Transcript - Episode 21: Life Is Messy
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 21
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Shea Aguinaldo
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
Rachel Zucker: Could I start us off?
Mike Sakasegawa: Please.
Rachel Zucker: I have been thinking, I've been wanting to share this thought with you, and maybe I did and maybe I didn't since we recorded, or since you sent me the draft for the last episode. Now I find it hard. This thing that I have been saying to you in my mind over and over again is somehow hard to say now that we're face to face. But after we spoke last time for Hey, It's Me, my grief changed. The quality of my feelings, my feelings changed, which I knew intellectually was likely to happen. I know that that's...
Mike Sakasegawa: You knew intellectually it was likely to happen just because of the passage of time, or because of specifically talking to me on the mic?
Rachel Zucker: No, the first.
Mike Sakasegawa: Okay.
Rachel Zucker: But I guess what I'm trying to say, I don't know. It's hard to say this. I want to talk about this more specifically. But in general, I would say that my grief was not clear and clean. I got angry with Abram. I felt a lot of guilt and a lot of shame. It became a different kind of grief and grieving. It became very hard for me to accept the care and support that people who love me were offering. I also got sick. Not super sick, but pretty sick, just like a really bad cold. I really haven't left the house very much in the past month. It was, and it still is, I'm in a little bit of a better place now than I was in the past several weeks, but at a real difficult low point that was scary and intolerable feeling to me, just really, really intolerable. You sent me the draft of the audio to listen to, and at first I was like, "I'm not going to listen to this. I trust you. Just go ahead." Then I don't know what possessed me, but I was like, "Oh, I'll just listen to it." There were a few things that got me through the place that I was in, this really low, terrible place that I was in. But I would say maybe the top thing was that audio because I never would have believed that that's how I felt if I hadn't heard myself describe it in my own voice.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: The gift of knowing that I had really legitimately felt so clear and clean and that I wasn't experiencing this crushing, almost unsurvivable amount of guilt was such a gift to me. So first of all, thank you. Second of all, thank you to myself also for recording with you and to both of us for having this podcast. There's been lots of times that I've been really grateful to have it, but this is really one of the top times. My therapist was really trying to help me. My psychiatrist was really trying to help me. My friends were really trying to help me. I really was at a point where I just felt, "I don't think I can survive feeling like this for a long, long time. I don't believe that it's going to change." Listening to myself describe a very, very different kind of grief proved to me that things change.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: There's a lot more I want to say about it because it has a lot of implications for me also about writing and talking about my life in the way that I do in terms of how autobiographical, how much detail I have gone into in a public forum about my life, and how conflicted I am about that and how much that brings up for me. But I will say that that audio was really probably the most important thing to help me keep going through a really, really difficult time.
Mike Sakasegawa: It strikes me that that's not the first time you've said something like that about this show. I know that when you were going through Abram's treatment, especially in the beginning part of it, coming back to the audio when I would send you a draft or when it would be published was something that also helped give you a certain perspective. Even more generally, we've talked before about how having an audience, even a theoretical audience, helps you feel real, which to me is maybe not exactly congruent to, but a similar thing to saying, feeling more grounded.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. Yeah. I think I wanted to record with you today for a lot of reasons. One, to thank you and to appreciate both of us for this space and this project. The other is also, I think, too, we had some really nice feedback on the last episode, and I'm very grateful for that as well. But I think I also feel a little bit compelled to say my grief didn't stay like that. I feel like I want to be honest about that for myself. Maybe it will be important to me in the future to look back at this moment and to be able to hear what it changed, but also to other people. It got very messy, and it's still messy. I know that that's okay, but it really doesn't feel okay. I think, I don't know, that feels important to me to talk about.
Mike Sakasegawa: Do you think it's likely that anyone listening, we got more feedback on that episode than I think we've gotten on any previous episode, which is understandable. We got a lot of feedback even from people who neither of us know, which was interesting. Do you think it's likely that any of those people expected that your grief was going to just be one thing or that your grief process would be clean and un-messy? If you were to see someone else going through it, would you expect that?
