Sam Sanders: Life Has Been Lifing

Published Aug 21, 2023, 7:00 AM

Sam Sanders is a well known and well loved radio and podcast host. He went a little extra-viral for a recent episode of his show, Vibe Check, in which he and his co-hosts openly discussed grief. This week on It’s OK, Sam joins us to talk about being open with his grief, and the ongoing relationships we have even after death. 



In this episode we cover: 

  • What happens if you give grief a voice? 
  • The double-edged sword of church communities
  • Why understanding context helps you treat yourself more kindly
  • How men speaking honestly about grief helps everyone
  • Throwing out the rule book on grief

 

Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
Train with Megan here: next course begins 9/04

 

Related episodes:

A Renaissance of our Own: Rachel Cargle 

 

Coming Home to Yourself with Alex Elle

 

Follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @refugeingrief and @itsokpod on TikTok

Notable quotes: 

“I wish churches would say, “Every emotion you feel is allowed and is in fact, holy, because God made them all.” - Sam Sanders

 

About our guest:

Sam Sanders is the host of Into It, the flagship culture podcast from Vulture, and the co-host of Vibe Check on Stitcher. He covered electoral politics for NPR, and was one of the original co-hosts of The NPR Politics Podcast. Sam also created and hosted the NPR news & culture podcast, It’s Been a Minute. Find him on social @samsanders

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world. Find her @refugeingrief

 

Additional resources:

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.

What am I naming my grief today? Who is she? We're gonna call her Sally today. She really wants to watch reruns of Designing Women and then maybe put on some old gospel records after that. And I think Sally would like have some hagandash butter pecan ice cream with me because my mother used to love that. And Sally has a big laugh.

This is it's okay that you're not okay? And I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show Somebody, a lot of you DMed and emailed me about Sam Sanders, co host of the podcast five Check and host of Into It. Today, Sam and I are talking about grief and love and church and the importance of friends. So many good and important things settle in everybody. All of that is coming up right 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 professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, So, Sam Sanders has been in the podcast and the radio world for a long time. He was the creator and host of National Public Radios podcast. It's been a minute, so you might have heard him there. You might know him from his twelve years as a reporter for NPR, where he covered electoral politics and was one of the original co hosts of the NPR Politics podcast. He's won awards as the best Radio and podcast host from both the Ambies and the Los Angeles Press Club. You probably know his voice, even if you might not know his name. As I mentioned in the teaser, so many of you sent me the Vibe Check episode in which co host Sam Sanders, Zach Stafford, and Say Jones discussed grief. Now, if you haven't heard that conversation, look for vibe Check wherever you get your podcasts so you can hear it. But you definitely don't need to have heard that conversation with Sam and his co host already in order to get into the episode today. This conversation with Sam Sanders has everything you could possibly want in a conversation about grief and love and taking care of your people while also taking care of yourself. We've got the good parts and the not so good parts of church, so we're covering both community building and spiritual bypassing. We've got expressions of grief that include ice cream and designing women marathons. We have got the sheer goodness of men supporting other men in their emotional and relational well being, which is super important. And we've got ongoing relationships with people who died years ago because we know that those relationships never actually die. There's a lot here. You're gonna hear Sam say towards the end of the show that he felt fortified by our time together, and I hope you do too. That's the beauty of these conversations, everybody. They feed us. These conversations feed us if we let them, if we make room for them. Now, just as so many people sent me the original Vibe Check episode where Sam and his friends discuss grief, I hope you will share this episode with your friends and with strangers on the internet. It is a great way to open up conversations that feed you and make the whole world better at the same time. Now, speaking of spreading the word and making the world better, you all have been responding to my pleas for reviews of the show, so thank you for that. There have been several new ones lately. I love reading them. Your reviews get people to listen to the show, and if you leave a review for a specific guest specific episode of the show, I tend to pass those along to my guest. Yes, So, Alira, thank you for your review of my conversation with Gina Rossero. I passed your message along to Gina so that she could hear what she means to you. So from both of us, thank you. Thank you to everybody who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please do so about the show in general or a specific episode that moved you. All right on with today's show with the kind, funny, wise and delightful Sam Sanders. I'm so glad to have you here with me today, and I have to say that everybody on the team was so excited that we were going to get to chat today, so you know you have some fans.

Yeah, Soscedens here, honored to be here and thank you for doing this work. I think that I've been talking about on my shows the last few weeks is how we and Americans especially just don't talk about grief enough, and so for people that do that intentionally, I'm grateful. So thanks for what you do.

Absolutely, Yeah, it's neat to see how comfortable might not be the right word, but how much more comfortable or how much more frequently people are talking about grief? I feel like when I started this work ten years ago, no one was really talking about it. So there has been a change, it's not quite enough of a change. But before we jump into all that, I mean, the obvious place for us to start here is with talking about grief and talking about your recent episode on vibecheck discussing your mom's death. Yeah, I would love to start with could you introduce your mom to us?

