What if you were just about to get divorced, but your partner gets sick? Like really sick? Rebecca Woolf was just about to leave an unhappy marriage when her husband got sick and died. What followed was a crash course in performative grief, and the dismantling of one life in order to build the next.
This week on It’s OK, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions (both internal and external), and personal agency - it’s QUITE the conversation.
Sensitivity note: this episode contains the F word, and references sex.
In this episode we cover:
Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.
Follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @refugeingrief and @itsokpod on TikTok. Visit refugeingrief.com for resources & courses
About our guest:
Rebecca Woolf has worked as a writer since her teens - it’s the way she understands both herself and the world. Her essays have appeared on Refinery29, HuffPost, Parenting, and more. She currently authors the bi-weekly column Sex & the Single Mom on romper.com. Her latest book is All of This: a Memoir of Death and Desire.
Find her on IG @rebeccawooolf (with three o’s) and at rebeccawoolf.com
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:
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.
I think when you go through a traumatic experience, you kind of I mean, at least for me, like when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my sort of after afterlife came from realizing too, like how finite it all is and how fast he went from being a healthy person to a sick person. And that could happen to me too, It could happen to anybody.
This is It's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Devine. This week on the show, what actually happens when the person you were going to divorce gets sick and dies before you had a chance to get divorced. The answer, as you might guess, is complicated. Author and advice columnist Rebecca Wolf joins us this week to talk about all of this settle in Everybody will be right back after this first break.
Before we get.
Started too 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. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational territory, and our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensemental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your world and.
Talk about it.
Hey, friends, okay, so listen. What do you do when you're just about to get divorced but your partner gets sick after years and years of conflict and abuse, Rebecca Wolfe was ready to divorce her husband. How they'd already talked about it, They greed.
To it, and the only thing left was the leaving.
And then Hal got sick, like really sick, like very soon to be dying kind of sick, and Rebecca was thrown into the position of caregiver and caretaker for the man she had been excited to leave behind. What followed was a crash course in performative grief and the dismantling of one life in order to build the next. In this episode, we cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, grief, shame, assumptions, and personal agency. It is quite the conversation I told you, Rebecca, is a lot of fun too, if we can say that about a conversation where we also discussed terrible things. Honestly, this episode really opens up the doors to how complex human relationships are, how desire and grief and liberation can all be intertwined. That's something we don't talk about very loch often. But sometimes your own personal freedom comes as a result of something bad happening. Now you know me, everybody, there will not be a pretty bow stuck on death, no transformation narrative where it all worked out for the best. But just listen to this show. Content notes. This episode explores sex and sexuality, and it definitely includes more than a fair amount of swearing. Let's get into.
It, Rebecca. It is so good to have you here now.
I was reading through a lot of your work yesterday to get ready for our conversation today, and there was this one line that actually stopped me. You wrote it felt a bit like the dreams I sometimes have where after years of living in the same house, I discover another room that had been there all along. Now that particular line is from an essay on Refinery twenty nine on Queerness, which we will link in the show notes. But I have those like mysterious room dreams all the time. And I was reading it and I was like, oh my god, somebody else has those dreams. Like, so, friends, if you don't know where we're talking about, Like you have a dream you're in a house that usually you recognize or at least often I recognize, and then there's a door and it goes into this whole room or sometimes for me, at an entire wing that opens up.
It's usually very elaborate.
Yeah, yeah, I love it to have those dreams too, because it's that's probably like the since I was a young person, the most like that has been the most recurring dream I've had.
And it's so awesome, Like it's such a great dream. It's like this this idea that we have that there's so much more that we're not aware of that like that's going on inside of us and in our like and all the inner cracks and crevices, like there's stuff lurking there and that we have no idea what's coming and what even exists in our space.
Like yeah, yeah, I mean.
It's that's life, right, Like there are dreams you don't know where are rooms that you don't know are there there rooms that you wish you never had to go into. There are rooms that you spend a lifetime trying to get out of. I think for me, in those dreams, I don't recall any of them feeling uncomfortable, more of the like, holy crap, this was in my house right this bathrooms that have waterfalls in them, or like this.
Oh my gosh, it's been here all along, and like for me, the one I had recently was like, oh my god, my kids have been sharing a room and they could have had their own room, or like I could have had my own office. Like all along there was this space and I've been you know, I've been unable to take advantage of it, to use it. And there's like this sadness that like I've missed out on years of taking advantage of the space that I didn't know was there.
