New Year, Same Grief (and the Math of Suffering) with Kate Bowler - Part 1

Published Dec 25, 2023, 8:00 AM

Is acceptance overrated? What happens when you have to face a new year without your person in it (or without the health you used to have!)?  In this special two-part episode, we face the new year together - with special guest, historian, author, and queen of awkward conversations, Kate Bowler. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

 

  • How do you have hope for the year to come when right now maybe isn’t so great? 
  • Acceptance, moving forward, and ferocious self-advocacy
  • The Math of Suffering: this year, last year, and measuring love
  • Why social bonds matter, and what happens when no one sees you



We're re-releasing some of our favorite episodes from the first 3 seasons. This episode was originally recorded in 2021.

 

Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.



About our guest:

Kate Bowler, PhD, is an associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke Divinity School. Author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved). Her latest book, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. 

 

Find her at katebowler.com and follow her on social media @katecbowler

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief

 

Additional resources:

Read Kate Bowler’s memoir Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved)

 

Read Kate’s latest book No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear)

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here

 

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

 

Books and resources may contain affiliate links.

This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Devine. This week on the show, a re release of one of your all time favorites from season one. Doctor Kate Bohler on the madness that is New Year's resolutions, finding hope when life feels impossible, and the complicated math of suffering. It's a great way to close one year and enter the next, especially if you are not that psyched about this holiday. Okay. Part one of my conversation with special guest, historian, author, and Queen of Awkward Conversations Kate Bowler right after this break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. This episode is from season one, in which I answered listener questions, sometimes on my own, sometimes for the guest. So if you want more of these Q and A style episodes, you can find the entire collection from season one wherever you get your podcasts. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together, this show, is not a substitute for skilled support, for the license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. I really want you to take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your own world, and talk about it all. Hey, friends, So a lot of the questions that we got for this week's show can be boiled down to one thing. How do I find hope in the year to come? Knowing what I know about life right now, these last few years of hardship upon hardship in our personal lives and the wider world don't exactly make hope or even optimism that easy to access. The closing of one year and the entrance of a new year is just not that easy to navigate with any kind of excitement about what's ahead. I always aim to open these shows without being a downer, but so far I have not succeeded. There are hundreds of beginnings and endings in any given twelve month span, both culturally and personally. Beginnings and endings happen all the time. This whole idea that the year ends in December and begins a new in January of the Gregorian calendar is just one of many transition points. One of my favorite things about today's guest is the ground she covers with her brain. She's like this amazing ven diagram of religion, self help, health, kindness, the minutia of being human, all stitched together with this deep view of culture and religion. She definitely gets what I just rambled about, that the new years don't always match the calendar, and even when they do, the new year isn't always that fresh start you long for. Doctor Kate Boehler is an author, historian, and one of my favorite people in the world these days. She received a master's of religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Duke University. She's an associate profess at Duke Divinity School. Her latest book, No Cure for Being Human, grapples with her diagnosis of stage four cancer at the age of thirty five and the intersection of blind optimism and the lack of control inherent in being a real, live human with limitations. Doctor Bowler made the whole country get used to speaking frankly about suffering through her popular podcast Everything Happens, which is truly awesome and you should listen to that too. In today's episode, Kate and I talk about all manner of math, and before you stress out about that, it's the math of human suffering. Don't stress out about that either. It's going to be great, all right, everybody. I am so glad to have my friend Kate in the studio well studio zoom with me today. So Kate, thank you so much for being here.

Hello, my dear thanks for having me. Absolutely so.

You are the one person that I wanted to talk to you for this end of the year. New Year's not really a special but the New Year episode because there's there's so much in all of your work, your whole body of work, all of your books about trying to live into the future when the present is so crappy, when you know what you know about things so right, right, Like, how how do you have any sort of optimism or hope in the future. Now we're going to get to that. I want to jump right into some listener questions because I think that's going to be the best, the best way to access the brilliance of your mind and your expertise here. So you okay with that? If I jump right into a question, all right, let's go. So listener question number one, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year that you shared with your person.