Yeah. My mother's name is Regina Sanders. She was the second youngest of six raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She was an elementary school teacher and a middle school vice principal and a Pentecostal church organist and a mother of two. And she was in wilvermin. I think the most energetically charismatic person I've ever known in my life, I said in vibe check. The thing about my mother was that every room she entered, she won them all over. And when it wasn't even a competition, or when there weren't even stakes, you always wanted to find a way to be on her side, because her side just seemed more fun. She was a woman who taught me and my brother and so many other people that you can be successful and you can be professional and you can get a lot of shit done, but you can like always find time for laughter and joy and like whimsy. My mother was like beautifully whimsical. She just she loved the weird joke, she loved the crash joke, she loved laughing where you shouldn't laugh, and till the very end, she was cracking us all up. So that's her.

Yea.

She passed away June twenty first, so a little over a month ago, and we miss her dearly.

Such a big presence. Now, something that you didn't mention in your description of who she was and what she did. She worked as a mortician when you were a kid, right or something adjacent to that.

Yeah. Yeah, This is also what has made dealing with grief over her passing a multifaceted exercise because my family, more than most other families, dealt with death a lot. So my parents met after my mother had finished college in South Texas and was teaching grade school, and she met my father and they had a quick courtship. And they'll never admit it but I think they were pregnant with my brother when she was walking down the aisle. Fine with it. But my father had had a multifaceted career. He was trained as a farmer, and he had like a master's degree in agriculture from Prairie View and a university, and for many years he worked for the state. They have what's called an extension service where a state life Texas basically has farmers on the payroll to help other farmers farm well. And so he was like a master farmer who like taught farmers how to farm good shit. So he did that. But when he left that, he began managing like senior centers and he did some other shit. But when he and my mother got married, he was like, I've always wanted to have a funeral home. This is a very reliable business in black communities because you'll notice Black people only bury their loved ones at black funeral homes. It's even more segregated than like Sunday Morning church in America. The funeral business when it's like it's black, right. So he was like, I want to do that, And then my mother was like, you know, I kind of always wanted to have a daycare. So they decided when we were young that they were going to have both a funeral home and a daycare, and they did. And I worked one summer in the daycare with the infants, actually two summers, and my brother did more of the funeral homework, but he would work the funerals like as an usher driving the car, and I did that for litle bit too. But all through our childhood we were around death. My parents had to work the funerals. My mother was trained to embalm bodies. We were just like as kids hang out at the funeral home all the time, which meant that like we could run around the funeral home and like play hide and go seek amongst the caskets, and every now and then I would like, dare my brother touch the body? Go touch the dead body. We could just like get that close. So it was never weird to me to be around a dead body, and it was never weird for me to think about death, which I realized in adulthood was a special kind of privilege, a special kind of privilege. There's a lot less queasinous about this shit with me.

How was grief talked about in your household?

Grief was not talked about, grief was performed.

Tell me about that.

A black funeral is an exercise in performance art. And I say that with love and with kindness. But it's a fucking show. Have you you've been, You've been to the least one. Yes, it's a show.

It is.

It's a show. It's a concert. They go on for hours. It's not just one emotion, it's all of them. So my first experience with grief, just as a kid growing up in a black church and as a kid with two black parents who owned a black funeral home, was understanding from a very early age that grief emotionally was multifaceted. It was multifaceted. You go into a black funeral, there's moments of sadness, there's moments of humor, there's moments of joy, there's moments of reflection. But it's not just sad. Right, you are the kid of parents who own a funeral home. You see all sides of the death industry. Right. I used to know how much caskets actually cost. Turns out you're all getting scammed. Then you're all getting scammed, like truly buy your casket at Costco, like save the money. But I just always burials explore. Okay, well but yes, yes, yeah, but I always just had a i guess, more well rounded experience or understanding of what grief was and what death was because I saw it through those ways, which which was is prismatic is not the word, but there was layers to it.

Yeah. It's interesting that when I ask you about grief, we go to the funeral and the performance, the performance aspect of that, you know, Like I hear from so many people who either grew up or are still deeply involved in church communities, and for them they feel like, wait a second, Like we had this outpouring of love and celebration and wailing and mourning during the funeral, and then a week later everybody was over it, and I'm still like, my dad just died.

I'm in that right now. Can I tell you what I've been telling clothes Lease, Yes, we have the funeral. It is a beautiful service. The church that we attended most of our lives, they really showed up for us and honored my mother with joy and humor and life, and it was wonderful. The grave site was literally one hundred and five degrees because it was a Texas heat wave that week but like we did it. It was it was a damn good funeral, and I've been doing a bunch of funerals, so I appreciate my entire church family for doing that for us. But a week or two later, I started telling my friends, I was like, you know what I wish. I kind of wish she had also been cremated so I would have an excuse to make a trip to toss her ashes somewhere. I wanted something else to mark the death that was smaller and quieter and more personal, and I've been seeking those moments in the week since her passing. So just this past weekend, I just quietly, without taking anybody with me, not even my dog, snuck off the San Diego and just walked along the beach for hours for the whole weekend. And it felt like it was getting me to that place that I want to be in. But I still have this weird desire to go somewhere, either alone or with just a few people, to honor her in the way that you would go somewhere to spread a parents' ashes and not weird like she's in the ground. I know she's in the ground, but I still want that too.

That's not weird at all. Nothing you do to honor, explore and maintain a connection with someone you love is weird.

That's the thing that I'm working through right now too, because even though no one's telling you there's a script on how to grieve, you're kind of always like, well, am I doing it right?

Yeah?

