Sometimes Loss Is Freedom: A Conversation with Rebecca Woolf

Published Mar 27, 2023, 7:00 AM

We’re on break, creating all new episodes for season 3. In the meantime, here’s one of our favorite episodes from the past year. See you soon.

 

What if you were just about to get divorced, but your partner gets sick? Like really sick? Rebecca Woolf was just about to leave an unhappy marriage when her husband got sick and died. What followed was a crash course in performative grief, and the dismantling of one life in order to build the next. In this episode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions (both internal and external), and personal agency - it’s QUITE the conversation. Sensitivity note: this episode contains the F word, and references sex. 



In this episode we cover: 

  • The conventions of marriage and grief that trap people in inauthentic versions of themselves
  • How you can love someone AND be relieved they’re dead
  • Why everyone has an opinion about how soon is too soon to date, have sex, or otherwise live your life after someone dies
  • Grieving the time you lost living someone else’s life
  • Building your own “house of hope,” according to your own desires

 

About our guest:

Rebecca Woolf has worked as a writer since her teens - it’s the way she understands both herself and the world. Her essays have appeared on Refinery29, HuffPost, Parenting, and more. She currently authors the bi-weekly column Sex & the Single Mom on romper.com. Her latest book, All of This: a Memoir of Death and Desire, hits the shelves last month. 

 

Find her on IG @rebeccawooolf (with three o’s) and at rebeccawoolf.com

 

Additional resources

It can be hard to find information about grieving the loss of a complicated relationship (an abusive parent, or an estranged partner, for example). Check out this post on grieving people you didn’t always like

 

Get in touch:

 

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with everyone you know. Talking about difficult things gets easier with practice, and that’s why we’re here. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right. 

 

Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? Visit megandevine.co to get in touch.

 

For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.megandevine.co

 

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Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A sessions. All the info at this link. 

 

Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You’re Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed.

