Grief: How to Move Through Losing a Friend with Sloane Crosley

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Speaker A
Squad. Welcome to we can do hard things. Today we have somebody who I have admired from afar for a very long time. It is true. It is very true.

And I've read every single thing that you have read. Well, first of all, I should tell. Them who you are that she's written? No, everything she's ever read. I don't think so.

Okay. Sloan Crosley is the New York Times bestselling author of the new memoir Grief is for people, the novels, cult classic and the clasp and three essay collections look alive out there. I was told there'd be cake. I almost start laughing just when I'm reading the titles. And how did you get this number?

She lives in New York City. Sloane, you are such a great writer. First of all, thank you for having me. And thank you for reading the script that my mother wrote for you in advance to introduce me. I was like, how did she find our address?

Okay, we're going to talk today about grief is for people. Which blew my little mind. I loved so very much. I read it a long time ago before it came out. Oh, thank you.

Sloane Crosley
Oh, in galley. Yeah. In galley, yes. And then I have just been rereading it this week. It's so good, Sloane.

Speaker A
It's so good, it's almost annoying. Oh, that's my second goal. The first is to move people, and then the second, if possible, is to irritate them as quickly as possible. Well, in my experience with watching. Cause Glennon is the reader and I am the listener of books.

Speaker B
And my experience, she reads five books a week. We call it dissociation. My therapist calls it dissociation. There are maybe, like, a handful of books a year that she gets kind of, like, annoyed that she didn't come up with it. And your book is one of them.

So she's like, it's annoying that somebody else is that good at writing, but. Sloane is actually impossible to be envious of being because she's so original. Yeah. Like, you never, ever think. I've actually never once thought.

Speaker A
I wish I thought of that. Cause I could never think of it because your observations are so deeply specific and personal, and that's what makes it so good. So let's talk to the people about what the book is about. You said that grief is for people was about what you called your first experience with a particular brand of grief. Can you tell us what was this brand of grief?

Just take us back. Yeah. And I will say, also, before I let the river of compliments just swing sort of flow by me without saying anything, I assume you're not jealous, necessarily, of the events that took place in the book, which I will now explain. So what happened was. Is in.

Sloane Crosley
On June 27, 2019, I left my apartment for 1 hour just to, you know, I actually went to get a hand x ray, which is only relevant because I have a line in the book where I say luck is a dirty thing when you're out of it, because I took all my rings off, knowing I would have to put my hand in some sort of MRi esque machine. And it was during that hour that someone came in through my window and stole all my jewelry, and I was burglarized and came home to. To discover that. And obviously, this was very traumatic, upsetting. But even at the level of a felony, you know how it is where when you're writing something, that's your story.

You're sort of always trying to move beyond the cocktail party conversation, always trying to move behind to figure out the larger point of the story. So even at the level of a felony, I'm like, eh, I'm upset, but I don't want to just complain. I want to know what the sort of heart of the story is. And usually that happens sort of naturally. And this time, I bit off a little more than I could chew.

So a month later, exactly on July 27, my dearest friend, who I had just seen three nights prior, died by suicide. And so this kind of compounding loss, these sort of concentric circles that got a lot bigger and obviously blew the first one out of the water, was a kind of grief I never experienced before. I lost people in different ways, but never, never known someone who died by suicide who I was this close to. And the two stories running alongside each other about your desperate need to solve the jewelry heist. Is suicide one of the deaths that you experience it as a mystery you might be able to solve?

Yes. I mean, the way I describe it is it's this strange math that you work backwards instead of forwards. You know, if someone is diagnosed with a disease, by the way, I'm not. This isn't a competition. It's all terrible.

Speaker A
It's all terrible, but. And it's all, you know, I mean, everyone has been touched by it in some. In some way, grief and loss, but there's a preparation, which is terrible in its own right, but it's sort of math. You work forwards, you know it's gonna happen. Which doesn't necessarily mean you can game grief in advance, but it's less shocking, it's less frustrating.

Sloane Crosley
That feeling of I don't know what happened. I want to know what happened. I'm retracing my steps. I think you only really get with either suicide or a very sudden death. Yeah.

And so the burglary was like that. It created this sort of structure for me to tell that larger story. I always feel the need, like, this pressure to let people know, if they haven't read the book, that I'm not equating these two losses, which one serves as sort of like, the container, the setting, haha. If you will. I'm sorry I was so cheesy.