Am I doing it right? You know? Before I talked about my mother's death on vibe Check, a podcast I host with two of my favorite people in the world, it was like, well, am I allowed to do this? Is it okay? What are the rules? And then you think long and hard about it. It's like, there are no rules around grief, and you shouldn't have any rules around grief. You got to just live it. But yeah, I'm so glad you raise that point, like what are the rules? The rules are you're sad. The rules are you're sad and you got to work. But the rules are also like, sometimes you're not just saying you're cracking up over a memory of that awful joke she told in the most unopportune moment, or sometimes you are. You know, there's just a range. So yes, like not accepting that there's no rule book and just saying this feels right today. I think is a work. That's the word. Yeah.

I think the challenge here is that we've been sold a rule book. Oh yeah, right, we've been sold a rule book with the you know, the five stages of grief and then with prolonged grief disorder and then like you know, you have six weeks to have your feelings and then you should be back to normal. And this whole idea that grief ends at the funeral instead of it begins at the funeral, Like there is a set of rules that we've inherited, like the fact that we're like, shit, am I allowed to talk about this? Says there is there's a line we feel like we're not supposed to cross. Yeah, so much of the work and so like so many people sent me your episode on vibechech exploring grief, talking about grief, saying we have to talk about this stuff. They were like, it's happening. This is so exciting that people are talking about it, and it really is like there there is no cage, right, We've been sold a cage, but there is no cage. And what's normal in grief is to feel how you feel and express how you express and not know how to do this. Yeah, because you've never had to live without your mom before. Yeah, so anything that you do is like is new. Yeah, yeah, is new and acceptable and like the only rule book is I mean to be poetic about it here. The only rule book is your own heart. That is the thing.

Yeah, it's funny. Thinking about rules a thing I was thinking about doing last week, and I was like, this might not be good for me. I was thinking a lot about the things that my mother loved, and I could always remember movies that she loved because we watched a bunch of movies together, and I remember she loved Still Magnolias and whenever it came on, like TBS in my youth, we would just watch it to Magnolis is on, We're watching it. And for a second I was like, Oh, that movie's actually about grief. Julia Roberts' character dies in that movie is very painful. Maybe watching that would like help me, And then I was like, no, Sam, maybe it won't. Maybe this Hollywood version of death and grief is the opposite of what you need, because as watching this going to make you think that you need to perform your grief in a still Magnolia's kind of way. So I haven't watched it yet, I might, I think if I do, all watch it with the critical lens, not a lens to which to inform myself. But yet there are rule books everywhere.

There really really are, And I like, this is all an experiment, right, Like, you don't know, you think it might be a great idea or maybe a caution to watch Steal Magnolias. So you turn on Steal Magnoias and you check in with yourself and you're like, how's this feeling to me? This is actually not feeling good, So I'm going to turn this off. This actually feels different than I expected. Let me explore this, right, Like, it's all an.

Experiments, Yeah, and relative exactly.

On one day, Steel Magnolia's might be the best thing ever, and you might want to be like, let's throw a Steel Magnolia's party because that sounds fascinating. I don't know, I haven't done this before, but there really is so much, like I think, Like, I think one of the reasons that we try to put so many rules around grief is we don't like the chaos. We don't like not knowing, we don't like not knowing the answer, and it's like, we're supposed to keep this whole buttoned up thing around all the parts of being human, and it's just it's weird.

Yeah, Like, the thing that we know the least about is what happens to us after we die. Some people think they know, some people make up stories to feel good about it. We don't fucking know. Yeah, So, of course, in the absence of knowledge of what happens to your loved one of yourself after this death, of course, it's like human nature to want to put rules and norms around it, to give this thing some semblance of order. So I get it. But yeah, I think, like, can we live our grief with the same amount of openness that death itself is?

Yeah?

Death is an extreme openness because you actually don't fucking know. I don't know where my mother is. I don't know if she's looking at me. I don't know if she's like, why the fuck are you talking about me? I don't know. But I can still love her and her memory in the I don't know of it all. And so it's like, how can I take that same okay with the I don't know that No, take that same feeling and apply it to how I'm living out my grief.

Yes, I love that you brought up the afterlife and our ideas about that. I think one of the things that happens for so many people, no matter what the spiritual practice is or what their religious tradition is, a lot of people feel like they get this shaming from their community, like don't be sad. You're mother's with Jesus. Don't be sad. It's all annot She's.

In a better place. She's I don't know. Are you fucking sure?

Are you are?

Re's the zip code? You tell me? Where is she?

Exactly? It really is this. Do you know that term spiritual bypassing?

No, tell me so?

Spiritual bypassing right where we use religious ideas, spiritual ideas to bypass the human condition. And that's what's happening when you're saying something like you know your your mother wouldn't wouldn't want you to be sad. She's in her better place, she's gone to Jesus. Like whether or not all of that stuff is true for the person, like not relevant in this moment because right now I am missing her here right It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that there is something after this, if we're using that as a way to invalidate the person who's right in front of us and the way that they're feeling and the way that we might care for them. Right. So, for a lot of people in religious communities, they're like, I can't I can't on my church community the way that I used to, because all they want to do is see me happy that my loved one is reunited with the life force, and I don't feel that. And I can be more than one thing. I can be really happy that my person's body and spirit has rejoined the oneness and really fucking want them still here. Yeah, both of the like you contain multitudes, Like you can have all of these feelings at once and they're all valid.

