Danielle Crittenden - Dispatches from Grief (Ep. 313)

Summary

Infinite Loops, Ep. 313: Danielle Crittenden - Dispatches from Grief

Date: May 7, 2026
Host: Jim O'Shaughnessy
Guest: Danielle Crittenden

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Overview:

This poignant episode centers on Danielle Crittenden’s experience with parental grief as explored in her new book, Dispatches from Grief. Host Jim O'Shaughnessy guides Danielle through a raw and honest discussion about the sudden loss of her eldest daughter, Miranda, and how this irreparable trauma reshaped her life, family, perceptions of grief, and even her understanding of love and humanity. The episode pulls no punches, eschewing comforting platitudes in favor of deep truth—serving as both recognition and refuge for those who grieve, and as a powerful window for those who have not yet experienced such seismic loss.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Danielle's Story: The Cataclysm of Unexpected Loss

• Danielle shares the traumatic loss of her 32-year-old daughter Miranda

  • Miranda, after a non-malignant brain tumor surgery, was told to expect a normal life with medication. When the delicate hormonal balance failed, Danielle and her husband received “the call no parent ever wants to get” ([00:00], [02:08]).
  • “One day you’re there, you’re having coffee, you’re reading the newspaper, you’re taking the kids to school and the next day everything is a smoking ruin.” — Danielle ([00:14], [13:06])

• Writing as survival and offering articulation when others failed:

  • Feeling that “none of the books I turned to really could help me understand,” Danielle used her journalistic background to document her emotional catastrophe, describing it as “a scoop… because no one is telling you this… The pain is incurable” ([04:07]).

The Physiology of Grief

• Grief as a mind-body onslaught:

  • Not just mental, but profoundly physical—insomnia, pain “in your chest, in your throat,” and the phenomenon of the “bad nervous system day” ([08:47], [09:48]).
  • Mothers, in particular, have higher mortality rates after child loss; sometimes “they just give up.” ([09:46])
  • “When my grandmother lost her son during World War II… she was dead within four or five years.” — Danielle ([10:11])

• Discussing “broken heart syndrome” and the literal collapse of the body in grief

  • “A love that is so strong that you would rather be dead than go through the grief and pain. Real pain, not just mental, physical pain.” — Jim ([70:41])

Suffering in Silence vs. Expressing Grief

• Jim recounts his own family’s response to sibling loss:
  • Parents who “siloed their grief,” couldn’t reach “acceptance”—“they suffered in silence” ([05:59], [07:06]).
  • Contrasted with Danielle’s candor and rawness: “You are just hurled into a completely different existence and you become a completely different person.” — Danielle ([04:58])

The Futility of Platitudes: “Griefsplaining”

• The disconnect between pop culture grief and reality:
  • Annoyance at “griefsplaining” and American-style boosterism (“The worst thing that has ever happened to you is something you can benefit from, actually.”—Danielle, [02:00])
  • “People say things like ‘she’s in a better place,’ but all I want to hear is, ‘this is horrible. I’m so sorry.’” ([13:52])

Obsessive Thinking and Guilt

• The endless loop of ‘what ifs’:
  • “Your brain is like the spinning orb… trying to find a reason for this… If only I had done this… why didn’t I know” ([15:17])
  • “If you could go back in time and say, ‘God, I’ll give my own life if you’ll bring back Miranda,’ would you do that? …Well, that’s not on the table.” — A bereaved father, quoted by Danielle ([18:07])

The Reversal of Family Roles in Grief

• The damage and guilt of not being able to “mother” through mourning:
  • Danielle admits, “For the first time as a mother, I felt I couldn’t help them… terrifying to see your mother crying” ([26:45])
  • Her daughter Bea steps up: “Mom, you’re not doing it alone. I want to be there.” ([31:19])
  • “I went from being this fun loving person… to just curled up on a bathroom floor wanting to die.” ([29:48])

On Books, Memory, and the Problem with Theories of Grief

• Why existing grief literature often falls short:
  • “They must have figured this out… But I was so taken by your book.” — Jim ([35:19])
  • “Stages of grief? My son said, ‘you feel them all at once sometimes.’” — Danielle ([36:33])
  • Moving beyond platitudes: “You don’t get through it. You’re going to learn to live with it somehow, and that’s not easy.” ([41:59])

Keeping the Lost Fully Alive

• Rejecting the “plaster saint” trope:
  • “We found that the way you keep a person alive is to remember them in all their dimensions, not make them into plaster saints.” ([43:39])
  • Miranda was “vibrant on the page… also difficult… a full-blooded person.” ([43:05])

The Power and Risk of Love

• Would you still choose love, knowing the pain?
  • “If you were to ask me, no Miranda, but none of this pain, or Miranda and all this pain, I would still choose Miranda and all this pain.” — Danielle ([73:10])
  • “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” — Jim ([77:05])

The Administrative Surrealities and Rituals of Death

• The “bureaucracy of death” and Jewish rituals as both burden and balm:

  • “I was choosing coffins online. Later that afternoon, I was in the funeral home, walking into her and seeing her…” ([23:44])
  • Jewish rites insist on immediate burial—brutal but helpful for confronting reality ([23:44]–[25:55]).

• Anecdote: The perils of social interactions while grieving:

  • Story of hotel clerk after Miranda’s death—a darkly comic exchange about “being in a good place” and wanting white wine instead of champagne ([60:14], [62:43]).

Therapy and the Treatment of Trauma

• The transformative experience of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing):
  • Danielle details her struggle to find immediate help (“There is an 18 month waiting list for help!” [101:00])
  • EMDR “teaches your brain to file trauma; you will manage your day, and grief won’t manage your day.” ([101:29])
  • “I compare it to kind of like an exorcism. Suddenly that thought doesn’t bother you anymore… somehow been able to file it.” ([103:05])

Hope, “Moving On,” and the Life That Remains

• On second sight:
  • “There is like a second sight, into how the people around you are and what they’re experiencing. And it makes you, like [Miranda] was, much more compassionate.” ([109:00])
  • “Realizing the fragility of your fellow humans puts… a very different lens on humanity.” — Jim ([109:17])

Advice for Grievers and Those Around Them

• What not to say/do to the bereaved:

  • “Never say, ‘call if you need me.’ Meaningless… Instead: I’m here when you want to talk.” ([55:16], [57:08])

• If you support someone grieving:

  • “Don’t give advice. Be present. Check in periodically. That’s what one does.” ([58:45])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the shattering nature of loss:
  • “You are just hurled into a completely different existence and you become a completely different person.” — Danielle Crittenden [00:14], [04:58], [13:06]
• On American “griefsplaining”:
  • “The worst thing that has ever happened to you is something you can benefit from, actually.” — Danielle [02:00]
• On how others react:
  • “All I want to hear is, ‘this is horrible. I’m so sorry.’” — Danielle [13:56]
• On the futility of platitudes:
  • “You don’t get through it. You’re going to learn to live with it somehow, and that’s not easy.” — Danielle [41:59]
• On love and pain:
  • “If you were to ask me, no Miranda, but none of this pain, or Miranda and all this pain, I would still choose Miranda and all this pain.” — Danielle [73:10]
• On advice for others in grief:
  • “Never say, ‘hey, call if you need me.’” — Danielle [55:16]
• On the hope of therapy:
  • “The goal is that one day you will manage your grief, and grief won’t manage you.” — Danielle’s EMDR therapist [101:29]
• Miranda’s vibrance:
  • “I once described her as a Google pin—you could just drop into any city… within 24 hours she would have friends, know where to eat, what to see… exceptionally cool.” — Danielle [43:59]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–04:45 – Danielle describes learning of Miranda’s death and the descent into a new “alternative universe”
• 05:29–11:08 – Jim’s family story, the dangers of bottling grief, and physical/mental dimensions of bereavement
• 13:01–15:45 – The social awkwardness and loneliness of post-loss interactions
• 18:07 – The impossible wish to trade places: “that’s not on the table”
• 23:44–26:40 – The speed and brutality of Jewish funeral rituals
• 29:48–34:45 – How parental grief undoes caregiving roles; reversal between grieving parent and children
• 36:20 – Societal denial of death and its effect on coping
• 41:59 – “You’re not through it. You’re going to learn to live with it.”
• 43:05–50:39 – Danielle brings Miranda alive as a real and complex person
• 55:16–58:45 – How to support others who are grieving; what not to say
• 60:14–63:45 – Dark humor in the face of heartbreak; hotel anecdote
• 100:21–107:00 – Danielle explains the value and impact of EMDR therapy
• 109:00–109:31 – The “second sight” and expanded human compassion forged through loss
• 110:30–111:50 – Danielle’s “two things” for the world: patience and appreciation

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Podcast Tone and Language

The episode is more than a clinical discussion of loss; it’s candid, vulnerable, and unwilling to sand down the edges of pain. Both Jim and Danielle mix dark humor with devastating honesty, never shying from the horror but also acknowledging the moments of absurdity and the gradual transformation that comes with love and loss.

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Final Thoughts

Dispatches from Grief is, as Jim puts it, “the real deal”—a book and conversation that refuses neat conclusions. Danielle Crittenden’s voice is a rare, courageous refusal to market positive thinking as a panacea for soul-wrenching loss. The episode leaves listeners with a toolkit of honesty, empathy, and a fresh mandate to recognize, support, and honor those navigating the raw landscape of deep grief.

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For full transcripts and more, visit: newsletter.osv.llc

Transcript

[Danielle Crittenton]

We got that call in the morning the next day that no parent ever wants to get. Our eldest, Miranda, died suddenly. The pain is incurable. One day you're there, you're having coffee, you're reading the newspaper, you're taking the kids to school and the next day everything is a smoking ruin. That's what it feels like. You are just hurled into a completely different existence and you become a completely different person.

[Jim]

My guest today is Danielle Crittenton, journalist, author, and someone who grew up in newsrooms. Infinite Books is publishing her new book, Dispatches from Grief, a very, very difficult and yet incredibly rewarding book to read. Please enjoy my conversation with Danielle. Danielle, welcome to Infinite Loops.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I'm so honored to be here. Thank you.