Which is a really great place to start a conversation today, right, like can you talk a little bit about the rooms that you find yourself in now?
Yeah? I mean I think really it was more of finding a new room after how died, and more like understanding what I could do with all the rooms I already had, And actually it's funny because I just was thinking about this yesterday because I was answering some questions for someone else and there was a question about cheating and affairs. And as I was writing about what my feelings are now like in retrospect about having affairs in my marriage, it occurred to me that the affairs themselves were mundane in comparison to the fact that my entire marriage was really built on performance and lies. And in every capacity I was lying to him, I was lying to myself. I was trying to fit inside a room right that did not feel comfortable for me. I was trying to figure out how to decorate that room with shit that I didn't like. I think for me like coming out the other side of that, I know what I want now, and I'm not willing to take the things that I think that I need and fill the rooms that I have been uncomfortable in for years. I think it's like I'm I'm really sort of at a point where I have been for the last few years where I'm just burning down the house and building a new one, and I'm questioning all of the materials that I use to build the original house, and like were those even actual materials, Like, I don't think they were. Like, there was so much to my old life that I think was just me trying to figure out how to just be good and make everyone else happy and like do the things that I was supposed to do. And now I'm like fuck it, like the opposite, Like you want me to you want me here, I'm going to go over there. You want me to talk about this, I'm going to talk about that. So I think the rooms for me are are still under construction, but they'd look they look very different than the ones that I walked around in before.
Yeah, I love that idea of burning the old, burning the old life to the ground. There's a poem which I'll also link in this in the show notes about burning the oldier, right, and just burning that to the ground and letting the smoke of that be your prayers from what's coming next.
Yeah, I love right.
And you've had to do that so many times.
It's so interesting because and I write about this in my book, like I the reason we got married was because I got pregnant. Like everything that happened in our relationship was a surprise, right, Like surprise, you're pregnant? Surprise, you're dying. Like there's this this really kind of incredible like full circle aspect to our relationship, which was like we were sort of thrown together. You know, we ended we married because I was pregnant, and we stayed together because he was dying, which is sort of amazing. Like if you think about what, it's very me. It's like I don't I never make plans. It's like things happened and I respond to them. So it's like I got pregnant, I guess I'm going to marry you. You're dying. I guess I'm gonna stick this out. Like it's for someone who like feels like I feel like I'm a very like active, with like person with agency, like I've actually everything sort of happened to me, and it's been very passive in this way that I think for me has has made me feel like I need to sort of exert exert some sort of authority over the situation or some agency over the situation because I'm like, wait, I was gonna leave. I swear like this whole experience for me has been sort of this weight. But I don't feel like a widow. Wait, but I was miserable and I was about to leave, like he left me first. I was gonna leave him finally, and I finally got the guts to do it, and I was ready, and like I had, I was making plans, and a little bit of part of me was like mad at him because I felt robbed of finally doing the thing that I'd been like psyching myself up to do for so many years. Which sounds crazy, like to be mad at someone for dying, but I think, like there's a lot of times when we lose somebody that we do feel anger, and a lot of that comes from, you know, unresolved feelings, unresolved you know, the things that we thought we wanted to do or wanted to say, regardless of what they are, even if they were, like even if they were a divorce, Like I was resenting him that he could he died before I was able to get a divorce, Like how could you? Like now I'm a widow. Now I'm I'm stuck with you for life, Like I have to write on all my on all my paper work, widowed, right, Like I'm not a single woman or a divorced woman. I'm widowed.
I love that though that the complexity I mean, everything you write is about complexity, right. The Jenny Lawson's review of your book, she described your book as a profound work on the complexities of grief, desire, and being human, which is an awesome blurb for the jacket of your book and also correct. But that that complexity of like I love how you phrased that, I just worked myself up to take my power back for myself and make a decision about my life. And then the bastard got sick. Now, if you all are listening and thinking like you, we don't speak ill of the dead, like we talk about what's true here, right, And this is something that I want to talk about with you. That that experience that you had, so before Hell got sick, you had made the decision to leave. You were feeling empowered around that and like taking your agency and your power back, and then he got his diagnosis. Were there times during that whole illness where you felt like you had to perform as the happy wife?