Yeah, And this is the thing. And I will say I was a church kid. I love my church experience. I have left the church, but I still think I believe in God. But yeah, I think sometimes our faith traditions are asking us or are giving us distraction. Sometimes it's just distraction. It's saying I get it you having some really negative feelings around this death right now, But don't think of those negative feelings, think of these positive feelings. Think about heaven. Isn't that cool? And on the face you're like, isn't that such a nice offering for them to give to me? But it's not getting rid of the negative emotions. It's just distracting you from them temporarily. They're still there, and they're there until they're gone. And I think, like I would love for our faith traditions to have a better language at helping us here in this world sit with our feelings. I would love to know that churches are doing the thing where they're telling you about having if that makes you feel good, but also saying to you very clearly and forthrightly, every emotion you feel is allowed and is in fact holy because God made them all. That's what I want to hear. All of it's valid, and I want to And this is not a theology conversation, because I really don't know where I stand. But if I believe in a higher power, a God, a Jesus, whatever, I believe that like that higher power is always telling us that pretty much everything about us is okay because we were made in the higher powers image. And if I'm feeling today and sadness is in me, it is holy. It's holy and how can I respect it and not just distract myself by thinking about who my mother is playing the tambourine with in heaven. You know that's right.

And also this idea that there are negative emotions and positive emotions, which just emotions and on or off. I love that you just called them all holy, and I'm with you on that one. There is no part of the human experience that is not holy. It doesn't mean that some people aren't jerks and that there's like not mad behavior, that's not what we're talking about, but we're talking about, like the way that you feel is the way that you feel, and can we find a way to surround that with love and curiosity and support and connection instead of trying to shove people out of what they feel by saying they're doing it wrong or this is the right way to be or get out of this. And like, I think this is why these conversations are so important, because we have inherent those rules around goodness and badness, positive and negative, what you're supposed to be doing and what you're not supposed to be doing, and how do you honor the debt? Like stop right, Like let's just be in this moment in this humanness that we're having and see each other. How rad would that be?

Yeah? Well, and how can we respect these emotions as multifaceted beings in and of themselves. What if a good thought exercise is to even personify our grief and talk to it.

I love that you just said that, because there's a course that I've been running for like ten years now called Writing Your Grief, and one of the prompts in there is personifying your grief. So it's this whole like creative prompt around. Can you if grief has a voice, If grief is a character, how does it move? What does it where? How does it speak? Does it speak? If it has a voice, let it like, let's listen. I love that. So I love that you just brought that up. Yes, there's just like a nice little yeah.

Well, now I'm thinking, like, what am I naming my grief today?

Yeah?

Who is she? We're gonna call her Sally today. She really wants to watch reruns of Designing Women and then maybe put on some old gospel records after that. And I think Sally would like have some hagandash butter pecan ice cream with me, because my mother used to love that, and Sally has a big laugh. That's today for grief.

See I love her.

I love her too. Oh my goodness, she's great. Oh Sally, come on in the front door, Sally.

We haven't got the ice cream getting to the proper thawed texture. A speak. I love this and this is this is what becomes available when you throw out the inherited rule book.

Yeah. Well, and throwing out the inherited rule book allows me to just like see things that I once thought were static as a multifaceted. One of the things I talked about in the vibe Check episode with Zach and Sayeed it was that, like, we are taught so much from an early age that grief itself is an exercise in scarcity and a practice in a scarcity mindset. But what a grief is abundance. I've been trying to look for in the ways since my mother has died, in what ways my grief over her and grieving her has expanded my world. So much of our default thought about grief is that, like, it sucks, it's sad we lost something. But my grief that I've been experiencing since my mother passed away has been abundant in so many ways. When people ask me how I'm feeling now, I say, my mother died a few weeks ago. It's kind of weird. And then you know what they tell me their grief story. They tell me about someone who died, They tell me about a loved one, and that story and that sharing is abundance. It's a new connection, right. I was in the bank cashing out the CD that we had tucked away to cover my mother's funeral expenses, and nice bank lady was like, so, what are you using this for? And they expect like a down payment for a house. Sure, my kid's going to college, and I was like, for my mother's funeral. And then we just talked for twenty minutes in the bank office and by the end she's crying and I'm crying, and I know all about her on something that's abundance, right, So how can I see grief not just a scarcity but as abundance? SAYI Jones on the podcast said one of the phrases he likes to use and he's hurt from someone else is that we are not just grieving, we are anointed with grief.

I loved that phrase from him.

Yeah, and if you look at anointing in the biblical sense. Anytime any character in the Bible had a special anointing, it meant that they had a gift that had to be shared. You weren't making full and good use of your anointance unless you were using it to help share with other people. And so on some days, not all days. Thinking about grief in that way helps me. It's abundance, it's building community, it's sharing stories, it's bigger, it's not just scarcity.