I think when you go through a traumatic experience, you kind of I mean, at least for me, like when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my of my sort of afterlife came from realizing too, like how finite it all is and how fast he went from being a healthy person to a sick person. And that could happen to me too, It could happen to anybody. 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. And it might seem like a weird thing to say, but I really enjoy interesting conversations about difficult things. Real talk about the hard parts of being human is what makes us human. Hereafter is the show where everyone is allowed to talk about what's real, the good, the bad, the joyful, and the horrible, all in the service of a more hopeful and connected world. This week on Hereafter, my guest is author and advice columnist Rebecca will Her new book All of This explores what actually happens when the person you were going to divorce get sick and eyes settle in. Everybody, this is a really wild conversation. We'll be right back after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in each and every episode, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professionals supervision related to your work. And one more note hereafter with Megan. Divine is currently on break between seasons. We'll be back before you know it with a whole new season with even more incredible guests. In the meantime, here's one of our most loved episodes, We'll see you soon. Hey, okay, so listen. What do you do when you're just about to get divorced but your partner gets sick? After years and years of conflict and abuse, Rebecca Wolf was ready to divorce her husband Hal. They'd already talked about it, they agreed to it, and the only thing left was the leaving. And then Hal got sick, like really sick, like very soon to be dying kind of sick, and Rebecca was thrown into the position of caregiver and caretaker for the man she had been excited to leave behind. What followed was a crash course in performative grief and the dismantling of one life in order to build the next. In this episode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions, and personal agency. It is quite the conversation I told you, Rebecca, is a lot of fun too, if we can say that about a conversation where we also discuss terrible things. Honestly, this episode really opens up the doors to how complex human relationships are, how desire and grief and liberation can all be intertwined. As something we don't talk about very often, but sometimes your own personal freedom comes as a result of something bad happening. Now you know me, everybody, there will not be a pretty bow stuck on death, no transformation narrative where it all worked out for the best. But just listen to this show. Content notes. This episode explores sex and sexuality, and it definitely includes more than a fair amount of swearing. Let's get into it, Rebecca. It is so good to have you here now. I was reading through a lot of your work yesterday to get ready for our conversation today, and there was this one line that actually stopped me. You wrote it felt a bit like the dreams I sometimes have where after years of living in the same house, I discover another room that had been there all along. Now that particular line is from an essay on Refinery twenty nine on Queerness, which we will link in the show notes. But I have those like mysterious room dream all the time, and I was reading it and I was like, oh my god, somebody else has those dreams. Like, so, friends, if you don't know where we're talking about, like you have a dream you're in a house that usually you recognize, or at least often I recognize, and then there's a door and it goes into this whole room or sometimes for me, an entire wing that opens up. It's usually very elaborate. Yeah, yeah, I love to have those dreams too, because it's that's probably like the since I was a young person, the most like that has been the most recurring dream I've had. And it's so awesome, Like it's such a great dream. It's like this idea that we have that they're so much more that we're not aware of it, Like that's going on inside of us and in art, like in all the inner cracks and crevices, like there's stuff lurking there and that we have no idea what's coming and what even exists in our space, Like yeah, yeah, I mean it's that's life, right, Like there are dreams you don't know, are rooms that you don't know were there. There are rooms that you wish you never had to go into. There are rooms that you spend a lifetime trying to get out of. I think for me, in those dreams, I don't recall any of them feeling uncomfortable. More of the like, holy crap, this was in my house right this bathrooms that have waterfalls in them, or like this this, Oh my gosh, it's been here all along, and like for me, the one I had recently was like, oh my god, my kids have been sharing a room and they could have had their own room, or like I could have had my own office. Like all along there was a space and I've been you know, I've been unable to take advantage of it, to use it. And there's like this sadness so like I've missed out on years of of taking advantage of the space that I didn't know was there. Which is a really great place to start a conversation today, right, like can you talk a little bit about the rooms that you find yourself in now? Yeah, I mean I think really it was more of finding a new room after how died and more like understanding what I could do with all the rooms I already had. And actually, it's funny because I just was thinking about this yesterday because I was I was answering some questions for someone else, and there was a question about cheating and affairs, And as I was writing about what my feelings are now like in retrospect about having affairs in my marriage, it occurred to me that the affairs themselves were mundane in comparison to the fact that my entire marriage was really built on performants and lies. And in every capacity I was lying to him, I was lying to myself. I was trying to fit inside a room right that did not feel comfortable for me. I was trying to figure out how to decorate that room with shit that I didn't like. I think for me like coming out the other side of that, I know what I want now, and I'm not willing to take the things that I think that I need and fill the rooms that I have been uncomfortable and for years. I think it's like I'm really sort of at a point where I have been for the last few years, where I'm just burning down the house and building a new one, and I'm questioning