I love working with dogs. They make my heart sing when they're doing good work. And it's not true that we always sit deep in grief when you know what I'm working on these cases, These aren't my death. These deaths belong to somebody else and my somehow, showing empathy or taking on that heartbreak is both counterproductive, but it's also kind of inhabiting something that's not mine to inhabit. This is Here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week on Hereafter, we are talking real true crime logistics with search dog expert Cat Warren. If you have ever wondered what a real crime scene search is like, or maybe a friend or a family member has been the subject of one of those searches, you're really going to appreciate what this week's guest has to say. All coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a license mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, so you have probably seen it or heard it described dramatizations of search dogs running through the woods, noses to the ground, looking for a missing person or for human remains. We've got a weird fascination with this stuff. In the media are obsession with true crime and with horror, real and imagined. Personally, I have never gotten into that true crime obsession thing. I can't not think out side the dramatized storyline, you know, like that's somebody's person who died or went missing, and we're just like casually consuming it with popcorn and ad breaks. Anyway, there is something fascinating about search dogs, though I am absolutely on team curious about dog searches. I first encountered Cat Warren when she moderated a panel on pet loss from the Collective for Radical Death Studies, which is a super cool organization I will link in show notes. I wasn't part of the panel myself, but my friend told me that I had to meet Cat. Her work combines so many things that I'm personally interested in, dogs and nature and puzzles, and of course that weird aversion fascination dance thing we have going on with death. Cat Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows sent Science and The Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. The book tells the story of her work alongside her young German shepherd, working together as a cadaver dog team to find the missing and the dead. Now content note here there are no graphic details in this episode, so you don't need to worry about that that we are obviously talking about death Cat. Welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here. Your work, both what you've done over the last fifteen and twenty years and what you're doing now is like the intersection of so many things that I'm into. You've got dogs, you've got solving puzzles, you've got journalism, you've got being out in nature, you've got history, and you have death. Right, Like if that would be a fascinating remix, but like that last one is kind of a weird calling card, right, yes, And you know that question of like cock kill parties and people ask what you do or it comes up and then you know one of two reactions either fascination, right, that can sometimes feel a little yellow media right, yellow journalism this kind of gruesome fast, or the flip side is just discussed and the why would you ever do that? I'm super curious about this. So when you're out of social gathering and somebody says, what what are you into? What are you into? Cat? What do you say so saying that one of my applications is searching for them missing and presumed dead, right, using the dog. And I think that I would say that two thirds of the people are sort of deeply interested, right, And I think it's partly Mayking. We're sort of that issue of dogs are an entree into so many things. The can be really difficult conversations and dogs can bridge so many of those gaps. And I keep finding that that, even when I think that people have a completely unrealistic notion of what dogs can actually do or how big a role they play in this mosaic, this complicated mosaic of of trying to find somebody who's who's gone, you still can have that conversation because if people like dogs, then they want to know more. It's almost like it makes it safe, safer territory. It does, I think it does. And what was interesting with writing the book was that there was a tiny portion of the audience who were deeply disappointed that the book wasn't completely filled with adventure stories and my talking about actual cases, right, that it wasn't a combination of true crime and dog hero and that the sort of the science and the history and even the memoir aspect, right, we're shunt to decide. But there were so many people where realizing that the dogs are just one section of this bigger piece of the world. Those people appreciated it. It's interesting that I remember reading that in the book and also some of the articles where you're talking about the book that like people, I guess the term that I usually use as trauma tire kicking, right, there's a sort of rubber necking. If you're at a an event or at the grocery store and somebody's making small talk and you say, I look for the missing and presumed dead using a dog, there is either initial or immediate fascination or immediate repulsion and changing the subject and walking away from you. But often that fascination is that sort of true crime. Give me all the details. I wonder if people are interested in listening to this particular episode because they're like, oh, I want to hear all about this. But at the same time, I know my audience, So like, can we can we talk about that weird thing where you do something that is very interesting two people who find search and rescue and recovery and dogs really interesting. There is this really fertile ground of fascination. But it's also the act of doing search and recovery is very intimate. It is, so how do we navigate that fascination and intimacy? I think it's really difficult. I was with a trainer yesterday because she actually trains service dogs for service people with PTSD. So one of the things as we were sort of standing there figuring out how to best work with the dogs and these two new wonderful handlers who are going to have these dogs in their lives. And I was talking about that all the times when media would say, well, what I want to do is come out on your next search, and Lucy, who has been in this world as well, that that sense of no, actually that is just so terribly invasive. It is so terribly invasive, and it's very easy to explain to the media, you know, this is a criminal case. We're not able to have you do this. We won't let you know afterwards how the search turned out. Right, there's that, which is in some ways, you know, the media is used to that. But going into a reading and inevitably people want to know how many bodies solo found, and it's it's sort of like like a numbers game, right, And in a way it is that I understand it from the point of view of people's exposure to this kind of thing is mostly through media and through movies and through fiction, and in a sense saying to that person, it's a lot more complicated. Right, Nine out of ten times you don't find somebody when you're going out on a search, what you're doing is clearing the areas where family or law enforcement I think they might be, right, And all those places are imagined places of horror for the family, right where they are in their minds eye thinking about these places, right, the creek that get high during flood and it's flooded, and all those places are in some ways just as important, right, even when you don't find that person. But that's not very dramatic, right, It's clearing land in a way, And I think all the people who do this find that it's really important and really central, right. And I think that afterwards when we talk about if we find somebody, or if somebody else finds somebody and you are on the search, the very first thing you do in a panic is you go to your computer and you look at your maps, and you look at the site where the person was finally located, and you breathe a sigh of relief that you were nowhere near that spot and you couldn't have missed finding that person. Right. So these are the things to me that it doesn't sound very dramatic, but it's it's the stuff that makes your heart pound because sometimes you're talking about years of people not having resolution. Did I answer that question, Megan? You did? You answered it beautifully because we started out talking about for people who are sort of surface level fascinated with the idea of cadaver searches, which is the proper term for it, but you're looking for somebody who is dead or presumed dead. This sort of proliferation of true crime podcast which I really don't understand, but like whatever you like, what you like, but there's this sort of surface fascination with it, Like we like to flirt with the idea of death and drama, but we really don't want to talk about it if it's our own right. This is actually a complaint. This is a complaint that I hear from a lot of grieving people that y'all are so interested in true crime podcasts, but my person was killed in a drive by shooting or some other act of violence, and you won't even talk to me, right, So we it's like a safe distance allows us to enter into the sphere of death but keeps us far enough away from it that we don't need to enter into any feeling of grief. That's exactly correct. It's