Transcript - Episode 22: Do You Want to Hear a Funny Story?
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 22
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.
Mike Sakasegawa: [sighs] Hi.
Rachel Zucker: Hi. [laughs]
Mike Sakasegawa: It's been a long time.
Rachel Zucker: It's been a really long time. I don't know how long it's been. Do you?
Mike Sakasegawa: It has been seven months. Seven months. Not since we talked, but since we recorded.
Rachel Zucker: So we recorded once after Abram died?
Mike Sakasegawa: We recorded just before Thanksgiving.
Rachel Zucker: Just before Thanksgiving. Got it.
Mike Sakasegawa: I suppose that if and when anybody hears this episode, they will know whether or not that pre-Thanksgiving episode ever got released.
Rachel Zucker: Right. Because as we're talking, it hasn't been. Right. So what are we doing? We were thinking about recording an episode in which we talked about why it's been so long since we recorded and also released an episode, because a lot of things have happened in the past seven months. But then two days ago, three days ago, a very big thing happened for me that I don't want to only talk about because the other stuff is really important to me. But I also want to be honest about how hard it is to talk about other things when something so big just happened.
Mike Sakasegawa: Well, you had actually just texted me yesterday and said, "Can we make a time to record?" because that's going to be the only way that you can talk about what's just happened. Then this morning you left me a couple of messages describing a really disturbing dream that you had that was sort of a way of explaining how it's been feeling for you. So, of course, we could talk about whatever. [chuckles] But it had been on my mind that we would talk about what's been going on the last few days.
Rachel Zucker: Right this second, I feel very capable of talking about the time before the memorial service. I mean, maybe I'll end up hijacking the conversation, but maybe I won't. So maybe we should start with the first part.
Mike Sakasegawa: Okay. So why we haven't recorded and why we haven't released any new episodes in a long time. As you mentioned, we have recorded one episode since Abram died, and that was just before Thanksgiving. I'm not done editing that, and I think I'm about two-thirds of the way through the edit. There's not any particular reason why I didn't finish it. There wasn't anything about the edit process or about what we were talking about—which at this point I actually cannot even remember what we were talking about. But I don't recall there being anything in that episode that was particularly difficult. But it has just been too much, and I've been too tired and burned out. [chuckles] So that is why we have not had any new episodes released in a while. As to why we haven't recorded in a while, I'm not really sure about that either. What do you think?
Rachel Zucker: I think that… I could be wrong, but I think that you didn't want to have a pile-up of recordings if you weren't going to be able to produce them and release them. I think that's one thing. It's not all of it.
Mike Sakasegawa: Because we have actually said at least four or five times, "Hey, we should record something. Why don't we record about this?" Then we didn't do it.
Rachel Zucker: Right. I don't know how much you want to say about why it's been such an overwhelming time, difficult for you to finish editing that episode. So much of it is running together for me on my end. I imagine the same is happening for you. A vastly oversimplified summary of the past seven months for me and for you: I was in Maine for the whole time except for I went to New York in February for one week. Then on May 20th, I came—I'm in Brooklyn right now. I'm subletting an apartment for a month in Brooklyn. But other than the past 12 days and that one week, I've been in Maine. Not entirely, but mostly very isolated, very alone. But a lot of things have happened internally for me. But I think a lot of external things have happened to you. In some ways, remarkably little has happened to me. I left the house so little during that period of time. I didn't travel. I left you fewer messages than usual. Not no messages, but for stretches of time, fewer messages. I was doing a lot of therapy, lots of different kinds of therapy. I still am. A lot of things were changing in my grief. But for the most part, I have been grieving, just really actively grieving every day. I've been in a lot of physical pain. I've been doing a lot to work with that physical pain. I've been in a lot of emotional pain. Many of the things that I've done have been remote. Many of the people that I'm in contact with... With you and me, that's very normal. But it hasn't been normal to basically have only remote relationships. I saw Aaron every three weeks or so until we broke up. I don't even know how long it's been. Two months since we broke up? A month?
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I don't know. I don't remember either.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. I think about two months. That was a big thing. But also, in some ways, I've been very available to record. But also so much internal stuff happening and changing, and I haven't been available to do any of the stuff that you do for Hey, It's Me. My sense is that your life has been a little bit of the mirror image of mine just in terms of types of activities. Sometimes in the past it's been feeling like things are really good for you and things are really bad for me. That's what I meant by wheel-of-fortune mirror image. I don't feel that describes this past seven months. I think things have been complicated for both of us in different ways. But I know you've been a lot of places, your kids are around, you're working. And I haven't been working, my kids haven't been living with me, and I rarely go out. It's a big triumph if I'm able to go to the grocery store. So does that seem accurate?
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah, I think so. I think that both of us have been struggling with capacity issues for different reasons. As you were saying, internal versus external reasons. It's worth noting that neither of us has also put out an episode of our individual shows in even longer. It's been over a year now for me and I think even longer for you. I would say I have probably more external stuff going on. I've been traveling a lot, and I've been very, very tired. Kind of a lot. More than usual. I mean, I've had the phrase "always tired" in my social media bio for over 20 years now, [laughs] but it's especially true the past six months or so. Even aside from that, I've had some chaos, some turmoil, some stuff going on within my family, with my kids. That has presented challenges. That's been a lot of mental and emotional energy spent on that. Even just for example, last week my son graduated from high school.