Oh?
For sure. I mean I was in survival mode for sure. So my priority was like making sure that I was there to be as advocate. Like that's something that I knew I had to do and something that I was very okay with doing but yeah, like when you're when you're the primary caretaker of someone who's dying, like you're like I I wasn't even really able to explore my own feelings as it was happening, because for me, it was like I had to take care of him. I had to go. You know, we're basically living in the hospital for four months. I had to make sure my kids were okay. I wasn't even in a place where I could really you know, my own feelings and were not. I didn't even know what they were yet. I was just like, oh my god, this is happening, Like I have to be I have to be on my a game. And I was like very stoic, and I wasn't emotional in a way that like I'd never been before, like I cry at everything, and I think I was, you know, I was like a little soldier. I was like, you know, doing everything I was supposed to do, doing everything right. You know, there's sort of a relief when you're when you're so when someone's really sick and you your job is to do sort of all of the like all the medical stuff is very it's not emotional. It's like you sit down and you have these meetings with these doctors and you're talking about all the stuff, and it's like, at least for me, like I was kind of relieved to have all this work to do where I didn't have to think about my feelings. Right, it was like I had to make sure that he was taking care and make sure he was okay, talk to the doctors, get him from point A to point B, tests, and this is and that, and you know, when you're really busy, you're not necessarily thinking about your feelings. But you know, everyone comes to you and they feel sorry for you and they're so sad and like they are you okay? Are you okay? And like, you know, they get a you know, they had a whole team of social workers who kept you know, who are like, we have these social workers for you to talk to if you need to talk to them. And I was like I really didn't. I didn't want to. It wasn't that I didn't need to, because I definitely probably did, but I was I was like, I have to keep I have to keep it together here because there were so many conflicting feelings that I think I was like, nope, I will not engage. I will not acknowledge anyone who's trying to. Like, you know, I didn't want anyone to feel sorry for me. I was like, we we just got to get through this. But I knew. I knew that I only had to do it for a certain amount of time. Like I knew that he was going to die soon. His prognosis from the beginning was that he was going to die soon. So for me knowing that this there was an out, knowing that there was an end to it, meant that I could be the wife that he needed at the time. If you were to have gotten a diagnosis where he could live for a year, two years, three years, five years, I could not have been there for him in that way. And I know women right now who are in that position, who are with a dying or a very chronically ill partner and don't want to be with them anymore, and are doing it because they feel like they need to and have to, and it's their job. And I think women take on all the time, you know, the caretaker role to people they don't want to take care of anymore. You know, we raise kids for eighteen years or you know, we're still raising kids and then you're doing it again. And I think it's not just with a partner, but with a parent. And I think when those parents, partners people die, there's a lot of fucking relief and that's absolutely valid, Like it's so valid to feel relieved, and there's really not you know, we don't we don't like leave a lot of rooms to have those conversations in a way that's supportive. It's really fucking hard to take care of a dying person, whether they're dying for a week or a month or a year. You know, it's to me, there's no harder thing.
It's exhausting. It's exhausting, exhausted.
Now it's relentless, Yes, it's relentless. And you know, just as you were saying, like you have I mean, you do have choice in the matter, right, Like you can always say I'm not doing this, but well that's the exactly who will Who's gonna do this if I don't do this? So there are all of these impossible decisions and it's like we don't we don't talk about this because there's that sort of puritanical recoil of like you have to do this, Like if you loved them, you would really do it like you would do it joyfully and cheerfully. Like this requirement that we do hard things joyfully and cheerfully is so not okay.
And I think like when.
You're talking about like the social workers are coming to me saying like, let's talk this out about your feelings, and you're like, no, tactical, only tactical only. I wonder what it would have been like if if a social worker or somebody had come to you and said, this seems really complicated. Yeah, do you want to talk about what it's like to be caring for a person you were ready to leave?
Yeah? I mean nobody, they didn't know that, but yes. And that's but that's the thing is too. It's like the assumption is that this is the love of your life or this is someone you know. It's assumed that you're in deep grief or that you're deeply sad that this person is is I mean obviously like yes, no one wants it to see anyone in pain exactly.
