Amy & David Sedaris, and Our Grief Brains
“You don’t know what it’s like ‘till you lose a parent.”
Grief is definitely trending. Or as Samantha Jones might say, “Grief is huge!” Thank you, Andrew Garfield. Thank you, Anderson Cooper.
Thank you, Regina King.
Thank you, Nicole Kidman.
Thank you, Elmo.
Many thank you’s to a slew of high-profile figures who have shared stories of something so painful, so personal and ultimately, if you let it be, so helpful. As Molly Shannon once said in conversation with Stephen Colbert:
“When you know somebody else who's lost [someone], I read everything they write about it because I relate to everything."
And while I, too, read everything (or at least try to), it’s the listening that really tends to stir me. Probably because reading happens in something of a stasis, whereas listening happens when we’re on the go. I was bowled over on the subway late last week when my scrolling landed me on a video of siblings Amy and David Sedaris on a recent episode of Anderson Cooper’s All There Is (which I think is a podcast, but also exists in video form on YouTube and is referred to on Cooper’s IG as something you can “listen” to and “watch” despite being, again, a podcast, a famously audio-only medium, but anyway…).
The clip opens with Amy saying one of those things you’re not supposed to say.
“When my mom died, I divided people up: ‘Oh, both of your parents are alive? You go stand on that side of the street.’ Because you don’t know what it’s like ‘till you lose a parent. It just changes everything. Like, ‘Really? Both of your parents are alive and happy?’ You just wait. ‘And you’re getting them what for Christmas? You’re getting her a CD?’ She’s gonna die.”
I laughed, because it’s funny and to cover up the uncomfortable relatability. It’s so true, though, the level of connection you can sometimes (not always!) feel when finding out someone is a part of what really is a club. (Cristina Yang was right; Sydney too.)
I knew about Amy’s dead rabbit, Tina Bunny, because she spoke about it often. I didn’t know about her parents’ death, and the impact it had and has on her, or the death of her sister. Then something pinged, and I suddenly remembered a 2012 essay David penned for The New Yorker called “Now We Are Five” about the suicide of their sister, Tiffany. She was living in what Sedaris described as a “a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts” and had been dead for what the coroner guessed to be at least five days before being discovered by her roommates. Per her wishes, nobody from her family went to the memorial service.
And so now here they were together, these two siblings, having survived the death of their parents, a sister and a bunny, dedicating some time to muse on a subject so familiar to them, yet one they’d never (to my knowledge) spoken about publicly, together, in this way. And so for 23 minutes, the famous siblings (up there with the Olsens and the Gyllenhaals in the pantheon of great high-profile siblings) talked with refreshing irreverence about what remains one of the most universal, yet isolating, experiences. You don’t get discussions as frank as this. As piercing as this. As funny as this. As honest as this. As sad as this. As educational as this. I hated when it ended until I realized I could replay it from the beginning and, when played back to back, it was 46 minutes. Imagine my delight upon realizing three times through and I’d get over an hour with the pair.
I loved their willingness to share perspectives not often foregrounded. For instance, that concept of forgiveness that David speaks about:
”Sometimes somebody dies and you don’t send a letter or you don’t say anything and then you’re embarrassed and then you almost don’t want to see them because you didn’t do that. But it’s never too late. Years could have passed and it’s never too late.”
I’ll admit, I don’t know if it’s as simple as “it’s never too late,” but I also love that thought pattern. And my admiration for David as one of the great modern thinkers makes me consider it in a way I might never have. It made me think about Molly Shannon’s appearance on Colbert and how in the middle of their discussion about grief, she turns to him, puts her hand on his desk and says:
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Stephen.”
It’s the kind of thing you might think is said only in the immediate aftermath, but as someone who knows grief as immediately as Colbert, Shannon understood (like Sedaris) that it’s never too late.
That’s the power of discussions such as these. It’s so easy to get stuck in patterns of grief and have them derail us because of the solitary nature of an experience like witnessing a loved one die. And sometimes talking about grief is effective, but for me, I know listening to other people talk about grief has been way more comforting. It’s also made me feel profoundly less alone. And that feeling is the closest feeling I’ve found to tethering me to my dad.