exactly correct. And I think too that in a sense, since people have no realistic notion, these are always things that get resolved in forty five minutes plus fifteen minutes of commercial right. So the idea that these cases can drag on for years or that nationwide, I think nationwide, the figures are like sixty people missing and presume dead by law enforcement. I mean, the missing are just like all over the United States. And in many cases those deaths, they're never going to make a podcast because I hate to say that they're mundane, right, But it's actually sadly true that most crime is just kind of stupid and brutal and predictable, right, And that doesn't make for great television or crime novels. Right, we don't write about those things or see those things. And so I think that people imagine, I mean, they sort of fill in what this stuff might look like, when in some ways it is. It's retracing steps. So what I hear you saying here is that the mundane details, the small details, the relentless details, the search to connect the dots and look for someone who is missing is not sexy. If you wrote out all of the details involved in a search and the end of a person's life and what happens next, most of the work would get edited out. Yes, yes, right, these mundane details, like if we move away from death just for a second. But like, these mundane details are what life is made of. Our lives are made up of the little things, right, All our lives are made up of those little things. And so to me, it's those learning how to be part of that and fitting me and a dog into that picture. Right, we talk about the fact that you know, loving to dogs and nature and and these things can still sound pretty dramatic, But in a way, it's that it was so easy to fit, to fit me and him into that without being like a huge rock thrown into a pond, right, it was just a little space for us to come in. So two things about this one one that I don't want to forget. You had started out by saying, you know, dogs are the bridge into what can be very uncomfortable territory. And I kind of wonder if our need for drama, our need for a big splashy rescue or discovery, is also a way that we look for a bridge into this stuff, like a way to tell ourselves that even though the person is dead, for whatever reason, the bad guys were caught, the reason was found. There is resolution, There is closure. I noticed that when you were talking about the completion of a search that you used the word resolution and not closure, And that is such an important distinction. People never get closure on this. Families never get closure. I mean, that just doesn't happen. Our entire culture is built on this extraordinary need for both resolution and closure, and we see it every day when we read accounts where there's a murder and a suicide. Right, so he basically shoots for and then shoots himself. And the very first question that people ask is what was the motive? Right? And I absolutely no longer understand why we are still somehow searching for motive in violence. Right, that that somehow if we understand that there was a motive i e. A rational reason for this explosion of violence, then once again we can sort of distance ourselves because it's not random, right, It's very targeted. And if we think about how people talk about these mass shootings, which are so deeply, deeply random, right, and they scare people, and instead of thinking about gun regulation and you know, sort of truly addressing this, what we all do is trying to figure out how we are different than the victims, or how that person who did that act had a motive as a disgruntled employee or whatever it was, right, And and then we can kind of we can move on because it really is too scary to look at the things that happened suddenly and without explanation, because that's mostly what happens. Yeah, it gives us a chance to say, not me, right, this is so cool because I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to get people to understand that not feeling intense emotions like grief is one of the driving forces of especially Western culture. But but a lot of a lot of the things we think of as normal or more normative are really like trying to escape big feeling, right, our fascination with violence in fiction, right in movies, in storylines like it, lets play out things in a way that lets us like I don't I mean, I don't even know where I want to go with us, because I know a lot of people have done some really raising work on you know, our our need for violence and entertainment and blah blah blah, all of this stuff. But there really is something about can you make this story, this news story, this random event that in some ways the perpetrators are very predictable. Can you package that in such a way that makes me feel safe and makes me feel like my people are safe and if they can't be safe, can you make it all turn out okay in the end anyway? And it is? It is so we do. It's what we do as a culture. I mean, I do it with my husband late at night, right when I am just in despair. I'll just say to him, tell me it's all going to be okay, Just tell me right. And I'm like a child because I am in a childish state. I'm like a child saying, let me know that the end is going to be great, when, of course the question asked by me is because I know it won't necessarily be all right in the end, right. And this can be from mundane things to you know, I mean climate change, like global warming, when it's absolutely silly of me to say, tell me it's going to be okay. And there's nothing wrong with needing stability and needing to know that there is a path forward. So when I sort of rant about our insistence on a happy ending or on resolution so that we can like you know, been there, dusted that where you know everything is good, like needing to feel safe and stable is not the same thing as things working out okay, right, Like where do we find a stability and a safety knowing that she does not always work out okay? And what I hear you saying is that one of the things that your career in journalism and your work on endless searches with detectives and historians and being out there in the field in that minutia of someone's life has shown you that you can't believe in a happy ending, that there is no resolution or no no tidy bow. And where do we find safety, connection, beauty, joy, interest, fascination, knowing all of those things that you know. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about recently and also talking with friends, partly because of our age. I'm sixty six and really thinking about this sort of this last section of my life. Should should I be so lucky? And I think that for me, finding small resolutions is what brings joy. And also, you know, people will ask this question, how can you possibly do this work? What? You know? What an amazing contribution that you're helping the community, right, And I have to laugh because it's actually pretty selfish. Right. The whole time I was doing it, I was very aware of the fact that I got great joy out of working a dog out in sometimes grim circumstances. And it's never the case that these searches are upbeat. They aren't ever, but there are these upbeat moments. There are these moments when the dog is just doing his best work, or there's some comic relief or something happens where you just stop and appreciate the things that are happening. Right. It simply should not exist, but it does because there are these moments of real grace in all of this work right, and it is self centered in a way where I can't say I'm sorry. I can't pretend that I'm out there to help the community or to let people bring closure. I'm out there because it's hugely engaging. It is hugely challenging. I love working with dogs. They make my heart sing when they're doing good work. And it's not true that we always sit deep in grief when you know, when I'm working on these cases, these aren't my depth. These deaths belong to somebody else and my somehow, showing empathy or taking on that heartbreak is both counterproductive, but it's also kind of inhabiting something that's not mine to inhabit. And so I don't know. This is a very roundabout way of saying that doing this kind of work, that you are always thinking about death and violence at times, but you are not doing this out of a sense of heroism or the need to contribute to the community. I'm also doing it because, first of all, because I can do it, so I'm fortunate that way, and because that part killer skill set is something that feels really like a super good fit for me. Yeah, that there is joy in the work and satisfaction in the work, knowing that the work sits inside somebody else's heartbreak. That is a nuance that people on the outside don't always understand. I think we have such a such a deeply ingrained hero thing where like I want to be the one, like I'm in there bringing closure to the fact, like you know, I'm the one who did this, and so so much of this is like one not about you and also aided by you, which is a really interesting, nuanced, complex place to live. I love that you said, and it will be more specific when when I go back and listen. But you said something about like I'm in this, but I don't inhabit it right, Like I'm in this, I am one piece of this person's life and the connections and the families and the lack of families and the web that they