The jewelry for the larger loss. Yeah, yeah. I just appreciated so much the insistence on talking about it, about talking about suicide, because. And I'm gonna actually have a therapist. I know.

Speaker A
Listen to this after we record it, just to make sure that it feels healthy the way that we talk about suicide. For other people. So don't worry. I always vet myself. No, I put myself.

Sloane Crosley
I worry about offending people who have been touched by suicide all the time, and I'm one of them. Yes. Nobody knows how to talk about it. Yeah. And yet I feel.

Speaker A
I have had a lot of experience in this realm, and I feel frustrated and afraid by the absolute terror that people have to talk about it. You know, it feels like people think actually, like all grief. Like, if we don't bring it up, no one will think of it. That works somewhat for certain closets in my house that are over stuff, but it doesn't actually work for mortality and human life. Even then.

Sloane Crosley
It doesn't work so great. But, yeah, I feel like there's a strange. I think people are scared, which makes sense. It's petrifying. We have all agreed, whether you're a religious person, whether you're not, doesn't matter who you are.

We have agreed on some baseline level that we're all gonna live through this thing together. And it feels like this frightening breach of contract. And it feels like, did I ever really know that person? And then you have so much ego involved in it. It's just this swirling mix of all the worst emotions.

Speaker A
Yeah. And so people are just scared to even discuss it. I mean, I think it's getting better. I mean, it's certainly not. This isn't the 17th century.

Sloane Crosley
We are allowed to discuss it. Yeah, we're allowed. It's still sort of taboo. Yeah. We sat at a dinner table a while back, a few weeks ago, and everybody at the table just started talking about death and suicide.

Speaker A
And it was a three hour conversation. And I just felt this, like, relief afterwards and this deep feeling of, oh, nobody's alone in this, because we're scared to talk about it, because we're angry and confused of people who do it. Yes. But I also feel like some of us feel very alone in ever even having those thoughts, because that's a different brand of being afraid to talk about it because. And so at this table, several people, somebody was brave enough to bring it up, and then several other people were like, actually, I have had bouts of that.

And somebody else was like, actually, that's always on the. And these are friends that I've had for a long time and didn't know. And I remember thinking, God, I wish everybody could hear this. Yeah. Something that you said during that conversation that kind of blew me away.

Speaker B
Glennon. It was kind of against our un talked about contract. I didn't know you said, yeah, I'm conscious that there is an exit door. I know that some people take it and some people don't. And logically, in my mind, I know that there is a door, but I never, ever consider it or think about it or I pretend it's not there.

There's so many of us. I always do. I'm like, life is a movie theater, okay? And I'm not gonna pretend that the red exit thing isn't there. Like, I could pretend it's not, but I know it fucking is.

I know. But it was important for me to hear this conversation, to understand you better and to understand the people sitting at our dining room table better, but also to understand my own relationship because I have a fear of death. That's probably why I'm like, nope, the lights on the exit sign are not on. They're off. But you said suicide is a tax on human consciousness.

Speaker A
And part of the destigmatization of suicide is not framing the desire or the flirtation as exceptional. Can you say more about those things? How is it a tax? I mean, it sort of shares a border, dovetails with exactly what you're saying. I think people are afraid to talk about it because the only way we have gotten better at sort of bringing out into the open.

Sloane Crosley
But it seems to me at least that the only way I experience it is in the extreme. So when people say, I've had suicidal ideations, I have known someone, I've attempted, you know, they have these sort of extreme scenarios where I think, okay, well, that is okay to talk about because that's mental health, right? That's okay. But there's a road to get there for a lot of people. This is a horribly crass analogy for it, but it's like a perfume.

You know, this smells a little different on everybody. And sometimes there's a history of, you know, going in and out of therapy, and it's really obvious. And sometimes it's just. It's just who we are. And I feel like if you look at it, it makes it like anything.

It sort of takes the fangs out of it, or it helps feel it a little bit, and it makes you feel less lonely. And for this specifically, it's helpful to feel less lonely. So if you have a problem, I'm just going to go ahead and say with your GI tract, it's not going to help your GI tract to feel like you're talking to other people about their problems. This will help, though. This is the actual heart of the matter.