Rachel Zucker: Congratulations.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. It's a happy thing, but it's also really emotional. He's going to be moving out to go to college in just a few months, and I'm really struggling with that. So yeah, there have been a lot of things going on for me, mostly things that are external to me. In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm not in control of my life right now. I don't have a lot of say in what's going on in my life, and that has been challenging. So mostly I have been doing a lot of resting and zoning out, [laughs] watching a lot of television, going to therapy once a week, and trying to figure out how I can manage my own side of all the stuff that's going on in my life and try to remain open. It's not the easiest thing in the world. Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: It's interesting that you say you feel like you're not so in control of your life. I feel like, first of all, looking back at the past seven months for me is totally different than being in the seven months because at each stage I didn't see it as a stage. I saw it as forever. I saw it as impossible. I couldn't even describe, in some ways, what was happening while it was happening because I couldn't see it. But looking back on it, I think one of the themes is that I needed to have as much control as possible over my life. What that ended up looking like was pushing a lot of people away, having a lot of boundaries, spending a lot of time alone. The isolation, I think, was a form of control. I also had a lot of social contact, social support from you and from other remote friends. But it had to be very curated by me. I had to be able to get off the phone whenever I needed to. I could listen to your messages or leave messages whenever I needed to. I was very careful about what I was watching on television and what I wasn't. I've had no social media presence whatsoever for more than seven months, but very intensively since Abram died. Do you want to hear a funny story?
Mike Sakasegawa: [laughs] Sure.
Rachel Zucker: I used to be a very politically informed and engaged person. When Abram got sick, a lot of that changed. Then when he died, it changed very profoundly. I just needed not to engage in things that I couldn't control and in the horrible things that were already happening when Abram died. My grief has been overwhelming. This is going to be so funny. Wait till you hear the funny part. The idea that there were wars and people starving to death and being bombed, I couldn't hold that. I just couldn't. So I really just dropped out. Right now I feel like Rip Van Winkle because I'm like, "Wait, what happened?" One funny example of this is that I don't have any... It's really hard for most people to believe me when I say I'm not on social media and I'm not on the news because most people even who say that really are at least to some extent because they live with other people. I don't live with anybody. So I guess I have, or once had, an online subscription to The New Yorker. I don't get the print edition. I don't get any magazines or things like that. But every once in a while I get an email. I don't really know why. I don't really know when. But every once in a while I get an email from The New Yorker. A while ago, I have no idea when—we could locate it in time by what I'm going to tell you—I got this email. I just quickly scanned the email for some reason and then went away. I noticed that The New Yorker had published a short story, a piece of fiction, about a shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I was like, "Wow, that's so edgy of The New Yorker because that seems like that could have happened or could happen. Are they going to get in trouble for publishing this piece of fiction that could incite someone to actually shoot someone at the White House Correspondents' Dinner?" But I was like, "Wow, The New Yorker really surprised me." Then I just went on with my sad grief life. Then a few days later, I went to the Hannaford in Maine, which is a triumph for me, as I said. Going to the grocery store has been quite difficult, very triggering. I'm going along, and I'm like, "I'm doing great. I'm not crying. I'm acting appropriate. I'm putting food in the cart. I'm going to pay for it. I'm going to get home. I'm going to have food. I am winning the grocery-store challenge for today." I overheard two people talking about the White House Correspondents' Dinner in the Hannaford. I thought, "Rachel, your elitist, New York-centric view of the world really got dashed. Look at this. The people in Maine are talking about the fiction in The New Yorker. [laughter] You think nobody reads The New Yorker because you don't read The New Yorker. It's not true. Everybody reads The New Yorker. Everybody's talking about the fiction." So then I'm appropriately shamed by my elitist views of who reads what. [laughter] The next day, I went somewhere else. Oh, my car had a problem, and I had to go to the mechanic. I'm at the mechanic's, and somebody comes in and is talking to the mechanic about the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I'm like, "Okay, I don't want to be elitist again, but really? Really, everyone is talking about the fiction in The New Yorker?" I was like, "I think maybe I have perhaps missed something." So I texted Judah and I was like, "Did something happen at the White House Correspondents' Dinner?" [laughs] And he's like, "Yeah, there was a shooting." I was like, "Oh. Okay." This has happened several times. I think I talked about this in one of our previous recorded conversations. I am definitely not a fucking Trump supporter, but I am the person who hadn't driven my car for probably two weeks and then drove it, as I do infrequently, for short drives. So I didn't run out of gas for a very long time. Then I went to fill up my car, and I was like, "What has happened? [laughs] Did I do something wrong? Did I press the wrong... Did I get the gas... Is this gas station special? Did I put some very fancy gas in my car? Is there a leak in the tank?" I really was just like, "I know that it doesn't usually cost this much to fill up my car. I have no idea what's going on." I texted Moses, and I was like, "Okay, did something new happen? Because the gas is very expensive." He was like, "Wow, Mom. [laughter] The politicians are all saying, 'The voters are really going to notice at the pump.' Everybody knows what's happening. They're not going to wait..." So I'm that person now. So, yeah, there's my funny story. [laughter] But I really have been in the grief hotel and in an internal landscape and spending most of my time with my dead kid and other people who are willing to be with me in that space.
