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 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 here after. And I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This is a bonus episode with this week's guest cadaver dog expert Cat Warren. If you haven't listened to the main episode with Cat, be sure to do that too. When I closed that episode, I asked Cat what hope looks like for her right now, and that question brought us into her work looking for forgotten historical burial grounds. It is really fascinating work with a lot of relevance to life right here and right now. So we're going to join that conversation already in full swing. I hope you enjoy it. So we've covered some like really intense and complex complex territory, complex territory is my favorite place, with so much complexity that you've lived, that you are currently exploring, and so much of you know, we started out talking about how like sometimes when people hear what you do, they're like, like, how can you live in that? Doesn't that seem really depressing? But so so much of this is like the opposite of depressing. So what I'm going to give you an option that I don't often give people. I'm going to give you two options to to give me an answer to, but like, what does hope look like for you right now? Or bonus question? Knowing what you know, knowing what you choose to focus on? What does joy look like for you now? So hope or joy, two very troublesome things, Which one would you like? I think I'm going to pick hope And I think I'll pick hope simply because I think we all always needed we have to have it, we have to have it as human beings. I don't think that hope looks like what many people think it might look like. And I think it gets back to the actually when you said about you know that that moment of sun filtering through the trees right that hope is often little, tiny, interconnected things. So when I think about some of the research and work that I'm doing now and thinking about burial grounds um so burial grounds for the enslaved, and bury grounds for Indigenous people's pre European invasion, and burial grounds for the Native American boarding schools and the children who are there, and all of those sound tragic and are tragic. And yet I'm watching people who can't engage as directly as one would hope with Black lives matter issues, right. In other words, people who are not going to get involved for whatever reason or me even come to those subjects with a hostile and defensive tone. Right, But would we talk about lost burial grounds of the enslaved. Those same people find that work important and rewarding, and they bring a care to that and an ability, you know, we talk about dogs being away in I also think that some of the work with burial grounds, with or without dogs, is a way in for people who can't face things like talking directly about police brutality against or black communities, right, but they can think about the importance of preserving a site where on a plantation there are hundreds of unmarked burials, right. And I find this, I find this interesting, and I find it fascinating and I also find it hopeful because it tells me that there are these different paths that you can sometimes take two make people aware. And I think I'm seeing that with the work on burial grounds, Florida is doing, despite its governor, is doing more than almost any other state to both locate and preserve lost burial grounds. And it's like, who knew. There's just things come together in a way. And I think that part of it is that, you know, we talk about death being the great equalizer, and it isn't. But it also is in the sense that I'm going to sort of I know frames badly, but that each and every one of us can relate to that idea of that we want to know where our loved ones are who are gone. It sounds like that that is a familiarity point that makes entering this particular story, in this particular facet of American and Canadian and frankly European history, it makes it gives you an entry point because we can feel that right, like yes, yes, and it's part of that I need a place to go, right, There's something about that human need to not be forgotten and to not forget and for me as somebody who's an atheist, and and where the whole issue of what happens to my body? Right? And you know, I'm hoping for actions, although there are the green burials that are starting to feel kind of appealing, just kind of It's it's fascinating that the place I've landed is thinking deeply about these spaces of burial for people that need to be refound. And I'd actually don't care really what happens to my body, right, because we already have our stories. And I think the issue of some of these urban spaces where you know, widening highways and everything else, just who cares if an African American cemetery is in the path of a widening of a highway that outrages me for all the reasons that I think almost anybody can see that and understand why that's wrong. This is my hope, Yeah, And there's so much hope in there, right. And again it's like hope inside these things that sound terrible, right, Like truly hope is inside the things that that are terrible, right. And it's something you just said there that I really want to pull out. You said, I don't about what happens to my body. I already have my story, and so much of the work as I understand it, that you're doing now with historic research and looking at burial grounds and looking at unmarked graves is about returning the story right. And what's kind of tragic about that too, but important to say is that the story is not a feel good story. Right. The issue of saying facile e of calling somebody in saying I've found the location you're coined a descendant and saying I've found the location of your of your ancestor who was a slave, that's not a given that that's a good thing to do, right. So there's there are sort of all of these, I think layers of complexity. There's a descendant with whom I've worked and she's done so much work on this urban cemetery, and her great great great great great grandmother is probably there, but we don't know because there's been so much desecration and so much abuse and so much digging up and using for roadbed skeletal remains that that becomes part of a nightmare for her. At the same time that it's deeply important that this place be saved from further desecration. Right, So it's not like, yea, we've found where she's buried. It's so not easy. Nothing's ever easy. But I think that's really important that there's all this grieving yet to do for people as they do find the stories, if they find the stories, if they find the stories, and that they aren't. The purpose of this work is not to find closure. It's not to make a happy ending, right. It is way more complex than that. And you know, whenever we have these conversations, I always think about the truth and reconciliation committees right where you are telling the truth, because the truth has been erased, the truth has been whitewashed, and just having the truth of the situation