her?" And they said to the medical examiner's building and it's like, "Okay, that's not the emergency room." And she might sell me a lot. It's some part of my brain, yes. David, in a lovely article you wrote about her dog, we go, "You said sooner or later you're going to join the community of suffering." Yeah. I love that phrase, the community of suffering. They're those who are in grief and the rest of humanity I now call pre-grief because it's coming. This is the most human thing about us, the most universal experience. At any given moment, there are people who are in the deepest part of it. And we continue to get mail from people who is an anniversary or we're within two months of the loss of a loved one. And there's more of it than you couldn't ever possibly imagine. You suddenly join this alternative universe, the land of grief. And when you get there, deported there, you look around you and you suddenly discover how many people are here. And also, people you thought you knew really well. And that only then do they open up and they say things like, "Oh yeah, when I lost my sister, when I was 18 or a hairdresser we'd had for 10 years, he was from Lebanon and he only then told me that he'd seen his brother and father shot a point blank when he was nine years old." But then you think, "Well, why would they tell you? Because what are you going to say except, oh my gosh, that's so awful. Oh, dear, I'm so sorry. But you can't feel it unless it's happened to you. The world moves on, your friends move on and you don't move on and you can't move on. But there becomes, you sense this kind of expectation around you. Well, it's been a year. Must be what, at acceptance about now, having gone through denial like, and there's also no stages to this kind of grief. There's no end American problem and the American response is there's an answer here. We can develop the resources and build our contraptions and find our way out. And much of the help that is offered to people who have lost such an intimate person is of the problem-solving variety. Grief has a problem. There are steps. There are things you can do. There are blank pages in the book where you can do the work exercises. Perhaps you'll become a better person. I hate those work exercises. I can't tell you. Let's give over those parts in the book. It's not a problem to be solved. It is the condition in which you must find a way to endure. If you live in a problem-solving culture and you're told that your grief is a problem that you should overcome and at the end, ideally become a better person and you fail to do that, well, then you're some kind of grief failure. You haven't learned the lesson. You haven't gotten the benefit that you should get from this term. You haven't gotten through it. This whole idea that there's your normal life resuming once you get through the weeds, you'll go back to feeling normal, I think, from our experience and from everyone I've spoken to who is even further, much further along, you don't get through it. You also talk about the question, "Oh, do you have any kids?" Oh, yeah. Most routine, non-fraud, conversational gambits. I just go into inner seizures. Somebody says, "You need another mother." Oh, how many kids do you have? Do I say three? I'll say three. Or I could say two. If I really, I'm not going to see this person again, I'll say two. But if it's somebody I'm going to be closer to, I'll say three. And then I'll immediately turn it back to them. And I will try and dodge any further inquiry as long as I possibly can. And then when you finally can't, like they press, you'll say, "Well, we lost our eldest daughter at 32," and then they look so stricken and embarrassed that you feel bad for them. And then you start to comfort them. And you just say, "No, no, no, of course, of course you didn't know it's fine, it's fine." But nothing is normal again, these types of common interactions. I found the same thing with people say, "Oh, do you have any siblings?" For a while, I found myself coming up with this formulation that would try to make them feel better immediately. So I would say, I had a brother, but he died, but I have two half-brothers. I would throw that out to sort of make the other person comfortable the other. But then in that situation, also, am I now negating my relationship with my brother? Like, yes, we lost our eldest, but it's okay. We have two other children. And with a child, it's something you don't want to go up. I say to David, I miss my variety path. You've formed this family unit over 32 years, and Miranda played a role. Nat plays role B, we play roles, they evolve over time. But once that person is gone and the hole is blown in your family, it's a whole reshuffling of the dynamics of your galaxy. She was very adventurous, very beautiful. She modeled for a few years based in Tel Aviv. She put out this exceptionally cool, like, persona, but she could talk to anyone. and not only could she talk to anyone, she could get right to their essence. And she liked oddballs. She liked creative people. She liked unusual people. Her friends began to call the people she collected, sometimes Miranda's strays, because they all were a little troubled, but they found kindredship in her. And she was able always to bring out the piece of gold that was in them. There was a 10-year gap between B and her sister Miranda. And it was just like the cooler mother. And it was a very intense loss. Be pointed out to us the other day that she had to face 60 years without her sister. You know, I guess we only have to fix 20 or something. But yeah, she's like the whole stretch, because she's now 24, so she was 22. The whole stretch of her life, any celebrations, any weddings, any children, she will not have that best friend and mother by her side. Be wrote