Mike Sakasegawa: I think that you might be, in that way, a little bit more extreme than typical. But I think that a lot of us, our worlds have gotten a lot smaller over the past couple of years. It's one of those things that seems coincidental almost. In some ways, the ways that our worlds have gotten smaller do have to do with the ways that these big global events have constrained our material lives. People are having to make choices because everything is more expensive than it used to be. The political landscape, fascism, and all that stuff are making people less inclined to be public-facing in a lot of ways. But at the same time, it also feels coincidental because, for example, for you, Abram dying has nothing to do with global politics. For me, my stuff that's been going on in my own life has nothing to do with global politics. These are all just things that happened. It feels a little bit like a weird coincidence. But I also have been turned inward a lot more than I used to be. That's been going on for a while. I largely stepped back from political activism in the wake of my divorce, which was five years ago now. I also took almost a year-long hiatus from Keep the Channel Open right at that same time, and that was all just to do with personal stuff. Though I had bounced back from that to some degree, I had brought Keep the Channel Open back, I started reading more again and that kind of thing, I don't think I ever really fully came back from it, and I've been dealing with the burnout from that time ever since. I don't think I ever really fully recovered. More to that, I always say that 2020 and 2021 were kind of the perfect storm for me personally because there was a global pandemic and lockdowns. There was my divorce. My dog died. My grandma died. I changed jobs. All of that happened in a very short span of time. But it was like that for everybody, it seemed like. I don't think that collectively we've been able to recover from that. I think we've all been dealing with a lot of burnout ever since then. Maybe part of that has to do with the fact that things were unsustainable even before the pandemic and that we were all doing too much and pushing ourselves too hard for a variety of personal and political reasons. But yeah, I had a big crash, and I don't think I ever fully came back from it. [laughs]
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. My version of that is similar. My youngest is a year ahead in school of your oldest. The coincidental timing of my separation in 2020, my divorce in 2021, the pandemic, and then Abram getting sick. It'll be two years ago that Abram got sick. That was Judah's senior year of high school. I missed, not all of it, of course, but I missed a lot of it. Then Abram died October 23rd in Moses's first semester of graduate school and Judah's first semester of college. Some of the changes and difficulties and reconfigurations of being with my living children would have happened if Abram hadn't gotten sick. I would have an empty nest. If Abram hadn't gotten sick, Judah would still have gone to college. But it's just been devastating to feel so disconnected at times from Moses and Judah, specifically Judah, who went from being my squishy baby, even though he was 17. We were very, very close, and he was very mature and independent in some ways as a 17-year-old because he's a New Yorker and he is very social and outgoing. But in other ways, he was just a very sweet and cuddly and connected kid to me and his dad and his brothers. We didn't have the experiences that I had with Moses and Abram when they were seniors in high school because I was completely absorbed with trying to keep Abram alive. It wasn't just this terribly sick kid. It was a terribly sick kid in a very particular way emotionally, and then also the stem cell transplant. Judah didn't spend half his time with me anymore. I hardly ever spent time with Judah without Abram. But also Judah was a disease vector and had to be kept away. So there were long stretches of time where I didn't see Judah and didn't get to see him unmasked for months. Even when I saw him, I was afraid to get sick and get Abram sick. Part of why I got divorced is that I wanted to live my life more in line with my own values than I was able to do with Josh. I wanted to parent on my own terms. I wanted to see who I was as an individual and as a parent. I wanted to build family rituals and routines that reflected the person that I am and the things that I think are most important, not just the things that Josh and I landed on together, an average of our two personalities or what we could tolerate easiest together. But because it was early COVID, COVID kind of ruined everything. We couldn't really come up with new rituals and routines. The first Passover was remote. It's just one example. I think it's the most important holiday for me and my family. Same with Thanksgiving, same with these other family routines. The second Passover, we planned to do a certain way, and then someone got COVID, and we had to do it a different way. I never got to a place where it was like, "Okay, kids, this is what I like for Passover. This is what I like for every other Thanksgiving. This is what I want on Mother's Day. This is what I want on my birthday. This is what I want for your birthdays. This is how I want to be with you," and figure out how they want to be with me and how they want to be with each other. We were just on the brink of being able to make some of those decisions. Abram was in the process of ending his work in Maine and moving back to New York City when he got sick. I had finally found a place in New York that I really liked, that I felt comfortable in, even though it wasn't perfect, with Judah. I'm starting to get some ground. Then Abram got sick, and everything in my life stopped except for that. Part of what's hard is that even though it's been almost two years since this enormous break in my life happened, it's actually been since early COVID, since the very beginning of COVID and my separation from Josh. A ritual and a routine are not something you do once. They're something you do over and over again. I never had a chance to do anything over and over again in ways that felt good. So, yes, so much of this is coincidental. Judah graduating and going to college is a good thing and would have happened whether Abram got sick or not. But the pileup, this combination of things in my life, all of these things together, it's like, "I just don't know what happened. Where am I? What now? What next?" Up until the memorial service, from the time Abram died until the memorial service, mostly my life was like, "I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. This feeling is going to kill me. How do I stay alive?" Since the memorial service, again, it's only been three days. I don't know how I'm going to feel in an hour. I don't know how I'm going to feel in a month. But I feel, for the first time since Abram got sick and definitely since he died, that I could make some positive choices. By positive, I don't necessarily just mean happy. I just mean that instead of my life being determined by the things I cannot do, my life, my actions, where I can go, being determined by keeping my sanity as intact as possible, keeping my body as healthy and alive as possible until I can get to a point where I can want things, I can fantasize about things, I can imagine things, I can think about a future. Since the memorial service, there is the beginning of, "Well, what do I want?" But I haven't been able to even want anything other than to just be dead, which is what I have wanted a lot of the time, or to just stay alive for the possibility that I might feel differently. I do now.