Yeah, that's right. Second anyone uses the word new, there's immediately the knowledge that we have to then move on without maybe the life we thought we'd be here, the person we thought we would have. I I think that's such a such a gorgeous, honest thing to say, because with all the folks on New Year's resolutions and like twenty, you know, it's always like it's kind of next year, it's gonna be the best year yet. And for many of us, especially when it comes to love, is like so for that love, there needs to be a moment to acknowledge that sometimes the best days of that love are behind us. It reminds me of some of the people I've met who create almost like a like a funeral for the year, for the for the thing that came before. Sometimes it was the person that they were, the love that they had, but just something that honors the immensity of being feeling like you were like filled to the brim of details of something you're scared about forgetting, just being honest about those fears, Like maybe I'm scared of starting something new because I don't want to let go.

I love that idea of having a funeral or having some sort of ceremony to mark the end of the form of relatedness that came before.

Yeah, maybe it's not just like the countdown to the new year, but just having a moment to count down the the one that's just coming to a close. You're right. I think we have this aggressive futurism that prevents us from being honest.

Aggressive futurism is a fantastic way of looking at it. Yeah, there's a word I want to pick up on. In this listener question, they write, how do you accept that you're leaving the last year you shared with your person? And I think this is a really good one because in your books and on your Instagram you touch on acceptance a lot. So can you talk to me about your relationship with acceptance.

Oh, it's horrible, anest I am acceptance. It's truly a nightmare. I've been living with incurable cancer for a long time, longer than I wanted to, and I kept thinking that life was going to be a series of challenges that I would overcome and then I could put things behind me. But part of trying to figure out how to live it seems is figuring out what maybe just to have a thicker category for acceptance, to have almost like a higher tolerance for the uncertain of having things that I love that I can't get back to and not ever going back to that like durable and destructible vision of myself I thought I would have. So I was diagnosed on US thirty five and I am forty one, and I feel so grateful every time I hit a new year. But at the same time, I need a minute to think, what are the things I cannot change? It's like gorgeous serenity prayer. But then how can I find like a little bit of traction, a little bit of like change wiggle ability to move because gosh, I'm not fully built for acceptance. I need a little bit of something that I can like totally kick the dust off of and move around. Man.

I think in a lot of ways we weaponize acceptance, right It's supplied from the outside as this end goal that you need to get to in order to be palatable to the others around you, Like you just need to accept that there are some things that your body can't do anymore.

Yeah, screw that, really, No, I've spent no You're right, I spend most of my energory trying to not accept most things, because I mean, I think that living at least for me when I think about the context of like I'm a professor, so I figure out how to keep changing and moving forward. I've got complicated medical care in which I very frequently have to yell at people what I'd rather use my nice hid or voice than like, if I don't constantly push against acceptance, it goes into stagnation and despair, and so sometimes not accepting things It's been a really important part of me staying alive and also just learning how to evolve and change because I'll never get to be the person I was before.

Yeah, some things are unacceptable, right I Yes, I love how you cared that though, Kate, that like acceptance in some ways is giving up and being passive, like sort of pitting it against self advocacy, right, just as you said right there, Like with my medical needs, I can't just accept that this is my condition and this is what needs to happen. That I need to ferociously advocate for myself, and sometimes that feels the opposite of acceptance. I'm a bigger fan of allowing rather than accept us, because I think acceptance comes with this connotation that you're cool with it. Right, we go back to if we go back to our question, our listener question here, how do I accept that I'm leaving the last year I shared with my person? So the understory there is that their person died in twenty twenty one, and we're facing a new year without this person. How do I accept that I'm leaving that year? Well, some things are unacceptable. It's not okay. Yes, you don't have to be quote unquote good with that in order to be healthy and human. And you're greety, that's right.

It's like so much of the experiment, right, is just living with unacceptable truths. Yeah, what a strange thing. I always love it when people say that. There's that lovely quote from it's the mayor of East Town, it's the Kate Winslet character, and she says, you know at some point, like you don't I don't know if she said you don't accept it, but it's like, but it's some point you just have to put groceries in the fridge. It didn't have that sort of like shiny neo Buddhist Everything's fine. With me. I am the ocean h quality about it. It's a stubbornness to that that I really I really respect.