named does something. It doesn't undo anything, it doesn't fix anything. It does not wrap things up in a shiny bow. But not being lied to and not pretending that terrible things didn't happen, there is something very very powerful and hopeful in that. And I love that your definition of hope is what some people would call ugly. It's not ugly, it's real. And I think just a little additional thing that you sort of brought up for me is that I did my dissertation on institutional silence, and I did it on the silence of the powerful. So the powerful being able to choose not to talk about things, right, And if I think about what we're talking about and the stories and the importance of truth and the importance of saying things, it is precisely because people have been able to who are in power, have been able to so completely suppress that discussion, right, they are able to make the choice to say nothing. Right. We talked about the silence victim, but the fact is is that the silence of the perpetrator, to me is what's still unacceptable. Yeah, and that's been true throughout history and it is true now. And the the ability of perpetrators, whether on an individual or a cultural global scale, the silence of the perpetrator is what lets those abuses, lets that violence continue. Right. It's why control of the media is such a powerful tool. It's why the rise of cell phones and being able to document what's actually happening is so powerful because it's circumvents that the power of the perpetrator, again on individual levels and on much larger scales, and that there is something very hopeful in that. I think that that's you know, this is something that a lot of people have been talking about this season on the show, and you know off Mike as well, that things are and feel so horrendous right now. And it is not that more terrible things are happening, it's that we know more about the terrible things that have always been happening. We have more eyes to see in, more ears to hear, and more ways to document, and more ways to pull that curtain back and tell the truth about what's happening. And that includes looking back into our history and finding those burial grounds of the predominantly children who were taken from their families and put into residential boarding schools. We have more people looking into these unmarked burial grounds and these graves of enslaved people's and looking at what we erase and what we hope nobody notices when we are looking for quote unquote progress, right, like you talk your reference like putting a highway in something that goes through burial grounds. So you know who who says history has never dead somebody somebody. That's an actual quote from somebody, but I can never remember who that is. But it gets really big right when we start talking about these things. It's sort of like oh my gosh, and then this problem, and then this problem, and then this problem, this is over here, and oh my god, like I understand why we like a simple story. You've been listening to an excerpt of my conversation with dog search expert Cat Warren. Find her book What the Dog Knows wherever you get books, and learn more about her work on historical burial grounds at her website cat Warren dot com, and remember to listen to part one too. If you haven't yet, 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 quest gen 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 O. 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 to Day'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, when 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 here after. And I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This is a bonus episode with this week's guest cadaver dog expert Cat Warren. If you haven't listened to the main episode with Cat, be sure to do that too. When I closed that episode, I asked Cat what hope looks like for her right now, and that question brought us into her work looking for forgotten historical burial grounds. It is really fascinating work with a lot of relevance to life right here and right now. So we're going to join that conversation already in full swing. I hope you enjoy it. So we've covered some like really intense and complex complex territory, complex territory is my favorite place, with so much complexity that you've lived, that you are currently exploring, and so much of you know, we started out talking about how like sometimes when people hear what you do, they're like, like, how can you live in that? Doesn't that seem really depressing? But so so much of this is like the opposite of depressing. So what I'm going to give you an option that I don't often give people. I'm going to give you two options to to give me an answer to, but like, what does hope look like for you right now? Or bonus question? Knowing what you know, knowing what you choose to focus on? What does joy look like for you now? So hope or joy, two very troublesome things, Which one would you like? I think I'm going to pick hope And I think I'll pick hope simply because I think we all always needed we have to have it, we have to have it as human beings. I don't think that hope looks like what many people think it might look like. And I think it gets back to the actually when you said about you know that that moment of sun filtering through the trees right that hope is often little, tiny, interconnected things. So when I think about some of the research and work that I'm doing now and thinking about burial grounds um so burial grounds for the enslaved, and bury grounds for Indigenous people's pre European invasion, and burial grounds for the Native American boarding schools and the children who are there, and all of those sound tragic and are tragic. And yet I'm watching people who can't engage as directly as one would hope with Black lives matter issues, right. In other words, people who are not going to get involved for whatever reason or me even come to those subjects with a hostile and defensive tone. Right, But would we talk about lost burial grounds of the enslaved. Those same people find that work important and rewarding, and they bring a care to that and an ability, you know, we talk about dogs being away in I also think that some of the work with burial grounds, with or without dogs, is a way in for people who can't face things like talking directly about police brutality against or black communities, right, but they can think about the importance of preserving a site where on a plantation there are hundreds of unmarked burials, right. And I find this, I find this interesting, and I find it fascinating and I also find it hopeful because it tells me that there are these different paths that you can sometimes take two make people aware. And I think I'm seeing that with the work on burial grounds, Florida is doing, despite its governor, is doing more than almost any other state to both locate and preserve lost burial grounds. And it's like, who knew. There's just things come together in a way. And I think that part of it is that, you know, we talk about death