lived in. I am one tiny piece in this, and I may be an important part of this, but this is not about me, and it's not about the dog, right. I mean, I will say that one of the things I write about and it was so incredibly hard to write about. And I know how you feel about this having written it's okay that you're not okay, but writing about my father's death, which happened right at the beginning of my becoming very serious about this work and his cancer diagnosis, and then sort of seven weeks later he was gone, and the degree to which I really I had to stop training solo during that time period. It was too hard. There was such an overlap. But between my own grief about Dad and the kind of details about doing cadaver searches that made it temporarily not a good fit at all, it made me even more aware, if that makes sense, going forward, what grief feels like from people who are experiencing it when their loved one is missing, versus my role in any of that. Right, It just it was just so crystal clear another lesson from my father. What I just heard you say was such a good a good example of something that I feel like we've been talking about but also I talk about quite a bit, which is like when you are newly ripped open when a death or another kind of loss has entered into your life, it's like you you have no buffer zone, and you're suddenly alive and alert to all of the pain in the world. Right there's there's no distance possible anymore so going into experiencing your dad's death and feeling all of those emotions. Going back out into the field made you that acutely aware of oh my gosh, grieving people are all around me, right, and feeling even a tiny corner of what somebody else feels is really one of the reasons that we shut down in the face of other people's pain and suffering, right, because those are very big feelings and they're too big, and there's not enough contest and not enough of a container. And you were able to step back from doing cadaver work with solo because you knew that you couldn't have that. What did you say in the book? You said something like, um, disinterested but not uninterested, right, that there is a professional distance that you need to have to be able to do this work, and when you are deep in your own emotions, that distance is impossible, yes, yes, to maintain no. And and this is I mean in therapy we have that term transference, right, And there was a time when the overlap was so great that I couldn't countenance it. And you know, to just give an example, this is just a really concrete example, you know, training with teeth and looking at those teeth and not being able to see those teeth is simply teeth. Those teeth were a part of my father. Right. As much as my mind didn't want to do that, as much as my rational mind said there's no connection, it was just so clear. It's like, no, I'm not going to get a lot done there. Yeah, there's something very visceral about grief, right, And even if we took out the cadaver search part of it. I remember when Matt ide and if I went to a yoga class and the instructor was like, focus on your breath, all I could think of was, Matt has no breath anymore, and he never will again. There's something about the visceral nature of bodies and death that there doesn't have to be a quote unquote logical connection. Right. You're talking about doing teeth work with training your dog and looking at teeth and thinking about bodies, thinking about my father, right, this this is what the emotional body does, right, And and to be able to recognize that, and to be able to take a step back and say, actually, I can't show up in the ways that I need to show up. And I also love that you brought in here is another facet of how I understand my work because having had this experience. I don't know what it's like to be a family member who was waiting for search and recovery teams to find my person, But I know what intense loss has felt like to me, and I can sort of bow in respect too how much I don't know about what it's like for this family. In the introduction, you're you know, the we were talking about how when you would say what you do and people would be like, Ah, isn't that terrible? And isn't that depressing? And I was thinking about this while you were describing sort of being a cog in the machine of a search, right, And you say, sure, some of it is dark, but gradations of light filter through. There's tragedy, there's incompetence and cruelty. Those things are all part of it, but they don't shine what occupies the most brain space or the other humans and the dogs. Basically what you're talking about. They are the communities of people and animals who have come together to look for clues for this singular mystery. Yes, there is something very beautiful and heartening set inside a truly horrible experience for those who are intimately affected. And I think we have that, you know, we have this binary so deeply embedded in us that it can't be both things. It can't be a beautiful moment of dogs and humans working together at things they are very very good at at the same time that it is a truly horrible thing for the people whose person you're looking for. It reminds me of, you know, when Matt disappeared into the river. We had, you know, there were search teams, there were helicopters and divers, and I remember the moment when it when it shifted from rescue to recovery. I remember that I knew what that meant, and I remember the individual humans. I remember marveling at the fact that divers were going into that water that took Matt and nearly took me and nearly took our dog, right that there were people who chose to do that every day. I remember marveling at, and not in a good way, the journalists who were up on the bridge zooming in on me and filming me, which I didn't I didn't realize because I was, you know, occupied. But there was somebody who was like a volunteer with the fire department. She came to me, and she said, you know, normally, she pointed at the news crew and she said, normally, I help those people get as close to the victims quote unquote victims. I helped them get as close to them as possible. But I can't do that today, and I don't know that I'm ever going to be able to do that again. You know, you and I have been talking about the disconnected is the wrong word, but the distanced beauty and joy and connection that happens when you are doing this kind of work for a living or as a volunteer, That community that gets built, and that pleasure in seeing humans and dogs do things that they're very very good at, the people whose tragedy that is we notice, We notice the skill, we notice the community. And speaking only for myself here, I noticed and was thankful for the distance. This brings back a memory and it had happened I think more than once when I was a journalist. But this is still sort of painful to me. But I was at the Hartford Current and I was on the site of a collapse of of a two twin buildings plaza that we're using lifts slack construction, and because one of the pumps gave out on the corner. Everything twisted and collapsed, and workers that weren't blown free from the sides were inside just the s right. And of course I was there as a journalist, and I was tasked to talk to the big victims families as they're waiting two have their loved ones brought out. Since I'm no longer a journalist, I lied to the editors. I didn't approach anybody. It's sort of like now. I did approach some of the investigators, who are already hugely frustrated, what with What they thought was why we're workers still inside that building while they were lifting these labs of concrete? Right? Why was anybody there? But in a sense, this this ethical issue of how close what's the right of people, right, what's the right of journalists to intrude on a private grief? Or when does a private grief become public? When is that? And it's it's such a thorny question, Megan, But in cases like this, this is what people seem to want access to with true crime podcasts, right, this is a way for them to access that, and it just it kind of makes me ill to think about that role. I remember working a scene that was so high profile that there was a picture of Solo searching along the end of the log and it was you know, and they ran it and it was you know, it was this huge picture. And I was amused in that case, first of all because this was not my tragedy. I was doing the search, but also because they sort of made up the hotline about you know, the dogs are along the log when he had actually finished the search and he was looking for a place to lift his leg. Here's your story, your story. His dog searched a long and hard and really needed a place to pee. And all of this is connected right with what we get as a news bite. Is sometimes, as with the case of the photo of Solo looking for a place to pee, like it's very curated for a very specific emotional aim, and it's not even a corner of the whole story, and it's you know, it's it's hard because you've got like the way that our brains work as relational mammals is that we need to feel something for an issue in order to care enough about it in order to agitate for change or bring attention to it. Like we have to have our emotional circuits firing in order to care, and what journalism and media and and other things do is like sort of bastardize that into just like this this