There's that human element of it, right, like for sure you snap into the I am a human caring for another human and I love them as a human. Yes, the person is a different story, yes, But the human is who I'm showing up for right now. I just I wish that there was a way to scream for that when married couples or if you're coming in taking care of a parent, I wish there was a way to screen for what was the relationship like before you walked in this door. Yeah, because if we have that conversation, then the social workers and the doctors and the palliative care teams they know the ground you're starting from, and it doesn't cause more suffering for the primary caretaker to be like now, I have to pretend that my mother wasn't abusive for the last forty years of my.
Life, right, which is such a you know, and I think I think probably the nurses, I'm sure pick up on that. And nurses, No, the nurses. Nurses and nurses are not The nurses are always the ones everyone else I had issues with the whole time. But the nurses were uh fucking amazing. Like I'm still friends with the nurses that I met when I was there, and they get it. They see they see the full humanity of their patients, and a lot of patients who are dying are awful. They're so mean, they're in pain, yes, but they're also like there's all sorts of stuff going on and they're so mean, Like they're so mean, So trying to be nice to someone who's so mean to you all the time, Like they get that and they like I feel like, you know.
They see you, they see you.
Yeah, But no, it's complicated, and I would venture to guess that almost always, it's complicated that nobody goes into anything without having multiple you know, no one goes into a death without having a range of feelings. And that can include relief, and I think it often does. When we don't talk about that, we don't allow ourselves to have those feelings, Like we're depriving ourselves of the space of the room, right of this room for us to explore what it is to be a human and what it means to die and to live and to love. And then it isn't just one thing, you know, we like we romanticize love of so like you know, marriage and love, and it's like and and and the happy ending, and we want happy endings and we want death to be beautiful and loving and all these things that you know, it's like we've seen too many movies, right, Like there's no trope, like there's no widow relieved widow trope, like certainly not a slutty widow. I was like, I was actually doing research because I'm doing a column right now on dating as a widow, because it's like, you know, the idea of being a widow who like wants to fuck, especially like soon after the death is like like all the pearls are clutched, like oh totally, you can't go to like an article or a forum or whatever and not hear people just like it's too soon, Like what a slug, Like it's whoa people work?
People get that at your misogyny is showing it is yeah, wild, how it is wild?
And the opinions.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Oh no, no, it's just like how you're expected to just like just like to be a celibate none, you know, for however many years. It's like I don't know, like what's socially acceptable?
I how many months?
Is that? Right? I think if you google it because you can and like get an answer. I think that it's like you can start dating a year later, like that's okay with like the.
Poccording to whom though, 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. The 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 Refuge in Grief dot com backslash wyg, or you can find the link in the show notes. Here's my question though, So the week of Matt's funeral, I had probably four or five people come up to me and say my wish for you is that you get married again as soon as possible, because you're so beautiful and you're so smart, and Matt wouldn't want you to be alone. So we're like, body hasn't.
Even cool yet. Wow, right, And then I know.
A lot of people who have either dated or had hookups soon after their person died, and they get judgment for that, like, you can't you can't please people, So do whatever you want, right, listen to your own needs and ask yourself what you need. And I love that about you that you're like, Okay, this was not the marriage that I wanted. I was getting ready to leave. I didn't get a chance to leave on my own terms. And then I was forced into the caregriver role, which I did with love and compassion and humanity because I am a human and there was relief after he died, and now I'm going to do what I want. Right.
Yeah, that was and just a great summary, thank you.
But that's this is the thing, right that all of this, the entire the entire house, with all of its rooms that we've seen and we haven't seen, you get to make choices about what you build and how you inhabit those rooms. And we have to start talking about not only that you have the right to design the rooms you inhabit, but also we have to start talking about what is actually behind all of that judgment. And as you said, pearl clutching and I mean misogyny is the answer.
Yeah, it's also God, I love I love this house analogy and I'm going to just like keep going with it because we have so little imagination when it comes to how we construct our lives. Right. It's like, there's a kitchen that looks like a kitchen, and a dining room looks like a dining room, and the bedroom looks like this, and this is where you put your this, and if it doesn't have a closet that it's not considered a bedroom. And we just go along with a sort of this is what it is, right, and we don't think, like, is it possible to have a bedroom here? To do you? Like, we we just go along with like the traditional structure of a home and this is what it is. There's so many different ways to have a relationship, to build a life, to raise children, and we just sort of we move into these homes that are pre fab or that have been you know, that have that are designed the way they've always been designed, with the materials that have always been in there, and we just that's what it is. We don't question any of it, right.