[Jim]

Your book, Dispatches from Grief, which we are publishing through our Infinite Books division. Wow. I mean, is really all I can say. Your training in journalism is pretty obvious here, but the thing that I want to ask you about first is the raw honesty that you write in this book. Really kind of took me back. You know, I love the year of Magical Thinking. I love when breath becomes air. And like I put your book in that, in that category with those books.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Wow, thank you.

[Jim]

First off, obviously, let's tell our listeners the tale. It's a sad one, but it is also an unflinching look at what grief really is as opposed to the feel good pop psychology. Oh, it's actually a gift. So welcome.

[Danielle Crittenton]

The worst thing that has ever happened to you is something you can benefit from, actually.

[Jim]

So American.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I know.

[Jim]

In its boosterism, right?

[Danielle Crittenton]

I know, I know. Well, the story is that our 32 year old daughter, we have three children, she was our eldest, Miranda, died suddenly one night in her apartment in Brooklyn where she lived. My husband David and I live in Washington D.C. and without getting too medically complicated, but she'd had a brain tumor five years before removed. It was non malignant. It removed her pituitary gland. But that can be replaced by drugs, we were assured, and hormones from everyone's opinion she was going to live a perfectly normal life so long as she took her medications. And what they didn't tell you was if you don't get your medications exactly right, you could drop dead. And that is what happened. And so we got that call in the morning the next day that no parent ever wants to get. And so I was just what I describe as being thrown suddenly into this alternative universe that people don't expect things to happen to them like this until they do. And why would they, you know, But I was just this is a story, and I wrote it partly, as you say, my journalistic upbringing. I grew up in a family of journalists, and actually, they would think journalists was a pretentious term. They were reporters. They were editors. You know, journalists went to Columbia.

[Jim]

Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You know, my parents were like firefighters or something. You know, it would still be Michelle Menken types. Yeah, yeah. Really tough, hard boiled. But my stepfather, who I write a little bit about in the book, he was just such an adventurer. And he. Every experience that happened to him, he would write about like it was. Didn't matter what it was. Good material. And. And so I grew up learning that maybe whether it was the way to understand things or, in my case, this grief was so horrific. And none of the books I turned to really could help me understand how bad it was. And so writing this down was a way of saying, my God, everybody, there's this terrible thing that can happen to you, and the pain is incurable. And no one is telling you this. It's sort of like a scoop, of course. But everybody who goes through this knows that I think it was important for me to convey to others who don't know it what it's like, and for those who do know it and are going through it to have some recognition or articulation of their pain, because I just didn't find that expressed anywhere. And I think a lot of the time, and especially my others, you ask yourself, are you going crazy? Time passes and you're not better? Am I failing at this? You are just hurled into a completely different existence and you become a completely different person. And so that's what I was trying to capture.

[Jim]

Well, you captured it amazingly well. My eldest sister died when I was 10, and I watched what happened to my parents. And that was 1971, so. And, you know, they were Irish. Right. So bottle up the emotions, don't talk about it. And even from that tender age of 10, I saw what it did to them.

[Danielle Crittenton]

What did it do? Well, they wanted you to tell me. I knew about your sister, but I wanted to hear.

[Jim]

They. They, unlike you and your husband, they siloed their grief. And, you know, I was the only. I was the martini baby.

[Danielle Crittenton]

So as we were back then, all

[Jim]

of my sisters were already away at either a high school or a college. And so literally, it was just me in the house. Right after my sister died, the family came together very much like when I was reading your book. It actually made me very emotional because it brought me back to that time. But they. They were. You referenced Kubler Ross and, like, As a. I. I didn't read it when I was 10, but I did read it when I was a bit older. And I saw, like, every step that I just immediately mapped my parents to it.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Huh. But they never reached acceptance.

[Jim]

They never reached acceptance, as it were. No. I mean, for example, Lael, it was my sister who died, was very much like your Miranda. She was very regal in her disregard for authority. Like Miranda. She was. Would ask anyone anything. I remember picking her up at the airport in 1970, and there was a sailor there, and he had a beard. And we were in an elevator, and it's quiet. And all of a sudden Lael turns to him and goes, are you actually in the Navy? If you're actually in the Navy, why are they letting you wear a beard like that? I think it's really cool. But have they really relaxed that and they. Immediate. And what was cool is the guy immediately relaxed, like somebody just interested in him. But again, back to my parents, it was very, very hard. And they kind of suffered in silence. Yeah. And my mom was a smoker. Smoked a lot more, drank more. And that one, you know, that connection that I saw, you're very open about. One of the other things that I really have to congratulate you on is you're incredibly honest about.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I don't know that that's a compliment. Gets me into trouble a lot. Like your sister.

[Jim]

Yeah. But you're incredibly honest. And like, talk about the body's reaction. It's not all grief, is not all mental. I don't know if you've read the book. The body keeps the score, but it goes into the body. And then that carried through. When I got to the part of the book where the mother actually retains the cells biologically, I just thought that was really incredibly beautiful. But it made me understand my own mom much better.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Did she? Well, let me address the physicality of grief, which is, again, something I've learned that we hear. You know, you read like, stress can affect you. Obviously, the worst thing, you know, the most stressful things you can go through is divorce, selling a house, death of a child. And until you kind of experience the physicality of that kind of stress and what I now call grief, but with a capital G. Because when you lose a child, it's different from losing a parent because it just upends the natural order. And this is true. In any case, when you lose somebody close to you tragically and quickly, like a spouse, I think it's similar that your body goes into shock. You start to hear and read A lot about the nervous system, which normally if you just say, oh, yeah, my nervous system is really upset you. You sound kind of weird or, you know, it's, it's. But it is.

[Jim]

I'm having a bad nervous system.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I'm having a bad nervous system day. But it really is true. Is true. And your brain, and this is what they talk about in PTSD when it, when a trauma like this hits, the brain can't process it. And you know, when we talk about non acceptance, it's the brain can't file this trauma. And we can, if you want, get into EMDR therapy a little later, which is what helped me a lot. But so, and you get. I came across this very grim statistics set of studies where especially mothers who have lost their child, their mortality rate suddenly goes down because sometimes suicide, sometimes alcohol or addiction and then. Or they just give up. I remember like in your parents case in that day, and when my grandmother lost her son in the second World War and she, she just drank herself to death. She was dead within four or five years of her son's death. People would say, well, she was never quite right after Bobby died. You know, and that's. You're not quite right. Not just because you're having a mental breakup, but you're having a physical breakdown as well.

[Jim]

Yeah. And you are, as I said, incredibly honest about what that feels like. And why do you think you also have wonderful terms like the bureaucracy of death? I remember that because I went with my parents to pick my sister's casket out.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And as a kid, it was just all so weird.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And because, you know, I guess what happened with me was I had someone tell me much later, somebody who had studied death and families and how it affects the family structure. She said, well, what you're not accounting for, Jim, is the day your sister died, you became an adult, your childhood ended because like, my instinct was to, you know, help my parents and help them now let's spoiler alert. Things eventually got much, much better, but as you point out, never the same.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Right.

[Jim]

And I think that one of the reasons why I'm, I'm so impressed by your book is you just honestly say that and, and, but I think that people who are in that undiscovered country. Right. Like the people who have experienced it versus the ones who haven't. Right. You call it grief splaining.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, there is a certain type of person who hasn't experienced it who might grief splaining.

[Jim]

Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

But it's more like those who know and those who don't know.

[Jim]

Yes, yes. And can you pick them out of a. Like, how long does it take you to know whether they know or whether they don't know?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, I couldn't pick them out of a police line of. Just point to that person.

[Jim]

You'd have to interact with them, obviously.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, it's quite fascinating. So what I likened sort of the earliest part, like as you describe when you have to start coffin shopping and things like that, you're just in a completely shell shock state. And the description I have is, imagine if a meteor hits your house and one day you're there, you're having coffee, you're reading the newspaper, you're taking the kids to school, and the next day everything is a smoking ruin. That's what it feels like. So you're just shell shocked. And then people. It's so horrible what has happened to you that people don't, most people don't know how to react. And hey, I get it. Some people get very upset that people say the wrong things, like, she's in a better place.

[Jim]

Oh, yeah, that.

[Danielle Crittenton]

But I think what it comes out of, and this is very human and very kind, is they want to make you feel better, like they're trying to be helpful. And the people, you could say, who don't know, don't understand the house is a smoking ruin. All I want to hear is, this is horrible. I'm so sorry. It's fine. But the, the people who know just hug you, they listen to you when they say they can say, how are you? And they say it in a way that how are you? What are you feeling right now? Is it different from. I think a lot of people would be afraid to say, how are you?

[Jim]

Yeah.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And so it's just a kind. It's more a bearing and a manner of people who have been through something doesn't even have to be the same thing, but maybe have been through terrible illness or whatever. But understand that your life and you are not the same, and especially in the earlier phases, not capable of anything except trying to take the next step and the next breath.

[Jim]

And you also talk about the repetitive thinking, the if I'd only done this, why didn't I know why when I was on the phone with her, why didn't I ask her about are you staying on your meds? And that is ubiquitous among humanity, I think. Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And it's your brain too. This is part of the brain training is the brain is. It's like the little spinning orb on the Internet and bandwidth isn't connecting the brain is trying to find a reason for this. So that's part of it. And then part of it, of course, especially as a parent, you're replaying it, because I knew Miranda, in her case, looked very pale. She looked very sickly for about six months. And you say to a young woman of. Beautiful woman of 32, you're looking a little thin. They're gonna go, thanks. You know, so you think so? So I couldn't say that. And, you know, as a mother, you don't want to get into body issues and everything. But I'd say to her, miranda, you're looking awfully pale. And she'd go, yeah, no. You know, it didn't worry her. And then she. I made her see another. Get a second opinion from an endocrinologist because she was complaining about her endocrinologist. So we got a second opinion, and he checked her out. So this would have been in the fall. She died in February. And then all the numbers checked out, but she still looked to me very, very pale. And then she sent me a photo. She was in Los Angeles about a week before she died. She sent me a photo, and she looked like a skull. She just was so gaunt. And I said to Miranda, you look so pale. Are you okay? And she had been struggling with, like, a cold, or so she thought. And so after she died, I just. I was just going over and over, and I didn't speak to her yesterday. And it turned out she was feeling much worse than she let on. And so, of course, you start beating yourself up on this. And then very early on, we spoke to another father who had lost his daughter exactly the same age, a year before ours. She had died, believe it or not, in childbirth, which you didn't think still happens, but it does. Yeah, suddenly. And he said. And he was an agent in Hollywood, and he said. He said. I remember he was on speakerphone in our kitchen, and David and I were just sort of hunched over the phone, listening. He said, if you could go back in time and say, you know, God, I'll give my own life if you'll bring back Miranda. He said, would you do that? I said, like, not even hesitant. Of course we would rather we were dead than she was dead. And he goes, well, that's not on the table.