drama junkie thing, right, and we don't. I mean, part of part of the cascading horrors of now is that we don't have time to feel any of these things before the next horror happened. So one of the episodes this season, actually the first episode of the season, is with Nolbe Marquez Green, whose daughter was killed at Sandy Hook, and we talked a lot about you know, she works with survivors, but also what we demand of survivors in order to make public space spaces safer, make schools safer, like to stop you know, random public shootings and gun control. She's like, who do we destroy in the service of our goals? Yeah, it's astonishing how much we suck from people who are using all their resources just to get from day to day, and it somehow becomes their responsibility so that we can do our public mourning. And if we do our public mourning properly with all of this in place, then change can happen. Right. That that's somehow is going to be. That's the chain of events that needs to happen over and over and over, and yet it doesn't in some of these cases. This is a really good conversation for a different day. But thinking about you know, assessment, right, Like, here's the thing that we do. We splash survivor stories in the media. We're because we're trying to get you to feel so that you are then motivated to take action for change. Okay, if that is our experiment, let us look at the results. Is it working? You know? I was thinking the other day like, do you know what we need? Is we need whoever was in charge of that campaign back in the eighties, for like cutting apart the plastics six pat containers so that sea turtles don't get tangled in them? Like I can't seriously, if I see a plastic six pat container on the ground, I will pick it up and put it in my pocket to cut it apart at home. Because that campaign worked, wonders right, So like I feel like, hmm, maybe we should run some different experiments on how how we get people to care so that change can happen. And this is of course true across a whole bunch of issues that are like constantly unfolding all over the place. And and this is like, this is you know, like the pull one dark string in the whole world snaps into place. Thing we started out talking about working with dogs, and how like pulling the dog card, talking about dogs makes a conversation about cadaver searches and recovery searches approachable for people because dogs are a great thing that you know, a lot of people love and are interested in and have in common, and there's a fascination. And this is how we get into this. And then we've gone through so much territory around distance and nuance, and this work is not sexy. This work is not flashy, and it means something very specifically to a very specific group of people whose names you will never know, and whose intimate daily lives you will never know. And this is true just for so much of life, Yes, so much going on underneath the surface that we just don't think about. That's so beautifully said. And I think those of us who right like as you do and as I do, and how writing is something that we do to help make sense of the world, to make sense of things. Sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm feeling about something until I can articulate it in writing, Right, I learned what it is. I think it feels sometimes just so difficult because we want stories to make a difference, right, That's why I mean making meaning through stories is what we use humans do. And yet we look at all of these kinds of ways that we tell stories and it's so deeply worrying, right, because so many of the stories that we're telling in this culture not only are not helping, they're actually contributing to a kind of deadening of things, of caring of right that we it is just part of the stories get reduced to formulas. Yeah, Like the way that we deal with with all of the nuance and all of the complexity is by trying to make a neat and tidy story out of it to serve that machinery that needs a neat and tidy story. And what we've been talking about this whole time is like, how does that complexity make you curious? How does that complexity make you look at the detail, make you look at the way that the sunlight comes through those trees? Yes, while your dog is searching for somebody who's missing. What is that complexity make you wonder about the story behind the flashy headline or those people whose stories don't make it to the true crime podcast, Like, can we use the complexity to lean into connection and curiosity instead of searching for that next dopamine hit of a a sexy, dramatic headline. I think this is a really interesting point to to come to as we sort of wind down here. Is there's no such thing as a simple story, and we aren't really built to absorb not only every terrible thing, but every beautiful thing all at once. Right, Like you you have to, I mean this comes this is this is a great tie in here for search dogs, right is, like you have to be able to filter out what is not important in this moment in order to really serve what is important in this moment. And by its very nature that means that some very important things are not your piece of the puzzle. Yes, like with the six pack plastic rings, where you can make a small but appreciable difference. It's a beautiful thing. This is the horrible and cliche you know, it is better to light one small candle, right you know which I hate that saying. And yet and yet yeah, I come back to it. Right is that there are these little candles here and there that I think make us hopeful. Yeah, that there is is hope in choosing this one small thing, right, But yeah, I think I think like we can't. We can never get away from the complexity, and we can also choose which part of that monstrous, beautiful, terrible complexity is ours, and that there is hope in that somehow. Yeah, I think that's a really beautiful place for us to end our time here together. Cat, thanks so much for being here. We're going to put a link to your website and your book in the show notes. I think we have a few articles about your recent work too, will put those in there. Stay tuned, everybody. I'll be right back with your questions to carry with you after this break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. You know what really struck me in my conversation with Cat was her insight into boundaries. If you know me, you know the boundaries are always my my favorite thing. But I love how she said it's not cool for her to show her grief for the person or show her grief to the families related to the person that she's searching for. That being affected personally by the job at hand would be as she said, inhabiting a grief that isn't hers and that that is disrespectful. I think that kind of sums up for me my aversion to the dramatization of other people's tragedies. You know that there's comfort we can provide by being calm, clear participants, doing our job and doing it well, but not putting our own emotions into the mix, and not letting our voyeurism, our curiosity violate our own boundaries of respect and kindness. I love that. I also really appreciated how she said, but that when her father died, it was really hard to maintain that respectful distance from other people's grief. That is such a big one everybody. Now, you might have noticed that I didn't ask Cat what hope looks like for her in this show, but I did. I did actually ask her what hope looks like for her in our conversation. Her answer, though, brought us into a long conversation about her work looking for abandoned black and Indigenous burial grounds. It's an important and fascinating conversation, so we pulled that part of our conversation into a bonus episode. We didn't want to leave it out, but It also made today's episode just extra extra long, So look for that bonus episode coming out this week and let me know what parts of today's conversation stuck with you. What made you think about your own life or the media you consume, or maybe just the coolness of the natural world and how rad dogs are. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you found something to hold onto. If you it, I want to hear about it. Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show and leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts. Be sure to tag us in your conversation starting posts on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here after Pod on all the platforms. That's how we'll find you and we love to see where this show takes you. Also, please remember to subscribe and leave a review and tell your friends about the show. That helps more than you could ever know. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming conversations with interesting people about difficult things, give us a call at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find the number in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c OH. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, everyday life is full of grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or accidentally dismissive statements is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical and social media support from Micah, Edited by Houston Tilly, Music provided by Wave Crush, and today's background noise provided by Luna and the wee little birds nesting in the lemon tree outside my window.