It actually really does help to talk about it. A very quick, weird analogy that's springing into my mind that I'll try to go through fast is I once did this piece about the Grimm's fairy tales where I retrace the actual original setting in Germany. And there is a Cinderella's castle that you can actually go to. There is Rapunzel's tower, little Red Riding Hood's woods. It's all very strange but beautiful.

And I met this german kid who said how great the Grimm's fairy tales were because they're so violent. In the original ones, the Disney ones are very watered down. There's a lot of blood and guts and crime. And I was like, why do you think that is? And he goes, well, because if you're scared sometimes that there's a monster under the bed, it's helpful to know what his name is and what he looks like.

Speaker B
Whoa.

Sloane Crosley
And I'm like, listen, german child, full of wisdom.

But I thought about it in a lot of different contexts, and I'm obviously thinking about it now in this moment, in this conversation, where it just helps to say this is the shape of the thing. Yes. This is what it looks like and to talk about it, and it doesn't necessarily mean that there's pressure on people to talk about it if they don't want to, but they should know that the option is there without being judged for being different. Yes. And everyone who's talking about it by default is someone who has not done it.

Good point. So when I'm talking to people about it, what they're talking about is their terror and their fear and the difficult nature of it and also all the reasons they decided to survive anyway. Like when we're talking about death, we are by default talking about life. Yes. Why we chose to stay.

And that's how, I mean, I think, Russell, my friend, the way I always put it is I didn't feel particularly. I don't know, it's all guessing. Right? It's like I wasn't there for the last moments, and you don't know what's going on behind closed doors between two people or one person, as the case may be. But whatever happened, he didn't feel compelled to stay here.

And I think about it a lot in terms of the fact that the second I found out, I think what was scary about writing the book is to say the words I immediately understood and I immediately forgave him. Because weirdly, because I'm still here, people are apt to look at that. I know it's sort of scary to say that and say, what do you mean? You understand? How much do you understand?

Are you endangered to. You know? And I'm like. I just. I just want to say that I get it and I understand, my friend.

That's all. Oh, God, that's so beautiful. It's like people feel like they need to distance themselves completely by saying, not. Me, don't have it. And that was wrong, and this is right.

Speaker A
I love that loving container of holding all of it. Because you have a beautiful part where you say, do you have to forgive a person who dies by suicide? To be gobsmacked by suicide, to consider it in need of forgiveness is to deny what the world is like for others to decide that darkness exists in service to light, that darkness is the glitch and lightness is the control, because that's how it is for you. So fucking good. Thank you.

When I read that, this is so ridiculous, but I kept thinking about how everyone gets pissed off when somebody doesn't stand up for the flag. And I'm like, you're pissed because when you see that something wells up in you that feels like it should because of what it stands for. For you. And you're mad because you think they're feeling that and not standing, but they're not feeling that what it means to you is not what it means to them. Right.

So I just appreciate that take. Thank you. Well, because I think that, in a way, I guess, a sort of reductive way to say it, is more to say that it's like. It doesn't mean you're not a citizen of the country, of the life, of the friendship, of anything if you don't express it. I mean, it's like a dictatorship, what you're describing, and it's like, almost an emotional dictatorship, is what it feels when people are like, this is how you grieve, this is how you love, this is how you express this.

Sloane Crosley
And I'm thinking, like, I don't know. But I think the reason why you write anything, as you know, is because even if it's very specific, as you were saying, you have this faith. I'm like, I cannot be the only one. I'm going to tell this specific story about my friendship, and I'm going to tell the specific story about this sort of wildly generous and funny and great and behind the scenes in the arts and really inappropriate man who I love so much. And I'm like, somebody will get it.

Somebody has lost someone in this way and thought nothing is speaking to me. You know, maybe not the self help books. And maybe not like Durkheim and Kant or Joan Didion or whatever it is. It's just sort of all. I just wanted to write something that was like him, if that makes sense.

Speaker A
Oh, yeah. You know, sorry, that was a badly old answer, but it ended well. Cause it's true. It's just, you know, something that he. That he would like.

Sloane Crosley
I mean, he probably wouldn't adore reading a book about himself being as inclined as he was towards self erasure at the end. But eventually he'd get around to it, and I think he'd like it. It would have been right next to his computer with his little letters and emails where people verified his.