[Jim]

What a great way to do it.

[Danielle Crittenton]

It's not on the table. And so you can. I think part of the delusion that you have is you keep thinking, if I go back and figure out what I could have done or she could have done, that would have been different than she's going to come back. No, that's not on the table. So you have to. It's one of the first things you have to let go. I don't know what it's like to be a parent who somehow feels like directly responsible for the death. I think. I don't think I could survive that. And I understand if it was your fault per se, but if you had any inkling, like you got in a car accident and you survived and the child didn't, or you turned your back and the toddler went in the pool, you know, just those sorts of incidents, or if your spouse was somehow seemingly at fault. I don't know how a marriage could survive that, even if there was nothing that could have been done, you know, so it's a terrible, immediate, as you say, obsessive series of thoughts that just go round and round and round as you try, as your brain tries to grasp it and as you try to wonder how it might have gone differently.

[Jim]

And then it also feeds into just our very normal humanity. Right. Like when something catastrophically happens to us, especially a death of a loved one, like, you get enraged. And like, as I was reading your book, I. I did have to set it down a lot of times. I. The. The line, nothing prepares you to see the body of your dead daughter. Oh, my God. Like, I literally had a. I had to stop because that is, I. I don't have many fears, but one is that any of my children or grandchildren predeceased me.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, that's the nightmare.

[Jim]

It really, really is. And especially you've experienced it. I watched my mom and dad experience it. And I just really. There's a very. Like. When I read that line, I had to put the book down because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to continue before I kind of calmed down a little bit. Did that happen? In a way. Like, I'd be really mad at the doctors. I'd be really angry that they didn't say, hey, this is life threatening.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yep. As you know, I'm Canadian by origin, so I'm not naturally litigious. I did call her Endo once we were getting a report because I just needed to know. They never actually came to a conclusion, but it was clear from everything the coroner told me that her renal glands had failed from a lack of enough cortisol. Doctors listening to that say that's not possible. I may have fudged it a bit, but that's what I remember. And I remember talking to the officer on the corner on the line when he was on the scene. And one of the first questions I asked him in this horrible call you never want to receive, and as it's coming clear, you're saying she's okay, right. We're taking her to the medical examiner's building. And you're going like, but. And you're thinking, that's not the emergency ward. He's making it pretty clear to me that she is dead. And so once I absorbed this, I said, I gave him a little bit of that medical history. And there was suddenly, oh. And he didn't want me to take this as a fact. He was cautious in the way he conveyed this, but he said, yes, you can have a perfectly, seemingly normal person come in to the emergency ward, claim of a they're having a flu, get tested, they'll leave, and the next second they're dead. And it was actually extremely helpful to me. And then the other thing I asked him, as any parent would, was would she have suffered. Yeah, first question, any pain? And it would have happened around 3am which, by the way, coincidentally, my son, who was on the other coast in Los Angeles, since she was in Brooklyn, woke up violently at 3am with Just, he said, the most terrible feeling of dread. But anyway, they said around 3am and he said, no, by the time it would have happened, she would have fallen unconscious and it would have been quick. And those, you know, you never think those are going to be the upside of things you want to hear. You know, you start, you get into these weird categories or hierarchies of grief. Well, at least she wasn't murdered, you know, or at least she wasn't. Simultaneous to this, one of my husband's relatives was an October 7th hostage.

[Jim]

Oh, dear.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Who's 22 years old. And he did not come back. But watching his parents not know his fate at that point, like, not knowing is its own kind cell of hell, you know. So it's like every parent who in this circumstance has a version of hell that they are living different from other experiences, but you're all in the same burning room. And. But then. Yeah, but then it's. We're Jewish. And there are very mercifully, I don't want to say strict, but there's rules that you follow after a person dies that I found very helpful. It was both terrible and helpful because you were really implored to bury a person quickly. You can't just send them off, have them come back in a little urn, and then wait a year for a celebration of life or whatever. Like, you have to face the reality of it right away. So by we learned she was dead, say, Friday morning. By Sunday afternoon, I was choosing coffins online. And later that afternoon, I was in the funeral home, the Jewish funeral home, walking into her and seeing her. And then the next day, we were on a plane to Canada to have her funeral and be buried near where our summer cottage is in Canada, outside of Toronto, which is where David and I planned to be. And unexpectedly, she now is. So that speed of where you still have to make so many crazy decisions when you're not in a state of mind to do it is yet somehow helpful to accept. You're never gonna accept being resigned to the fact that this has happened and that phase of it is over quickly, and then you're just left in. Think of Brueghel's depiction of hell. Of all these people, what do you want? Whipping today or swatting following swords of fire? Each day is a new day like that.

[Jim]

How did your other kids help? How did they process? Because, again, you're the mother. And the normal relationship between a parent and a child, especially in times of incredible crisis and stress and everything is. You know, the mother is the mother and she takes care of those kids

[Danielle Crittenton]

and she's gotta hold it together.

[Jim]

She's gotta hold it together. Yeah. How did that play out?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, I've always been first. I've always loved being a mother. Like, I love motherhood.

[Jim]

And by the way, that comes through very clearly in the book, I think, which is a bit of a surprise, because it's a book about grief, right?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's. You know, I wanna say, young people today, you know, they're not getting married, they're not having children, and they're missing. And I say this in the context of someone who has now lost a child. They are missing out on the most profound and, as you said, human experience of existence. There is nothing. There is nothing like having children. It's like what we're put on Earth to do. It's not to go to dive bars and it's like, that's all fun. But eventually it is to have children. And when you have a child, it's. Speaking of alternative universes. You can never know what that's gonna be like till you have one. You can sit out and list all the negatives. They're easy to see, but you don't see the positives till you cross over. And in a way, it's like the grief is the opposite. You don't know how horrible it is too, when you've crossed over. And as a mother. So I always felt it was. People will sometimes denigrate or criticize the fact that women tend to put themselves last, put everything else needs before theirs. And that's just what a mother does. And I think it's a kind of. I wrote, I think it's a kind of superpower. The idea which I couldn't have done before as a mother, that whatever was going on with me or my emotions, if some child was. Of mine was having a problem, I was on it. You know, you're the strength. You're the person who's going to solve this for them or help them solve it, I should say. So. When Miranda died and the siblings were all very close, very close family. My son Nat was two years younger and our youngest daughter Bea, who was 10 years younger than Miranda, like you and your family, they all kind of. They of course looked to me and their father and David was. I mean, he was shattered, but he was able to more visibly hold it together. And I just went off the rails, you know, I mean, I did everything. I kept my brave face on till she was buried. And then after she was buried, I lost it. And to feel as a mother that you. I couldn't prioritize their feelings. I mean, obviously I tried and we all hugged together, but I. For the first time as a mother, I felt I couldn't help them. And I knew they were in their own chambers of hell. And I tried, but they. And I think it's terrifying to see a parent and to see your mother crying. Like just, just. Even if you can imagine your mother crying at a sad movie or something, it's very distressing to a child. I think I wrote about my. My wonderful stepfather, the journalist who. When our. One of our dogs died and he'd been in the Korean War and everything, and he kind of whimpered and I looked at him, I thought he was laughing. And then I realized he wasn't. And I was so shocked, but so upset, like disturbed that something could wobble him. And so there was a period early on where, you know, I was. I'd gone from being this very fun loving person. Like really I enjoyed my life and was excited. David and I, we excited to be empty nesters and we had these plans and suddenly I went from that to just curled up on a bathroom floor wanting to die, just wanting to die because the pain was so unbearable. And it's physical pain. It's in your chest, it's in your throat and. And you can't close your eyes to the smoking ruin that is around you. People again. I read people ask if I could sleep. And weirdly, I could sleep. Sleep was a gift. It was when you woke up and you realized that even though your bedroom looked the same as it did five days ago, your entire world is completely different. And so being suffering that pain, looking as I did through books, manuals, websites, how can I stop this pain? And spoiler alert, you can't. You can drug yourself, which, by the way, Valium, everybody, I highly recommend. Don't become addicted, but Valium is helpful. Very tempted to drink a lot. That works for a bit. Never was a big drug person, but you're trying to numb your pain. And it's also a supremely. You're aware of it being a supremely selfish thought. As a mother knowing, here I am lying on the floor, wanting to die, and the brain telling me, they'll be okay, it's okay, they're going to be fine, but you just can't go on. And then having just sort of not wanting to express that to them, like, yeah, you guys are great, but I'm ready to die. Like, it's kind of insulting to them, like, you aren't worth living for. And of course that's not what you're thinking, but that's how you feel. And so they would be. And I included. She's a beautiful writer. And I included in the book some of. She took some journal notes at the time and what it was like to go into. David spent that first night back home in Miranda's bedroom. And she heard him just howling through the walls because her room was next to his. And she went in and tried to comfort him. And again, that's the reversal of things, right? The child comforting you. And so it was very hard. And that's. If I felt like a failure at anything, that's what I felt a failure at that during that time. And I've, you know, gradually I was able to pull it together. But I think what you said about your childhood ended. I mean, Bea, our youngest, was 22. She was in. She'd been studying her semester abroad, so she would have been a junior college. And suddenly she. She became. She was always, like, solid, but she became unbelievably strong. And the things that she did with me, she wouldn't let me do alone. Like going to Miranda's apartment and cleaning it. I was taken by that and packing it up. Like, she. I was like, no, no, I'll do it. I can do this. I can do this. For everybody. And she's, mom, you're not doing it alone. I'm coming with you. I want to be there. That was, you know, such a gift. But I think, you know, you do get that strength back. And I hope I've been able to be there for my kids more in the way I used to be than I. Than I was at that moment.