I love that we lay that down, that idea that grief can be an anointing and grief is abundance. We lay that down after our conversation about none of this is about talking you out of your grief. I think sometimes we can like conflate abundance with celebration, and then we're right back to where we started again with like, yeah, hold on positive vibes only, and if it's abundance, it's a celebration and we're only going to talk like we can like derail that so quickly. Yes, yes, hey, before we get back to my conversation with Sam Sanders, you know, Sam created that character for his grief, the glorious Sally who eats butter Bacan ice cream and watches a marathon of designing women. I love how that unfolded. That was completely unscripted, everybody. The Writing your Grief course that I mentioned in that part of the show is truly one of the best things I've ever created, and it includes that prompt on personifying grief that Sam ran with to find the voice of Sally. So if you want to explore your grief in creative and truly helpful ways, check it out Writing your Grief. You can find it at refuge in grief dot com backslash wyg, which is for Writing your Grief, or click the link in the show notes. All right, everybody, back to my conversation with co host of Bye Check, Sam Sanders. What I love in that story about your conversation with the woman at the bank. I remember when I was first when we were first shopping my book around to publishing houses, people were like, this is so great, it's so necessary, it's so needed, but nobody wants to talk about grief. So we pass, and I'm like, you know, nobody ever wants to talk about grief if you talk about it as this finite thing that if you do the steps correctly, you're over it and you never talk about it again. Nobody wants to talk about that. But if you open up opportunities for people to tell the real truth about their grief and connect in that without being hijacked or bypassed or talked out of it or cheered up or any of those things, then everybody wants to talk about it. And I think, you know, this is something that we see coming out of that Vibe Check episode, is that when you talk about grief in unbounded ways, not as a measure of psychological health as to how quickly you can snap back to normal and be positive, but when you talk about it like a human, everybody wants in on that conversation.

Yes, yeah, well, and like that was the least scripted and pre planned episode of Vibe Check we've ever taped. So one of the EPs of the show is dear friend of mine and he lives like a mile down the street. It's hanging out with him. We both have dogs, a walk our dogs other. Sometimes we're talking about life whatever, And I was like, Brandon, hear me out. All I want to talk about right now is my mother's death. And Vibe Check is a show where the three of us talk about our feelings. Would it be weird to do that? He's like, do it. Then we tell the rest of the team and they're just like do it. And then we're all like, well, just stop there. We're not going to script this. We're not going to research this, we're not going to have bulleted talking points and try to stick a certain landing. We're just going to talk about it. So everything in that episode was off the cuff, and I think that is what our grief conversations maybe need more of. I'm over twelve steps for anything. I'm over a playbook or a grief one on one for dummies. I need to hear myself think out loud about this and allow others to hear that too, so that they know that they can do it as well. And that's what I think the episode accomplished. It was a goal, you know.

Yeah, and I think we've covered this a lot already, but like one of the things that you said in that episode was like, this is so important because I feel like there's shame around grief and I want to pull one thing in just to make sure that he's mentioned. So, your dad died when you were a kid eighteen yeah, eighteen. Interesting intersections. So my partner died the day before his son's eighteenth birthday. So like this like loss of your dad at this like really pivotal, just graduating from high school, just turned eighteen, all of this stuff, and then here is this person who disappears, right, So I wanted to bring him into into our spare, into our conversation. And also when you talked in the in the Vibe Chech episode about we need to be able to talk about this without shame, it made me curious as to how have you experienced that shame previously and what was it like being a young man losing your dad and navigating all of those things that are inherent in being a young adult, a young adult black man in this culture. Yeah, I guess my question in all of that soup is like where did you intersect with that shame that you mentioned in this episode?