all of the materials that I used to build the original house, and like, were those even actual materials? Like I don't think they were. Like there was so much to my old life that I think was just me trying to figure out how to just be good and make everyone else happy and do the things that I was supposed to do. And now I'm like, fuck it, like the opposite, Like you want me that, you want me here, I'm going to go over there. You want me to talk about this, I'm going to talk about that. So I think the rooms for me are are still under construction, but they'd look they look very different than the ones that I walked around and before. Yeah, I love that idea of burning the old, burning the old life to the ground. There's a poem which I will also link in this in the show notes about burning the old year, right and just burning that to the ground and letting the smoke of that be your prayers from what's coming next. Yeah, right, And you've had to do that so many times. It's so interesting because and I write about this in my book, Like I the reason we got married was because I got pregnant. Like everything that happened in our relationship was a surprise, right, like surprise you're pregnant, Surprise you're dying. Like there's this this really kind of incredible like full circle aspect to our relationship ship, which was like we were sort of thrown together. You know, we ended we be married because I was pregnant, and we stayed together because he was dying, which is sort of amazing. Like if you think about what, it's very me. It's like I don't I never make plans. It's like things happen and I respond to them. So it's like I got pregnant, I guess I'm going to marry you. You're dying. I guess I'm going to stick this out. Like it's for someone who like feels like I feel like I'm a very active with like person of with agency, like I've actually everything sort of happened to me and it's been very passive in this way that I think for me has has made me feel like I need to sort of exert exert some sort of authority over the situation or some agency over the situation because I'm like, wait, I was going to leave I swear like this whole experience for me has been sort of this wait, but I don't feel like a widow. Wait, But I was miserable well, and I was about to leave, like he left me first. I was going to leave him finally, and I finally got the guts to do it, and I was ready and like I was making plans, and a little bit a part of me was like mad at him because I felt robbed of finally doing the thing that I'd been like psyching myself up to do for so many years. Which sounds crazy, like to be mad at someone for dying, but I think like there's a lot of times when we lose somebody that we do feel anger, and a lot of that comes from, you know, unresolved feelings, unresolved that you know, the things that we we wanted to do or wanted to say, regardless of what they are, even if they were, like even if they were a divorce, Like I was resenting him that he could he died before I was able to get a divorce, Like how could you, Like now I'm a widow, Now I'm I'm stuck with you for life, Like I have to write on all on all my paperwork widowed, right, Like, I'm not a single woman or a divorced woman. I'm widowed. I love that though the complexity, I mean, everything you write is about complexity, right. The Jenny Lawson's review of your book, she described your book as a profound work on the complexities of grief, desire, and being human, which is an awesome blurb for the jacket of your book and also correct. But that complexity of like, I love how you phrase that. I just worked myself up to take my power back for myself and make a decision about my life. And then the bastard got sick. Now, if you all are listening and thinking like you it don't speak ill of the dead. Like we talk about what's true here, right, And this is something that I want to talk about with you. That that experience that you had so before how got sick, you had made the decision to leave. You were feeling empowered around that and like taking your agency and your power back, and then he got his diagnosis. Were there times during that whole illness where you felt like you had to perform as the happy wife? Oh? For sure. I mean I was in survid i a mode for sure. So my priority was like making sure that I was there to be as advocate. Like that's something that I knew I had to do and something that I was very okay with doing. But yeah, like when you're when you're the primary caretaker of someone who's dying, like you're like I wasn't even really able to explore my own feelings as it was happening, because for me, it was like I had to take care of him. I had to go. You know, we're basically living in a hospital for four months. I had to make sure my kids were okay. I wasn't even in a place where I could really you know, my own feelings and were not. I didn't even know what they were yet. I was just like, oh my god, this is happening, Like I have to be I have to be on my a game. And I was like very stoic, and I wasn't emotional in a way that like I'd never been before, Like I cried everything, and I think I was, you know, I was like a little soldier. I was like, you know, doing everything I was supposed to do, doing everything right. You know, there's sort of a relief when you're when you're so when someone's really sick, and your your job is to do sort of all of the like all the medical stuff is very um, it's not emotional. It's like you sit down and you have these meetings with these doctors and you're talking about all the stuff, and it's like, at least for me, like I was kind of relieved to have all this work to do where I didn't have to think about my feelings. Right, it was like I had to make sure that he was taking care and make sure he was okay, talk to the doctors, get him from point A to point B, tests and this is and that, and you know, when you're really busy, you're not necessarily thinking about your feelings. But you know, everyone comes to you and they feel sorry for you and they're so sad and like they are you okay? Are you okay? And like, you know, they get a you know, they had a whole team of social workers who kept you know, who are like we have the social workers free to talk to if you talk to them. And it was like I really didn't. I didn't want to. It wasn't that I didn't need to, because I definitely probably, but I was I was like, I have to keep it. I have to keep it together here because there were so many conflicting feelings that I think. I was like, Nope, I will not engage. I will not acknowledge anyone