a lot about what was going on. And she writes very movingly about what it was like to suddenly not have her parents cope well with something like this. I want to read that. She talked about a visit you made to her at college. You write, "B would later recall her father visiting her at college nine months after Miranda died." She wrote, "Over dinner, I told him how painful it was to see him and my mom like this. I wanted to know if there was something else I could do." He answered, "Your mother and I will never be our former selves. Miranda's death is the defining fact of the rest of our lives. But it is different for you. This isn't the defining moment. It will change you, but you have to keep living in a way your mother and I don't have to do. Our wish for you is to keep living the life you have beyond this." As a mother and as a father, but I think especially as a mother, you are so used to putting your children first and their needs first. And so when Miranda died, I just crawled under a rock. Our children had to watch me crying, howling crying. It was the first time I felt utterly unable to comfort them. I mean, I tried, but I lost all capacity to be. it felt to me like a mother. And not only that, I felt I was being cruel and selfish because the most natural thing in the world is to hold them and tell them it's going to be okay. I couldn't do. You said, "The loss of a child upends the natural order and media are crashing into your personal galaxy. The universe, as you knew it, is destroyed forever. However unique and precious your own loss feels, you've discovered that you've simply joined the limping thousands, millions whose lives have been devastated by the routine catastrophes that befall someone somewhere every second of every day. From these fellow travelers, we learned what no grief manual will tell you. The person you were died with your child. There is no healing, no journey back to yourself. That map burned with everything else. On that February morning, we became entirely different people wearing the same faces. Do you still feel like entirely different people? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously there are parts of you that remain. I mean, you are you. But I don't think I can experience joy or happiness the way I used to in a completely unmitigated way. Everything will be offset or tinged with sadness. I realize that that sounds very pessimistic and not a lot of fun. But I'm finding I'm learning to cope with that. And what you try and learn to do and what I'm definitely becoming better at is just simply being in the present, sitting with your friends laughing, engaging in whatever moment it is. And then the minute you step away, it's like a flare up of an old war wound. You feel she's still not here. And that's how I think it's going to be. There was one other thing you mentioned in the book which I've always been fascinated by. The idea that you've carried a child and the cells of that child are still inside you. This was a scientific thing I learned a few years ago before Miranda died. And then I went and re-looked it up that when a woman gives birth to a baby, some of the cells remain in her body forever. The cells of that baby. The cells of that baby leave some of its cells behind. And these cells have been known to help a mother fight illness, cancer. And then it's also regarded as one of the few, if only instance where foreign cells can live compatibly in a completely different person. And so this is something that gives me great comfort because I know then that I carry Miranda's cells with me so part of her literally remains alive in me. It must be an incredible feeling. It's one of the special things about being a mother. We'll have more in a moment. In 2024, a man was killed by the FBI. And to this day, the authorities have refused to say why. He was a father, an ex-husband, and a Russian-born American citizen. He just seemed like a lonely guy, and he needed a friend. And he kind of talked about death, didn't he? He talked about you just never know when it's your time. I'm CNN investigative reporter Isabel Chapman, host of the new limited series, "Savillion or Spy." They noticed that he was communicating with people that were of concern to the FBI. Oh my god, Jesus. Head over to the CNN Presents Feed and listen to our three-part series, "Savillion or Spy," available wherever you get your podcasts. The two of you, you had to work to really not retreat into your own silos of grief. It was David who recognized that. And every time I tried to just crawl into a ball, you were the one who would pull me back and say, we can't retreat into our own silos of grief. That's when he coined this phrase. And I also saw that he was maybe even nervous about talking about his grief with me. And so, as I got a little stronger, I sort of forced you to talk about it with me because I could see you could go into your mind and into your tasks. Then when you did, actually, we could talk about it together. It gave me such comfort. And I realized that we were the only two people who understood exactly what the other was going through. And so, that's what we leaned into. But it did take enormous effort to do that because you are so ready to just silo yourself off. Yeah, so Danielle and I have been married now for 38 years. Before all this, I used to joke. We've had a lot of marriages. This is the same person. But along the way, the marriages have been different. There was a marriage before children. There was a marriage with young children. There was a marriage with mature children. There was a marriage as empty nesters. And we became different people along the way. And now, in the wake of this shattering pain, you have to find a new way to be married all over again. And we have changed a lot of our