[Jim]

Yeah. It's just as. It's obviously different being a father than a mother, I'm fully willing to acknowledge that we do things differently. Like, my own mother and I had this wonderful relationship, and I was so lucky to have her unconditional love. And, you know, not so much with my dad, but the. As I was listening to you, it's. It's just seems so unfair because not only are you dealing with this hammer blow of losing your eldest, then you have this compounding guilt about my kids. They need me, and I can't be there for. And it just. It just continues to compound negatively.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jim]

And, you know. You know, one of my instincts when faced with a crisis is to, like, go to the. Go to the literature.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, that was mine.

[Jim]

They must have figured this out. I gotta be able to find something. And that's why I was so taken by your book, because I had read the Year of Magical Thinking and When Breath Becomes Air, different kind of book, but same category. And I'd read a lot about that. And I'm holding those out as they're the real deal, and I'm holding your book out as the real deal. Why do you think that? Given all of the resources we have to study this process, is it just because we've so tried to remove death from our daily experience that you get these, as you said? Yeah. This most horrible thing in your life that just happened to you and will irrevocably change you. It's gonna be good.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Or it's. It's, you know, you can. It's gonna be hard for a bit.

[Jim]

Yeah.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Or also this idea of the stages, like. Like, I think it was my son who said, you know. Yeah, there are stages. They don't tell you. You feel them all at once sometimes, you know. Yeah, it's. No, I don't. You know, people say that, like, we just don't face death in our society. And, you know, maybe we should be more like tribes in Africa and really embrace death and our ancestors. And I think, well, maybe because we are a very lucky society, that we have a lot of cures for a lot of things that would have killed our own relatives 20 years ago. So it's not that we've tried to remove ourselves from death. Maybe death has been removed from us. And we don't all live on top of each other as we once did. And people live an extraordinarily long time, generally speaking. So I don't blame people who don't want to think. Like when somebody says, oh, I just can't even imagine. It's like, nope, you can't. And you are lucky. I'm glad you can't imagine it because you can. And I think part of the other things that people can't imagine is this whole concept that you become a different person. Well, what does that even mean? You're still you. You're still Danielle. Okay, you're really sad, Danielle. You're not fun, Danielle, but you're really sad, Danielle. But and speaks to fathers too. Because I think fathers and mothers can react differently. I mean, as you said at the beginning, one of the sciences that your baby's cells stay within you. So you have this, which I find comforting. There's always going to be a little bit of Miranda alive in me.

[Jim]

Which by the way, I just found that so cool.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And they will help you, a mother, fight infection.

[Jim]

Yeah, it's amazing.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. And as you say, it's so understudied. But a father, you know, his. In the dynamics of the family, everybody's a new person. Because you are. Because not only has a hole been blown apart in your dynamics and your relationships, but you are never going to be the way you were with that person. And that person is never going to be there to bring out, you know, the qualities. So for Bea, our youngest, Miranda was like the coolest mother. Their 10 year age gap was enough that Miranda was very protective towards her, but it was also way more fun than I was. And Miranda was fun. And Bea could go to Miranda and tell her a thing that he would obviously not bring to me. But they had a certain bond and my son had a certain bond. And of course David, who Miranda most resembled. They shared a sense of humor that none of us really got. I mean, it was a very funny sense of humor. But they would just laugh at. They look at each other, they just start laughing and we're trying to. What's so funny? We don't get this. And so those are the things that you lose. And I just. And now. And from a mother's and father's perspective, you've gone from being a parent of three to a parent of two. And that alone brings up just everyday awkwardnesses. You know, because suddenly the most normal interactions, like mothers, oh, how many kids do you have? And that you. Oh, I have three now. You go, yeah. And you've got to learn to answer the most banal questions relating to the tragedy. I actually found after I wasn't finding what I wanted in the books, I started to read a lot of Holocaust survivor memoirs because, I mean, there are people who lost entire families who had to do. Their days were physically way more awful than mine were. But I think that's. You want to find some connection of recognition of somebody who has endured something that you are enduring, and you want to know how they did it and what their thoughts were. And I think that was in the end, my goal with this is. And there is some hope expressed of how I came through those earliest days, but it's not the kind of hope that the grief explainers, the grief fluencers would want to say, oh, yeah, well, you get through it and you're a better person and you will get through it. It's fine. It might take longer, but you'll get through it. No, you won't get through it. You're not getting through it. You're going to learn to live with it somehow. And that's not easy. But there is this phrase out there. The important thing is not to avoid grief like your parents or another, to go through it. And there's some truth, I'm sure, to facing it, but it implies an ending, a destination. And I don't think that destination is there.

[Jim]

Yeah. And that is, again, very clear and honest in your book, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it, because the happy, happy, joy, joy. No, honestly, no. It's not going to work out like that. You're going to carry that with you. I still think about my sister, and she's died when I was 10 and I'm 65.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

But let's talk about Miranda for a minute. Because I fell in love with her and there's often in books about somebody who's died, we tend to turn them into saints and. Or symbols. Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And only speak good of them.

[Jim]

And only speak good. And you didn't do that. You were super honest, which.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, I didn't trash her.

[Jim]

No, of course you didn't. But you made her real.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Especially in my second reading of the book, I just, like. I felt so sad that I could never meet her because I love this girl. She's vibrant on the page as she was in life. She was also difficult. I was a difficult kid. And that you write her full blooded is to me a real gift. Is that like.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Well, is that how you think about her right now?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Oh, my gosh, yeah. Well, there are two things. I write the opening chapter about sort of familiar grief. The death of a parent, the death of our parents. David's father, sorry, David's mother died at 54, unusually young. My stepfather died in his 80s. So when I was writing about the death of our parents, whom we were all very close to, one of the ways we found that the way you keep a person alive is to remember them in all their dimensions, not make them into plaster saints. Telling stories of David's mother, telling stories of my stepfather, who could be so mischievous with the children. He was like a child himself. And he and Miranda were thick as thieves. In fact, when he was dying and she walked into his hospital room to say goodbye, which miraculously we all did and able to do, he pointed to the floor and he said, I'll see you down there. And she was. She reeled back and then of course started to laugh hysterically like that, you know, that was. And so she was very like him in many ways. So you want to remember them in their fullness. But when I was first writing this book, or, you know, what was becoming a book, I didn't know what it was. I was just writing it. I kept Miranda very much out of it because I didn't think I could do her justice. I wanted to focus on the grief process, or whatever it is, experience itself of a mother. I didn't. And I thought if I brought her into it too much, well, I'd never be able to capture her. And I don't know, it just felt wrong to me. And then actually, my very first book editor, I showed her an early draft and she said, I want to know more about Miranda. Okay? So I started to go into her and I'm really glad you say she becomes alive on the page because she was a difficult person to capture. And she did. She gave us. You know, I think I first started Zoloft when she was about 15. Zoloft also recommended, but she was just. I once described her as a Google as she grew up, a Google pin that you could just drop into any city in the world and within 24 hours she would have made friends know where to eat, what to see, and not just the museum. Like she would have had the exhibit that no one else knew about what to see. She was exceptionally cool. And she had gone. We had gone on a family trip to Israel when she was about 21 or 22, and she hadn't wanted to go. We had all gone sort of separately on various different journeys, but we'd never gone as a family. And. And she just said, oh, why are we going to Israel? I was like, can't we be a normal family? Just go to a beach? Why don't we ever go to somewhere like a beach? And she loved, like history and archeology and things, but, you know, we always. We never took beach vacations. And so I said, well, there's a beach, there's a beach in Israel, in Tel Aviv. And anyway, sort of pulled her along kicking and screaming, which is how you brought her along on something if she didn't want to go. And she got to Tel Aviv and one look at it was the coolest place she had ever seen. I know the news now would not indicate this, but anybody who has been to Tel Aviv knows it's. She thought it was like Paris mixed with an Arabic bazaar, and it was so youthful and coffee culture and people stayed up all night and they really emerged. Embrace life. And so she came back from this trip and within three months quit her job, found some bogus program that would get her like a student visa of some kind and taken herself over. And there she became a fashion model for a bit. And she gave me. She identified very strongly as Jewish, but she was not religious. And so she loved everything that was not religious about it. Anything that was not Jerusalem. Like, when I wanted to visit and go to Jerusalem, she's like, ugh, so lame. And she taught me to see the culture that was there. Like 200 different ethnicities all living and the artisanship and the food and music and everything that was happening. So she could. She would make me see things and she did this wherever and whatever she was doing. Like, if I came and visited her in Brooklyn, she would just have this program of things that I would just never have done on my own. In fact, after she died, Nathaniel, her son, said, now I'm never going to know where to eat. And she was. But her company, she was so effortlessly, piercingly witty. I mean, she's like Oscar Wilde, a modern Oscar Wilde. Like, she would just toss off one liners that were so insightful, but just. You would just be gasping with laughter when she would say things. She's very well read. She didn't go to. She went, lasted about three months in university and that was it. And she worked in news and she loved news. She wanted to be in the real world, she wanted to live in the world and she wanted to live, live, live in the world. And she was just the best company. But she brought out things. She was a booster. She was a lawyer. She saw. She had this gift for seeing people, Interpeople, and what their gifts were and encouraging that. So she had a lot of friends, a lot of strays, we called them, like, sort of lost girls who wanted help, sympathy. And so when she died, there were also a lot of people who came to her funeral. Young people were just like, I don't know what I'm gonna do without Miranda to talk to. Like, she was. She had a deep kindness and compassion to her. And I think that comes out of someone who had illness, you know, someone who'd seen trauma. She lived. When she was modeling, there were a few intifadas that happened, and she'd be running with curlers in her hair to bomb shelters. So she really lived a big life in her 32 years. And you lose someone like that, and it's. Yeah, it's a crater. Just a crater.