Rachel Zucker: Maybe. I think even though, again, the rational part of my brain and my lived experience tells me that grief is messy and feelings change, I had this overwhelming relief and gratitude that Abram was not suffering anymore, that I had, after such a complicated relationship with him for years and years, and especially during his illness, come to a resolution or a place that I think I hoped would last a long time. There are moments that I still feel that way. That's still part of my experience, but it's very overshadowed by a lot of other feelings that are really painful and difficult. It took me 10 years to really get to a better place with my mom and my mom's memory. I think I really thought when we spoke last that the situation was so different, right? My mom, I had such a complicated relationship with her, such a difficult relationship with her. She died so suddenly in the middle of a fight with me. I just thought, "Well, this is in some ways the polar opposite of that situation." I had time with Abram. We knew how sick he was. A lot of my grief and trauma that surrounded my mom's death was she was alone. She was in Taiwan. She was so far from home. She was angry at me. With Abram, I was right there. But also with my mom, it was so hard to believe that it had happened. I just kept thinking, "Well, she's just traveling. She's just away." But I saw Abram die. I saw him get sicker and sicker and die. I still don't believe it on some level. Also, despite how long he was sick and how clear it was that he was probably going to die, and then how clear it was that he was dying, because, and we've talked about this on the show, Abram really did not want to process things with me the way I really want and need to process things by talking about them. So in some ways, I am in a very similar position than I was when my mom died. I had to make decisions about, for example, whether Abram would be cremated or buried without knowing what he wanted. I asked him in the last weeks of his life several times, and he wouldn't answer. I finally got to the point, the death doula was very helpful with me in this way. She said, "Ask him," and pushed me to ask him, which I'm grateful that she did. She said, "Most young people who are dying do have preferences of what they want in a memorial service or where they want to be buried or if they don't want to be buried or whatever." I asked Abram, which is a very fucking hard question to ask your child, even if everybody is pretty clear that he's dying. It's really hard to say out loud to your child, "What do you want me to do with your dead body after you die?" So it was tough. He just either would fall asleep or not answer or say, "I don't want to talk about this right now." So then the death doula was like, "Next time you ask him, say, 'Do you want me to make this decision, or do you have a preference between being cremated and buried?'" And he said, "You decide." There's so many other decisions like that that I'm having to make that I don't really know what he wants. I feel upset and angry with him and with myself because in some ways I'm like, it's very similar to the situation that I was in with my mom of having to make all of these decisions. Also to feel so unresolved with Abram. I felt somehow miraculously resolved in some way last time we spoke. Even hearing my own voice say that, it's still hard for me to identify with that because I just feel devastated that I can't share with him what I've learned about myself and about my relationship with Abram now because he's dead. I also feel just heartbroken that I can't resolve things with him more. That leads to anger and disappointment with him, and then I feel like a bad mother. Now that I am getting up a little more, I'm back to one of my primary dilemmas as a human being in this fucking lifetime, which is I feel on the one hand that I cannot survive this experience unless I find a way to find meaning and make meaning out of it in a way that enables me to keep his life and dying and death with me and do something in the world or in my relationships with other people or in my understanding about my own life and the story of my life. I need to find and make meaning from this experience or I can't. The idea that he had a difficult birth and a difficult life and a difficult death, and now that's over, that's it, I can't really tolerate. But the primary way that I do that is through talking like we're doing right now and through writing and through telling the story to myself and other people of what happened, figuring out what's meaningful about that or making a story out of it. I don't know how to do life without that. It seems inevitable that I'm going to do that for my own well-being, also because that's what I do. But to do that feels like I am turning Abram's whole life into a metaphor or into a learning experience for me, as if I am the main character in the whole story and he's a side character. Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that if I really loved Abram, if I was a really good mother, I would never write about him or talk about him publicly again. But clearly I'm not going to do that. So I'm just spinning in this, "I'm a terrible mother," and I'm back to the thing with my mom, "I killed my mom with the book."
Mike Sakasegawa: Can I interrupt you for a second?
Rachel Zucker: Sure.
Mike Sakasegawa: Because I feel like you are...
Rachel Zucker: You can try.
Mike Sakasegawa: I feel like you are spiraling right now.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. This is the new grief. It's messy.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yes, it is. It is messy. Life is messy. Everybody's life is messy. I wanted to offer a few observations. The first is that you are still alive, and while we are alive, change is inevitable in the way that we feel about things and the way that we move through the world. It always changes. So it was always going to be the case that your grief would change in one way or another. I think you know that. The next thing is that the fact that you are continuing to live is one of the differences between life and a story or a book or anything like that because a book has an ending, but life doesn't have an ending. It doesn't have that. It just continues. Even after you have your ending, the experience of the people around you is going to continue. There's no tidiness, right? But there's still what you were talking about: making meaning, making a narrative, telling a story. You said that that's inevitable because that's just what you do and who you are. I think that's true, but also there's no way that this experience would not inflect all of your later experiences, whether they're related or not, because this is a big part of who you are now. One of the things that has always struck me about you, because I think it's a similar thing with me, is that you're not just impatient to move through an emotion. You're often surprised that you can't. That's been something through all of this, through the whole experience and even before, that somehow you and I feel like because we're smart people and because we understand what's going on, we see the pattern and the psychology, that that means that we should be able to move through the experience more quickly. But that's not how it works, and you know that. The other thing is that the way you were just talking about Abram and his life and, to put it in perhaps crass terms, how you might make use of his life. The thing that you said was as though he is some side character and you're the main character. But the thing is, he is a side character in your life, and you are the main character of your life. That's true for everybody. I don't think that there's really anything that can be gained from trying to deny that you're the main character of your own life.
Rachel Zucker: Yes.