It was compounded And I'll tell you I but first I'll say, like the circumstances of his death just it was wild. So my father died December fifteenth, two thousand and two, so winter of two thousand and two. I had finished high school the first week of June. In two thousand and two, I had graduated. I was set to go off to California to college. I ended up not going because my mother had her stroke which paralyzed her in September of that year, two thousand and two, and then right after that, my father was hospitalized with in stage kidney failure which would kill him by the time we got to December of that year. So basically June I graduate for my mother's paralyzed, my father's already in the hospital, and by December he dies. I deferred a year from college just to take care of them, and then I ended up staying in San Antonio to go to undergrad to care for my mother. But over the course of that year before my father died, that summer to fall, it was probably the most depressing time in my life. I'll never forget my Aunt Alta, my mother's sister. She and I had Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and my mother was on one floor of that hospital and my father was on another. And this is after I had turned down the chance to go to Stanford to be there with them, After I had, as an eighteen year old, had to close down the family businesses, and I was just like, I don't see how things get worse than this, right, So I experienced the loss of my father in just more of a low point in life period. You know, my mother died last month, But my life outside of that is pretty good. I like my two jobs, I just bought a house. I'm love in La right, like, life was okay. So that was the biggest difference from the start. But I also think I had a lot more shame around grieving my father, and it was all compounded by being closeted at that moment in time. I really didn't start to come out until my mid twenties, and my father died not knowing that I was gay, or I hadn't told him that I'm gay. I think he knew, and there were moments, especially when in his last several months of life when I was this primary caregiver, where I could just see in his eyes that he knew, you know what I'm saying. But we never had that conversation. And so I think had I been out of the closet the way that I dealt with my grief and talked about my grief, a big part of it would have been a conversation about how to make peace with knowing that I hadn't come out to him before he died. Because I wasn't out. I just didn't have that conversation with anybody, not even myself. So my grief, the totality of my grief, was not truncated. What's the word I'm looking for. I couldn't have all of the grief conversations I wanted to have around my father's death because I wasn't out of the closet, and so I did not grieve as holistically or as fully as I'm able to grieve now with my mother's death. Right. I also think that life was just in such disarray. I was just trying to keep my head above water and really try to not think about grieving. I was still taking care of my mother, who was bedridden. I was still figuring out if I might go to college or not. I was still figuring out how to live as an eighteen year old with no functioning parents. My father had died. My mother was there, but she couldn't be a parent to me anymore. So all of a sudden, I'm eighteen, not in school. One parent is dead, I'm taking care of the other. There's really no supervision my church was there to support, but they weren't going to tell me what to do. So I was just trying to figure out how to make sense of this very new life that was thrust upon me. And I think making sense of that meant that, like I maybe didn't give myself enough time to just live grief holistically. Now at thirty eight, with my mother passing one, she had been sick and bedridden for twenty years, so we knew it was going to happen at some point. I don't think we expected it to happen now because she had lived twenty years. We all thought she was going to live to be like eighty five, just bedridden, So I wasn't ready for it, but I knew that death was coming. But I also think that I'm in a place in my life where things feel more settled and I'm able to just take more time to think about my grief. The fact that last weekend I drove down to San Diego, It's been a weekend on the beach and think about grief. That was a luxury I was not able to afford myself when I was eighteen. So my life is more comfortable now, which means I have more space to just let the grief be, if that makes sense, But also so much these conversations are easier because I can talk about being gay, having a mother, and growing up in a church that was anti gay until it kind of wasn't, and having a mother where I think the last person in my life close to me who accepted them that I'm actually gay was my mother, and I don't think it clicks to her until I brought a man home for Thanksgiving two years ago. So a lot of my grief is working through that. My mother is the love of my life. I don't think she actually accepted the totality of my life until the end of hers What the fuck is that about? But even being able to say that, that's part of the conversation. I couldn't do that when I was eighteen and my father died. Sorry, that was a very long answer.

I love that answer because this is the reality here. Like we don't grieve in a vacuum, we don't love in a vacuum. There are cultural issues, there are communal issues, there are interpersonal issues, and they all have to do with how fully are we allowed to know ourselves and how fully are we allowed to let other people know us, And that's not always an easy answer, right. It's not always safe to be seen as who you are or to be loved as who you are. And sometimes the people we love aren't capable of loving the totality of your life the way that you just said, right, And there's just so much to grieve in all of that. There's so much to grieve in all of that. Like, it's just like, it's ridiculous to me that we think that grief is this siloed thing that happens at this very specific time when a person dies and it's over really quickly. Like, grief is like the backdrop of the world, right, it is everywhere, And until we make space for that and open conversations about that, then we're not gonna get the full abundance that we're longing for.

Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, thinking more on like the difference between grieving my father and my mother, and I talked about this a little bit on vibe check, but in a Twitter threat a few months ago, I want to sit actually, few weeks ago, round Father's Day. One of the things I had to make peace with allowing myself to do well some of the world building we do around dead loved ones. My father was a very present father. He was always there and because he actually was the parent who did like pick up and drop off for everything, So every band practice, every meet, every whatever, my dad was the one there. He was a constant in our lives. But like many straight male fathers, he was physically present and emotionally distant. You know, they're very good at that, those men. And so I found myself after his death continuing to hold down to his hold on to his memory in my heart and my mind. But I made his memory this character that grew on my and in the twenty one years that he's been gone, I felt the memory of my father become a fully formed character who changes and lives and breathes. And there's some moments in my life or I feel like he and I are like throwing back cocktails and shit talking. There are some moments in my life where he is my champion or my hero, or there's some moments in life where he is like the prankster. But like the memory of my father has become its own being. That is almost what I need him to be when I need it. And I used to get mad at myself for building him up in that way in my heart and in my mind. But now I'm kind of like it's allowed. It's my dad and it's my mind. And this helps. And so part of this whole idea of like grief as abundant, some of that abundance is like you get to do with your dead loved ones memory whatever you need to do with it, and you get to build that world. And that actually has been so cool. And my father's memory has been able to sustain me and parent me in ways that my father when he was here might not have been able to do. So I like it.

I love it, I love and I love what you just said there that like whatever you grow that relationship into or imagine into for that relationship like that is yours. It's sort of like staking this claim to your own life.

Mm hmm.

Honestly, every conversation that I've had for the last year, like we always come back to agency and sovereignty, right, like this is your life.

Yes, your heart, your mind, your love, your life.

Yes, and that other people get to have theirs as well, and that other people's love, life, grief, all of these things are not a threat to yours.

Exactly.

You get to love as you love, and explore as you explore, and grieve as you grieve. And can we acknowledge that in each other and share that with each other and not see it as one of you is doing it right and one of you is doing it wrong.

And acknowledge is just going to be different. You know, my brother and I are ten months apart in age. Our parents literally had us back to back, and I took care of my mother for about the first five years after she had her stroke, and my brother took care of her the last five years and the last five years or so she had debnia. So his experience caring for her was different than my experience caring for her, And so I know that the way she lives in his head after she's gone is going to be different than what it was for me. That's okay, right, Like that's okay. And now it's like, you know, I'm still just weeks out from her death, and I don't think her memory has come back to me me and the way my father's has yet, but I'm waiting for her to show up. I'm like, all right, Regina, when you come back into my heart and my mind in this like new form post death form for just for me, what you're gonna be Like, I'm excited to see, if that makes sense, I'm excited to see. I'm excited to see what the character of my dead mother becomes in me and how I talk to that.