[Jim]

And I'm very grateful that your original editor made you write about her.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Because it. Again, so much of this stuff can seem kind of intellectual, abstract. You know, this is how you get through grief. Here's the program. You know, everything is. Well, we'll take this step then. This step. And there are some effective therapies that we're going to talk about in a minute.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

But having her there really helps understand why you went through what you went through. Right. And I'm not saying that in a pejorative way. Like, I'm sure that a parent who loses a child who isn't that. Right. Maybe they're very studious or very quiet. They have their own special attachments that the parent has with that child. But the thing that I really think your book does so well, you do so well, is just the raw honesty of it. Right. Because she was all of that. But she was also a challenge for you. I mean, you literally had to send her up to your stepdad and have him take a crack.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, yeah. Her last two years of high school, she went. We shipped her up to Canada to live with my mom and my stepfather. And my mother, you know, has been extraordinary. And she's still alive. And she was the one who conveyed how much being a mother meant to her and was one of the best things she. Of her life. Aspects of her life. But my mom was. My mom was probably stricter with her, but my stepfather had been a lieutenant and sort of knew how to deal with an unruly troop. So he could. And as I think as a grandparent, you know, you can deal with. With sometimes a grandchild better than the parent can deal because the parents, you're just too close and you feel too responsible where sometimes they need a little space.

[Jim]

There's that great joke. Why do grandparents and their grandchildren get along and bond so well? They have a mutual enemy.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Exactly. Yeah. No, look, it was a godsend to us and they really pulled her through and. Yeah, but I think any child, you know, and that's the thing. I mean, you enter this alternative universe and you meet other people. Some people's children have died from suicide, you know, or they. And then you could say, well, those were really problematic, you know, but it's no less because in the end it's. I said, when I learned that she had died, I said, what is the opposite feeling to giving birth? I mean, it's crazy to think that you can create this life. And now this thing that you bore has been taken from you has died. And that bond is not describable. But any child who is your child is going. You know, people have. I had a miscarriage once and then I just learned every. Oh, join the line. Everybody has a miscarriage, but. And it was very early, but I remember just spending the entire day kind of in a morning. And then babies and it doesn't really matter the age. It's. It's. You just have that bond. And I think that's part of what I was trying to get to is the unnaturalness of when it, of when it's. When it happens.

[Jim]

And what would you. Now that you have your passport to this country?

[Danielle Crittenton]

On what? Exile? Yeah. Deported.

[Jim]

A passport. You did. Did not choose, you did not want.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I wish I'd been sent to Venezuela, let me tell you. Oh, Venezuela. How lucky.

[Jim]

Yeah, I'd rather go to North Korea.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jim]

What would you advise if a friend or a loved one experiences this? What are you going to tell them that is different because you've been through the experience?

[Danielle Crittenton]

It's a good question. Sadly, it happened last fall. A friend of ours daughter died suddenly by an embolism. 18 years old, just getting off a plane and, you know, very unexpected to be joined by someone so close to me. And I think what you learn is not to tell them anything to say because they know you know, and you actually, I mean, obviously you are there for them. Never say to. This is just a rule of life. Never say, hey, call if you need me. Never, never do that for anything. Anything. You want to see me, call me Or I will call you. But hey, don't hesitate to reach out if you need anything is a meaningless phrase. And so you don't actually say that. But I've been solicitous, I've said, I'm here, you want to talk. But I don't give her advice. And they're dealing with their own families and situations. And. And I think this community of mothers that I've now joined, many whom I didn't know at the beginning, who have reached out to me through various social media. And David wrote a beautiful article in the Atlantic a few months after she died, called Miranda's Last Gift. Yeah, I read it about talking about Miranda through her relationship with her dog, Ringo. And so I've met people that way. And one of the universal experiences that people feel is loneliness. In this sense, I feel lucky that I have had. I have a close family, the marriage has survived through it, and our family remains close. And I've had the support of many very good friends, but that is not the common experience. And I think, you know, I've heard from single mothers, sometimes families have lost their only child and there is. The drumbeat of the world goes on. And again, totally understandably, like, you're sad indefinitely, but after three or four months, you know, there's not gonna be. People just naturally stop asking or they forget or they remember to ask, oh, right, how are you doing? But again, I don't fault them for that. The world goes on, time goes on. It just doesn't feel like it's going on for you. And so to another mother in this situation, or a father, as it's not on the table, friend was for us. They're there to talk to you whenever you need them. And that's completely understood. And then I will reach out and just check in, say, how are you doing? Let me know. Thinking about you. You want to talk, I'm here. That's what one does. And in that case, in that world, you know, they are there for it.

[Jim]

I think one of the things that your book does is it gives the reader who's experienced this permission. And by that I mean, you know, if you're reading the Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy, this is going to make you stronger. And you're not feeling that. And I bet you're not.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, no, I'm not.

[Jim]

That your book allows them to see you and what you went through, but then it gives them, oh, all right. So I'm not this crazed creature.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

I'm not, you know, doing it wrong.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Because we. We have so much of that. You know, the. This. These are the 10 steps you have to do.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Are you not. You're not through it yet?

[Jim]

Yeah.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You're supposed to get through it.

[Jim]

It's two years. Come on. It's. It's been a while.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

What's wrong with you? Yeah, right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And so. And that only heaps more pain.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. And if you're lonely and you don't have a lot of people around you who understand or close family who understand, I'm sure it's a terrible feeling. Yeah. And people do say amazing things. I tell a story of the checking in at the hotel in Brooklyn.

[Jim]

Yeah. I love that.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Oh, my God. That was. There are times people say so much the wrong thing. It's funny. And this was, I don't know, a month after Miranda died. Because we weren't there before. They removed her. Police sealed up her apartment. We had to go through this horrible legal bureaucracy of death to just get access to. To her apartment. And I was very much, among many things, haunted by the aspect that no one had been in there to clean up. And I thought, you know, there's food rotting on the counter. Like, you know, this is. We have to be able to get. I could wait for her things. I just wanted to. So Bea, again, our daughter, accompanied me and we checked in, in this hotel that was very near her apartment in Brooklyn. And. And we got there late and we were exhausted and we were braced for having to go in the next day and face this. It was the first time we had to face anything like this. And we go to the check in and it's this really jolly New York check in person. And he's like, well, hello ladies. What brings you to New York? And Bea and I just. We look at each other and I was like, business, pleasure. And I was like. And Bea just says, neither. We're not here for anything like that. Oh, we got plans. And I'm like, yeah, we have plans. We have plans. A show? No, not a show. And he goes, well. And he keeps going on. And finally, and this is one of these early things you have to learn is when to drop the nuclear bomb and when not to. In the early days, you're tempted to drop it all the time. Like you're checking out at the drugstore and you want. Turn to the clerk and say, you know, my daughter just died. You know, like, it's weird, you just become compulsive about it. But this one, you know, this one, I was trying not to because he was so jolly and Finally I just said, you know what? My daughter died. We're here to clean up her apartment after her death. I'm thinking, okay, wow, I just exploded you. And he went, oh, oh, well then, well, at least she's in a good place now, right? And I said, well, she actually had a good place. She was lived right near the esplanade in a one bedroom apartment. And he was like, yeah, that is good. Real New Yorker. That is good real estate. I know. And I said, so I think she was in a pretty good place. And he said, well, yeah, I guess, well, can I send you ladies some champagne? And I said, well, he said, we're not really celebrating. And he goes, well, what do you want? And I said, I just said, oh, fuck it. White wine. Do you have white wine? He said, yes, bottles coming your way, ladies. And it was just. I mean, we did. It was actually like, you know, the comic bits in the Shakespeare tragedy where the guards are all drunk. And, you know, that was that moment for us.

[Jim]

When I was reading that part, I thought it was a Monty Python sketch.

[Danielle Crittenton]

So much of life turns into a Monty Python sketch. But yes, no, it was. And then.

[Jim]

And yeah, and it's not their fault. No, they haven't ever. They probably have no knowledge of what a person feels like, what they're experiencing somatically, you know, but he. That was like a routine, honestly.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, I couldn't break the route. Couldn't break the bit. No, I mean, what I did get. I think my favorite targets if I was going to have annoyance or anger were the happiness gurus. There are people who study the science of happiness, and it's great at a TED Talk or at a corporate retreat with billionaires about learning to experience and take strength and lessons from your misfortune. And then you realize nothing has ever happened to you. You never want to presume. One of the other things you realize is so many people are out there that you didn't even realize are walking about in my state or some version of my state. As I said, this alternative universe is very well populated and more populated than you think. But then there are a lot of people. I don't want to presume that nothing bad has happened to this person, but nothing bad has happened to this person. It's like more than they got. They lost a job, you know, or they had a bad time in college and I learned from it, you know, Or I started my first company and it failed. But that made me better businessman, you know, like, yeah, okay, good. Good for you.

[Jim]

Yeah, I really Empathized. When I was reading your views on that, I. I used to get cluster headaches, which they used to call suicide headaches for the obvious reason.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And I had a male neurologist tell me, you know, it's the worst pain a man can feel. And then mercifully, they went away. When I was in my mid-40s, and I had an occasion to see another neurologist, female, and she was looking through my chart, and she goes, ooh, cluster headaches. And I went, yeah, My previous guy told me they were the worst pain a man could feel. And she goes, oh, no. They're the worst pain a human being can feel.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And that's coming from a mother and a mother. And a mother.

[Jim]

Yeah, because I was present when all three of my kids were born. That ain't for sissies.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, it is when you get. You have the wit to get the anesthesia, right.

[Jim]

Well, my wife chose not to do that.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I compare that to, like, natural heart surgery, you know?