who's trying to Like, you know, I didn't want anyone to feel sorry for me. I was like, We've just got to get through this. But I knew. I knew that I only had to do it for a certain amount of time. Like I knew that he was going to die soon. His prognosis from the beginning was that he was going to die soon. So for me, knowing that there was an out, knowing that there was an end to it, meant that I could be the wife that he needed at the time. If he were to have gotten a diagnosis where he could live for a year, two years, three years, five years, I could not have been there for him in that way. And I know women right now who are in that position, who are with a dying or a very chronically ill partner, and I don't want to be with them anymore, and doing it because they feel like they need to and have to and it's their job. And I think women take on all the time, you know, the caretaker role to people they don't want to take care of anymore. You know, we raise kids for eighteen years or you know, we're still raising kids and then you're doing it again. And I think it's not just with a partner, but with a parent. And I think when those parents, partners people die, there's a lot of fucking relief and that's absolutely valid, Like it's so valid to feel relieved, and there's really not you know, we don't we don't like leave a lot of rooms to have those conversations in a way that's supportive. It's really fucking hard to take care of a dying person, whether they're dying for a week or a month or a year. You know, it's to me, there's no harder thing that's exhausting. It's it's relentless. Yes, it's relentless. And you know, just as you were saying, like you have I mean, you do have choice in the matter, right, Like you can always say I'm not doing this, but well that's the exactly who's going to do this if I don't do this? So there are all of these impossible decisions and it's like we don't we don't talk about this because there's that sort of puritanical recoil of like you have to do this like if you loved them, you would really do it, like you would do it joyfully and cheerfully. Like this requirement that we do hard things joyfully and cheerfully is so not okay. And I think like when you're talking about like the social workers are coming to me saying, like, let's talk this out about your feelings, and you're like, no, tactical, only tactical only. I wonder what it would have been like if if a social worker or somebody had come to you and said, this seems really complicated. Yeah, do you want to talk about what it's like to be caring for a person you were ready to leave? Yeah? I mean nobody they didn't know that, but yes, And that's but that's the thing's too. It's like the assumption is that this is the love of your life or this is something you know. It's assumed that you're in deep grief or that you're deeply sad that this person is I mean obviously like yes, no one wants it to see anyone in pain exactly. There's that human element of it, right, like for sure you snap into the I am a human caring for another human, and I love them as a human. Yes, the person is a different story, but the human is who I'm showing up for right now. I just I wish that there was a way to scream for that when married couples or if you're coming in taking care of a parent, I wish there was a way to scream for what was the relationship like before you walked in the store. Yeah, because if we have that conversation, then the social workers and the doctors and the palliat of care teams, they know the ground you're starting from, right, and it doesn't cause more suffering for the primary caretaker to be like now I have to pretend that my mother was an abusive for the last forty years of my life, right, which is such a you know, and I think I think probably the nurses, I'm sure pick up on that and the nurses. No, the nurses. The nurses are their nurses are always the ones everyone else I had issues with the whole time. And the nurses were a fucking amazing Like I'm still friends with the nurses that I met when I was there, and they get it. They see it, they see they see the full humanity of their patients, and a lot of patients who were dying are awful, they're so mean. They're in pain, yes, but they're also like there's all sorts of stuff going on and they're so mean, Like they're so mean. So trying to be nice to someone who's so mean to you all the time, Like they get that, and they like, I feel like, you know, they see you, they see you. Yeah, But no, it's complicated, and I would venture to guess that almost always it's complicated that nobody goes into anything without having multiple you know, no one goes into a death without having also a range of feelings, and that can include relief, and I think it often does. When we don't talk about that, we don't allow ourselves to have those feelings, Like we're depriving ourselves of the space of the room, right of this room for us to explore what it is to be a human and what it means to die and to live and to love. And then it isn't just one thing, you know, we like we romanticize love, so like you know, marriage and love and it's like and and and the and happy ending. We want happy endings and we want death to be beautiful and loving and all these things that you know, it's like we've seen too many movies, right, Like there's no trope, Like there's no widow relieved widow trope, like certainly not a slutty widow. I was like, I was actually doing research because I'm doing a column right now on dating as a widow, because it's like, you know, the idea of being a widow who like wants to fuck, especially like soon after the death is like like all the pearls are cletched, like totally. You can't go to like an article or a forum or whatever and not hear people just like it's too soon, Like what a slut, Like it's whoa people work? People get at your misogynia show wing it is yeah wild, how it is wild? And the opinions. I'm sorry, go ahead, Oh no no, it's just like how you're expected to just like just like to be a celibate none, you know, for however many years. It's like I don't know, like what socially acceptable if you how many months? Is that right? I think if you google it because you can then get an answer. I think that it's like you can start dating a year later, like that's okay with like the people to whom though, we've been talking with Rebecca Wolf, author of the new book All of This, a memoir of death and desire. Let's get back into it. It's a really fun show. Here's my question, though. So the week of Matt's funeral, I had probably four or five people