routines. I just do many fewer things than I used to do. I spend more time. We have lunch together, which we didn't typically used to do. You took your foot off the gas pedal in some regards externally. I think also, you just naturally lose interest in a lot of things, too. I lost interest in everything. I stopped writing, for sure. I couldn't even read unless it was about grief. Anything I realized that once gave me pleasure, I could no longer do. And maybe that was just because, for that time, I could no longer experience pleasure. And physically, I've become fascinated in the physical toll that grief takes upon you. The whole nervous system gets rattled. Your brain has a terrible time processing it. And I write a bit about EMDR therapy for PTSD, which I found super helpful. It was the only thing I found helpful. Not least, because I couldn't get any other help of any kind, because every time I reached out to a grief specialist or grief institution, they were like, yes, we can see you in 18 months. And I'm feeling, no, I want to actually kill myself right now. And I don't know where I'm going to be 18 months from now. But it's very, very hard to get therapeutic help quickly when you need it unless you check yourself into a hospital and say, I'm going to commit suicide. But what was that going to do? That wasn't going to help me. But you felt that way. I suddenly understood. And this feels like a terrible thing, again, to say as a mother and a wife. But for the first time, I understood that pain could be more powerful than living, that death could offer this retreat. From the pain and I could go into the ground with Miranda and be with her and then your brain Starts to yeah, David will be fine. The kids will be fine, but I can't keep living and and and it's that bad How long did that last for? Least three months and then the EMDR kicked in and it it realizes that the brain has a lot of difficulty Processing trauma. It doesn't know what to do with it. It that your brain regularly files normal memories is straight forward and They've now shown it's to you know the miracles of MRIs that when a traumatic memory hits the brain starts Reacting in completely different ways parts of it Light up that don't light up with regular memories and the theory is that the experience Remains present and so when you're reminded the trigger The when I walked through the supermarket and suddenly saw the things I used to buy from Miranda and I had to like Run from the building like it was on fire because I couldn't cope with that It learns to train the brain to file those memories away and It it works. How long was that treatment? I'm still doing okay two years on the goal when I talked to the therapist I said well, what is especially early on? I said what is really the point of this? Because I'm not going to stop grieving. I'm never going to not miss Miranda and She said our goal is for the grief to stop controlling your days and to stop controlling your mind and that Really made sense to me and it is proven to be true. I think I'm a lot further along in being able to Like even now just talk about this in a matter of fact way, which I don't think I could have done Without having already gone through a lot of this in therapy. I want to read something you wrote You said to me the most infuriating observers are those who insist grief is a gift Believe it or not. There's no shortage of people who believe that the worst thing that can happen to you is actually an opportunity for growth The happiness hucksters of Ted talks and tic-tocks promise that everything is surmountable if you just find your truth and believe in yourself You get a lot of nine workshops. We'll get you through your grit and because it's so painful I mean you're willing to try anything. I wanted to reach out to psychics like I just wanted Something to stop this pain that no medication could help Selling you this hope selling you that you're a better person. I think is the Inverse of the message you want to hear this idea the whole the gift idea I talked to Stephen Colbert about this back in 2019 I'd come across something he had said in an interview quoting a J. R. R. token who said what of God's punishments are not gifts he went on to say In a later podcast that I did with him He said grief can become a form of wisdom about your human experience that you can share with other people I would say there is truth there And there is power there and there is Wisdom there but it's not a truth and it's not a power and it's not a wisdom that we can share or we can use I've lost both my parents now and when you lose a parent whether horribly prematurely is in my mother's case or Somewhat prematurely in my father's case. They leave behind in your life a kind of not only avoid but a role That you can take their parts of their lives and and and this is not a robbery because this is what they I see now Now I'm a parent when when I die. I will feel the same way. They leave behind things for you to take from them That's the role they leave behind that yes and in some ways only when they leave the earth Can you fully internalize them and is the parental role complete because You have left behind an example of the whole life Even leaving an example of how to die and even leaving an example of how to die and as a child as sad as you are and in my mother's case We're shattered and my father's case from your deeply in grief But they have left behind something for you with a child. It's not like that You wanted to leave it for them if a Miranda sitting here talking about us I would be very pleased if I could hear it to hear say my parents Death was in a way a gift because that's what I would like. I would like to leave both my life and my death as a gift for my children But this gift we'd like to