[Jim]

You know, I'm gonna go the natural way because I'm like, honey, you know, the. A spinal block. It won't. It won't play with your mind. No, no, no. Your.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Your wife is impressive. I was watching a movie. By the time it was ready for Miranda to be born.

[Jim]

Yeah, well, you're very wise.

[Danielle Crittenton]

She was born. At the time it was fashionable to go to midwives.

[Jim]

Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

In fact, I wrote an essay at the time. I use my experience. I don't let material go to waste. I wrote an essay at the time for the Wall Street Journal called Knock Me out with a Truck.

[Jim]

My mom was the same way. She was like, when she heard that Missy wanted to do it without any anesthesia or any pain meds, my mom was just, like. She would say it directly to Missy. I think you're really misguided here.

[Danielle Crittenton]

This is experience that. It's not a returning. It is a returning to nature, but it's like one of those ones you don't want to return to.

[Jim]

But again, why it resonated so strongly with me was like, when you're in a cluster headache, like, you literally can't think.

[Danielle Crittenton]

It's like a migraine or worse. Worse.

[Jim]

Basically, when people would try to ask me to describe it, the closest thing I could come up with was imagine somebody heats up a drill, drills the side of your head, and then pours white hot molasses with chunks of glass.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I know that feeling. Yes. And.

[Jim]

And I think. And that's why I'm bringing it up.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Because reading your book I was like, oh, I know how she felt. Because it.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, it's relocated to your chest.

[Jim]

Yes.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And that then when we're talking about the physicality. Yeah, no, I've not experienced that level of headache, but I have had a couple of things that I thought I was brain hemorrhaging. And it turns out it was his silence. So just. That is bad enough. So I know what you. But you can't. You can't think, you can't function. All you want to do is lie on your back. And with the pain, and especially the early pain, I originally compared it in the book to Prometheus, and David thought it was too literary. So he said, no, you have to cut that. But it felt like Prometheus, the story of Prometheus is he's lashed to a rock and every day comes in, come in, eat his liver, and then. And then they come back the next day. And that's what it felt like. Waking up every morning was Prometheus, your heart being ripped out of you physically. And that was the pain that sends you to the floor.

[Jim]

And that's what I found so helpful in your book, the pain. A lot of people think it's just all mental or it's all, you know. No, it's not. It can collapse you as you write onto your bathroom floor. It can, you know. Broken heart syndrome. Yeah. My mother in law suffered from it after my father in law died.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Did she?

[Jim]

And it's real.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, it is real.

[Jim]

It is very, very real.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And we moved her out here from Minnesota and she ended up living with us the last years of her life. She died just last year at nearly 99. But that period right after my father in law died, we were incredibly worried because she had broken heart syndrome. And so, like I always do, I did a huge research project on it. And I'm like. Because my wife was like, this can't kill you, can it? And I'm like, unfortunately, it can. And so that's another thing I wanted to just hear directly from you. How do you do a great job putting it into words, but a love that is so strong that you would rather be dead than go through the grief and pain. Real pain, not just mental, physical pain. I saw you on that floor and I'm just like, how do you get up?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, I think I'm glad you brought this aspect up because so far, despite my advocating for motherhood, been quite bit of a downer on the cost or the potential cost of it. But I do include a conversation that I had with A friend of mine. And he. He never had children. He's gay. He got married when they finally could. And just children were never sort of in their cards. And anyway, he was sitting one night with me and I was describing this pain that I was having. And he knew me as this former. My nickname used to be the Minister of Fun. I was always the one planning stuff. And I stopped planning stuff. And he. So he knows me as this former Minister of Fun. And he's looking at this absolutely shattered person. And I said to him, I told him that I times felt I'd rather be dead. And he started. His eyes started to water. And I said, I have never experienced a love so intense that I would rather be dead than not have had it. And that is the core of it. Because in the end, when you. When I look back and a father the same, that's not on the table. Father, who was a year ahead of us, as it were, he wrote me, and I included this note in the book. And he wrote me that for the first time a few months ago, the first time he could walk and think of his daughter Leia, without also being consumed by sadness. That in fact, that sadness was turning into a type of gratitude that he had had the fortune to know her the 32 years that she had been in his life for 32 years. So if you were to ask me, no Miranda, but none of this pain or Miranda and all of this pain, I would still choose Miranda and all of this pain.

[Jim]

Yes. And that is like. That, to me, was one of the central messages of the book, and especially your friend who never had a child. I was not fully prepared for the birth of my first child. I was 24.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No one is.

[Jim]

But the part I wasn't prepared for was the just instant, unconditional love I had never felt. I had felt it from, like, my mother.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yes.

[Jim]

I felt. Felt to what it felt like to receive it, but I. I'd never felt it for another creature. Right, Right. I loved my wife, I loved my siblings, I love my parents, all of that. But there is nothing like. At least I've never experienced anything like this love. And when I got. When I saw that in your book, I'm like, yeah, yeah. And we were chatting before we sat down, and you also have a new grandchild. Congratulations. Yeah.

[Danielle Crittenton]

So that's a gift of life and

[Jim]

joy, but it happens there, too.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, Here we go, getting attached again.

[Jim]

And I wasn't prepared for that.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Well, apparently grandparenthood, as I'm discovering, is like all of the love with none of the hassle.

[Jim]

It's great.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Back to you. I highly recommend it over to you, son.

[Jim]

Yeah. Here you go.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Here you go. That was great. We had a great time. Yeah, no, I'm very excited about that. But that's when I was talking about how they change you and the list of negatives that you can easily rack up when thinking about having a child. But I wrote that just as I had David. And I had to teach Miranda how to be an adult. She taught us how to be parents. And when you have that first child and you people think your life shrinks and early on, of course, you know, you're much more constrained. And yes, you know, you gotta get them to sleep through the night and blah, blah, blah, but they enlarge you. They bring out dimensions that you didn't think you had, including that selflessness which a father has too. That the sense of not just responsibility for another being, but just growing into a role. Like now you're the father, you're not the son anymore. That sounded more religious than I intended. Filled with the spirit. But no, you go from being the child to the parent at that moment. And then I spent a lot of the first year of Miranda's life when my mom, who was so helpful and so great having her around, she said I just returned to her multiple times. Go, Mom. Thanks. She'd say, what? What for? And I'd say, just thank you. Thank you. Now I know what you felt like, what you did, and I know what it feels like now. And it's an extraordinary thing. And I think if you, if you don't have that opportunity, it's hard to convey how, if you can do it, how amazing it is. And for you, selfishly, there we could be a happiness guy. Have a child and it'll bring out

[Jim]

the best in you. It's good for you.

[Danielle Crittenton]

It's good for you.

[Jim]

But I also saw that in the book as the bridge. And by that I mean you're very clear that you're never going to be the Minister of Fun like you used to be. You might have a different version of it, but it's never going to be like it was. But nothing is. But there is that when you get asked that question. No, Miranda, none of this pain, Miranda, all of this pain. I would make the same choice you made. That's a no brainer to me. Right. And that is the part where you kind of realize, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And that was kind of a bright beacon for me. Actually, in your book it's like, yeah, most of the shit you read from the happiness purveyors and the TED talkers and that's it, it's bullshit. But there is a way to survive this, right?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, and the child, even, you know, when we talk about difficulties, even the testing the child does of you makes you stronger. You know, that's why it was so strange for me to tumble back into a form of helplessness and not have the energy. I still don't have the energy. I still don't have the capacity. I'm like an older model of myself now. I've gone back. But the strength, the wisdom, what you learn about yourself and your capacities is something that being a parent, you can only learn through being a parent. And so, yeah, when you lose some of those skills, it's very upsetting. But join the history of mankind that has experienced this and worse. And you know, as I said, you're not unique. You've just joined the whole world of people have experienced loss.

[Jim]

Yeah. And then you also write about moving her because the cemetery that you chose in haste.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yes.

[Jim]

Was really ruley.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. That was the one downside of this Jewish journey of death. It was rituals of mourning. It was. We chose a Jewish cemetery that we hadn't realized was a little more Orthodox than we expected and certainly that Miranda would have not enjoyed. They were the Jerusalem side of the.

[Jim]

You know, that's so funny. When I was reading it, that's what

[Danielle Crittenton]

I thought, like, mom, this is not Tel Aviv.

[Jim]

She got buried in Jerusalem. And so instead of telling me, what are you thinking?

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, I heard her, I heard her. We had wanted to plant. So again, haste, it's February and we had found this Jewish cemetery near. There were very few Jewish communities or let alone cemeteries in this area where we had spent all of their childhood summers. And so there was miraculously this small one. And I'd wanted to plant a wildflower garden for her and do a monument that was a little more her. Nothing garish, but like a very beautiful, designed, tranquil wildflower garden with little benches where you could sit, stools. It was all very, very cool design. She would have approved of it and they just, the committee would not allow it. It had to be a black stone in a row of flat lawn. And it was off this highway and it wasn't near where our cottage is. It wasn't sort of in the area that would have been familiar to her as a child. And so I then found this beautiful non denominational cemetery. I mean, everybody is buried There. And it was historic cemetery in the town. I had never even seen it. It was just sort of tucked away. It's like a nature park. And so we had to make this very difficult decision, which again is wrenching, not something you want to go through twice. Of moving her from that cemetery and reburying her in what turns out it's like natural cathedral. It's got trees and they let us do whatever we wanted with the garden. And it's always got people going by. It's used like a local park. People hike through it and dog walk through it. And that's what I wanted for her. And so we did go through the process of it's all done side on. We were waiting on the side of the highway while they unearthed her. And we would not have wanted to be there, but we were not allowed to be there, thank God. And then they put her in another hearse and we followed that hearse to the new place. And again it was one of the things I was dreading horribly. But this time seeing her first of all laughing at what she was saying, cursing us. Is mom off a highway amongst these orthodox people? What are you thinking about?

[Jim]

You can't do anything without me.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Mom.

[Jim]

Mom.