Mike Sakasegawa: I don't think that just because someone else's experience, someone else's life or death, can be a meaningful event in the course of your life, that necessarily diminishes their value in any universal or personal sense. It doesn't mean that that's all they were in the universe. It doesn't mean that that's all they were to themselves. It doesn't mean that you expect that that's all they were, right? You and I are always beating ourselves up about being at fault for things, about trying to find the least charitable way of explaining ourselves. But just because you're able to find some meaning in this, just because you're able to take something about this experience and maybe make it into a metaphor or use it as such in your own continuing life and growth and development, that's not how you saw him as a person. It doesn't mean that you saw him that way, or you fundamentally believe that that's what he was. You're not such a narcissistic person that you believe that other people only exist in how they affect you. I need to put that out there because I don't think anybody who knows you for real is going to think that about you. Maybe people who don't know you very well might think that, but fuck them.
Rachel Zucker: Okay. I have a few things to say about what you're saying. One is that, yes, everybody is a kind of supporting character in everybody else's life, right?
Mike Sakasegawa: I mean, this is a running thing with your writing in general, right?
Rachel Zucker: I know.
Mike Sakasegawa: I'm literally a supporting character in the novel that you've been working on. We talked about this when you had me read that. [laughs]
Rachel Zucker: I know. I know. So I agree with you. This is an issue in my life. I think in part because my mom, I think, really was a narcissist. I think that she was a performer. I mean, she was a performer. I think that real narcissism, and that term gets thrown around a lot. I really like what someone told me recently, which is that they like to think of narcissism as a healthy, good, normal stage of development. Like children need to have narcissism. But if you get stuck there, and also it's not like once you grow out of it you never have those feelings again, but it's a stage of development. If you get stuck there, or if you are regressing to that experience over and over again, that's where it gets problematic. But whether you think of it as a personality type or a developmental stage, I think that my mother really struggled, really struggled her whole life understanding me as anything other than an extension of herself. Or not an extension of herself, but like, "Was I giving her what she wanted and needed?" It's almost like I didn't quite exist when I wasn't with her. This was a big part of the problem between us and the problem with the way she was my mother and a mother. It really was very complicated. It was very complicated with Abram because, as we talked about, he hadn't really separated from me. I don't have the same relationship with Moses and Judah. Moses and Judah are in my work a lot. They're in my work more than Abram, really. But they're so clearly separate people who are at the center of their own lives. I don't know that Abram really was. Our relationship was messed up surrounding this...
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah, but that's as much because of his choices and desires as it is anything to do with you.
Rachel Zucker: I agree. But there are times where I hear myself saying things like that. "These were his choices." He could have talked to me and said, "I don't want you to write about me," or "I don't care about that." He could have controlled his own narrative much more than he did. Those things are true, but when I hear myself having those thoughts, I accuse myself of justifying wanting to write about him. Or not even wanting to. I don't even really want to, but there's a part of me that feels like, after all of this, maybe this is what I get. This is like the booby prize, this story, this experience, which I could write about and learn from. Because there are moments where, honestly, I feel like, "I'm either losing my fucking mind or I'm becoming some kind of superhero." [chuckles] Do you know what I mean? I think about all the origin stories of the superheroes, and it's like something really fucking bad happened to me. I'm in this interesting stasis where I don't go out, and I'm just in this grief world. But anyway, I'll come back to that. I just wanted to say one other thing, which is I was listening to Sally Mann's new memoir, listening to her read it, before Abram died. Then I wasn't listening to anything in the weeks before he died. Then I went back to it after he died. I was very grateful. I loved her first memoir, Hold Still. This one's called Make Art, I think, or Art Work, I think. We've talked about her work before. I really love her work. I'm really interested in her. She's an amazing writer. I was grateful to be able to be distracted, even for short periods of time, to go back to listening to this book. Have you read it or heard it?
Mike Sakasegawa: I haven't. I've read her first one. I've read Hold Still, but I haven't read this one.
Rachel Zucker: It's not as good as Hold Still, but there are parts that I found very interesting. But in any case, one of the things that I was really curious was, was she going to talk about her son, Emmett? I don't know all the details, obviously, but I do know that Emmett died by suicide, I believe, in his late 20s or early 30s.
Mike Sakasegawa: I think it was his late 20s. Yeah. He was young.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. I believe he was diagnosed as having schizophrenia, but I would have to go look that up. One of the things is I was kind of interested to know, was she going to talk about that? All of a sudden I had this different relationship with Sally Mann as the mother of three children, one of whom died young. I had all kinds of fantasies as I was listening to the book. "Maybe I'll just write an email to her somehow. I'll try to get her email address and I'll write to her. This will be my first episode back to Commonplace. I'm just going to get in the car and I'll come see you in Lexington, Virginia. Can I just talk to you?" I had this moment where I was like, "I'm only going to talk to artists who have a child who died. That's all I want to do now. I just want to talk to those people and find out, 'How are you still functioning?'" She mentions Emmett, and there's one moving part where she's looking at her journals and her computer files and noticing and reporting, "This is the most common topic," or "This is how many files I have on this," or "This is how many times..." as a way of telling the listener and the reader, "These are the things that I care about," or "These are the things that I really paid attention to in my life over and over again." There's one moment where she's like, "I have this computer file: Emmett crisis number one, Emmett crisis number two, Emmett crisis number three, Emmett death." One other time in the book she alludes to, "This would become a very important experience, but we didn't know it at the time," for Emmett. But otherwise, she does not talk about it. I have not seen her talk about it in interviews, and not in two memoirs.