We bend ourselves to those made environments.
Right right, Yeah, and then we fill those rooms based on their size and the where you know, we put our bed based somewhere the window is. It's like we we really don't or don't they don't get ourselves a space to imagine a different kind of home. It's just the how you know, It's like when you're a kid, you draw the like square with a triangle top and the two windows in the door.
No matter what you've grown up in, that is what you draw.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. So it's like we it's so deep in us to think that this is what it's supposed to look like. And for me, I think I've been doing so many exercises on like what am I defaulting to? What am I automatically assuming needs to this needs to look like, Oh shit, this isn't what I want. Why am I seeking out something that I don't want, like like because that's what I think I want? And then I get there and I'm like, wait, I don't want my house to look like a square with a triangle and a little I'm I wanted to look different now like I lived in this way. I don't want that anymore.
Yeah, what does that look like?
Where do I get the materials? Oh? Shit? Like this is It's like like that's where I'm at. I'm like, how do we question everything? And how do we build new paradigms and how do we find ways to normalize all the different things that we've felt shame about forever? And how do we talk about it in a way that's not like we're not doing it to be provocative. We're just having conversations because this is the way it is.
You're being curious about the structures of your life, all of them, all of the things that we don't think about we just sort of take for granted. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that queer couples or same gender couples like that was I mean obviously still in some pockets, but like that was completely disrupting our bedrock ideas of what relationships would look like and what marriage is and all of these things. And we've come made some progress since the fifties some but that isn't the revolutionary.
Act that it used to be.
Yeah, right, because those structures have changed because we kicked down those walls, right, And it takes people being willing to kick down those walls and question those walls. And it's it's interesting as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about years and years and years ago when I was in private practice before Matt died.
I saw a lot of people, a lot.
Of women in their thirties and forties and fifties who were sort of waking up to the things that you're talking about. Like, I live in a life in a house that I didn't really actively choose, and this is not the life that I want. How do I start extricating myself from this life?
Right?
I think it was you had you had a post.
I think it was you.
If it wasn't you, it was somebody normalize seeing divorce as a good thing.
That was you, right, Yeah, normalized divorces good news?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think this is really tricky territory because I'm also going to say sometimes we normalize death as good news, and it's tricky because we don't want to say someone died so that you could find your self, because life is not a trade now like that in our best vision of reality here you would have been able to leave how and get divorced and learn these things about yourself, and he would get to be on his own thing.
Right, that's not the story that we got, ye, It's okay. If there is relief and.
Gratitude after someone dies, that might not be your story. And I think there's also even a middle ground in.
There that.
For however long you are completely destroyed after someone dies, for however long that takes, little green shoots will eventually start to come back in and you get to choose what kind of life of after you build for yourself. It isn't the life that you chose, It isn't the life that you wish you had. And since you have to live this life, what do you want to build for yourself?
For sure? And also I think when you go through a traumatic experience, you kind of I mean, at least for me, like when you're with someone who's dying. So much of my sort of after after life came from realizing too like how finite it all is and how fast he went from being a healthy person to a sick person, And that could happen to me too, It could happen to anybody. And what am I doing with this one body? Right? Like, it's not even about what am I doing with my life? It's like what am I doing with my body? It works right now, I could live to be a hundred, but maybe my body only functions this way for like the next ten years. I don't know, So what am I doing with this body? So I also think it's super like the idea and again like going back to this like sort of invisible number where you've lost somebody in your to just like close shop and lock yourself in a room. Yea, when if you've just witnessed someone losing their life force, it's actually super normal to be like so to be turned on and to like want to fuck like immediately after. It's actually normal, Like you're you're an animal and you've just been with an animal who's died, and you're you are trying to feel alive, right because you've just been around death and you've been so it's actually it's super normal to have those feelings where you're like that is something that I like, I started doing like a deep dive on on death and sex and how they're related and they're actually very close. There aren't a lot of there aren't a lot of experiences that a human body has that are just completely it's like it's a kernal it's a full body experience, right, and feeling your life force like that's sexually if you're having a good experience, that's what you're feeling. And I think like there's you know, I think this idea that we have to wait to have an experience that for a lot of us is something that we're craving, you know. It's also it's ridiculous, Like it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous, like who gets to dictate what you're doing with this life and this body?