[Danielle Crittenton]

In fact, the first time I visited there in the summer before we moved her, I walked into this very sterile lawn place and I couldn't find her grave. And suddenly I found it. There was this unbelievable burst of. It turned out to be wild mustard, but yellow golden flowers, tall, six feet tall. And I was stunned. And they were nowhere else. They were in the neat rectangle of her plot.

[Jim]

That's so cool.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And as I walked up, a little rabbit hopped out and I just like. It was like her protest, you know, this gushing thing of gold in this otherwise quite grim place. And I did start to laugh. And then. Okay, got the message. And so now she's in a very beautiful place where she. Where it's sounds weird, a joy to visit her, but it feels correct. And it's a place where you, not you see yourself being there too. And that's weirdly comforting. It's not something again, anyone wants to think about. But once you kind of know where you're going to end up, there's a lot of comfort in that.

[Jim]

Yeah.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No hasty decisions. No.

[Jim]

I found I'm not a religious person, but I'm not an atheist because I think that's a religion all of in itself. Right? I know. There is no God versus I know. Exactly.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I love funerals where they tell you exactly where your loved One is right. You know, and what they're doing at that moment with Jesus, it's great. I wish I had that certainty.

[Jim]

Yeah. I am comfortable with the uncertainty, though. Right. So, like, well, Jews are.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Jews don't have these strong visions.

[Jim]

Right. And so maybe I'm.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Maybe you're Jewish.

[Jim]

Yeah. Maybe I didn't.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You're Jewish adjacent.

[Jim]

Yeah. Well, I had a good friend who. I have a lot of good friends who are Jewish, and one, we might have had a little too much to drink. And he said to me, you know, I never liked you goyim, until I met the Irish. He goes, I think you might be one of our lost tribes.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Or as Fran Lebowitz said about Italians or Jews with architecture. Yeah. No, there are a lot of spiritual Jews. I'm a convert. And one of the reasons I converted, and I was not under pressure to convert because David was Jewish, was for that very uncertainty. Like, everything about the religion matters. What you do in life.

[Jim]

Totally.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You know, like, you. It's fine for you to be a mass murderer and then accept Jesus on the deathbed.

[Jim]

You know, I always thought that was one of the.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I mean, get out of jail free cards.

[Jim]

So I was brought up Roman Catholic. Right. And. But Roman Catholic light. Because my parents were not terribly religious either. But, you know, this 60s and 70s, and, like, I was the wise act. Wise ass with the priests and, like, hey, Father, like all, you know, Greek mythology makes much more sense to me than this.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I think you guys have stolen a bit of that, too.

[Jim]

Of course they did. They stole it all.

[Danielle Crittenton]

But.

[Jim]

But they're. From a marketing perspective.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Oh, so much better.

[Jim]

So brilliant.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

So brilliant. Not only, like, when. And St. Paul, the original of the marketing geniuses, right?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

He would go in, he would commandeer the most populated synagogue, and his pitch was simplicity itself. Hey, all the special diet stuff, you don't need to do that.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, no, no.

[Jim]

This.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, you have. How many commandments do you guys have? We just have 10 and 10. Yeah, I know. We just lost all your Roman Catholic views.

[Jim]

I know.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, but, dad. No, it's okay. David and I, whenever, literally whenever we've gone into one of those beautiful cathedrals and we just look at each other and. You guys, Jews could never. We're never going to win this one.

[Jim]

I tell you, it's true. But the real secret that I actually admire about the religion I was raised in. What you mentioned confession.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Wait a minute. Wait, let me get this straight.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, no, it's way better. And actually, the more evangelical you Get. You can pray for stuff. Like, I once met someone who was praying for a sofa. Like the whole church was doing a prayer.

[Jim]

A Mercedes Benz.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Apparently that can happen, too. So we actually. Now you're making me feel like the loser of all of this.

[Jim]

No, that's Janis Joplin.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, no, I mean like that. But that our religion is, you know, pretty grim.

[Jim]

Well, yours is probably closer to the way things really are.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. I don't know. I just. I'm like. In that sense, I don't presume to know. But I also know that things have happened since she's died.

[Jim]

That's what I was getting at. That are sort of the flowers and the bunny and the flower coming up in your own garden.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Like, I love that kind of stuff because who knows. Who knows how strange the universe that we live in actually is.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I don't know that they're not just, like, we talk to each other online and you could be in Japan. Like, I don't know that there's not another dimension that.

[Jim]

Exactly. And, you know, the light spectrum. I'll believe it when I see it. And then, you know, the big joke, Laughing out loud. You know, here's the part of the light spectrum the human eye can see. Here's the light spectrum.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I don't question. And there have been things that haven't. I haven't gone looking for them, but I have a few of those odd things. And then I've very suddenly, at moments, had her voice land in my head. And one time was that morning we woke up in the hotel to go to her hotel. Sorry, her apartment. And I was just dreading it. And just as I was waking up, I suddenly felt this strong wash of peace over my being. And I heard her voice say, you got this, Mom. And then I did. It just was like spiritual Valium or something. And then Bea and I, we went there and we did it. And actually, the other time it came into my head was I was thinking about this book. And it's weird to promote such a book. It's weird to talk about this book in, you know, buy the book way. Like, I never wanted to write this book. As a writer. This was not my ambition, obviously, to write such a book. And I've been very sort of morally torn up about it. And I was lying. Just. I don't know. A few weeks ago, I was thinking about this. I said, well, I was talking to her, as I sometimes do. I said, well, at least this keeps you alive in the world, right? And again, I heard her voice very strongly say, and it's not something I would have thought spontaneously I heard her say, no, mom, you keep me alive in the world, and you only keep me alive if you live. And meaning not just live, but live. If I'm just going to walk around as a sad sack, I am not keeping her alive. And I was very startled by that thought.

[Jim]

Yeah. And you know what's interesting about that is that's ultimately what got my mom through too.

[Danielle Crittenton]

But hearing the voice was. Well, that sounds really crazy, but.

[Jim]

Yeah, not like that. But her saying, because again, as a young son, you're very attuned to how your mom is doing.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. And I wouldn't say that of most young sons, but in this case, maybe.

[Jim]

But under the circumstances, I was very attuned to both my parents. And I. Like there was a day, I don't know, nine months, maybe a year after Lael, my sister died, where she just seemed different. And I went, you seem better, Mom. And she said something virtually the same as you just said. She was like, Lael would be so mad at me.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Right.

[Jim]

For moping around. Because Lael was this, like your Miranda was this incredibly vivacious, fun, witty, you know, a liver of life.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

And. And that was kind of the way my mom came back as well. It was like, you know what? I am doing a disservice to Lael. And I think that. But that requires time. Right. Because it's also.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You tell yourself this over and over, like. Yeah, well, Miranda would hate to think that she'd cause you to be this sad. Or as my son said very early on, nothing would be worse to Miranda's memory than for this to shatter our family. Which is a line I keep a lot in my head. But there was something about the bolt of lightning of her voice saying that to me. And it's not me. It didn't feel like me telling myself,

[Jim]

yeah, no, I know. And that was very similar to what my mom transmitted to me after. And so again, I have no insight as to how strange the universe might be and what might or might not happen. But those types of things are really interesting to me because maybe it's just us concluding that naturally after the grief. Right. I don't know. But hey, if you hear the child's voice, listen is kind of the way I think about it. So how are you girded for you're going to be going on with your publishing company?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Mr. Shanz?

[Jim]

I'm sorry.

[Danielle Crittenton]

No, you guys have been. I just want your listeners or viewers to know that Infinite Books has been the most extraordinary publishing experience I've had. I've published four previous books, none on this topic. And just what you guys are doing, the modernization of publishing, but also the compassion and warmth everybody has and professionalism has been. I've just. It's been amazing to me. And editor Jimmy Soni has. I mean, he's like the old Max Perkins. If anybody. Who knows who that is, I know who.

[Jim]

Yeah, I know Max Perkins very well,

[Danielle Crittenton]

but also a friend. And he's someone who Miranda helped research one of his books for, so he knew her. But he's just been such a booster and such a support. And I can't imagine going through this with any type of traditional publisher. I really can't. So I'm grateful.

[Jim]

Well, thank you very much. We essentially. We decided. Jimmy and I were comparing notes, and we just thought it was so funny that most of my books were written in the 90s. My last imprint was 2011. I'm writing a fictional book now, which is kind of fun. But mine were all nonfiction, and we were together. And Jimmy especially was just so struck that exactly the same things that had happened 20 years earlier to me were still happening.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. And still are. Yeah.

[Jim]

And we just looked at each other, and I'm like, all right, Infinite Books it is then.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's. I have friends publishing other books with other publishers. And I'll just say something in passing, like, you know, they ab tested my cover, and they're like, what? Wait, publishers do that?

[Jim]

No, they don't. We do. You know, the COVID actually is really interesting because the A B test here, for anyone who's watching, this is the COVID that won. I think it's a fabulous cover.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, it was one that took me by surprise. And thanks to ab testing, because the COVID is showing a selfie I took of Miranda and me on a girls trip to Malibu. I think it was 2000 2017. 2018. And I had given that photo as one of several photos that you guys were looking at for author photos.

[Jim]

Right.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And we were trying very artsy, beautiful covers. Like, and I really loved the artsy, beautiful cover.

[Jim]

So did I.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And unbeknownst to me, your team mocked up and they went through about five or six covers, which also never happens. And they mocked up that one. And it won. Like, forget it.

[Jim]

It won with a bullet.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Yeah, it was.

[Jim]

And Jean Marc and I were like, this is interesting. Yeah, let's retest it.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Because we were like you. We won't bore our audience, but There were a lot of really beautiful and very artistic covers.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

This just blew them out of the water.

[Danielle Crittenton]

I know I'd startle and.

[Jim]

And so, like, it's just like, one of those things. If you can do that and you can get access to that, why aren't you doing that?

[Danielle Crittenton]

It wasn't like. It wasn't difficult. Like, you didn't have to have, like, whole teams of people do this. It was just like, do anything. You probably do it on AI now, you know.