Mike Sakasegawa: She's been pretty pointed in interviews about, "I'm not going to talk about that." In fact, after he died, the way that her relationship with her work in interviews was very clearly different. She would say to people, anytime fans of hers would ask her for advice about using family as subject matter, she'd just tell them, "Don't do it because it's not worth it."
Rachel Zucker: Right. As you can imagine, this feels significant to me as some cautionary tale or some instructions or whatever. I don't want to hear, "Don't do it." Also, there's something that I really admire about that line that she made. It makes me feel like she's a good mother. It makes me feel like that's the right thing to do. I keep saying to myself, "Look, Sally Mann still writes books and makes photographs, and she's able to do that and not talk about her kid, this one thing." But I also don't know that I can do that. I don't know. I wonder if this is part of why this memoir is less good than the other one. I don't know.
Mike Sakasegawa: It's striking me again that the working title of your novel was My Guru. I think both of us have at times wanted to have a mentor figure who could just tell us what to do. As I'm thinking back on it, I think maybe I can even hear a little bit of that in your interview with Lois Conner.
Rachel Zucker: Lois Conner.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. But just in general, how your energy in Commonplace interviews is so different when you're talking to someone older than you and when you're talking to someone younger than you. But Sally Mann's nice. She just doesn't have any answers for any of us. [chuckles] The work that she made after Emmett's death is not without its... She's still making work, but it's got its problems. [laughs] Lots of people have talked a lot about how there's problematic stuff about her later work. She is a great writer. There are elements of Hold Still that are politically or socially cringey.
Rachel Zucker: This book's very folksy, which is part of her real voice, but it's not me. [laughs]
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. That was something I'm sure we've talked about. Maybe we mentioned it on the show, that Sally Mann was a really important and influential figure in my development as a photographer, especially because my photography, especially my early photography, focused so much on my own children and my life. I wanted to be able to get answers or maybe permission. It was something that I said a lot when I was thinking about the photographers who really mattered to me when I was first starting, people like Sally Mann or people who I became friends with, like my friend Andi Schreiber or Liz Fleming or any number of people, Kate Hutchinson. I didn't know her, but she did some interesting work about taking portraits of her husband. Or people like Callahan or Emmet Gowin. To say that these people gave me permission to do the thing that I wanted to do anyway. But realistically, there isn't any such thing, not least because I never asked them and they never said anything to me. [laughs] But I don't know. Why do we want that? I just keep thinking to myself, this is something that comes up for me over and over again in my own life, which, as you know, I'm going through some difficult things right now that I'm not prepared to talk about on the podcast. But the things that I keep repeating over and over again, either to myself or to someone else, are things like, "There's no way out but through." "There's no right answer." "There's no one right answer." "While there's life, there's hope." Things keep going, and eventually something happens. These are all just platitudes on some level.
Rachel Zucker: No, those are truisms also.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. But I mean, aphorisms are both useful and unsatisfying. They're true and also trite. But sometimes they can be useful if you need something to keep repeating to yourself to get you through the moment.
Rachel Zucker: I think I am confused right now about whether I think art and self-expression are good or bad. I know that that's the most black-and-white way of saying it. [laughter] But I also just listened to My Friends by Fredrik Backman. I'm struggling right now with transitions between activities, like being awake and being asleep or getting up out of bed. So I get really stuck in one place, and I can't move to the next thing. So audiobooks are really helpful right now for me. Podcasts, other than ours, are potentially difficult for me because I don't know what to expect. I don't want to hear any news. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. In this book, which is engaging but not a great book, I'm not necessarily recommending it to anybody, but I'm grateful that it kept me engaged for 10 hours. There's an artist who's at the center of the story, this group of friends. It's like one of these books where it's just the cult of art in a very genuine, sincere way. Artists are special people who see the world in this certain way, and seeing a beautiful painting can change your life. I don't know why I'm using this tone of voice, like I believe in these things.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. These are all true things.
Rachel Zucker: Right. I'm also like, yeah, I don't know. Sally Mann's way of talking about art is more like, "Everybody has a job. Art was my job. Art is my job." These are the particularities of having your job be an artist. Yes, art is incredible, and also it doesn't give you any kind of pass in any way. I read into her decision not to talk about Emmett and to change her relationship to her work in part as, like, there are limits to what art should allow anybody to do. I guess I'm just interested in the fact that in your aphorisms that you said are getting you through, there's nothing about art.
Mike Sakasegawa: No.
Rachel Zucker: For some people, there might be, right? For some people, it's like, "I was put on this earth to paint. I was put on this earth to dance. I have to share my gift with people," or, "Being an artist helps me pay attention to the world," almost like a Mary Oliver way of being in the world. For some people, art is what keeps them alive.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: I'm not sure how I feel about that. It wasn't on your list.