Right?
Who gets to make those decisions for you? And that can even be internalized, right, like it's bad of me to have these desires, it's bad of me to go do this because that isn't what's expected of me. And there's this whole internalized shaming around that, like shame is just trash. Like shame is just trash, right, Like whether you're doing it to yourself or you're hearing it from other people, that judgment about who you are and what you're doing with your life force.
Yeah, yeah, and who. And it's amazing to me that people think that they have any that that's their place at all, Like it makes me who.
I didn't know you were a part of my counsel of internal beings telling me what I should do with my life, Like hmm, I'm gonna boot you out.
And it's like what we're seeing with Roe v Wade. It's like the fact that people think that they have the authority of other people's agency and sexuality and experiences. It's like the it comes from this place of internalized shame too, Like people only shame other people who feel shame themselves. So it's like, as soon as we can strip that back, we can really actually make big changes, like globally, because so much of it, so much of all of them, all of this comes from shame. It's just like it's it's perpetuating and everyone's just shaming each other and feeling shamed, so feeling thinking to shame.
And yeah, it's a giant shame over.
I love this because this actually pulls something out that we were talking about earlier. You just mentioned and correct me if I misunderstood what you said. But the people who are controlling others' bodies. Yeah, and shaming predominantly women, but also anybody who is not a cis white male. They're carrying their own shame and their own pain that is not explored, not supported, not addressed, And as we've said before, hurt people, hurt people. If this goes back through millennia of things, and I think where it gets tricky is that we flip into that binary of like, you have to have compassion for the people who are harming you, and we think that having compassion and understanding the pain at the root of the oppressor excuses them from their actions. And we go back to what you've been talking about with your experience with Hall. It's like you showed up and took care of him out of a shared humanity and because he's the father of your kids and for all of these other reasons. And you can love someone and still hold them accountable for their actions. You can still tell them to stop and have them stop and make them stop, and you can still be relieved when they stop. That doesn't make you a bad person, It makes you human. And this is how we get the world that we want right where everybody is allowed to talk about what hurts, and they are not allowed to use what hurts to harm others.
Yes, oh yes, that was beautiful, thank you. And it's interesting because so I talked to somebody about this yesterday who read the book, and was like, they were commenting on the fact that I wrote about how basically as a human that he was. You know, that I had a less anger and that we had this very toxic marriage, but there was also a lot of love too, and I wrote about all of that. And people don't know what to do with that. Like people, right, you.
Did not choose one or the other. Stay in your narrow lane.
Pe will really want a hero and a villain. Yeah, and they want a complicated hero, which is the same thing as a hero, right, Like everyone's complicated and they and a villain. All villains are like we all are complicated, And I think like people, you know, it's again like we have no we're so binary. We don't know how to carry more than one thought or feeling at the same time. It's because we were not able to articulate it. We don't articulate it culturally, we don't hold space for all the different feelings. You know that the person that the social worker comes to me assuming that I'm sad, instead of coming to me assuming that I'm feeling.
Well, not assuming being curious, right, and being curious instead of assuming.
Yes, But this, this and that was sort of the experience that I was received, just like across the board was just this like I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. People just apologizing, apologizing, apologizing, and then me feeling more and more shitty that I wasn't only sad, like, well, I god, these people everyone feel sorry for me. I don't, but I'm I don't know, I'm not a victim, like I don't feel sorry for like you know, but but speak saying that you know, and then you're dismissing everyone else, and you're just all these people are so lovely and generous and they're they feel sad for you, and you don't want to disappoint them by telling them not to feel sad, that you're okay, Like whoa, But if we were, if we weren't to assume every time something happened, like we're just we assume, because we've been told the same stories over and over and over that this is what it looks like to you know, to lose someone this is what it looks like to have ex experience? Why experience instead of just recognizing that every experience is a human experience and there's so many conflicting feelings that are happening behind you know, and we don't know anything really, we don't know. Yeah, and just to be able to hold space for each other, like that's the whole like hold space, Like if somebody like that's that's really like my Like when people are like, oh, someone's like what do I do my friends you know, going through whatever, Like, just give them the space to feel all of their feelings, like, yeah, tell them that you're here to listen to all of it. Anger the rate, like, don't project your shit onto other people.