[Jim]

Well, actually, we do. Yeah. But we also do it with humans.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah.

[Jim]

Everything that we do, we run first through an in silica audience. And in silica, you can create characters, and I guess we could call them agents. Right. But you can create thousands of them. Wow. And then give them the AB test. But we always make sure that we do it with humans as well, because, you know, AIs know nothing of grief.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Well, also, they don't. They're not walking into bookstores or.

[Jim]

Exactly, exactly. But what's really interesting is Jean Marc can attest to this. The AI picked this with a bullet, too.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Jim]

And. And he and I were just kind of like, okay, live by it. We got to die by it.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, every. Everybody, like my mother is overjoyed by the COVID And. Yeah.

[Jim]

Every person that I've shown this cover to has reacted so warmly to the COVID Yeah. Like, oh, that's.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Well, because it's such a miserable topic that if you had this big, black, gloomy, you know, dispatches and font and, like, you'd kind of like, whoa, I'm not opening that. Like, it's like a scary box.

[Jim]

Exactly.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You know, And. And this looks.

[Jim]

I wanted to ask one other question about the title. Right. Dispatches from Grief immediately to me says, it's like a war correspondent dispatches from the war zone. Was that the reason for the title?

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, I never. It's funny, it was always the title in my head after I started writing, because I was also writing it in a fairly not dire. It's not a diary like, form, but an episodic form in that. So one section is just. It's a dispatch, like, about how modern social media is a source of terror becomes a source of terror for you because, you know, you can put their old clothes in a drawer. But, you know, every time I'd pick up my phone, there'd be memories or, you know, my car would say, want to connect to Miranda's iPhone? And every time that happened, I just burst into tears.

[Jim]

Sure.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And, like, no, curse you, Facebook memory And so, so there's a section on that. There's a section on like the grief splainers and the. But structured in a, you know, in. Along the journey, in what do you call it? In a natural way, but thematically as well. So in that sense it had. And it wasn't like me sitting down to write a book that said this is grief. This, this is what it's like. It's much more the old journalistic school.

[Jim]

Yeah, well, I think it was like when I saw the title first. We usually test titles too. We were just like, nope, that nails it. But then I just started wondering on my way in today. I'm like, the image that I get is like, okay, you haven't been here, I'm here.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, it's like my dad, right? That's what we used to do. He would do that from Beirut.

[Jim]

Exactly. Well, this has been really. I gotta be honest, I was a little worried because the topic is tough and it does get any tougher. Right. But the last thing I want you to talk just briefly about is the therapy that did in fact help you. Because I've read a lot about it, but I want to hear about it in your words.

[Danielle Crittenton]

So the therapy I eventually found, and keeping it brief, I did go try and get grief therapy. And I write about how incredibly difficult it is to get therapy quickly because everybody has a waiting list. Doesn't matter what your insurance is. Basically, unless you are willing to say you are suicidal and check into an emergency ward, it's very hard to find help when you really, really need it.

[Jim]

Parenthetically, the getting the answering machine when you called, I just, I got mad.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah. Oh, it was awful. And I'm calling up these places, the Grief Institute. You know, we help families. And I'd go, hello, I'm a mother, I've lost my. My child and I need help really badly. We will get back to you as soon as we can. Please understand. There is an 18 month waiting list for help. And you're like, how is this going to.

[Jim]

Crazy.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Just crazy. 18 months from now, I'm hoping not to need you.

[Jim]

Exactly.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Anyway, EMDR is the therapy and it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Which is a long way of saying that it originated by a psychotherapist, a woman in the late 80s got this was dealing with PTSD victims. And we think of a PTSD victim typically like a soldier who, you know, a car backfires and suddenly he's back in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam and starts screaming and so treating this level of trauma. She was the one who speculated that the brain doesn't process traumatic memories the way it processes others. And she developed what began as. And this is the eye movement part, where you'd look at a dot, an electronic dot, and by watching it go back left, left, and right, while you recalled the traumatic incident in detail. And that somehow had the effect of helping the brain process it. And until recently, and it worked. It had a lot of effect, but they didn't really know why. Today they use. I use hand buzzers connected to my computer, which buzz left and right, but they can. You can still use a dot. But the reason they found out it worked is when they could now study brains, put them under MRIs, and people who have had trauma that they would watch, they would have people process first ordinary memories, the picnic, what I did yesterday. And then they would say, now the traumatic memory. And the person would start thinking of it, and they could see. The brain put on the brakes. Parts of the brain started to light up that aren't normally associated with memory. And essentially the memory became trapped. The brain couldn't file it in its usual hippocampus, correct drawer. And with the result, it stayed present. It stays present. So when the car backfires, you are back being bombed. When the Facebook memory comes up, I am getting it flung in my face that my daughter is no longer here, and I am no longer communicating with her on social media. But with grief of this kind, it's in everything. I couldn't go to the supermarket without having a panic attack because I just start passing things that I used to buy her, Miranda, in advance of her visits and pass the energy drinks. And just the first time I went, I had to leave the store. I just left my cart, ran out of there. And so my therapy, which I still do two years later, and I've been doing it weekly, and eventually the goal is for you to get off it. Like, it's not like some Freudianism therapy where they want to keep you on the couch, like, forever. It's like cbt. It's like these modern types of therapies that teach you how to manage whatever it is, like your addiction, your trauma. But because I think with a child, it's so layered and it keeps coming back at you. So many things in different ways that you go. I've been going through this and through this. So when we talked about that early, obsessions of obsessiveness, of what I could have done, we would talk through that, and I would talk all the way through and all the things I could have done and what didn't happen. And then by the end of the session, I came out, and my son, who was doing it as well, said, I. I don't know what they did, but I feel better. And you come out. It's like I compare it to kind of like an exorcism that you come out and that thought suddenly doesn't bother you anymore. I mean, you're not happy about it, but it's filed it. It's somehow been able to file it. So to be able to even write about some of the things I write about, like going and seeing her dead body for the first time, going to her apartment, all of these things I've been able to write. And I guess writing them down is also a form of emdr. My therapist said, think of if you ever get a song caught in your head, the way to get it out. I didn't know this, but apparently it's true. You listen to it all the way through, and then it goes out of your head. And this is the premise of that therapy. And so when I ask my therapist early on, I said, like, what's the goal here? I'm not going to stop grieving. I'm not going to stop missing Miranda. And she said, the goal is that one day you will manage your grief, and grief won't manage you. You will manage your day, and grief won't manage your day. And that, to me, said, okay, that's a realistic goal. And if I can get there off the floor, walking, that's what I need to do. And that has been to me. So if anybody asks me or friends who are going through similar types of trauma, I always raise the emdr, and unfailingly, a lot of them are already doing it.

[Jim]

Well, I think that obviously we're incredibly proud to be publishing your book. We think it's very important. One of the things that, as we've already covered, that I love about it is its raw honesty. People don't need people bullshitting them when they're going through that kind of experience. And in a way, like reading this, as opposed to happy, happy, joy, joy, or, you know, you're going to emerge in a better place. That just seems so false and so inauthentic to me, whereas this is very authentic. And then it kind of allows the person to feel what they're feeling, in other words. Right. It gives them. Oh, like, so I'm not the crazy one here.

[Danielle Crittenton]

And it does. I refuse to call them gifts because they're Unreturnable, you know, but people say, well, you know, to be fair, in becoming the different person that you are, I think of these now, I call them to myself, Miranda's gifts, that if she had to leave me, she left me with these gifts. And it is. Are you more sensitive to other people's pain? Yes. Are you more aware of other people's pain? Yes. That makes you more patient. I never. Boy, I could have been a real Karen at one point. Like, God, can you pack these groceries any slower? You know, it's like, I have all the patients in the world and I'm sorry, saying, how is your day going? You know, like, it sounds stupid to say it makes you appreciate life, but you have. Because there's a lot I don't appreciate now because I'm sad a lot of the time. But it does make you. It gives you like a second sight. You have a second sight into how the people around you are and what they're experiencing. And it makes you like she was having gone through her own traumas, much more compassionate friends said she could look past your tattoos, you know, your angry T shirt, and she could see you. And that's, I think, the gift that she has given me.

[Jim]

It's a lovely gift for her to have given you. Realizing the fragility of your fellow humans puts you in a very different lens on humanity.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Yeah, it does shift. It does. It shifts the view.

[Jim]

Yeah. Danielle, this has been fantastic. We do have a closing question here that we ask everyone.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Is this a surprise question? No.

[Jim]

No.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Is it a math? I can't do math. Math. Okay.

[Jim]

It is speculative though, because for our purposes, we're going to wave a wand and we are going to make you empress of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re education.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Chance. It's no fun. What kind of wand would you do?

[Jim]

We made it the unfun version. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept the entire population of the earth. Whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm actually work on doing these two things. What are you going to incept?

[Danielle Crittenton]

You mean I'm going to figure out what people's goals should be when they wake up in the morning?

[Jim]

No, it can be some of the answers that we've had are completely non goal. Oriented. You just. It's. You get to be. You get to be the magic genie to help in their ear, to.

[Danielle Crittenton]

Okay. To say, like, okay, so you're telling them what to do when they get up, or you're suggesting. You're giving them a helpful suggestion that could be life changing. I would say. I mean, the obvious thing that is always said is, like, you know, embrace life. Nobody has a guarantee it could be over today. You know, live life as this is your last day, which one does after these things anyway. But I would say so, allowing for all of that, I would say be more patient with yourself and with others. I have to have two of these, right? And appreciate those who you love and love you back. Just show appreciation. I think it's important in any relationship. And I do this with David, do this with my kids, especially now, just thanking them for small gestures, showing that kind of appreciation is good.

[Jim]

I love both of those and both are good advice. Danielle, thank you so much.

[Danielle Crittenton]

You sure I can't kill anyone? No, yeah, I'm sure.

[Jim]

Sorry, that's kind of our number one question. Can you just make an exception to this one?

[Danielle Crittenton]

One, just one person? Thank you. It's been a real pleasure and joy to be with you, so thank you.