Mike Sakasegawa: [chuckles] I don't think art is what keeps me alive. I don't think art is what I was put on the world to do. I don't think it's my purpose in life. I think that if there is anything that I was made for, it was to love people. Art is a way that I can do that. Art is a way that I can love the world. It's an important one, but it's not the only thing. Right now, I'm in a very fallow period, and I have been for a while. I just have too much other stuff going on in my life to really make things. I don't know. People might think that the reason we haven't been making episodes of this show is because things have been really hard for you. Certainly that's part of it, but it's not the only part. I haven't been making episodes of Keep the Channel Open. It's been months and months and months. I think I put out the last one in March or April. I don't know. It's been a long time.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. You've taken on all of the production and all of that part of this podcast. So yeah, as hard as things have been for me, all I ever do with this podcast is show up and talk to you and send you the file.
Mike Sakasegawa: [laughs] That's the deal, though.
Rachel Zucker: I know, but I'm just saying, yes, things have been hard for you. When things are hard for you, the podcast stops, understandably so. [laughter]
Mike Sakasegawa: The other thing, when I think about all of the things that were in that list, they were just about continuing. They're just about enduring and tolerating and continuing. That's the only thing I've ever done in my life, is just continue to put one foot in front of the other, even if I don't know where I'm going, because I don't have any choice, because I'm not willing to just lay down and die. I think one of the things about being an artist—well, it just took me a long time to be willing to call myself an artist, but I think I am—one of the things about being an artist, and particularly being an artist who shows up in the world the way that I do, making an interview podcast, doing collaborations with people, being in an artistic community, I know a lot of artists now, as do you. The way that you were talking about art just now, that art is important, art is a truth, it's something beautiful that can make you want to continue living, whether that's because you experience it or because a painting can change somebody's life. Sure. A painting can change a viewer's life. It can change a painter's life. Sure. Artists are doing something wonderful for the world, which is something that I truly do believe. Not maybe every artist, but every artist and every work of art has the potential to be life-changing for somebody. Also, you and I both know a lot of artists and know, therefore, that all artists, as far as I can tell, are just people. They're full of bullshit. They're sometimes self-aggrandizing. Often they are wrong about things. When it comes to somebody like Sally Mann, I was saying just a minute ago that other people can't give me permission to do things. They can't say it's okay to do things. They also can't say it's not okay by the same token. Sally Mann can decide what was worth it for her, and she can decide that she has lines that she won't cross, as we all must decide. All of us do have lines that we won't cross. Not all of us are necessarily aware of where those lines are, having maybe not thought about it, but some of us are. In the end, this is just what it means to be a person, right? You have to decide these things for yourself, and nobody can decide them for you. There's just doing the thing and dealing with whatever the consequence of having done that thing is. Sometimes we might try to make some kind of justification. We might try to say it was worth it for me to have done this, even though maybe it was hurtful to this person or that person, because look at what it opened up for all of the other people who were moved by it. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe we can look at that decision and say, "Yes, I'm glad that happened, even though it hurt somebody." Or maybe we could say, "You know what? Maybe that's not good enough." But we all have to decide that for ourselves too. There's not a right answer to these things. This is the thing that I just keep going through. There's no right answer. Unless there is a God somewhere who's set down some rules for us, then we're all just muddling through it, and we do the best we can.
Rachel Zucker: I think there's a parallel conversation or theme that I've been thinking a lot about that I think is connected to what you're saying. But maybe you can connect these two pieces more explicitly than I'm able to do right now. I think it has to do with control. I feel like this desire for control and this terror of the reality of how little control I have in the world, but not wanting that to slip into meaninglessness or anarchy, or that I don't have to make choices. I'm in this very extreme, binary, black-and-white, dualistic place that I know is not... I want to get out of it. I want to be able to hold opposites and complexity more than I'm able to do right now. It's an extreme version of what happens in my mind, this all-or-nothing thing. But what I notice is this strong desire to find someone who will relieve me of the burden of responsibility to make ethical choices, to make logistical choices by telling me what to do, by telling me what's right and what's wrong. It's this desire to be relieved of this overwhelming, crushing responsibility. But then I have this equal and opposite desire to imagine that I have control over the outcome of all of these things. Even though I knew I didn't have control over Abram getting cancer or not, this whole drama about, "Am I going to write about him? Am I not going to write about him?" is this desire to somehow control the meaning of his life or whether I'm a good mother or a bad mother. We've talked about this before, but I know every time I get into a guilt spiral about Abram or about anything, or this shame spiral, at the heart of it for me is always, "If I did something wrong, it means I had some control." Guilt is much easier, as painful as it is to feel, than, "This wasn't mine to control." I wrote a whole book about this, and I had therapy about this for almost 13 years. Literally yesterday was the first time it occurred to me that that same realization about every time I feel guilty about Abram, it's because I so much wish I had control, is true about my mom, right? The idea that I killed my mom by writing a book about her. Why do I, in a way, cling to this idea, even though it's clearly hurting me so much? It's because the alternative is I had no control. I had no control over any of this shit. Anyway, I think this question of... Yeah, all those Commonplace conversations, at the heart of them, are me basically asking all these people, "How should I live my life? Who should I be? How should I act? What should I care about? What should I prioritize? You tell me what you do. I know I like your work. I want to hear you talk about it." The details were different, but that was essentially the question. "Am I okay? What should I do? How should I be?"