Yeah, curiosity and not condemnation.
Yes, oh my god, yes I love that.
Taglines seriously, but this is really the thing, right Like we need to be able to be comfortable with the complexity in us and the complexity in front of us, right Like, let the person let you, in this whole story, in this whole house, be the whole person that you are, and let the dying person be the whole person that they are. Right, this idea that once somebody has died they become canonized and you can't talk about the rough parts of your relationship, Like Matt and I had a great relationship and he was a pain in the ass. Yeah, yeah, right, And I get to be really glad that I don't need to deal with that stuff anymore, at the same time that I'm really heartbroken that he's not here, like multitudes.
Oh my gosh. And that's love too, exactly.
Yeah, there's another line in your book. It said, you said, it's heartbreaking to say that you can love someone and not miss them when they're gone.
That is God is human.
It is human. And I also think, you know, a lot of grief, at least in my experience, is not just grieving the fact that the person has died, but it's grieving the years that you spend with them, you know, I guess in the same way you do in a divorce. I have a lot of friends who've been through divorce, and I've my experience was very similar to theirs, and that I you know, really the initial grief that I felt was for my kids and for my family, and like that was you know, it wasn't even about me. It was about them not having a dad anymore. But after that when it was like time for me to really kind of dive into my own feelings. My grief. The majority of my grief came from the fact that I had been, you know, unhappy for years, and I was like, oh Jesus, like I was grieving, like my my, you know, just all of that, Like I didn't. You know, when someone dies, you're not again. You don't you're not thinking about what the years of you know, you're supposed to think about, like the happy years, missing them. And I was thinking a lot about like, fuck, I was miserable for like a really long time, and like thought that I could fake it till I make it kind of thing, and like couldn't. And like so I you know, I grieved for those years and not just for me, but for him that like he couldn't. I wanted us both to be able to come out on the other side of that and have an afterlife, like I wanted him to have one too, right, Like, OK, And there's you know, there's survivor's skill, as I'm sure you know you are very familiar with, and and you know that is you know, I've watched my kids grow up and he's not here to do that, and that's really hard, and just you know, the it makes I feel so lucky to be here, and then I my, you know, the other side, right, the shadow of feeling so lucky is feeling like God, I wish that he could that he's not missing this. But at the same time, and then there's the other side of that where I'm like, God, it's so nice to just be able to be the only parent and do this by myself and I have to deal.
Yeah, and all those things are true.
All of it is true.
All of it is true, the full catastrophe of being human. And also and also that I mean this, this will probably take us on another tangent that we don't necessarily have time for today, but this idea that a quote successful relationship is not necessarily till death. Do you part right, That loving somebody is sometimes walking away.
Oh yeah, right.
If we go back to.
What you were saying, like it would have been preferable if he got to live his after and you got to live an after as not a widow. That's not the story that we have. But that sometimes that separation is the most loving thing in the world.
Oh, one hundred percent. I believe that wholeheartedly, like for you and for your children, your for your whole family. That's why that's the like the divorce normalized. The worse is good news. Like that's where that came from. It was this conversation that I was having with people on Instagram, like they were pouring in I kind of did it. I had a hashtag called how it I left, where I was talking about my experience and then I never really got to leave, and that a part of me felt like, God, I just want to break everyone out of their bad marriages now because I'm on the other side of one, and I'm like, oh my god, this this is beautiful over here. So it turned into this amazing sort of like lawyers reached out offering pro bono work and they're like people were all it was like this like behind the scene, I was like hooking women up with other people who had experienced and people were helping each other figure out how to get out, and it was like the same story over and over. We're like women telling how they left and talking about how they had stayed married for their kids, not realizing that it was an act of love to leave and just to model to their children. This other house right, like this other version of what it can look like to be happy and to you know, like it doesn't have to look this one way, like we're so afraid of, like we're so afraid of moving from the squarehouse so that with a triangle, But there's a really beautiful, fucking well imagined house on the other side of that that, you know, I think, I feel so grateful that I get to dwell in now.
Yeah, we all deserve.
To be happy, Like it's very simple, and I think a lot of women don't think that we do, or think that the priority is our children and our significant other and that they're somehow going to be happy when we're not, which is also not the case at all.