return. Yeah And it's non-returnable Daniel's stepfather. He had this process. He was in the hospital for about 10 days. Yeah, during the final dying And he had a word for everybody. He had a joke for everybody and that's the gift That's the gift when you can do that Rand was also exceptionally close because Through a couple of rebellious years of her teenage hood She we eventually just shipped her up to lip with my parents. They were in Toronto and Canada and she went to school there So they became very very close and so when we were That sort of getting the last messages Miranda came in and he looked at her and he said I'll see you down there And she real did and started to laugh hysterically And then she came and sat on his bedside and he held her and he said I couldn't have loved you more And Miranda actually died on his birthday. She did die on his birthday. Yes And in some ways we hope that he was he was maybe there to catch her Hmm. Do you believe in signs? I before this I might have said yeah, sure. I know Really believe in signs because there are things That happen That are so connected to them and yet completely inexplicable. I often talk to her and I imagine what she would say But there have been times at critical moments It's like her voice is landed in my head and said something that I wouldn't Have expected her to say and actually One of them relates to this book. I've been very torn about you know promoting it It's a weird thing to have to keep going out and talking about again and again and repeating the fact that she's dead again and again And one night as I was falling asleep. I was thinking well Miranda At least at least this book, you know Keep your memory alive in the world And then I heard her in her sharp voice and she said no mom That's not what's going to keep me alive in the world You are going to keep me alive in the world and the only way you will keep me alive is if you live And by live she meant live And she was always someone who was joyous and seeking joy And I I have also taken that to heart. Can you do that? I'm trying I'm trying and actually the process of this book and talking about her I feel her very strongly by my side and I feel it's been Her way actually To bring me back into the world. It's the first time I've been able to write again Is a article you wrote that was in the Atlantic about Ringo That was the first time you were able to write again when you thought you couldn't write There are other more inexplicable signs, but you do you do feel their spirit I'm very aware as obviously you are of the people around me who may be suffering And I remember well, what would Miranda do in this situation and and and then I do it It's been more than two years. Yeah. Does that feel like a long time does that feel like a short time It feels like both I sometimes Miss the early grief You know as horrible as it was Because I was still closer to her in time Nothing physically around me had changed you could almost touch her and now And the analogy is your train pulls away from Miranda station And you get farther and farther along and things get different and things happen and suddenly You're really aware of the world that she is not joining you on this journey and we had just the ultimate joy of A grand daughter recently and that was just You know such a great great bringer of new life And yet even then I'm thinking Oh Miranda was so looking forward to being on she and that would talk about Pushing strollers to each other's apartment and just the fact that she would never know this person even with these extraordinary life Gifts to use the word you just don't Experience them in the same way And I think it's also because you know what can happen you're no longer in the this could never happen to me or anyone I love mode Why not me why not us? So you just lose that kind of protection That people walk around with in their alternative universe You took a trip to Auschwitz and you Yeah, I'm sorry ended up the story the trip With karaoke We did a family trip to Poland and Miranda would have been about 17 she brought along one of her best friends And especially being Jewish you go through Poland and you see all the most Depressing parts of Poland you go to the world saw ghetto, you go to the Jewish museum. And so this was the last big expedition of our trip before we would fly back to the U.S. And right down the street from our hotel was a karaoke bar, obviously a Polish karaoke bar. Which are the best kind of karaoke ever. No, I have to say, this was, I don't even, I hadn't even known about karaoke bars, but the minute we walked in, we were instantly unpopular, because we were obviously English-speaking Americans. But and why we, David and I were there, we don't know. She was just very insistent that to end this tour of tragedy, we had to go to a karaoke bar, because that was her spirit. And we went to this karaoke bar, and Miranda at all of 17 knows exactly what to do. And she starts commanding shots of vodka, which you, to my total surprise, got heavily into this whole experience. And you don't even like singing. And she queued up, don't stop believing. And then we, yeah, and then we, it's our turn, and we're just following Miranda and her friends lead, and we, you know, mangled the song. And then after a certain point, it became very clear from the surly DJ that it was time for us to leave. That was just like the funniest story for years, you know, after tragedy, karaoke. That, that was Miranda's kind of outlook on life. And so at her memorial service, which in Judaism, you do a year after they are buried, that's when you, it's called an unbilling, you literally unveil their headstones. So we planned this ceremony for Miranda, and her friends came, including this friend, who had been on the Polish