I love working with dogs. They make my heart sing when they're doing good work. And it's not true that we always sit deep in grief when you know what I'm working on these cases, These aren't my death. These deaths belong to somebody else and my somehow, showing empathy or taking on that heartbreak is both counterproductive, but it's also kind of inhabiting something that's not mine to inhabit. This is Here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week on Hereafter, we are talking real true crime logistics with search dog expert Cat Warren. If you have ever wondered what a real crime scene search is like, or maybe a friend or a family member has been the subject of one of those searches, you're really going to appreciate what this week's guest has to say. All coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a license mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, so you have probably seen it or heard it described dramatizations of search dogs running through the woods, noses to the ground, looking for a missing person or for human remains. We've got a weird fascination with this stuff. In the media are obsession with true crime and with horror, real and imagined. Personally, I have never gotten into that true crime obsession thing. I can't not think out side the dramatized storyline, you know, like that's somebody's person who died or went missing, and we're just like casually consuming it with popcorn and ad breaks. Anyway, there is something fascinating about search dogs, though I am absolutely on team curious about dog searches. I first encountered Cat Warren when she moderated a panel on pet loss from the Collective for Radical Death Studies, which is a super cool organization I will link in show notes. I wasn't part of the panel myself, but my friend told me that I had to meet Cat. Her work combines so many things that I'm personally interested in, dogs and nature and puzzles, and of course that weird aversion fascination dance thing we have going on with death. Cat Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows sent Science and The Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World. The book tells the story of her work alongside her young German shepherd, working together as a cadaver dog team to find the missing and the dead. Now content note here there are no graphic details in this episode, so you don't need to worry about that that we are obviously talking about death Cat. Welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here. Your work, both what you've done over the last fifteen and twenty years and what you're doing now is like the intersection of so many things that I'm into. You've got dogs, you've got solving puzzles, you've got journalism, you've got being out in nature, you've got history, and you have death. Right, Like if that would be a fascinating remix, but like that last one is kind of a weird calling card, right, yes, And you know that question of like cock kill parties and people ask what you do or it comes up and then you know one of two reactions either fascination, right, that can sometimes feel a little yellow media right, yellow journalism this kind of gruesome fast, or the flip side is just discussed and the why would you ever do that? I'm super curious about this. So when you're out of social gathering and somebody says, what what are you into? What are you into? Cat? What do you say so saying that one of my applications is searching for them missing and presumed dead, right, using the dog. And I think that I would say that two thirds of the people are sort of deeply interested, right, And I think it's partly Mayking. We're sort of that issue of dogs are an entree into so many things. The can be really difficult conversations and dogs can bridge so many of those gaps. And I keep finding that that, even when I think that people have a completely unrealistic notion of what dogs can actually do or how big a role they play in this mosaic, this complicated mosaic of of trying to find somebody who's who's gone, you still can have that conversation because if people like dogs, then they want to know more. It's almost like it makes it safe, safer territory. It does, I think it does. And what was interesting with writing the book was that there was a tiny portion of the audience who were deeply disappointed that the book wasn't completely filled with adventure stories and my talking about actual cases, right, that it wasn't a combination of true crime and dog hero and that the sort of the science and the history and even the memoir aspect, right, we're shunt to decide. But there were so many people where realizing that the dogs are just one section of this bigger piece of the world. Those people appreciated it. It's interesting that I remember reading that in the book and also some of the articles where you're talking about the book that like people, I guess the term that I usually use as trauma tire kicking, right, there's a sort of rubber necking. If you're at a an event or at the grocery store and somebody's making small talk and you say, I look for the missing and presumed dead using a dog, there is either initial or immediate fascination or immediate repulsion and changing the subject and walking away from you. But often that fascination is that sort of true crime. Give me all the details. I wonder if people are interested in listening to this particular episode because they're like, oh, I want to hear all about this. But at the same time, I know my audience, So like, can we can we talk about that weird thing where you do something that is very interesting two people who find search and rescue and recovery and dogs really interesting. There is this really fertile ground of fascination. But it's also the act of doing search and recovery is very intimate. It is, so how do we navigate that fascination and intimacy? I think it's really difficult. I was with a trainer yesterday because she actually trains service dogs for service people with PTSD. So one of the things as we were sort of standing there figuring out how to best work with the dogs and these two new wonderful handlers who are going to have these dogs in their lives. And I was talking about that all the times when media would say, well, what I want to do is come out on your next search, and Lucy, who has been in this world as well, that that sense of no, actually that is just so terribly invasive. It is so terribly invasive, and it's very easy to explain to the media, you know, this is a criminal case. We're not able to have you do this. We won't let you know afterwards how the search turned out. Right, there's that, which is in some ways, you know, the media is used to that. But going into a reading and inevitably people want to know how many bodies solo found, and it's it's sort of like like a numbers game, right, And in a way it is that I understand it from the point of view of people's exposure to this kind of thing is mostly through media and through movies and through fiction, and in a sense saying to that person, it's a lot more complicated. Right, Nine out of ten times you don't find somebody when you're going out on a search, what you're doing is clearing the areas where family or law enforcement I think they might be, right, And all those places are imagined places of horror for the family, right where they are in their minds eye thinking about these places, right, the creek that get high during flood and it's flooded, and all those places are in some ways just as important, right, even when you don't find that person. But that's not very dramatic, right, It's clearing land in a way, And I think all the people who do this find that it's really important and really central, right. And I think that afterwards when we talk about if we find somebody, or if somebody else finds somebody and you are on the search, the very first thing you do in a panic is you go to your computer and you look at your maps, and you look at the site where the person was finally located, and you breathe a sigh of relief that you were nowhere near that spot and you couldn't have missed finding that person. Right. So these are the things to me that it doesn't sound very dramatic, but it's it's the stuff that makes your heart pound because sometimes you're talking about years of people not having resolution. Did I answer that question, Megan? You did? You answered it beautifully because we started out talking about for people who are sort of surface level fascinated with the idea of cadaver searches, which is the proper term for it, but you're looking for somebody who is dead or presumed dead. This sort of proliferation of true crime podcast which I really don't understand, but like whatever you like, what you like, but there's this sort of surface fascination with it, Like we like to flirt with the idea of death and drama, but we really don't want to talk about it if it's our own right. This is actually a complaint. This is a complaint that I hear from a lot of grieving people that y'all are so interested in true crime podcasts, but my person was killed in a drive by shooting or some other act of violence, and you won't even talk to me, right, So we it's like a safe distance allows us to enter into the sphere of death but keeps us far enough away from it that we don't need to enter into any feeling of grief. That's exactly correct. It's exactly correct. And I think too that