come up to me and say, my wish for you is that you get married again as soon as possible, because you're so beautiful and you're so smart, and Matt wouldn't want you to be alone. So we're like, body hasn't even cooled yet. Wow. Right, And then I know a lot of people who have either dated or had hook up soon after their person died, and they get judgment for that, like, you can't win, you can't please people, So do whatever you want, right, Like listen to your own needs and ask yourself, well you need? I love that about you that you're like, Okay, this was not the marriage that I wanted. I was getting ready to leave. I didn't get a chance to leave on my own terms. And then I was forced into the care river role, which I did with love and compassion and humanity because I am a human and there was relief after he died, and now I'm going to do what I want. Right, that's just great summary, thank you. But that's this is the thing, right that all of this, the entire the entire house, with all of its rooms that we've seen and we haven't seen, you get to make choices about what you build and how you inhabit those rooms. And we have to start talking about not only that you have the right to design the rooms you inhabit, but also we have to start talking about what is actually behind all of that judgment. And as you said, pearl clutching and I mean, misogyny is the answer. But yeah, it's also God, I love I love this house analogy, and I'm going to just like keep going with it because we have so little imagination when it comes to how we construct our lives. Right. It's like, there's a kitchen that looks like a kitchen, and a dining room looks like a dining room, and the bedroom looks like this, and this is where you put your this and if it doesn't have a closet that it's not consider a bedroom. And we just go along with this sort of this is what it is, right, and we don't think, like, is it possible to have a bedroom here? To do you like, we we just go along with like the traditional structure of a home and this is what it is. There's so many different ways to have a relationship, to build a life, to raise children, and we just sort of we move into these homes that are pre fab or that have been you know, that have that are designed the way they've always been designed, with the materials that have always been in there, and we just that's what it is. We don't question any of it, right. We bend ourselves to those made environments, right right, Yeah, And then we fill those rooms based on their size and the where the you know, we put our bed based on where the window is. It's like we we really don't or don't they don't get ourselves a space to imagine a different kind of home. It's just the how you know, It's like when you're a kid, you draw the like square with a triangle top and the two windows in the door. No matter what you've grown up in, that is what you draw. Yeah, yeah, it's true. So it's like it's so deep in us to think that this is what it's supposed to look like. And for me, I think I've been doing so many exercises on, Like what am I defaulting to? What am I automatically assuming needs to this needs to look? Like? Oh shit, this isn't what I want. Why am I seeking out something that I don't want? Like like because that's what I think I want? And then I get there and I'm like, wait, I don't want my house to look like a square with a triangle and a little I want it to look different now, like I lived in this square. I don't want that anymore. Yeah, what does that look like? Where do I get the materials? Oh? Shit? Like this is It's like like that's where I'm at. I'm like, how do we question everything? And how do we build new paradigms and how do we find ways to normalize all the different things that we've felt shame about forever? And how do we talk about it in a way that's not like we're not doing it to be provocative. We're just having conversations because this is the way it is. You're being curious about the structures of your life, all of them, all of the things that we don't think about we just sort of take for granted. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that queer couples or same gender couples. Like that was I mean, obviously still in some pockets, but like that was completely disrupting our bedrock ideas of what relationships would look like and what marriage is and all of these things. And we've come made some progress since the fifties some, but that that isn't the revolutionary act that it used to be, right, because those structures have changed because we kicked down those walls right, right, And it takes people being willing to kick down those walls and question those walls. And it's interesting as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about years and years and years ago when I was in private practice before Matt died. I saw a lot of people, a lot of women in their thirties and forties and fifties who were sort of waking up to the things that you're talking about. Like, I live in a life in a house that I didn't really actively choose, and this is not the life that I want. How do I start extricating myself from this life? Right? I think I think it was you. You had you had a post. I think it was you. If it wasn't you, it was somebody normalize seeing divorce as a good thing. That was you, right, Yeah, normalize divorce is good news? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think this is really tricky territory because I'm also going to say sometimes we can normalize death as good news. And it's tricky because we don't want to say someone died so that you could find your self, because life is not a trade like that. In our best vision of reality here you would have been able to leave how and get divorced and learn these things about yourself, and he would get to be on his own thing. Right, that's not the story that we got. Yeah, it's okay. If there is really leaf and gratitude after someone dies, that might not be your story. And I think there's also even a middle ground in there that for however long you are completely destroyed after someone dies, for however long that takes, little green shoots will eventually start to come back in and you get to choose what kind of life of after you build for yourself. It isn't the life that you chose, It isn't the life that you wish you had. And since you have to live this life, what do you want to build for yourself? For sure? And also I think when you go through a traumatic experience you kind of, I mean, at least for me, like when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my