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I think that you just asked me to connect those things. I think you've pretty ably connected them yourself. But I also would just throw out there that it's true that you can't be responsible for something that you don't have control over. I think that's different from saying that you have no responsibility at all. Because there are things that you have control over. Namely, you have control over yourself and your own behaviors.
Rachel Zucker: But it's as if I'm imagining to myself there's a right choice and there's a wrong choice about, let's say, writing about Abram, right?
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: If I make the right choice, I don't know what that is, but if I make the right choice, this is all going to be okay. It's not going to all be okay, no matter what I do, no matter which choice I make.
Mike Sakasegawa: It's not going to all be okay, but it's also not going to be catastrophic. If something goes wrong, it's not going to be unrecoverable. These things are true.
Rachel Zucker: I'm having a lot of trouble with the idea that I have some control but not all control. It's like I either want none or all.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: I'll say one other thing. Yeah, I didn't think that my grief was going to stay the same. I don't imagine that anybody else thought that. But it fucking sucks, Mike. In our conversation last time, every part of this is just terrible. It's just terrible and terrible and terrible. In our conversation, Aaron was on his way here. I was so excited to see him. It was complicated. Abram had just died a few days ago. But I could not have predicted that when he came here full of love and care and support and consideration and patience and tenderness and gentleness and kindness, I would be so irritated by him. It was horrible. It was so bad. He's on his way here now again. He's coming here in a little over an hour. [laughter] We've seen each other once since. The first visit was just so hard for me. So hard for me. I was a nightmare. I was so bitchy and awful.
Mike Sakasegawa: What's the purpose of you saying this about yourself right now?
Rachel Zucker: Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is... Okay, one of the things that my therapist said that was very helpful to me when I described this way that I was treating Aaron, which is basically fending off every nice thing he was doing, she said, "You guys are actively at cross purposes with one another right now. He loves you and wants to help you feel better. You are at a moment of grief where you do not want to feel better for a lot of reasons." One of those reasons for me is something that you and I have talked about a lot, which is, in this specific case, it's Abram's death. But I don't feel, on some level, worthy of having someone love me the way Aaron does or take care of me or to experience pleasure right now. My kid fucking died. It's bringing up all of that unworthiness shit. Then I'll just add one piece of this, one more part, which I think is important for me to say to you specifically also, because this is something we've talked about too. This is the first time in my life that I can remember that I don't have anyone to take care of. I don't have anyone that I need to take care of. Judah went to college while Abram was dying. After 15 months, all of a sudden I have no kids living at home. It's the first time in almost 27 years. Before that I was married. I was in the marriage caretaker-wife role. I clearly cannot take care of anyone right now. I do not want to be in that position. That would not be good for me.
Mike Sakasegawa: Right. But you also don't know what to do with yourself.
Rachel Zucker: I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how to justify my existence without earning my keep.
Mike Sakasegawa: Why does your existence need to be justified?
Rachel Zucker: Right. But it's not rational. You know that. I had such an extreme situation with Abram where I was like, "I got to keep this kid alive. I got to keep this kid alive. Now I've got to help him die. Now I've got to help him die." Like you said, you don't think your purpose is to be an artist, and you think it's to love people. I think mine, I would say, at least what I've always felt that it was, is to help alleviate suffering for others and to care for other people, which is maybe another way of saying love. Maybe it's slightly different. I don't know. But I also don't know how much of that comes from childhood trauma.
Mike Sakasegawa: Does it matter?
Rachel Zucker: It does because right now I'm at this moment in my life where I want to figure out who I want to be now that I maybe can choose with less fear and more freedom. I'm not going to choose to be a horrible person, but I could choose to be less ashamed of being a writer or the kind of writer that I am, or I could choose to basically have limits around my own energy and prioritize myself in ways that I never, ever have because I didn't feel like I could survive the world if I did that. I had to earn my keep by taking care of other people all the time. I don't know if I was... I don't know. I don't know.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that my therapist wants me to work on too. How much of who I am and who I want to be is just me being codependent and not having enough of a theory of self? She had me fill out a worksheet that was like, "What are the things that you enjoy? What are the things you think are important? What are the things that make you happy?" Trying to think about those things outside of the context of doing things for other people. That's all well and good. But I also think that there is nothing wrong with valuing service for other people. There's nothing wrong with thinking that compassion and care and love and giving are things that you want to be.