Mike Sakasegawa: I'm really glad to hear that.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. It's amazing and also completely bizarre because I feel like I don't know anybody who has as much freedom as I do, but also I'm 54 years old. I don't know where I want to live. I don't know who I want to live with. I'm not responsible for my living children, and they don't want to live with me. I don't know if they ever will again. I don't really feel like a mom in the way that I used to, some of which is fine, some of which is very protective and like PTSD. It is much easier for me to be annoyed with my living children than to really feel the love that I feel for them. It's very hard for me to have relationships and let people in. I haven't been able to tolerate loss and disappointment, smaller losses and disappointments, because I'm just so completely full of loss and disappointment. If you can't open yourself up to that, you can't connect to other people in certain ways. I started teaching again for the first time in over a year. I can't even describe... I could try, but it's fucking insane. It's insane for me to be teaching right now. But do I want to do that? Do I ever want to live in New York again? I have no idea. It's very bizarre. It's very bizarre to be this old and this free, but also this traumatized and weakened.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. Basically, the things that I'm pulling out of what you just said are that this is a time of great transition and something about identity and something about safety and healing. Some of the things that you're describing, as we both have said, are things that would have happened anyway, no matter what was going on with the specifics of the crises that have come up in our personal lives or in the world. It strikes me that it's an ironic thing, or just a weird coincidence, that you and I are experiencing something like a midlife crisis. A midlife crisis, I think we could understand as at least in part a thing that has to do with a great transition in life and having this awareness that the rest of your life is not going to be the same as what's come before. That is happening at the same time that the whole world is going through basically the same thing. I think this thing that you're saying about not even being able to want things, not being able to do more than survive, not being able to think about the future, that is true for so many of us in our personal lives. It's also extremely true politically right now, that we are all in a place where we feel very much, and not just that we feel this way but in very material ways, that we have to prioritize just getting through each day. For me as an activist, it's difficult to know where to put my energies if my focus previously had been, "What do we want to be building? How can we think about building something new?" when we have to spend so much of our time just getting through each day and each fresh horror. But I think there was another thing that you said earlier where you described things as being in each phase of the past seven months. This is something you even said before, before Abram died, about the different phases of his illness. But it didn't feel like a phase when you're in it. It felt like, "This is just how it is, and it's maybe going to be this way forever." I can't help thinking about how, for you, you're describing that it is starting to maybe transition out of that. I'm thinking about that for my partner as well, as she has been going through these really profound changes. And something that the two of us have been saying to each other a lot—we've been together about a year and a half now, and a lot over the past year and a half we've been saying, "It's not always going to be like this." At times, I think—I don't want to speak for her, but I think that this is true for both of us. It certainly has been true for me that some of the times when I have said, "It's not always going to be like this," there's always a part of me that knows that's true. But I think at least some of the time when I have said that, and I have to assume that some of the time when she says that to each other, it's as much an aspiration as anything else. Even now, as I'm speaking, I realize that is a phrase that I've said to you many times over the past couple of years as well. "It's not always going to be like this." I am seeing this to be true for her, that as some of these transitional periods in her life are coming to a resolution, things are becoming more settled for her emotionally, and she's being able to find out who she is now. I'm not there yet. I'm still waiting for things to settle out so that I can find out what my life is going to be like and find out who I'm going to be in that new future. But it is a really positive thing to see that starting to settle for her and starting to settle for you. Another thing that I'm thinking about is you said just now that it's only been three days since the memorial, but that since the memorial, things are feeling different. I can't help thinking about the importance of rituals and rites of passage. Not to say that a graduation is the same as a funeral, but it is still a ritual. It is an occasion that has a certain practice to it. It has things that you do. I think there are so few opportunities in contemporary American life for us to engage in ritual. I can't help thinking that that's something that we probably need some more of. But I want to hear more about the memorial because you sent me the speech that you gave at the memorial, which I did not have time to read. But I have been thinking about you a lot the past week or so, knowing that it was about to happen and then knowing that it did just happen. Because I know that for months now you have been very consumed with it, and not just consumed with the preparation of it, but also with the other people who are involved in it and their stuff, some of which I hope went better than it could have, [laughs] though knowing what I know about certain specific people, I have a suspicion it probably went about like I would think. But yeah, I've been thinking a lot about it and wondering how it went.