trip with us. And I was very worried the memorial would end on a very sad note, which, in retrospect, probably was appropriate. But then I said to her friend, Erie, the night before over a glass of wine, I said, Erie, do you think we should do don't stop believing tomorrow at the end of the ceremony? She's like, that's a great idea. And so we then solicited some opinions, and they were, her friends were like, you got to do it. So we took a speaker, we took a microphone, and after the end of this service, a friend of hers had poured a perfect dirty martini, which was her favorite drink and had placed it at the beginning of the ceremony on her headstone, which is not part of Jewish tradition. I just want to make that clear. And we keyed up journey on the karaoke app, and we mangled it just as beautifully as we did before. But this time, everyone gathered and started to sing. Imagine in this beautiful old historical cemetery, these people singing this absurd song. And then we toasted her, and I poured the martini onto her glass, and that was how it was ended. And all I could think of was Miranda sitting over there, watching us, bent over laughing. And to me, I don't now care what anyone else thought. It felt like to us the way that we should close that ceremony for her. Miranda, by the way, had amazing taste of music. Every cartridge, she had the greatest playlist. And after this, that was like, like, I don't think Miranda really loved journey. Like, that was not her song. At the graveside, there was a QR code, which is a fix to a plaque, which you can scan and get Miranda's playlist. No kidding, really? Yeah. That's an awesome idea. All of her friends and us got together and did a playlist of her favorite songs, and you can listen to that there. And also learn about her. And now, people who go and enjoy this garden, which we made for public enjoyment, because Miranda would always like to welcome new friends. They can just learn a little about who she was. Danielle made a beautiful gravesite for Miranda, where we will, in time, follow. And I think we both have a strong feeling of she is there. And when we're there, you will lie beside her. And you lie down on the grave. Yeah. I mean, I, especially the first summer after I felt very strongly, I wanted to be able to sit with Miranda. And I thought a wild flower garden, I love gardening, so I thought that suited her. But we go there now, it's in a beautiful, beautiful spot in rural Canada near our cottage, where we spend every summer, where she spent every summer. We have little stools and I sit and I'll have a glass of wine with her. I'll talk to her. And sometimes I'll just, I'll just lie down on the ground next to her. And I'll feel really close to her. I mean, obviously she's not there there, but she's there. Even when it's cloudy or looking like rain and I go, the moment I hit her grave, the sun comes on unfailingly. Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others? Yes. No one ever knows the right thing to say, especially the tragedy of this kind. And I think people are always uncomfortable with anything, saying anything. And really, the right thing is to just show up and be there for people. It was the check-ins and the willingness to just sit there and listen to me because I think, especially in those early days, you need to kind of talk and talk or I do. And just to have the presence of friends was a good thing. People want to come for you. They hate seeing you in pain and they try and make it better for you. They try and say, you know, you'll get through this. It will be better. And actually what you want people to say, this is the worst thing. I'm so sorry. This is terrible. Let me go get you a glass of scotch. You want them to lean into the suck as it were. And you don't want to be told how you're going to feel, how you should feel, you want people to recognize the immensity of what you've lost. We as human creatures live in time, but this particular motion exists outside of time. And that's something that if you're in the pre-greave world, that's hard to understand, but the clocks are broken. There are anniversaries that are intense. There are moments that are intense, but this emotion exists without reference to time. Thank you so much. Thank you. Danielle's memoir Dispatches from grief. A mother's journey through the unthinkable is available now. If you have thoughts you'd like to share about my conversation with them or about your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on our grief community page at c9.com/all there is or leave us a voice mail at 404-827-1805. For the next podcast episode, August 20th, you'll hear my conversation with legendary drummer Travis Barker. It's a remarkable conversation. He's the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed some of his closest friends. He underwent months of agonizing treatment for third-degree burns, which covered more than 65% of his body. And he talks beautifully and candidly about the losses he carries with him. Every day life was really hard for me. If I saw a plane come in the sky, I would hide. Plains had just equal death to me. Leaving the house was just hard. I was just waiting for something to happen. Chris and chair gone. These two pilots passed away. I was in a burn center for six months. Life was hard. You're a different person. Yeah, it was challenging. I remember my post dramatic doctor had said something like, people go through life just expecting everything to be perfect. And not everything's going to be perfect. Sometimes you're going to face adversity and you faced some of the worst adversity ever, right? But these things either destroy you or define you. And there was no way I was going to let it destroy me. All there is with Travis Barker comes out August 20th.