Rachel Zucker: I mean, better to have a coping style or a trauma response where you're a really nice and good caregiver to other people than to be one of the people who are traumatized in their childhood and end up raping and killing people. It's a good problem to have. [laughs]
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. There have been a number of men in my life who it had become very clear to me had a really deep wound from their fathers not loving them enough. So they went on to be extraordinarily manipulative and emotionally abusive to the people in their life, to their spouses, to their children. That's definitely fucking worse for sure. You were saying your therapist said that you and Aaron were at cross purposes. There can be a difficulty sometimes when you love someone, you don't want to see them suffering, right? It's one thing to be able to sit with your own suffering. It's something else to be able to sit with someone else's suffering if you love them and care about them. Sometimes that's the best thing to do. I'm thinking about how, I don't remember if this was before or after our last recording, which was a month ago at this point. I don't remember if it was before or after, but there was a day that you tried real hard to pick a fight with me over text message.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. I really tried.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. The thing is, yeah, I knew that you were doing that. I know that that is something that, if I had had more time, if I hadn't had other pressing things literally screaming in my face, I would have indulged you because it's okay. [laughter] The thing is, sometimes if somebody loves you, they're willing to take the time to say, "Where is this coming from?" and they're not going to hold it against you, at the very least, and it's okay.
Rachel Zucker: He's not holding it against me. He also will not fight with me. He doesn't seem capable of doing that, which is fine. I thought it was really interesting that what my therapist counseled during that first visit that was so difficult was, "Maybe have him go home early." You've been waiting a long time for a relationship like this, and he's a wonderful person, and he's maybe not going to be able to give you what you want right now because nobody can. So maybe just don't do this with him, which is new for me in a relationship. When he came back the second time after Abram died, she counseled me on making a very explicit list before he arrived, and said, "I want you to read him this list of things that you want and don't want and ask him, 'Do you think you can try to do these things?' If you can't, because these things are against his nature, it's really an unfair ask." One of them was, "No praise. Stop saying nice things about me because I can't handle it right now." That is so against his nature, which is nice. The things were very concrete. "Don't tell me I'm okay. Don't say everything's going to be okay. Don't reassure me that you're okay. Don't use the word 'okay." These were a list of eight things. She said, "Then if he says that he feels like he wants to try to do these things, he can come. But if he ends up doing these things, he should go home again. It should be nothing about the relationship or him or me or anything. It's just very concrete. This is what I think I need right now. Do you think this is even within your capacity to try this crazy shit?" "Yes. Let's try. If it doesn't work, whatever." I think that was very good advice. I did it. I think it was very helpful, but it's still incredibly painful. It's really, really hard, exactly from what you're saying. Watching someone else suffer the way I am suffering right now and being told, "No, you can't help. In fact, your presence is aggravating and making things worse for me," that's really hard to take.
Mike Sakasegawa: It is. It is really hard to take. It was making me think about something that you were saying earlier in the conversation where you were talking about being really fixated on, "I have to keep Abram alive. I have to keep him alive. Then I have to help him die." I know you and I are both very interested in Buddhism and the whole concept of non-striving and non-attachment and accepting that all things are temporary, that the good times are temporary and the bad times are temporary. So we're not really striving to live in the good times because if we're striving to live in the good times, then when it starts to swing the other way, we're just going to suffer more. But also, you can talk as much as you want about trying not to be attached to outcomes, trying to be accepting of ephemerality, but the truth is that no amount of personal growth or philosophizing or meditation or any of it is going to make us completely unattached to outcomes. There are certain things that we want to avoid. It's usually more about the things that we want to avoid than the things that we want to positively happen, right? There are certain things that, of course, we want to avoid. If we've watched somebody that we care about fall apart or suffer or die, there's no way that's not going to have an effect on us. Thinking about how to stay in that sort of... I don't know a better word than laissez-faire kind of space where you're just like, "Whatever happens, I accept it. Whatever happens, happens." It's really hard. Of course it's helpful, but...
Rachel Zucker: I think it's hard. It's very hard. Who would we be if we had no preference between suffering and not suffering? That would be really interesting. We're not monks and nuns. That takes a whole lifetime to get to a place where you are really not having a preference and not clinging to less suffering. So it is really hard. I think, for me, the best way in is, again, to come back to control and to recognize... I had a few good days in a row, a few better, easier days in a row. I was so glad. I also knew it's not going to last. There's going to be, even if it's two steps forward, one step back, or even if there are just normal ups and downs or whatever it is. I know myself well enough to know that when I can come a little bit up out of the anxiety-and-depression mind and my mind gets a little bit quieter, and then it gets noisy again, I go crazy trying to figure out, "What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? I didn't go in the ocean that day, or I took a different supplement," as if I'm in control of every emotion, every mood, every whatever. It brings us back to what we were saying earlier. On some level, I imagine that I can control either my experience or at least my attitude toward my experience with my mind to such an extent that I could get to the point where, even though of course not everything's okay, everything's okay because I'm so accepting and I'm such a great Buddhist. Blah, blah, blah. It's such bullshit. I don't have control over that. For some reason, that's easier for me to... It's not about accepting at all. It's reminding myself with more humor, or with the opposite of humor, what control would even mean for me.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I also just think, remembering back to some of our older conversations and talking about me being addicted to doubt, there is a real addiction to thinking that we're at fault, to thinking that we're the ones who are a piece of shit. What would it mean for either of us to admit, "Actually, I didn't do anything wrong. Actually, I'm pretty great. Actually, I'm a decent person. Actually, I don't deserve this."