Rachel Zucker: I'm trying to think of which part to talk about or where to start. But maybe I'll almost go backwards. When you go to see a homeopath, as opposed to a mainstream doctor, they always say, "How are you feeling right now?" and then they go back. Whereas when you go to see a mainstream doctor, they say, "When did you start having these symptoms?" and they do it that way. I think that it went as well as it possibly could have gone. I think that, including the things that went wrong or that were crazy and difficult, I feel like, "How were we going to have a memorial service for Abram that wasn't going to include crazy shit?" Of course it was going to, and it did. It was really important. I think that it accomplished a lot of things. Most importantly for me is that I did something for me and my kids, my living kids. It was the preparation right at the end, because they didn't really get involved in the preparation until the end. Before the memorial service, in the few days before the memorial service, I was really struggling with Moses and Judah, feeling very unseen in different ways, feeling very disconnected from them. First of all, I wasn't spending a lot of time with them. But it wasn't just that. Our grief styles are so different, and the loss is so different. So I want to be clear that I do have some criticisms of them. [laughter] I really do. Also, the dynamic in our family is completely different without Abram. Abram was the designated patient in the family before he got sick and just took a lot of space and was very emotional and very difficult and very complicated and very angry and sometimes verbally abusive and aggressive. So my other two kids were like angels compared to Abram.
Mike Sakasegawa: Can I just say also, there's a thing here that... Because you had said even going back before all of this, going back to your divorce, you've been trying to figure out what the new dynamic of your family is going to be for quite some time, as have I.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. Yeah. But Abram was still occupying this space where all the conflict was surrounding Abram. That's not true, of course. Now Abram is gone, and now I'm noticing, "Oh, certain things about Moses, certain things about Judah, our relationship..." It's complicated in different ways. It's nothing like Abram, but if you have one person in a family that is just an anger machine, like a broken hydrant and the anger is just shooting out, Moses and Judah don't do anger. Doesn't mean they don't feel it, but they don't express it. That is complicated for me because I know they feel it and I'm very sensitive, and I'm much more like Abram in certain ways in my emotional sensitivity. In any case, the days leading up to the memorial service, where Moses and Judah were really struggling in their own ways with their own speeches... There was a memorial band, Judah, Moses, several of Abram's friends, and one of Judah's friends, played three songs in the memorial service. They played "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," "I Shall Be Released," and "Bahamut." The music was incredible. For me, watching my kids play music, I've always had this, one of my favorite things in the world, there's something about watching them communicate with each other in music and also specifically being able to feel and hear their emotions without talking and without badgering them and without having it be between us in a way. There's something, when I hear Moses play alone, Judah play alone, but even more so, profoundly, when I hear them together with other people or just the two of them—and it used to be with Abram too—I just have this profound feeling that they're okay. Because, "Judah, he's a 19-year-old boy." I've been joking that he's come home from college an emotional libertarian. He has these ideas that everybody would get along really well if everybody just... If he's not dependent on anyone and no one's dependent on him, if he has a different opinion about how I should be making choices, choices that include emotional and physical pain, that's a choice in his idea. He just keeps his opinions to himself, and then everybody gets along. [laughs] It's like, "Okay, man, sure. Keep going with that. See how long that..." And I want him to keep going like that. Their brother died, and both of them had very successful first years of college and graduate school. They have relationships, and they're happy, and they're resilient, and they're resourceful, and they're okay. They're enough okay. But the memorial service also showed me that they are... I knew this, but it showed it to me in a different way, I could connect with them in grief. I could see their grief. I could feel their grief. It was expressed. It was embodied. We struggled together to get there and then have that experience. The night before the memorial service, the memorial band had a three-hour rehearsal at a rehearsal space in the Lower East Side. They'd had two before. Judah clearly didn't want me to be there, so I didn't go. But this third one, it was Judah's birthday. It was his 19th birthday, the day before the memorial service. Moses asked if I wanted to go. I said yes. So I ended up getting to do that. My friend Joan was there as well. My cousin Nathaniel, who's a professional musician. The three of us got to be there for like two and a half hours and watch them rehearse. It was a peak experience for me. I could feel the grief for Abram. I could feel the missing. I could feel the connection between Moses and Judah and Abram's friends in the music and in the rehearsal and how much they wanted it to be good, picking these songs that were so meaningful to Abram or to them. One of Abram's two closest friends, Jackson, who is not a singer, they roped him into singing one of the songs. Just getting to see that and getting to be there... As I was there the night before, I just thought, "It doesn't even matter what happens at the memorial service tomorrow because I'm getting this very profound thing." Then the memorial service itself was so interesting because a lot of things happened that were unpleasant, but I was okay. I was okay the whole time. My therapist—who I saw in person for the first time in like a year on Tuesday, that was wild. I've been speaking to her once or twice a week, but always remotely—she was like, "Yeah, you had your defenses up, and you needed them, and they were working." So maybe that's it. I wasn't on any drugs or anything. But my dad and stepmother, I was very clear. "Could you please keep your comments together under five minutes, and please write it down? This is not a time for ad-libbing." That is not what happened by any stretch of the imagination. [laughter] I could feel that Josh was extremely anxious about this. I just was like, "Wow, this is what's happening now." Or people who were at the memorial service who really have very complicated and negative feelings about me. There were actually a lot of people there like that, hugging me over and over again and trying to work something out with me at Abram's memorial service. It was so inappropriate. So not cool. The whole time I was like, "Wow, this person is now hugging me again. This is what's happening now. That's not what I hoped would happen." It's happening, and it's okay. It's okay. There were also a lot of positive things. But I'll tell you one other thing, even though I don't necessarily want to dwell on this. I hadn't been responding to almost anybody's texts or messages for the whole time I was in New York before the memorial service. I just couldn't. It's hard to explain, except that dream helps to explain. I was in this fever-dream, fugue-state, horrible, intense experience that I couldn't even describe to other people while it was happening because the lead-up to the memorial service and being in New York was very bad, very hard. I also hadn't specifically been responding to Aaron, who had been sending me some texts every few days. I was just like, "I couldn't. But also, don't get involved in something that you can't control, that you don't know what kinds of emotions it's going to bring up because I can't do that." Anyway, I spoke to him for the first time the day after the memorial service in the afternoon. That morning I had been feeling so hopeful, so open, so relieved, so sad, but so grounded in a way that I haven't felt for really almost two years. Look, I understand that this is not what he expected was going to happen. But what happened is that I had responded to one of his texts, and then he asked if he could call, and I said, "Okay." He called, and he ended up telling me that he's seeing someone else who knows me and who likes my work. Let's just say it was not good timing. [laughter]
Mike Sakasegawa: That's not out of the ordinary, though, for that particular relationship.