in a sense, since people have no realistic notion, these are always things that get resolved in forty five minutes plus fifteen minutes of commercial right. So the idea that these cases can drag on for years or that nationwide, I think nationwide, the figures are like sixty people missing and presume dead by law enforcement. I mean, the missing are just like all over the United States. And in many cases those deaths, they're never going to make a podcast because I hate to say that they're mundane, right, But it's actually sadly true that most crime is just kind of stupid and brutal and predictable, right, And that doesn't make for great television or crime novels. Right, we don't write about those things or see those things. And so I think that people imagine, I mean, they sort of fill in what this stuff might look like, when in some ways it is. It's retracing steps. So what I hear you saying here is that the mundane details, the small details, the relentless details, the search to connect the dots and look for someone who is missing is not sexy. If you wrote out all of the details involved in a search and the end of a person's life and what happens next, most of the work would get edited out. Yes, yes, right, these mundane details, like if we move away from death just for a second. But like, these mundane details are what life is made of. Our lives are made up of the little things, right, All our lives are made up of those little things. And so to me, it's those learning how to be part of that and fitting me and a dog into that picture. Right, we talk about the fact that you know, loving to dogs and nature and and these things can still sound pretty dramatic, But in a way, it's that it was so easy to fit, to fit me and him into that without being like a huge rock thrown into a pond, right, it was just a little space for us to come in. So two things about this one one that I don't want to forget. You had started out by saying, you know, dogs are the bridge into what can be very uncomfortable territory. And I kind of wonder if our need for drama, our need for a big splashy rescue or discovery, is also a way that we look for a bridge into this stuff, like a way to tell ourselves that even though the person is dead, for whatever reason, the bad guys were caught, the reason was found. There is resolution, There is closure. I noticed that when you were talking about the completion of a search that you used the word resolution and not closure, And that is such an important distinction. People never get closure on this. Families never get closure. I mean, that just doesn't happen. Our entire culture is built on this extraordinary need for both resolution and closure, and we see it every day when we read accounts where there's a murder and a suicide. Right, so he basically shoots for and then shoots himself. And the very first question that people ask is what was the motive? Right? And I absolutely no longer understand why we are still somehow searching for motive in violence. Right, that that somehow if we understand that there was a motive i e. A rational reason for this explosion of violence, then once again we can sort of distance ourselves because it's not random, right, It's very targeted. And if we think about how people talk about these mass shootings, which are so deeply, deeply random, right, and they scare people, and instead of thinking about gun regulation and you know, sort of truly addressing this, what we all do is trying to figure out how we are different than the victims, or how that person who did that act had a motive as a disgruntled employee or whatever it was, right, And and then we can kind of we can move on because it really is too scary to look at the things that happened suddenly and without explanation, because that's mostly what happens. Yeah, it gives us a chance to say, not me, right, this is so cool because I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to get people to understand that not feeling intense emotions like grief is one of the driving forces of especially Western culture. But but a lot of a lot of the things we think of as normal or more normative are really like trying to escape big feeling, right, our fascination with violence in fiction, right in movies, in storylines like it, lets play out things in a way that lets us like I don't I mean, I don't even know where I want to go with us, because I know a lot of people have done some really raising work on you know, our our need for violence and entertainment and blah blah blah, all of this stuff. But there really is something about can you make this story, this news story, this random event that in some ways the perpetrators are very predictable. Can you package that in such a way that makes me feel safe and makes me feel like my people are safe and if they can't be safe, can you make it all turn out okay in the end anyway? And it is? It is so we do. It's what we do as a culture. I mean, I do it with my husband late at night, right when I am just in despair. I'll just say to him, tell me it's all going to be okay, Just tell me right. And I'm like a child because I am in a childish state. I'm like a child saying, let me know that the end is going to be great, when, of course the question asked by me is because I know it won't necessarily be all right in the end, right. And this can be from mundane things to you know, I mean climate change, like global warming, when it's absolutely silly of me to say, tell me it's going to be okay. And there's nothing wrong with needing stability and needing to know that there is a path forward. So when I sort of rant about our insistence on a happy ending or on resolution so that we can like you know, been there, dusted that where you know everything is good, like needing to feel safe and stable is not the same thing as things working out okay, right, Like where do we find a stability and a safety knowing that she does not always work out okay? And what I hear you saying is that one of the things that your career in journalism and your work on endless searches with detectives and historians and being out there in the field in that minutia of someone's life has shown you that you can't believe in a happy ending, that there is no resolution or no no tidy bow. And where do we find safety, connection, beauty, joy, interest, fascination, knowing all of those things that you know. It's something that I've been thinking a lot about recently and also talking with friends, partly because of our age. I'm sixty six and really thinking about this sort of this last section of my life. Should should I be so lucky? And I think that for me, finding small resolutions is what brings joy. And also, you know, people will ask this question, how can you possibly do this work? What? You know? What an amazing contribution that you're helping the community, right, And I have to laugh because it's actually pretty selfish. Right. The whole time I was doing it, I was very aware of the fact that I got great joy out of working a dog out in sometimes grim circumstances. And it's never the case that these searches are upbeat. They aren't ever, but there are these upbeat moments. There are these moments when the dog is just doing his best work, or there's some comic relief or something happens where you just stop and appreciate the things that are happening. Right. It simply should not exist, but it does because there are these moments of real grace in all of this work right, and it is self centered in a way where I can't say I'm sorry. I can't pretend that I'm out there to help the community or to let people bring closure. I'm out there because it's hugely engaging. It is hugely challenging. I love working with dogs. They make my heart sing when they're doing good work. And it's not true that we always sit deep in grief when you know, when I'm working on these cases, these aren't my depth. These deaths belong to somebody else and my somehow, showing empathy or taking on that heartbreak is both counterproductive, but it's also kind of inhabiting something that's not mine to inhabit. And so I don't know. This is a very roundabout way of saying that doing this kind of work, that you are always thinking about death and violence at times, but you are not doing this out of a sense of heroism or the need to contribute to the community. I'm also doing it because, first of all, because I can do it, so I'm fortunate that way, and because that part killer skill set is something that feels really like a super good fit for me. Yeah, that there is joy in the work and satisfaction in the work, knowing that the work sits inside somebody else's heartbreak. That is a nuance that people on the outside don't always understand. I think we have such a such a deeply ingrained hero thing where like I want to be the one, like I'm in there bringing closure to the fact, like you know, I'm the one who did this, and so so much of this is like one not about you and also aided by you, which is a really interesting, nuanced, complex place to live. I love that you said, and it will be more specific when when I go back and listen. But you said something about like I'm in this, but I don't inhabit it right, Like I'm in this, I am one piece of this person's life and the connections and the families and the lack of families and the web that they lived in. I am one tiny piece in this, and