Yeah, stay tuned for more coming up right after this break. Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing. There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing. My thirty day Writing your Grief course is not like that. Them prompts are deeper, they're more nuanced. They're designed to get you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now, writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful. You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample prompt from the course and get writing your own words in minutes. My thirty day Writing your Grief Course is still one of the best things I've ever made for you. Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken the Writing your Grief Course refugegrief dot Com backslash WYG or you can find the link in the show notes. So there's a related question that kind of goes back to what you were talking about with marking the end of one period before you enter the next period. And so the next question ready, Okay, it's going to sound almost like the first question, but there's a slight angle change here. So question two, how do you go into a new year knowing that your person won't be there for it? If my person died this year, now I have to start saying they died last year, and it makes them feel so far away from me. So something kind of inherent in that question is the passage of time that gets sort of crystallized once we switch from December thirty first to January first, Like, now I have to say my person died last year, or if your person died in twenty twenty, you can't say they died last year anymore.

M Yeah. It kind of gets to the the math of suffering that gets applied to all those of us who suffer, which is that there's the kind of a rough calculation in the listener. It's like when someone says how when you know someone died, They're like, well, how old were they like immediately there's a sense that our grief is rendered invalid with the passage of time, or our love doesn't sometimes even increase and our grief increase over the course of so that I do feel like there's with the passage of time comes the feeling of leaning to justify either moving on or whatever that means, or not moving on and whatever that means to an audience, And there's like a there's a jury out there who gets to decide. And I have not found that there is a really easy way to describe what suffering has meant over time, like I you know, I, for instance, even if I just said, oh, I was diagnosed six years ago, truth is, it was three years after that that was probably the worst moment of my life. You know. It wasn't the diagnosis. It was the facing a different life for deth surgery and trying to still have problems that made sense to anyone after they thought that it was all over by them. And so I'm like a big fan of bad math, like where we just assume we can't add up other people's lives because I know I can't.

I love that I remember that was actually a line in your new book that stood out to me when I was reading it rereading it again yesterday, The Mass of Suffering. Right, It's such a beautiful way of looking at it, because you're right, like, the inherent in this question that this listener sent in was I'm going to have to start defending the fact that I missed them or that I am quote unquote still grieving, because I'm not going to be able to say, oh, it was just earlier this year that they died, or it was just last year that they were here. There is this judgment that enters the chat at the change of the year, Right, Yeah, And I really love what you just said there about I'm going to commit myself to bad math. I just paraphrase what you said, but as a person who has a hard time with math in general, I love I kept thinking like, oh, we need a new applied mathematics, the mathematics of suffering. That only the person at the center of that equation is the one that gets to say what time means or or what suffering means, and how we judge that because there is so much judgment about how you're suffering, how much you should be suffering, what the worst times were for you. It's really interesting that you brought that part up, that you know, when you tell your story diagnosed six years ago with cancer and people are like, oh, that must have been such a terrible time for you, And what you just shared was that actually that sucked, and my equation of suffering actually had a different high point.

I think too, the part of the fear, at least for me, of having someone here has how to chronically terrible, terrible, wonderful but pretty terrible, chronically terrible life is just sorry. It's just that the more things happen, you know, the more that there's this kind of creeping fear that if people don't understand, then I'll be left alone. If people don't understand, I won't have the community and the support and the friendship. Like if I can't make other people understand my suffering math, then I'm no longer translatable as lovable, carriable, intelligible. Then you get untranslated in a way. And it's been hard to manage the fear that persistent suffering creates, and that that's something I recognize in other people, is the feeling untranslatable anymore.

It makes me think of survival as mammals I know that you can hang with my tangents here.

I'm really into it already, right.

Yeah, dun, dun, duh. So while you're describing like this, this fear of being untranslatable, that I'm going to have to explain what it's like to be me clearly enough so that people stay with me. That drive for connection and being seen, it is so fundamental to our existence as human animals. This is why excommunication is such a powerful tool. If you look at you're going to know this one better than I do. With your history and your background, which ones, Kate, are the tradition on the East Coast where you where the whole community gathers around you. And if you're done saying about about shunning, yeah, yeah, can you describe shunning for folks who don't know what I'm rambling about here? Describe shunning for me, Kate.

Well, it is a powerful tool of social cohesion and lack thereof, where if someone violates like a sacred or a special tenant of the community, that they will be kind of exiled by no one acknowledging or speak to them. And so like I have a family member who was shunned for having an organ at or wedding that within a in a service that prohibited musical instruments, which is very funny now but was very sad at a time. But it's it's the it's the ability to render somebody invalid by not socially seeing them.