being the great equalizer, and it isn't. But it also is in the sense that I'm going to sort of I know frames badly, but that each and every one of us can relate to that idea of that we want to know where our loved ones are who are gone. It sounds like that that is a familiarity point that makes entering this particular story, in this particular facet of American and Canadian and frankly European history, it makes it gives you an entry point because we can feel that right, like yes, yes, and it's part of that I need a place to go, right, There's something about that human need to not be forgotten and to not forget and for me as somebody who's an atheist, and and where the whole issue of what happens to my body? Right? And you know, I'm hoping for actions, although there are the green burials that are starting to feel kind of appealing, just kind of It's it's fascinating that the place I've landed is thinking deeply about these spaces of burial for people that need to be refound. And I'd actually don't care really what happens to my body, right, because we already have our stories. And I think the issue of some of these urban spaces where you know, widening highways and everything else, just who cares if an African American cemetery is in the path of a widening of a highway that outrages me for all the reasons that I think almost anybody can see that and understand why that's wrong. This is my hope, Yeah, And there's so much hope in there, right. And again it's like hope inside these things that sound terrible, right, Like truly hope is inside the things that that are terrible, right. And it's something you just said there that I really want to pull out. You said, I don't about what happens to my body. I already have my story, and so much of the work as I understand it, that you're doing now with historic research and looking at burial grounds and looking at unmarked graves is about returning the story right. And what's kind of tragic about that too, but important to say is that the story is not a feel good story. Right. The issue of saying facile e of calling somebody in saying I've found the location you're coined a descendant and saying I've found the location of your of your ancestor who was a slave, that's not a given that that's a good thing to do, right. So there's there are sort of all of these, I think layers of complexity. There's a descendant with whom I've worked and she's done so much work on this urban cemetery, and her great great great great great grandmother is probably there, but we don't know because there's been so much desecration and so much abuse and so much digging up and using for roadbed skeletal remains that that becomes part of a nightmare for her. At the same time that it's deeply important that this place be saved from further desecration. Right, So it's not like, yea, we've found where she's buried. It's so not easy. Nothing's ever easy. But I think that's really important that there's all this grieving yet to do for people as they do find the stories, if they find the stories, if they find the stories, and that they aren't. The purpose of this work is not to find closure. It's not to make a happy ending, right. It is way more complex than that. And you know, whenever we have these conversations, I always think about the truth and reconciliation committees right where you are telling the truth, because the truth has been erased, the truth has been whitewashed, and just having the truth of the situation named does something. It doesn't undo anything, it doesn't fix anything. It does not wrap things up in a shiny bow. But not being lied to and not pretending that terrible things didn't happen, there is something very very powerful and hopeful in that. And I love that your definition of hope is what some people would call ugly. It's not ugly, it's real. And I think just a little additional thing that you sort of brought up for me is that I did my dissertation on institutional silence, and I did it on the silence of the powerful. So the powerful being able to choose not to talk about things, right, And if I think about what we're talking about and the stories and the importance of truth and the importance of saying things, it is precisely because people have been able to who are in power, have been able to so completely suppress that discussion, right, they are able to make the choice to say nothing. Right. We talked about the silence victim, but the fact is is that the silence of the perpetrator, to me is what's still unacceptable. Yeah, and that's been true throughout history and it is true now. And the the ability of perpetrators, whether on an individual or a cultural global scale, the silence of the perpetrator is what lets those abuses, lets that violence continue. Right. It's why control of the media is such a powerful tool. It's why the rise of cell phones and being able to document what's actually happening is so powerful because it's circumvents that the power of the perpetrator, again on individual levels and on much larger scales, and that there is something very hopeful in that. I think that that's you know, this is something that a lot of people have been talking about this season on the show, and you know off Mike as well, that things are and feel so horrendous right now. And it is not that more terrible things are happening, it's that we know more about the terrible things that have always been happening. We have more eyes to see in, more ears to hear, and more ways to document, and more ways to pull that curtain back and tell the truth about what's happening. And that includes looking back into our history and finding those burial grounds of the predominantly children who were taken from their families and put into residential boarding schools. We have more people looking into these unmarked burial grounds and these graves of enslaved people's and looking at what we erase and what we hope nobody notices when we are looking for quote unquote progress, right, like you talk your reference like putting a highway in something that goes through burial grounds. So you know who who says history has never dead somebody somebody. That's an actual quote from somebody, but I can never remember who that is. But it gets really big right when we start talking about these things. It's sort of like oh my gosh, and then this problem, and then this problem, and then this problem, this is over here, and oh my god, like I understand why we like a simple story. You've been listening to an excerpt of my conversation with dog search expert Cat Warren. Find her book What the Dog Knows wherever you get books, and learn more about her work on historical burial grounds at her website cat Warren dot com, and remember to listen to part one too. If you haven't yet, 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 quest gen 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 O. 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 to Day's background noise provided by Luna and the wee little birds nesting in the lemon tree outside my window.