I may be an important part of this, but this is not about me, and it's not about the dog, right. I mean, I will say that one of the things I write about and it was so incredibly hard to write about. And I know how you feel about this having written it's okay that you're not okay, but writing about my father's death, which happened right at the beginning of my becoming very serious about this work and his cancer diagnosis, and then sort of seven weeks later he was gone, and the degree to which I really I had to stop training solo during that time period. It was too hard. There was such an overlap. But between my own grief about Dad and the kind of details about doing cadaver searches that made it temporarily not a good fit at all, it made me even more aware, if that makes sense, going forward, what grief feels like from people who are experiencing it when their loved one is missing, versus my role in any of that. Right, It just it was just so crystal clear another lesson from my father. What I just heard you say was such a good a good example of something that I feel like we've been talking about but also I talk about quite a bit, which is like when you are newly ripped open when a death or another kind of loss has entered into your life, it's like you you have no buffer zone, and you're suddenly alive and alert to all of the pain in the world. Right there's there's no distance possible anymore so going into experiencing your dad's death and feeling all of those emotions. Going back out into the field made you that acutely aware of oh my gosh, grieving people are all around me, right, and feeling even a tiny corner of what somebody else feels is really one of the reasons that we shut down in the face of other people's pain and suffering, right, because those are very big feelings and they're too big, and there's not enough contest and not enough of a container. And you were able to step back from doing cadaver work with solo because you knew that you couldn't have that. What did you say in the book? You said something like, um, disinterested but not uninterested, right, that there is a professional distance that you need to have to be able to do this work, and when you are deep in your own emotions, that distance is impossible, yes, yes, to maintain no. And and this is I mean in therapy we have that term transference, right, And there was a time when the overlap was so great that I couldn't countenance it. And you know, to just give an example, this is just a really concrete example, you know, training with teeth and looking at those teeth and not being able to see those teeth is simply teeth. Those teeth were a part of my father. Right. As much as my mind didn't want to do that, as much as my rational mind said there's no connection, it was just so clear. It's like, no, I'm not going to get a lot done there. Yeah, there's something very visceral about grief, right, And even if we took out the cadaver search part of it. I remember when Matt ide and if I went to a yoga class and the instructor was like, focus on your breath, all I could think of was, Matt has no breath anymore, and he never will again. There's something about the visceral nature of bodies and death that there doesn't have to be a quote unquote logical connection. Right. You're talking about doing teeth work with training your dog and looking at teeth and thinking about bodies, thinking about my father, right, this this is what the emotional body does, right, And and to be able to recognize that, and to be able to take a step back and say, actually, I can't show up in the ways that I need to show up. And I also love that you brought in here is another facet of how I understand my work because having had this experience. I don't know what it's like to be a family member who was waiting for search and recovery teams to find my person, But I know what intense loss has felt like to me, and I can sort of bow in respect too how much I don't know about what it's like for this family. In the introduction, you're you know, the we were talking about how when you would say what you do and people would be like, Ah, isn't that terrible? And isn't that depressing? And I was thinking about this while you were describing sort of being a cog in the machine of a search, right, And you say, sure, some of it is dark, but gradations of light filter through. There's tragedy, there's incompetence and cruelty. Those things are all part of it, but they don't shine what occupies the most brain space or the other humans and the dogs. Basically what you're talking about. They are the communities of people and animals who have come together to look for clues for this singular mystery. Yes, there is something very beautiful and heartening set inside a truly horrible experience for those who are intimately affected. And I think we have that, you know, we have this binary so deeply embedded in us that it can't be both things. It can't be a beautiful moment of dogs and humans working together at things they are very very good at at the same time that it is a truly horrible thing for the people whose person you're looking for. It reminds me of, you know, when Matt disappeared into the river. We had, you know, there were search teams, there were helicopters and divers, and I remember the moment when it when it shifted from rescue to recovery. I remember that I knew what that meant, and I remember the individual humans. I remember marveling at the fact that divers were going into that water that took Matt and nearly took me and nearly took our dog, right that there were people who chose to do that every day. I remember marveling at, and not in a good way, the journalists who were up on the bridge zooming in on me and filming me, which I didn't I didn't realize because I was, you know, occupied. But there was somebody who was like a volunteer with the fire department. She came to me, and she said, you know, normally, she pointed at the news crew and she said, normally, I help those people get as close to the victims quote unquote victims. I helped them get as close to them as possible. But I can't do that today, and I don't know that I'm ever going to be able to do that again. You know, you and I have been talking about the disconnected is the wrong word, but the distanced beauty and joy and connection that happens when you are doing this kind of work for a living or as a volunteer, That community that gets built, and that pleasure in seeing humans and dogs do things that they're very very good at, the people whose tragedy that is we notice, We notice the skill, we notice the community. And speaking only for myself here, I noticed and was thankful for the distance. This brings back a memory and it had happened I think more than once when I was a journalist. But this is still sort of painful to me. But I was at the Hartford Current and I was on the site of a collapse of of a two twin buildings plaza that we're using lifts slack construction, and because one of the pumps gave out on the corner. Everything twisted and collapsed, and workers that weren't blown free from the sides were inside just the s right. And of course I was there as a journalist, and I was tasked to talk to the big victims families as they're waiting two have their loved ones brought out. Since I'm no longer a journalist, I lied to the editors. I didn't approach anybody. It's sort of like now. I did approach some of the investigators, who are already hugely frustrated, what with What they thought was why we're workers still inside that building while they were lifting these labs of concrete? Right? Why was anybody there? But in a sense, this this ethical issue of how close what's the right of people, right, what's the right of journalists to intrude on a private grief? Or when does a private grief become public? When is that? And it's it's such a thorny question, Megan, But in cases like this, this is what people seem to want access to with true crime podcasts, right, this is a way for them to access that, and it just it kind of makes me ill to think about that role. I remember working a scene that was so high profile that there was a picture of Solo searching along the end of the log and it was you know, and they ran it and it was you know, it was this huge picture. And I was amused in that case, first of all because this was not my tragedy. I was doing the search, but also because they sort of made up the hotline about you know, the dogs are along the log when he had actually finished the search and he was looking for a place to lift his leg. Here's your story, your story. His dog searched a long and hard and really needed a place to pee. And all of this is connected right with what we get as a news bite. Is sometimes, as with the case of the photo of Solo looking for a place to pee, like it's very curated for a very specific emotional aim, and it's not even a corner of the whole story, and it's you know, it's it's hard because you've got like the way that our brains work as relational mammals is that we need to feel something for an issue in order to care enough about it in order to agitate for change or bring attention to it. Like we have to have our emotional circuits firing in order to care, and what journalism and media and and other things do is like sort of bastardize that into just like this this drama junkie thing, right, and we don't. I