Rachel Zucker: I know. In the moment, I was just like, "Oof." It wasn't jealousy that he's seeing someone else. What it was was profound jealousy that other people are able to move on with their lives, go back to their lives, live their lives in ways that I can't. Just some despair around that. But what was interesting is that I got off the phone relatively quickly with him. I was like, "This is not good for me." I started to remember all the same things that didn't bother me during the memorial service, and they started to bother me. I started to do things like count up. I think there were probably between 250 and 300 people at the memorial service, a lot of people. I started to count up, "Who were my people who were there really just for me?" I got to like 25. And that's really okay. It was really okay on the day of the memorial service. It's still really okay. But in those hours, for about 24 hours, I just went right back into this very old habitual state of, "How did this happen to me? Why don't I have any people?" This abandonment, humiliation, shame. I started to focus on that and start to feel like, "What did I do wrong in my life that at my son's memorial service this is who came and this is how they feel about me?" So where am I going with this? It's all of those things. There are more and more moments where I know what the truth is, which is I have a lot of people who really love me, who really care about me, who have shown up for me at different times in different ways, profoundly and consistently. Sometimes other people show up in different moments. It's not always the people I expect in the ways that I expected it. But that's the truth. It's also the truth that because of my childhood, because of my marriage, because of all of these other things, there are a lot of moments where all I can see is this scarcity model and this abandonment feeling. So, yeah, the memorial service, of course, was going to have both of those qualities for me. But I really want to be clear that the scarcity, abandonment, humiliation version of this event was in my mind. That doesn't mean it's not real because it's part of what my experience is at moments, but it's not as real as this other piece. Also, the effect of the memorial service, the fact that I am able to even talk to you like this, that I have this hopefulness, that I have this feeling of real reconnection with my kids... I think that... I mean, you'll read my speech, but I wanted two things from the memorial service in terms of my speech, maybe in general. I wanted people to feel really terrible. [laughter] I wanted people to feel some of what I feel. I wanted people to know just a tiny bit of what it was like to take care of Abram and to watch him die and to have lost a child, which I think, for the most part, some people have connected to very deeply. [cries] Other people cannot let themselves get close to that feeling, the real feeling of it, the real truth of it. They wanted or needed to believe that the cancer was going to be fixed or the medications would make Abram not feel pain or that Abram wouldn't be scared. It just wasn't true, or that I would move on easily. Nope. I wanted to tell the truth about that. I wanted to feel seen, and I wanted to feel connected to other people in this incredibly deep pain. I also wanted... The fact that Abram died when and how he did is really, really painful. The fact that he had such a difficult life before he got sick is really, really painful. He just didn't feel loved enough in his life, even though he was loved. To the extent that he, whatever he is, could feel it, I wanted him to feel loved at this memorial service, even though I don't actually think he was really there or that it was even really for him. But I wanted to just raise this huge amount of grief and love in this room with these people. And I did. It wasn't just me. It was the whole thing. It was interesting because when I wrote the speech, I read it to a few people in the days before, different versions of it. Each time I read it to someone, they would say, "It's great. Don't change anything." I would think, "Okay. Yes, it's good." Then as soon as five minutes would go by and I wasn't talking to that same person, I would think, "It's terrible. They can see that I'm in such bad shape and I'm so fragile that they have to lie to me." I really had this very split feeling about it. I was imagining these people that we're alluding to, an unfriendly crowd for me, just being like, "Oh, there she goes again. Melodramatic, over-the-top, self-centered," all this stuff that I imagined as criticisms of my speech. I would flip back and forth between feeling like, "I know what I want. I know what I want to say. This is who I am. This is authentic. This is what is meaningful to me," and then, "I can't see myself. Nobody's being honest with me."
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. Kind of seems like, in that way... Well, I guess what I would say is that, just as what you're saying now, these are not new thoughts.
Rachel Zucker: No.
Mike Sakasegawa: These are the same thoughts that you've had all the time, every day, about every aspect of your life, your relationships, your work, certainly the whole time I've known you.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: The thing is that some people do feel that way about you, right? You know this because they've told you.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: So what are you going to do with that?
Rachel Zucker: I don't know. I mean, I think Judah feels that way about me sometimes.
Mike Sakasegawa: If I recall correctly, he has said so.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. Yeah. You know.
Mike Sakasegawa: What if it's just okay to be... What if it's okay to be self-centered?