sort of after life came from realizing too, like how finite it all is and how fast he went from being a healthy person to a sick person. And that could happened to me too, it could happen to anybody. And what am I doing this with this one body? Right? Like, it's not even about what am I doing with my life? It's like what am I doing with my body? It works right now, I could live to be a hundred, but maybe my body only functions this way for like the next ten years. I don't know, So what am I doing with this body? So I also think it's super like the idea and again like going back to this like sort of invisible number where you've lost somebody and you're supposed to just like close shop and lock yourself in a room for when if you've just witnessed someone losing their life force, it's actually super normal to be like so to be turned on and to like want to fuck like immediately after, it's actually normal, Like you're you're an animal and you've just been with an animal who's died and you're you are trying to feel alive, right, because you've just been around death and you've been so it's actually it's super normal to have those feelings where you're like that is something that I like, I started doing like a deep dive on on death and sex and how they're related, and they're actually very close. There are a lot of there aren't a lot of experiences that a human body has that are just completely it's like it's a carnal if it's a full body experience, right, and feeling your life force, like that's sexual sexually, if you're having a good experience, that's what you're feeling. And I think like there's you know, I think this idea that we have to wait to have an experience that for a lot of us is something that we're craving, you know. It's also it's ridiculous, Like it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, like who gets to dictate what you're doing with this life and this body? Right? Who gets to make those decisions for you? And and that can even be internalized, right, like it's bad of me to have these desires, It's bad of me to go do this because that isn't what's expected of me. And there's this whole internalized shaming around that, like shame is just trash. Like shame is just trash, right, Like whether you're doing it to yourself or you're you're hearing it from other people, that judgment about who you are and what you're doing with your life force yeah, yeah, and who. And it's amazing to me that people think that they have any that it's their place at all, Like it makes me who, I didn't know you were a part of my counsel of internal beings telling me what I should do with my life, Like hmm, I'm gonna boot you out. And it's like what we're seeing with Rove Wade. It's like the fact that people think that they have the authority of other people's agency and sexuality and experiences. It's like the it comes from this place of internalized shame too, Like people only shame other people who feel shame themselves preach. So it's like as soon as we can strip that back, we can really actually make big changes, like globally, because so much of it, so much of all of this comes from a shame. It's just like it's it's perpetuating, and everyone's just shaming each other and feeling shames of feeling the thinging to shame, and yeah, it's a giant shame of I love this because this actually pulls something out that we were talking about earlier. You just mentioned and correct me if I misunderstood what you said. But the people who are controlling others bodies and shaming predominantly women, but also anybody who is not a cis white male, they're carrying their own shame and their own pain that is not explored, not supported, not addressed. And as we've said before, hurt people, hurt people. And this goes back through millennia of things. And I think where it gets tricky is that we flip into that binary of like, you have to have compassion for the people who are harming you, and we think that having compassion and understanding the pain at the root of the oppressor excuses them from their actions, right right, And we go back to what you've been talking about with your experience with how it's like you showed up and took care of him out of a shared humanity and because he's the father of your kids, and for all of these other reasons and you can love someone and still hold them accountable for their actions. You can still tell them to stop and have them stop and make them stop, and you can still be relieved when they stop. Yes, that doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you human. And this is how we get the world that we want, right where everybody is allowed to talk about what hurts and they are not allowed to use what hurts to harm others. Yes, yes, that was beautiful, thank you. And it's interesting because so I talked to somebody about this yesterday who read the book and was like, they were commenting on the fact that I wrote about how basically as a human that he was, you know, that hat ale us anger and that we had this very toxic marriage, but there was also a lot of love too, and I wrote about all of that, and people don't know what to do with that. Like people, right, you did not choose one or the other. Stay in your narrow lane. People really want a hero and a villain. Yeah, and they want a complicated hero, which is the same thing as a hero, right, Like everyone's complicated and a villain of all villains are like, we all are complicated. And I think like people, you know, it's again like we have no imagination, we're so binary, we don't know how to carry more than one thought or feeling at the same time. It's because we were not able to articulate it. We don't articulate it culturally, we don't hold space for all the different feelings. You know that the person that the social worker comes to me assuming that I'm sad, instead of coming to me assuming that I'm feeling a whole not assuming being curious, right, and being curious instead of assuming yes, But this, this, and and that was sort of the experience that I was received, Just like across the board was just this like I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. People just apologizing, apologizing, apologizing, and then me feeling more and more shitty that I wasn't only sad, like oh my god, these people everyone feel sorry for me. I don't, but I'm I don't know, I'm not a victim, like I don't feel sorry for like you know, but but speak saying that you know, and then you're dismissing everyone else and you're just all these people are so lovely and generous, and there they feel sad for