mean, part of part of the cascading horrors of now is that we don't have time to feel any of these things before the next horror happened. So one of the episodes this season, actually the first episode of the season, is with Nolbe Marquez Green, whose daughter was killed at Sandy Hook, and we talked a lot about you know, she works with survivors, but also what we demand of survivors in order to make public space spaces safer, make schools safer, like to stop you know, random public shootings and gun control. She's like, who do we destroy in the service of our goals? Yeah, it's astonishing how much we suck from people who are using all their resources just to get from day to day, and it somehow becomes their responsibility so that we can do our public mourning. And if we do our public mourning properly with all of this in place, then change can happen. Right. That that's somehow is going to be. That's the chain of events that needs to happen over and over and over, and yet it doesn't in some of these cases. This is a really good conversation for a different day. But thinking about you know, assessment, right, Like, here's the thing that we do. We splash survivor stories in the media. We're because we're trying to get you to feel so that you are then motivated to take action for change. Okay, if that is our experiment, let us look at the results. Is it working? You know? I was thinking the other day like, do you know what we need? Is we need whoever was in charge of that campaign back in the eighties, for like cutting apart the plastics six pat containers so that sea turtles don't get tangled in them? Like I can't seriously, if I see a plastic six pat container on the ground, I will pick it up and put it in my pocket to cut it apart at home. Because that campaign worked, wonders right, So like I feel like, hmm, maybe we should run some different experiments on how how we get people to care so that change can happen. And this is of course true across a whole bunch of issues that are like constantly unfolding all over the place. And and this is like, this is you know, like the pull one dark string in the whole world snaps into place. Thing we started out talking about working with dogs, and how like pulling the dog card, talking about dogs makes a conversation about cadaver searches and recovery searches approachable for people because dogs are a great thing that you know, a lot of people love and are interested in and have in common, and there's a fascination. And this is how we get into this. And then we've gone through so much territory around distance and nuance, and this work is not sexy. This work is not flashy, and it means something very specifically to a very specific group of people whose names you will never know, and whose intimate daily lives you will never know. And this is true just for so much of life, Yes, so much going on underneath the surface that we just don't think about. That's so beautifully said. And I think those of us who right like as you do and as I do, and how writing is something that we do to help make sense of the world, to make sense of things. Sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm feeling about something until I can articulate it in writing, Right, I learned what it is. I think it feels sometimes just so difficult because we want stories to make a difference, right, That's why I mean making meaning through stories is what we use humans do. And yet we look at all of these kinds of ways that we tell stories and it's so deeply worrying, right, because so many of the stories that we're telling in this culture not only are not helping, they're actually contributing to a kind of deadening of things, of caring of right that we it is just part of the stories get reduced to formulas. Yeah, Like the way that we deal with with all of the nuance and all of the complexity is by trying to make a neat and tidy story out of it to serve that machinery that needs a neat and tidy story. And what we've been talking about this whole time is like, how does that complexity make you curious? How does that complexity make you look at the detail, make you look at the way that the sunlight comes through those trees? Yes, while your dog is searching for somebody who's missing. What is that complexity make you wonder about the story behind the flashy headline or those people whose stories don't make it to the true crime podcast, Like, can we use the complexity to lean into connection and curiosity instead of searching for that next dopamine hit of a a sexy, dramatic headline. I think this is a really interesting point to to come to as we sort of wind down here. Is there's no such thing as a simple story, and we aren't really built to absorb not only every terrible thing, but every beautiful thing all at once. Right, Like you you have to, I mean this comes this is this is a great tie in here for search dogs, right is, like you have to be able to filter out what is not important in this moment in order to really serve what is important in this moment. And by its very nature that means that some very important things are not your piece of the puzzle. Yes, like with the six pack plastic rings, where you can make a small but appreciable difference. It's a beautiful thing. This is the horrible and cliche you know, it is better to light one small candle, right you know which I hate that saying. And yet and yet yeah, I come back to it. Right is that there are these little candles here and there that I think make us hopeful. Yeah, that there is is hope in choosing this one small thing, right, But yeah, I think I think like we can't. We can never get away from the complexity, and we can also choose which part of that monstrous, beautiful, terrible complexity is ours, and that there is hope in that somehow. Yeah, I think that's a really beautiful place for us to end our time here together. Cat, thanks so much for being here. We're going to put a link to your website and your book in the show notes. I think we have a few articles about your recent work too, will put those in there. Stay tuned, everybody. I'll be right back with your questions to carry with you after this break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. You know what really struck me in my conversation with Cat was her insight into boundaries. If you know me, you know the boundaries are always my my favorite thing. But I love how she said it's not cool for her to show her grief for the person or show her grief to the families related to the person that she's searching for. That being affected personally by the job at hand would be as she said, inhabiting a grief that isn't hers and that that is disrespectful. I think that kind of sums up for me my aversion to the dramatization of other people's tragedies. You know that there's comfort we can provide by being calm, clear participants, doing our job and doing it well, but not putting our own emotions into the mix, and not letting our voyeurism, our curiosity violate our own boundaries of respect and kindness. I love that. I also really appreciated how she said, but that when her father died, it was really hard to maintain that respectful distance from other people's grief. That is such a big one everybody. Now, you might have noticed that I didn't ask Cat what hope looks like for her in this show, but I did. I did actually ask her what hope looks like for her in our conversation. Her answer, though, brought us into a long conversation about her work looking for abandoned black and Indigenous burial grounds. It's an important and fascinating conversation, so we pulled that part of our conversation into a bonus episode. We didn't want to leave it out, but It also made today's episode just extra extra long, So look for that bonus episode coming out this week and let me know what parts of today's conversation stuck with you. What made you think about your own life or the media you consume, or maybe just the coolness of the natural world and how rad dogs are. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you found something to hold onto. If you it, I want to hear about it. Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show and leave your thoughts in the comments on those posts. Be sure to tag us in your conversation starting posts on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here after Pod on all the platforms. That's how we'll find you and we love to see where this show takes you. Also, please remember to subscribe and leave a review and tell your friends about the show. That helps more than you could ever know. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming conversations with interesting people about difficult things, give us a call at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find the number in the show notes or visit Megan Divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c OH. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. Want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, everyday life is full of grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or accidentally dismissive statements is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical and social media support from Micah, Edited by Houston Tilly, Music provided by Wave Crush, and today's background noise provided by Luna and the wee little birds nesting in the lemon tree outside my window.