Rachel Zucker: The only way I can get there, again, is I need the step where I recognize that my mind is doing the self-blame because it's desperate for a sense that I have more control over things than I have. I can't go right to, "It's not my fault."
Mike Sakasegawa: But also, what if using your mind to get there, what if using the recognition that you're seeking control, what if that's fine? What if the fact that you can't just jump straight to, "I'm actually fine," is fine?
Rachel Zucker: Yes. Yes. Yes. [laughter] No, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: I'm also thinking about, there's a line... I think it's the funniest thing how you'll find profundity in places that are unlooked for, which reminds me of a Tumblr post. [laughs] Let me see if I can find it. There was a Tumblr post where somebody was like, "It's so weird that you'll find profundity in places that are completely ridiculous." They were referencing some really profound thing that they thought was from some famous book or something, and it turned out it was from a crafting video on YouTube. Then the response to it was, "Why do you people feel profound thought has to come from high places? The gutter looks at the stars too." Now they were saying, "Okay, yep, this is just a Tumblr response," but it looks like that may actually be an Oscar Wilde quote. So never mind. [laughter] But this is all tangential. The thing I was thinking about had to do with a line that comes to my mind a lot that comes from a Marvel property, of all things. I think it's from the TV show WandaVision, which is an extended metaphor for someone processing an extreme grief. They just happen to have superpowers, so it turns into something really fucked up and universe-altering. As part of it, she's talking to a version of the person that she's grieving. That person says, "What is grief if not love persevering?" I think you keep talking about how you don't want to feel better. Part of it is because you don't feel like you deserve to feel okay. That's just been a constant theme for you and me and for some other people who are important in our lives. But also, part of it is that there is a guilt to it, to say, "If I stop grieving, then that means I don't love this person anymore," which of course is not true.
Rachel Zucker: Or not holding them close. Abram and I would be cooking right now if he was alive. It's the first Thanksgiving without him. Moses and Judah are also on their way here, and what the fuck? What the fuck? You know, it's insane.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: It's not okay. It's not normal. It's not okay. Part of it is, yeah, I don't feel like I deserve to be happy. But also part of it is just that feeling that to act as if this is normal or to feel okay about this is to erase him. It's not even a choice. I just can't. I just can't. Right now, he's just...
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. You can't. It's only been a couple of months.
Rachel Zucker: It has been one month and four days. Three days. Yeah. Not even a couple of months. Really.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. [sighs]
Rachel Zucker: [sighs] Should we stop on that incredibly sad note? [laughs] I think let's think of one... Not happy. Fuck happy. But lighthearted. I'm trying to think of something because I still laugh a lot. I'm trying to think of something that made me laugh recently. Can you think of something that made you laugh recently?
Mike Sakasegawa: Oh, you know I laugh all the time. Last night I took my kids and my stepson out to dinner at an Islands burger place. As often happens, they had snowboarding and surfing videos playing on the monitors next to a basketball game. Of course, tiny stepson is just entranced by any moving images and can't concentrate on anything else if there's a screen on. He was just transfixed with these videos of the snowboarders doing tricks. At one point he actually gathered himself enough to ask, "What's he doing?" I was like, "Oh yeah, he's doing some sick jumps." He said, "Yeah, he's doing some sick jumps," the three-year-old. I said, "Yeah, he's catching some gnarly air." He says, "Can you say that? Gnarly air." He said, "Gnarly air." Then all of us burst out laughing because that's very cute. [laughter]
Rachel Zucker: Yeah, that is very cute. Yeah. All right. Well, I can't think of a single... I know there have been a lot of things that have made me laugh. Something funny and stupid lately, but I can't even think of one.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. It's not okay, but it'll be okay, even if it isn't.
Rachel Zucker: Still meditating every day with Moses and still going in the ocean every day. One nice thing is there's a woman who moved here from England exactly right where I live, and she likes going in the ocean every day. What a surprise. I did not expect that. I'm getting to know her.
Mike Sakasegawa: Do you both do a little anti-hypothermia dance?
Rachel Zucker: The warm-up dance? Yes. I have a warm-up dance podcast if anybody wants to suggest a song to it. Can we share that? It's my après-swim. I need more music. I listen to the same songs over and over again. It must inspire jumping, and expletives are good. [laughter] It's very cold in the water, and it's very cold in the air. I stay in for like 15 to 20 minutes every time. So getting warm afterwards requires jumping and cursing.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yes. All right.
Rachel Zucker: All right. Thank you for doing this, Mike.
Mike Sakasegawa: Hey, thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.
Rachel Zucker: You too.