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. I don't even think I actually am self-centered. I think I'm so worried that I'm self-centered, but I'm actually just myself. I'm a person with a lot of big feelings who expresses them. I'm not super consistent.
Mike Sakasegawa: What would it even mean to be self-centered? Because everybody's feelings matter to themselves and should, right?
Rachel Zucker: I guess I didn't want to be making it about me instead of Abram.
Mike Sakasegawa: What if you did want it to be about you, though? Would that have been so bad?
Rachel Zucker: No. Well, I'm glad I did what I did, which I think was partly about me.
Mike Sakasegawa: I'll just say this because this is something you and I have talked about a lot. Obviously, we've talked about self-centeredness. We've talked about how we think about these things and all of that. We've talked about other people in our lives who really are self-centered and don't seem to give a shit about it, some of whom were definitely there at the memorial and participating in the memorial. You and I have had criticisms of those people's self-centeredness, right? But I don't think that the fundamental thing that we have been critical of those people for is that they feel their feelings and that their feelings are important to them, or even that they want a certain amount of attention for their feelings, but rather that they don't have any kind of awareness of that part of themselves, of what it might cost other people, and that it also comes with a sense of entitlement of, for example, saying, "I want to have more than half of the pears."
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: Which the listeners are not going to understand what that means. [laughs] Maybe we'll just have to let them wonder about it. But it's not just the feeling and it's not just the asking, but it's the taking. There's something different about this.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: Because if someone had given you and someone else a big box of pears, not only would you not take more than half of them, but you would recognize that it's a very weird thing to do to say out loud, "I want to make sure that I get more than half of the pears." [laughs]
Rachel Zucker: I think that this whole notion of narcissism or altruism or selfishness or giving... Are you a person who wants more than half the pears and announces it and takes more than half the pears? Or are you a person who would never do that?
Mike Sakasegawa: It's not weird to want more than half of them. It's not even weird to want all of them, right? But to say it out loud as though that's not a weird thing to do is weird. [laughs]
Rachel Zucker: Right. I think that's very true. It's also a stand-in for something else, like very black-and-white thinking. I think it's connected, and we've talked about this before, to a sense that I have, and I know you have a lot of this too, that my self-worth is all bound up in being a person who's not going to take more than half the pears. Even if I want them, I'm not going to say that. Or even if I say it, I'm going to say it, but I'm not going to do it, that that's what makes me lovable or that's what makes people not leave me. It's more complicated than that. For example, initially Moses was going to give a speech that was not dishonest but was what he thought Abram might want him to say. Not because Moses is selfish, but because he was wrestling. The speech he actually gave starts off by him saying, "I felt at first that there was a choice I had to make between being honest about his relationship with Moses," which is that they were not close in a lot of ways and in conflict and struggled, or hearing Abram's spirit basically say to him, "Don't use my fucking memorial service to talk about how our relationship was difficult for you." In the end, he did both, I feel, because he ended up saying the relationship was very difficult. One of the things that Moses lost and one of the things that he's grieving so deeply is the hope that they would be close later. That maybe Abram was going to be a really great uncle to Moses's kids. Maybe something would happen to Moses and Abram would show up for him in a way that changed the dynamic. Maybe they would go and live far away from me and Josh, and they would come together in some way. Maybe Abram would get to a place where he felt that he had enough and that he was happy or settled enough that he could. That was so true and moving and respectful and honest and loving. But initially, he thought that he had to choose, in a way, between himself and Abram, between the truth and respect. It took some very painful working on this to get to a place where he could do both. I don't know.
Mike Sakasegawa: It’s just interesting. I never knew Abram. I never talked to him. But the impression that I got was that he was a person who had very little tolerance for bullshit.
Rachel Zucker: Yup. He had no tolerance for bullshit, but he wanted Moses to love him as he was and to act different and to be different. He wanted something he didn't get. He didn't want people to see him sick, but he wanted people to know the truth of his suffering. It's complicated. I guess what I really am trying to say is that the last six, seven, I don't even fucking know how many years of my life have been really fucking hard. The last almost two years have really destroyed most of me. It has also destroyed a lot of bad stuff about me and given me an opportunity to let stuff go that I was trying to let go of my whole life, that I couldn't really let go of. It was like I was trying to move to a different place, but I didn't have the courage or the capacity or the ability. Then my house burned down, and now I got to move. This is a metaphor. My house didn't burn down. But that's what it feels like. I do not wish this had happened. I feel very sorry for myself still a lot of the time. I think that's fine. This has been brutal, and it still is. Also, like I said, I have a lot of freedom that other people don't have. It's not just that I don't have children I need to take care of, and I don't have a partner, and I have enough money that I can figure out what I want to do for work. I don't have to go back to work right away, even though I'm working right now. It's also emotional freedom. I got so broken and destroyed, I get to choose now which relationships I continue to nurture, which parts of myself I want to go back to. A lot of times, that feels like scarcity and abandonment and loneliness, but it's also a lot of power. I don't care about a lot of the things that most people care about anymore. [laughter] I just don't, and I don't know what that's going to mean for me yet or how to put that into effect. But that is something that I have that most people don't.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: I wish that we had recorded the last seven months of my life more regularly because it's a blur to me now. Even though along the way I thought, "This feeling is going to last forever," it obviously didn't. But I also feel, especially as I hear myself talking about freedom and this capacity, I didn't love my teaching job for a long time, but I hadn't left. I wanted to live not in New York, but I hadn't left. All these things happened that I didn't choose but that I wanted, part of me wanted, and now they've happened. I think maybe something is similar in thinking about the fact that we didn't document these past months in some way. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making myself feel better about it. But I think there's something. This isn't why we didn't record for the past seven months, but I do think that I have a different relationship to privacy now than I did seven months ago. That's interesting to me, that there may be some real benefits to not having documented this time. Does that make any sense to you?