“This interview is ingrained into my grief brain the same way every time Andrew Garfield speaks about grief is,” one of my followers commented on my Instagram post meme-capping some highlights from the interview. The grief brain! I know this brain well. I think a lot of us do. And there’s something about this brain that is able to hold onto clips like these and recite them from my memory in ways your non-grief brain could never. And like most times I post about grief, whether through personal experience or a quote from an interview, people feel implicated and activated. “Ohhh, I wanna listen to this,” Molly Shannon commented on my post. “Wow,” wrote Andrew Scott. “So good,” Kaitlan Collins added. The comments kept coming, as they do with every post of this nature, with one prevailing throughline: “I needed to hear this.”
And it was certainly their words, their stories, their storytelling, but critical to this interview was the aforementioned irreverence. It’s so important to not make grief too precious. Or, I should amend to say that in my experience it’s so important to not make grief too precious. Back to that Molly Shannon interview: Asked what grief has given her, she replied by saying that it gives her an urgency about life and the comfort she found in getting to do all the things her mother could not.
“And I just get like, ‘Oh my God, we’re…we’re all alive.’”
She starts to cry.
“It’s so sad to talk about about it on such a comedy show, but I feel so grateful that we’re alive and we’re living and I don’t take it for granted.”
Seconds later, she says “fuck” on live television, covers her mouth with both of her hands and she and the audience erupt into laughter.
“I like the feeling of crying,” Amy tells Anderson Cooper after sharing that she’s recently been bawling her eyes out in the weeks since Tina Bunny passed away. She acknowledges the ridiculousness of how deep her devastation over losing a 7-pound rabbit might be, while also holding space for the genuine devastation she feels. And again, it’s subsequently so hilarious. “David found an urn for Tina, like, five years ago, maybe at a flea market or somewhere in England,” Amy shares. “Wait, you bought an urn…for Tina…five years ago?” Anderson interrupts to ask David. “Yeah,” David says with a sly smile on his face. Amy laughs. “You’re a planner,” Anderson tells him. David responds, “Because I bought an urn for her last rabbit too, so I’m just always on the lookout for something that can hold rabbit ashes.” He’s laughing because he knows how ridiculous it sounds, but I bet the emotion was very different when he found himself at an antique shop all those years ago and found Tina’s perfect resting place. Eureka! Imagine the phone call to his sister. He must have been so excited! “Guess what, sis?”
So there’s the humor, which is an obvious appeal to this interview. But there’s also the honesty. It happens from both of them throughout. Amy, as mentioned above, when sharing up dividing people up between those who have lost a parent and those who have not or when she admits she feels no connection to her mother’s ashes. And then David, when talking about guilt — or the lack thereof — over his sister’s suicide.
“I felt no guilt. The tragedy wasn’t her suicide, it was her mental illness. And there’s nothing anyone could have done to change that.”
Instead, he describes it as a sorrow. He also talks about dreams he has about Tiffany in which he fantasizes about a different version of her than the one that existed. For me, these exist as daydreams, projects of how to slot my dad into the given scenarios of life that have unfolded in his absence. And I often wonder if the version of him I’m inviting in is the one I knew or the one I’ve implanted in my memory.
At the end of the interview, Amy advises to pay more attention to the little signs that pop up that can be comforting. “You’ll see ‘em or feel it and know they’re still with you,” she says. For me, it’s pennies. I see them everywhere. I’ve always collected them (only when heads up) and thought them to be wish-granting mechanisms. When my dad died, they became him; his presence. When face up, I put him in my pocket. When face down, I kick it over and leave there for someone else, perhaps, to feel their dead loved one. I wonder: Do they have to know or buy into this to feel it, too, or is the penny’s power applicable even to those unbeknownst? So many questions. So few answers. So much comfort all around us.
Thank you, Amy. Thank you, David. Thank you, Anderson.
❤️ your writing continues to flourish. Thank you for this gorgeous essay from the bottom of my heart.
Every time you write about grief it feels like soothing lotion.
It's 6 months since the death of a close friend since my teenage years. More than 40 years of friendship. The loss is different from the loss of my parents/beloved in-laws. But the wound of grief is the same.
Thank you for this essay, it helps. xx