Yeah, this is actually a really good place for us to talk about my always closing conversation for season two. So knowing what you know, knowing the houses that you've burned down, the houses that you've rebuilt for yourselves, the curiosity about what houses might come next, Like what does hope mean for you?
I think for me, hope it's so funny because hope for me has always felt passive, right, like we can't like it's what we want for ourselves, not necessarily what we're doing for ourselves. And I think I lived sort of with this want for myself and was very afraid to actually do the work to get there. So for me, hope is sort of again reimagining what it means to hope. Rebuilding what hope looks like finding the extra room and the idea of hope, or rather instead of finding the extra room, building that room myself, because that's the thing to It's like, we don't have to wait for the room to appear. We can build it, right, we can build it. And for me, that's been my experience these last four years. How can I build? How can I build? How can I redesign? How can I relearn? Unlearn? So I guess for me, hope is finding new ways to unlearn and create and rebuild and sort of reconstruct a life that doesn't have to look like anyone else's.
Yeah, I love that.
I love opening new rooms and hope right like this for me, this is what season two is all about. Is like, it is so awful in the world right now on so many different fronts, and it's so easy to feel hopeless. I love your definition, your working definition of hope there that this is something it's not wishful thinking, it's not hoping for a specific outcome. It's building a hope that belongs to you, right, and that looks like you and that you can live in.
Yeah, being active in hope. Yeah, like taking taking it with you instead of sitting with it somewhere.
Yeah. Yeah, don't camp out with your hope in somebody else's needs to be renovated since the forties placed with a drop ceiling. Don't do that to yourself. Yeah, hope to better digs. All right, that is a great place for us to end. So I'm going to link to all the places and obviously to your book in the show notes. But what do you want to let people know? Where should they find you? Where should they look for you? What do they need to know?
Well, they can find me on Instagram at Rebecca Wolf with three os. I'm on Twitter at girls gun Child, and they can also check me out over on Rebecca Wolf dot com, which links to all my essays, columns, books, et cetera. I also have a book that's called All of This, a Memoir of Death and Desire, and you can find that where all books are sold.
And yeah, and it's awesome. And last little note here. You and I both did a shout out to ourselves in our books. Your dedication is to you, and my acknowledgments ends with me. Ah right, I love that.
Yes, yes, yes, let's go.
I love it.
Yeah, let's normal normalize that too, normalize appreciating yourself for surviving the shit you've had to survive. Oh, I love it all right, Everybody stick around.
I will be right.
Back after this last break. Each week I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. This season is all about hope, and I have been both surprised and fascinated to hear how many guests bring hope up before I even get a chance to.
Bring up myself.
But you know what really struck me in my conversation with Rebecca is her complete lack of shame around things that most people are really really hesitant to mention. There's something really liberating in hearing somebody else claim their own liberation That feels like a hopeful thing to me. I also love how Rebecca said quote hope is finding new ways to unlearn and create and rebuild and reconstruct a life that doesn't have to look like anybody else's. I love that we talked about how there's hope in discovering new hope in yourself. I do love a personal agency moment. What parts of this conversation stuck with you today? What parts made you think or see something differently, whether that's in your life or in somebody else's life. Which parts of Rebecca's story made you feel seen in your own life. Now, everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I hope you do find something to hold on too. I'd love to hear what you've taken from this episode, what new rooms are unfolding in the house of your life. Check out Refuge and Grief on Instagram or here after Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show. And that's a good place to leave your thoughts or your comments or your reflections right there on those posts, and be sure to tag us and you share the show on your own social accounts, use the hashtag here after pod on all the platforms. Really, really, the whole team loves to see your comments. We love to see where this show takes you. And with this episode with author Rebecca Wolf, we really did cover some taboo territory.
So let's get those conversation parties.
Started and tagus and let us see where your conversations go. You know how most people are going to scan through their podcast app looking for a new thing to listen to, and they're going to see the show description and think, I do not want to listen to difficult things, even if cool people are talking about them. Well, here's where you come in your reviews. Let people know it really isn't all that bad.
In here.
We talk about heavy stuff, but it's in the service of making things better for everyone. So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word in your friend groups, your professional circles on social media, and click through to leave a review.
Do that right now.
Subscribe to the show, download episodes, and keep on listening. Friends Hereafter with Megan Divine is written produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, Edited by Houston Tilley. Music provided by Wavecrush.