I love that. I could talk to you for hours, but I want to I want to, like at least start turning in the direction of the door. So there are two questions that I want to get into. So thinking about that difference between being able to tell yourself the whole truth before you can tell others the whole truth, and the difference between the aftermath of your dad's death and the aftermath of your mom's death. Like, one of the things that I've seen in my inbox, in my comment and my DMS stemming from your episode is how thankful people are that a bunch of men are sitting down and having this conversation, right, that there is something so special to hear any people, a group of people, but specifically a group of men come together and really make space for each other and listen to each other and hear each other. And this isn't something that comes out of the blue, right like this, like my mom died and I decided to start having deep, vulnerable conversations with people in my life that doesn't just arrive. It's reminded me of when I was getting ready for our time here together. I remember reading about an incident with your male friends in grad school. I don't know if it was grad school or undergrad where it was an interview I read with you a while ago where you were talking about you hadn't come out yet, and your straight male friends were like, dude, stop hurting yourself by pretending to be something else, please please be who you are.

Yeah, this was the thing. It's like, one of the biggest catalysts, like coming out journey was not gay people being like, come out, girl, because my straight friends being like, we already know when we see you struggling, what the hell? That's what it was like. That was a catalyst. And like, yeah, my dear friend Desmond Surrette love him dearly, sat me down well after midnight in an I hop in Harvard Square. It was like, we're here for you, dude, Like we know. Yeah, yeah, anyway, I for sure cut you off, go ahead, finish your thought.

No you didn't. I was hoping you would pick that up and tell that story a little bit, but there's there's something in there. And then also sort of looking at your career and being known as a person who actually somebody writing about your career with NPR, somebody wrote surfacing uncommon pathways from emotional sincerity has long been the object of sanders work. It isn't that sweet?

I love this, appreciate that.

So there's this connection there or this sort of call and response that I saw as I was learning about you and reading what you've said about yourself and what others have said about you and listening to you obviously that there's this long standing, deeply rooted interest in what is below the surface. Yeah, and how do we connect there? And how do we talk about that? And I wonder if that assessment that that person wrote, surfacing uncommon pathways for emotional sincerity has long been the object of Sanders' work. Does that feel accurate? And if so, like, how do you see that showing up in not just your grief? And this is a super long, complicated question, apologies, welcome to my brain, but like, if it does feel accurate, how does that relate not just to your grief but the way that you are connecting with the people in your life through that vulnerability, depth, and honesty. That is the longest, most convoluted question ever in the world. And if you heard a real question, let me know.

Yeah. I think the question is like, how'd you get cool with talking about feelings? And talking about feelings a lot and in different ways. I talk about feelings as they relate to entertainment and popular culture. When I covered politics, I talked about the way our emotions inform our political lives. When I was a news reporter, a lot of the work was like, this thing just happened, how do people feel about it. I've always liked looking at the journalism I do through the lens of emotion, like stories or facts and figures and numbers and whatever, But they're also stories about how people feel, and how they feel always drives the action for any news story, So that's always undergird how I approach like my professional work. And then I think personally, maybe part of why I'm so eager to have these kind of conversations in adulthood is because in childhood I just really didn't have them. I was surrounded by a loving family and a loving church and people who cared for me, but there were two things that kept me from being truly emotionally honest as a kid. I was gay in South textasn't very closeted. And two, I had a really bad stutter. It was very hard for me to talk for a very long time. I don't think I really worked through it fully until my twenties. So I remember this yeourney in aching to be better able to express myself as a kid and say all these things I wanted to say. I think part of why I gravitated to music and playing the saxophone was because that was a way that I could express something without a stutter on it, right. So I think that's the second reason why I'm so into having these kind of conversations as a grown up. I'm one of those people who like loves talking to strangers. I love it. I'm in a long line waiting for something. Oh, we're talking. We're talking. I'm at the CBS, we're talking. Don't put me in an uber where the ride is longer than half an hour, because by the end I'm walking out the car being like, I think it's all gonna work out. You're gonna get custody. Keep me posted on Blair like I get in there right exactly, And I think all of that is like from this, it's like feeding and nurturing this child too. For a few reasons, just didn't get to have all the conversations he needed to have as a kid. So now I probably overconversate and I found ways to get paid to conversate, which isn't even a real word, but I like it conversate. But yeah, I think that's part of it.

I love the play on overco over conversate and overcompensate. Love that. But this is also like medicinal time travel, right, like, oh yeah, here is my life and it is an answer to what I longed for as a child, Like we're always doing that.

Yeah. I tell folks that Vibe Check, which is on purpose a show hosted by three black gay men. I tell folks Vibe Check is having the podcasts and cultivating the friendships that I wish I could have had as a young queer black kid in South Texas. I didn't have that. I didn't have a sight in Zach when I was a kid. I would have loved to have those friends as a kid. I get to have them now as an adult. And my favorite letters we get from listeners are younger queer folks, saying, listening to y'all is like hearing my gay elders. I'm the elder, sure, all aloud, whatever, but take it. Yeah, if we are modeling something that people don't get enough of, especially queer folks, let me do that. I love doing that. I love doing that exactly.