you, and you don't want to disappoint them by telling them not to feel sad, that you're okay, Like, whoa, but if we were, if we weren't to assume every time something happened, like we're just we assume because we've been told the same stories over and over and over that this is what it looks like to, you know, to lose someone, this is what it looks like to have X experience. Why experience instead of just recognizing that every experience is a human experience and there's so many conflicting feelings that are happening behind you know, and we don't know anything. Really, we don't know. Yeah, and just to be able to hold space for each other, like that's the whole like hold space, like if somebody like that's that's really like my Like when people are like, oh, of a summons, like what do I do my friends, you know, going through whatever, Like just give them the space to feel all of their feelings, like, yeah, tell them that you're here to listen to all of it. Anger the rate, like, don't project your shit onto other people. Yeah, curiosity and not condemnationous. Oh my god, yes I love that MM taglines seriously, but this is really the thing, right, like we need to be able to be comfortable with the complexity in us and the complexity in front of us. Right, Like, let the person, let the let you in this whole story, in this whole house, be the whole person that you are, and let the dying person be the whole person that they are. Right, this idea that once somebody has died, they become canonized and you can't talk about the rough part of your relationship, Like Matt and I had a great relationship and he was a pain in the ass. Yeah, yeah, right, and I get to be really glad that I don't need to deal with that stuff anymore, at the same time that I'm really heartbroken that he's not here, like absolutely multitudes, Oh my gosh. And that's love too, exactly. Yeah, there's another line in your book. It said, you said, it's heartbreaking to say that you can love someone and not miss them when they're gone. That is God is human, It is human. And I also think, you know, a lot of grief, at least in my experience, is not just grieving the fact that the person has died, but it's grieving the years that you spend with them, you know, I guess in the same way you do with a divorce. I have a lot of friends who've been through divorce, and I've my experience was very similar to theirs, and that I you know, really the initial grief that I felt was for my kids and for my family and like that, you know, it wasn't even about me. It was about that not having a dad anymore. But after that, when it was like time for me to really kind of dive into my own feelings, my grief, the majority of my grief came from the fact that I had been, you know, unhappy for years and I was like, oh Jesus, like I was grieving, like my my, um, you know, just all of that. Like I didn't you know, when someone dies, you're not again. You don't you're not thinking about what the years of you know, you're supposed to think about, like the happy years, missing them, And I was thinking a lot about like, fuck, I was miserable for like a really long time, and like thought that I could fake it till I make it kind of thing, and like couldn't. And like so, I you know, I grieved for those years and not just for me, but for him that like he couldn't I wanted us both to be able to come out on the other side of that and have an afterlife like I wanted him to have one too, right, Like, and there's you know, there's survivors skill as I'm sure you know you are very familiar with, and you know that is you know, I've watched my kids grew up, but he's not here to do that, and that's really hard and just you know, the it makes I feel so lucky to be here, and then I my, you know, the other side, right the shadow of feeling so lucky is feeling like, God, I wish that he could that he's not missing this. But at the same time, and then there's the other side of out where I'm like, God, it's so nice to just be able to be the only parent and do this by myself. Yeah, not have to deal. Yeah. And although those things are true, all of it is true. All of it is true, the full catastrophe of being human. And also and also that I mean this will probably take us on another tangent that we don't necessarily have time for today, but this idea that a quote successful relationship is not necessarily till death do you part? Right, that loving somebody is sometimes walking away. Oh yeah, right, if we go back to what you were saying, like it would have been preferable if he got to live his after and you got to of an after as not a widow. That's not the story that we have, but that sometimes that separation is the most loving thing in the world. Oh Hudent, I believe that wholeheartedly, like for you and for your children, your for your whole family. That's why that's the like the divot normalized divorce as good news, Like that's where they came from. It was this conversation that I was having with people on Instagram, like they were pouring in I kind of did it. I had a hashtag called how I left for I was talking about my experience and then I never really got to leave, and that a part of me felt like, God, I just want to break everyone out of their bad marriages now because I'm on the other side of one and I'm like, oh my god, this this is beautiful over here. So it turned into this amazing sort of like lawyers reached out offering pro bono work and they're like people were all it was like this like behind the scene, I was like hooking women up with other people who had experienced and people were helping each other figure out how to get out, and it was like the same story over and over. Were like women telling how they left and talking about how they had stayed married for their kids, not realizing that it was an act of love to leave and just to model to their children. This other other house, right, like this other version of what it can look like to be happy and to you know, like it doesn't have to look this one way, like we're so afraid of, like we're so afraid of moving from the square house so that with a triangle roof, but there's a there's a really beautiful, fucking well imagined house on the other side of that that. You know, I think I feel so grateful that I get to dwell in now. Yeah, we all deserve to be happy, Like it's very simple, and I think a lot of women don't think that we do, or think that the priority is our children and are significant other and that they're somehow going to be happy when we're not at which is also not the case at all. Yeah, this