And it's really really powerful because we need each other so and that that shunning that we're talking about, it belongs to specific spiritual and religious traditions, but you can also find it showing up in pop culture. Totally outing my nerd here, but I believe on one of the one of the Star Trek shows. Gosh, I'm going to get so many messages about this for not knowing which part of the Star Trek right, which Star Trek trivia I'm quoting here? Apologies, my brain is full, everybody, But there is an episode where I believe it's a it's a klingon shunning excommunication thing, where like the person who did the socially unacceptable thing stands in the middle and everybody makes a circle, looks the person in the eye, and then crosses their arms in front of their chest and turns their back.

Right.

That's what I think of when I think about shunning used as communal operational force, right, like this is how we keep people performing the way that we want them to perform. And what you described in talking about like I want my suffering to be translatable. I need people to hear me and understand me and see me, because if you can't understand me, then I lose connection and community. And if I can't be translated, I can't be seen. Yeah, and that is its own form of sort of communal shunning.

I think that's why as a historian, I got so excited about sort of studying religious and cultural cliches, because I think that's exactly the reason why I found them so interesting. Was it felt like if I can study the cultural scripts, like the stories people tell about suffering, like you know, everything happens for a reason, God never gives you more than you can handle, that kind of thing. If I understand the script, then at least I understand when I'm off script. Because I have felt i've just you know, having a chronic problem. I have found that so little of it actually creates the kind of social understanding that I'm looking for. If I say something like, oh yeah, it's pretty terrible and it's stayed, really, it's pretty much stayed pretty awful. There's really no. It doesn't suit the American culture of optimism. It doesn't give anyone the exit, the cultural exit ramp that they're looking for. I think social cohesion and cultural scripts tell us a lot about when we're in and when we're out, yeah, because we certainly feel it when we're out. Yeah.

And I think the temptation is to bend yourself to fit the social construct so that you don't get shown, so that you don't feel alone. If you've lost your person, or you have a really impossible diagnosis or a chronic illness or injury, you know, you need your community. And the temptation I think is like, maybe I'm the wrong one. Well, part of the way that I see a lot of my work, Kate, is that like, you're not the one that's wrong. The culture is wrong. And you and I, you know, work at different angles or different starting points for this same challenge, which is it's the culture that misunderstands suffering. It is our entertainment and the stories that we tell ourselves and what we believe is the most helpful thing to do for somebody when they're suffering. That's where the problem is. It's not in this person who asked this question about you know, how do I go into a note a new year knowing that this is a year my person will never see the implications or the connotations inside that is like, I'm going to have to justify this. And I think this also what we were just discussing also points to why it feels so important for people to justify their right to suffer, or their right to be in pain, or their right to be having a hard time that doesn't match the Disney stereotype or the you know you got through the like that transformation narrative, right, You and I have yacked about this before, that transformation narrative, for like, if you do your suffering correctly, then you come back a bigger, stronger, wiser person and the bluebirds fly from your brain and everything works out exactly as it should. And I think we know that that's not true, and that need to explain our suffering, translate our suffering. I love that phrase that you used to talk about that we feel like we're failing a cultural script and we're going to be left even more alone, but we also know that we need to tell the truth about our own experience.

Yes, that's right.

Right, So that's an interesting point of discomfort culturally and personally and professionally, right, Yes, trying to rewrite those scripts. And it really does take more people willing to tell the truth about their math, suffering, their suffering of I mean, you said it so much better and I can't remember what it was, but it was awesome. It really does take people talking about the reality of suffering. Yeah, to start changing those bigger conversations so that we don't feel like our math is getting questioned every time we turn around and every time there's a year change.

That's right.

This is just the first half of my conversation with Kate Boehler. We had so much fun talking together, and yes, we had fun talking about this really serious stuff. That's what we do together. This conversation was so much fun and so interesting and had so much useful stuff in it, we decided to split it into two parts. This is part one. Part two is coming your way next week. Don't miss it, friends. You know how most people are going to scan through the show description here and think, I do not want to talk about all that pain stuff. 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 should listen. Spread the word in your workplace, in your social world on social media and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more Hereafter? Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events that clearly divide life into before and after. Learning how to talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or simplistic think positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everyone. Find trainings, workshops, books and resources for every human trying to make their way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at Megandivine dot Co. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, edited by Houston Tilley, and music provided by Wave Crush.