I mean, this is the whole reason for this podcast, right, is to have the conversations that we long to have, that we need to have personally, interpersonally collectively, to give people conversation starters, to give them something to live into, to give them something that says it is okay to do this. Yes.

Well, it's like, I mean, not to totally overuse the most overused quote of all time, which is incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela, but that Mary and Williamson quote. You know when I let my light shine, it shines right on you. Whatever. It's so, it feels corny, but it's true. Modeling this kind of behavior helps other people start doing it themselves. Modeling a grief conversation, Modeling a mature and friendly conversation between queer men between black men that allows other people and inspires him to do it themselves, and if just one person leaves this episode or that vibe check episode and says to themselves, I want to talk about grief with the loved one today. All of it was worth it. All of it was worth it. That was actually the point.

Yeah, that is a great setup for closing question. Okay, what you know and living what you have lived? What does hope look like for you today?

Hope looks like my dog laid on me. My dog, Zora is the sweetest dog ever, an old, lovely pit bull. She has been with me through every major milestone of my last twelve years. She's moved across the country with me twice. She was in the room when I introduced my mother to my boyfriend and she finally got it that I was like actually gay. Like forever, Zora was with me and with my aunt Paulette as she died of cancer. She has been in the room and in the space as I've navigated friendships and relationships. She's just been there for it all. She has been the forest gump of my life, just kind of like always there for all the big moments. And when I see her, I see the entirety of what she's lived with me, and I also see an ending coming. She will die. She is old, she's grayer this year than she was last year. She's on our medication, she's on arthritis medication. She's had in the last six months two major surgeries. She will die. And what I get to do every day was the other dog is make peace with that juxtaposition. I've lived a whole life with her, and it feels so big, and I know she's going to die. What do you do in the face of that? Like we know that everything we love will leave us, but a dog is a very present reminder of that. And what do we do when we have a dog in our lives, even knowing that they're going to leave us before we want them to, We love them even harder. I love her more every day. I love her more today. Sorry, great with you. I love her more today with her scars and her arthritis and her crotchy old bones. And I have to pick her up and get her in the bed now. And I love her more today than when she was a little bitty puppy. Isn't that hope? That's hope, you know? So like for me, it's like that is hope. Knowing all of this will end, and loving it anyway. You got me, I'm crying. My dog is hope. My dog is hope she will leave me, and so what, I still love her? Goddamn. I don't think there's going to be the dog that set.

Me off, right, It's always the dog. I can do such a good emotional callous to most things, but the second it's a.

Dog, I mean, I mean every time, yeah, every.

Time, every single time. All Right, thank you so much for being here, for both being on this show, for being on your shows, and for being in the world in all the ways that you are in the world. I'm so glad you're here.

This was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for the work you do. I feel fortified after this conversation.

Thank you, Thank you. All Right. We are going to link to vibe Check in the show notes. Obviously, anything else you want people to know about or places they can look for you, or any other missions.

I'm on social channels at Sam Sanders. My other show for Vulture is not really in the spirit of the Vibcheck conversation or your show, but it is a pop culture podcast I host, so if you wanted to mention it, cool, but like, no need to you know, different worlds, But yeah.

That's it all right, everybody, stay tuned for your questions to carry with you. I'm going to go compose myself. We'll be right back each week. I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again.

Okay.

One thing that really struck me in this conversation was how much fun it was. There are a lot of ways to be playful, even when you're talking about difficult things. Right, Playfulness is healing. I think you learn a lot about who you are and what you need when you allow yourself to be freed from that cage and play a little bit right. I also really liked how Sam looks back on his grief soon after his dad died and sees it in context. What was available to him then is different than what's available to him now, and one way of grieving one context isn't more correct than the other. Right. There's such kindness and such honoring in that view of the past self and the current self. So maybe that's something you might play with in your own life. Who were you back to and what kind of emotional life or emotional expression was available to you? And who are you now? Today, knowing what you know and what is available to you at this time. I think that kind of respectful questioning or curiosity, I think that can apply to any pivotal part of our lives, not just death. Yeah, how about you, what stuck with you from this conversation. Everybody's going to take something different from the show, but I do hope you found something to hold on to. If you want to tell me how today's show felt for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered, let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you. And while you're at it, you could also tag at Sam Sanders let him know how his story affected you. Spread your reflections around, follow the show at It's Okay Pod on TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video clips from the show, and use the hashtag It's okay pod on all the platforms, so not only I can find you, but others can too. None of us are entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company. That's it. For this week. Remember to subscribe to the show leave a review as I requested earlier. I love to read your reviews. I love to pass them along to our guests too. Coming up next week on the show, Tamblock, author of the book From Scratch and the very very popular Netflix show by the same name, and just a lovely all around human being. Follow It's Okay on your favorite platform so you do not miss an episode. It's okay that You're not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by me Meghan Devine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, with logistical and social media support from Micah. Post production and editing by his Antilli. Music provided by Wave Crush and very quiet background noise provided by Luna gently pawing at me to go get her some snacks.