is actually a really good place for us to talk about my always closing conversation for a season two. So knowing what you know, knowing the houses that you've burned down, the houses that you've rebuilt for yourselves, the curiosity about what houses might come next, Like what does hope mean for you? I think for me, hope it's so funny because hope, for me has always felt passive, right, like we can't like it's what we want for ourselves, not necessarily what we're doing for ourselves. And I think I lived sort of with this want for myself and was very afraid to actually do the work to get there. So for me, hope is sort of again reimagining what it means to hope. Rebuilding what hope looks like finding the extra room and the idea of hope, or rather instead of finding the extra room, building that room myself, because that's the thing too. It's like we don't have to wait for the room to appear. We can build it, right, we can build it. And for me, that's been my experience these last four years. How can I build? How can I build? How can I redesign? How can I relearn? Unlearn? So I guess for me, hope is finding new ways to unlearn and create and rebuild and sort of reconstruct a life that doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Yeah, I love that. I love opening new rooms and hope. Right, Like this for me, this is what season two is all about. Is like, it is so awful in the world right now, on so many different fronts, and it's so easy to feel hopeless. I love your definition, your working definition of hope there that this is something. It's not wishful thinking, it's not hoping for a specific outcome. It's building a hope that belongs to you, right, and that looks like you and that you can live in. Yeah, being active and hope. Yeah, like taking it, taking it with you instead of sitting with it somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, don't camp out with your hope in somebody else's needs to be renovated since the forties place with a drop ceiling. Don't don't do that to yourself. Yeah, cling hope deserves better digs. All right, my friend, that is a great place for us to end. So I'm going to link to all the places and obviously to your book in the show notes. But what do you want to let people know? Where should they find you? Where should they look for you? What do they need to know? Well, they can find me on Instagram at Rebecca Wolf with three ers. I'm on Twitter at Girls gun Child and it can also check me out over on Rebecca Wolf dot com, which links to all my essays, columns, books, etc. I also have a book that's called All of This, a Memoir of Death and Desire, and you can find that where all books are sold. And yeah, and it's awesome. And last little note here, you and I both did a shout out to ourselves in our books. Your dedication is to you, and my acknowledgements ends with me. Right. Love that, Yes, Yes, Yes, let's go. I love it. Yeah. Normalize that too. Normalize appreciating yourself for surviving the shit you've had to survive. I love it all right, Everybody, stick around. I will be right back after this last break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. This season is all about hope, and I have been both surprised and fascinated to hear how many guests bring hope up before I even get a chance to bring it up myself. But you know, it really struck me in my conversation with Rebecca is her complete lack of shame around things that most people are really really hesitant to mention. There's something really liberating in hearing somebody else claim their own liberation. That feels like a hopeful thing to me. I also love how Rebecca said quote hope is finding new ways to unlearn and create and rebuild and reconstruct a life that doesn't have to look like anybody else's. I love that we talked about how there's hope in discovering new hope in yourself. I do love a personal agency moment. Parts of this conversation stuck with you today. What parts made you think or see something differently, whether that's in your life or in somebody else's life. Which parts of Rebecca's story made you feel seen in your own life. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I hope you do find something to hold onto. I'd love to hear what you've taken from this episode, what new rooms are unfolding in the house of your life. Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show, and that's a good place to leave your thoughts or your comments, or your reflections right there on those posts and be sure to tag us when you share the show on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here after pod on all the platforms. Really, really, the whole team loves to see your comments. We love to see where this show takes you. And with this episode with author Rebecca Wolf, we really did cover some taboo territory. So let's get those conversation parties started and tag us. Let us see where your conversations go. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question for upcoming explorations difficult things, give us a call three two 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 co. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megandvine do coo. 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. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for a new thing to listen to, and they're going to see the show description for Hereafter and think I do not want to listen to difficult things, even if cool people are talking about them. Well, here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad. In here. We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your friend groups, your professional circles on social media, and click through to leave a review. You could do that right now. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and keep on listening on friends want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief, from those daily disappointments right up through the losses that rearrange the world. Grief is everywhere. Learning how to deal with it and talk about it without cliches or platitudes or simplistic dismissive statements is an important skill for everyone. Find tip sheets, trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus the Guided Journal for Grief All At Megan Divine, Do Hereafter With Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Elizabeth Fasio, with logistical and social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilley, Music provided by Wave Crush, and background noise provided by both intermittent air conditioning and the general sounds of living in a city.