Mike Sakasegawa: Sure. Sure. Things are still in transition. Things are still changing. In some ways, things always are and always will be. But something that my partner says a lot is that awareness isn't the same as healing.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah.
Mike Sakasegawa: That's something that I was thinking about a lot as you were talking just now. Also, the idea that wanting something, wanting something to change, isn't usually enough to make that change happen. I think that, especially, well, honestly, whether it's something external like where you live, what your job is, or something like what your behaviors are, what your patterns of thought are, nobody changes until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing.
Rachel Zucker: Right. Or if you're forced to.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah.
Rachel Zucker: Either you get strong enough to do it or you get so weak that you just can't keep doing the thing you were doing.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. It is an interesting thing, though, our changing relationship to privacy, the thing that finally got us to record again was you texting me to say, "I don't think I can talk about this unless we're recording."
Rachel Zucker: Yeah. That's really interesting. That's a really, really good point. Well, I think that was about a few things. One, needing it to be interactive and in real time, needing to be able to see you and have your questions and stay in the container of the presentness. I was just like, "If I'm going to leave you messages about this, it's going to be a hundred messages that are each a hundred minutes long. I'm just going to have to show you the recording of the memorial service and have you read everybody's speeches and then annotate it somehow. At this moment I was feeling this, and this moment I was feeling this." Somehow I couldn't be the real-time editor and the narrator almost of the experience. But also, yeah, I think there's a way in which recording it, not just doing it, not just having a conversation with you, but recording it gives me some narrative distance from it to be able to describe these feelings that are so difficult to describe. I mean, if you think about that dream, I was just face down in the mud. The first person that I spoke to who wasn't at the memorial service didn't go well with Aaron. That was very painful. So I haven't yet talked about this to people who weren't there. I think there's some way in which the recording of it, the imagined audience of it, makes me feel like I don't have to do it over and over again, even though, of course, that's not true. It's not like all the people are just going to listen to this and then they'll know. But yes, there's something so important to me about the archive and the audience and the combination of the container of the relationship, the past, the trust, and then the imagined future. Also being able to come back to this myself. There were so many times in the past since we started doing Hey, It's Me where listening to a previous version of myself was deeply grounding and stabilizing and hopeful. It's one thing to practice with uncertainty and know that everything changes, but it's another to hear your own voice and your own self saying what is most true for you in the moment that is no longer the same when you're re-listening to it. Having that was deeply helpful to me. So I think also feeling like doing this today was not just for me and not just for you and not just to catch you up with my life. Because at a certain point, it's hard to be close to someone who didn't witness this with me. It's complicated. It's like a part of me that's hard. So I knew that I was going to talk to you about it, but somehow doing it this way, I know it's also a gift to my future self to have done it and to have recorded it.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I hope that means this is us getting back into the swing of things.
Rachel Zucker: I hope so too. I miss this. I really miss this. But I also will have this conversation another time, recorded or not, because I don't know where I want to put my creative energies next. I'm starting to think about whether I will go back in some way or another to Commonplace or to poetry or to the literary world or any of these things. But I miss this. I really miss this. But I really don't want, can't burden you with it. [laughter] I just can't. We're going to have to find a way to make the production stuff work in a way that's not onerous for you. We will figure it out.
Mike Sakasegawa: Of course, my first instinct is to say that it's not a burden and that it's not onerous. But clearly, if I haven't been able to edit this episode in seven months, there's something there.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah, for sure. So we got to figure that out. It shouldn't be more emotionally complicated than, like, our equipment died and we need to buy new equipment.
Mike Sakasegawa: I will just say, though, that I have also missed doing this show. I have missed having our conversations. I've missed you. I've missed the me that was able to do all of these things, including the tedious backend work. I still miss that version of me. I miss having a project. I miss Keep the Channel Open a lot. If I'm being honest, I'm probably not at a point where I can be a podcast producer in the way that I was. I have always had the dream of being able to be one of those people that just shows up to record and then somebody else does everything else.
Rachel Zucker: Let me tell you, it's great. I had that dream, and then you made that dream come true for me. [laughter] And it's fantastic.
Mike Sakasegawa: Well, the thing is that another big part of that is because we've talked about bringing on a producer. It's also me being willing and able to let go of certain aspects of the creative process. So, yeah. But I feel like we'll get there. I feel like I am getting back to the point where I'm ready to, where I need to be doing something more than just getting through each day.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah, but I don't want you to fill that with anything that's not life-giving. [laughter] So we got to get a producer. That's what we need. Then we'll figure out what that looks like, and maybe it'll suck. Then we'll figure it out.
Mike Sakasegawa: Yeah. I think we have to end this recording as well.
Rachel Zucker: Yeah, we do. All right.
Mike Sakasegawa: All right.