Maybe I should say, like, a little tiny bit, where he was my old boss in publishing, and he was just very frank with people, but he also expected people to be frank with him in return. So it wasn't like an abusive kind of cruelty or frankness. And he had this one woman who came in for an informational interview who said, I can't figure out why no one's hiring me. There wasn't a position open. He was just helping her out.

And he said, well, you're very well read, and, you know, you're qualified. He's like, but you're not fun. I'm like, oh, no. And then, you know, he's like, it's a small department. Like, ease up.

Just be a little more casual. This isn't like you're not applying for a job in academia. It's a job in book publishing. It's in publicity. You have to talk about books with enthusiasm and animation.

And years later, she wrote him a thank you note, thanking him for this life changing candor. And he always would point to it. Every time he was accused of being too gruff or too mean, he'd be like, talk to the note. Talk to the note. Dude, that's one person.

One. That is one lady who's not mad at you. That was like, the checklist. He was like, I'm good forever. I've got my affirmative.

And I was like, this isn't like predestination now, but anyway, it was generous. But the thing is, it's still so hard to see it clearly. It's so funny. I don't know those people you were talking to at dinner when they had their various thoughts, if they have them all the time, you know, or if it was hard to know when to write the book. I still feel like the book is about really, as much as it is an elegy to him, like a struggle to figure out, to have this ongoing process of how I think about his death.

Because I've talked to people who, of course, many people whose loved ones have died 20, 30, 40 years ago and it still hurts like it was yesterday if it's this way. And I feel like such a plebe now. Yeah, you know, your friendship is so beautiful. And I loved him. As I read the book, I just loved him.

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Speaker A
I wonder, is part of the difficulty. I don't remember if you read this or I thought this. I don't know. But you guys were so close, and your takes on the world were similar, and you're just, like, doing it together. It reminded me of, you know, the friend that you're with when you leave the party, and you had all the same judgments of everyone, and you just know that the other person's having the exact same experience as you are, and you actually can't wait to leave because the debrief is gonna be better than the thing, so.

Speaker B
Good. Uh huh. That's how I feel about you. Same. Oh, yeah.

Speaker A
I mean, the other day, our daughter said, we need to stop talking so much shit every place we leave. She said that to us. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna work on that. I don't think that we're necessarily talking shit. We're making observations, and I think they're clear eyed, but, like, I think it's a rebalancing of being out in the world.

Speaker B
Yeah, we have to, like, prove that we need to go home. Yeah, I completely get it. As long as it doesn't sink down to the root system. I think your daughter is basically like, this is gonna make us negative people when we go in. Yeah, that's what she's saying.

Speaker A
She's like, look what you're modeling for me now. I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Is part of the resolution of the grief, which I don't even know if that's a thing, but admitting to yourself, deciding to yourself that you are different, that you and Russell were different, I feel like sometimes people don't want to talk to me about this suicide thing because it creates a difference between us.

If they're like, I've never thought of that. And also, people think of me as smart, so they're scared that maybe I know something they don't know. Is it the intelligence thing is really. Oh, God. That's the scariest part to me.

Sloane Crosley
That's the scariest part to me. Even as someone who has experienced, you know, depression has definitely, as I say in the book, even in the most casual way, been standing on the subway platform and just. It's not depression. It's almost just fallibility that, like, oh, my God, there's no guardrails here. Yes.

Jump. Yeah. But of course, that's not quite the same thing. It's not even in the ballpark as being ready to do that. Or overwhelming desire to do it.

But, yeah, it creates this barrier, and it created a barrier between Russell and I. Yeah, I definitely felt that a little bit. It took a while for it to kick in, so immediately I understood. I say I never really went through anger. I think the book itself is angry in a way where it provides some of the engine for both the humor and the heartache of it, where I think I just got so mad at the idea that people wouldn't know him, and I felt this not so fastness.

And I think that's because also I think everyone feels that way about their loved ones who go, you know, you want to sort of take out the sky writing. And it's been wonderful to be like, let me talk about my friend. But I feel like part of that is because he worked behind the scenes in the arts and made other people famous. And I just wanted him to have his sort of moment in the sun in a way. But I think the whole book was like, he didn't get an obituary.

I joke around that I got, like, 200 pages worth of real pissed that he did not get an obituary. But I don't feel this. So I immediately wasn't angry at him. I was angry at the world. I accepted that he had done this thing.

And then it took me months to be like, wait, but why? And to take ego out of it. I mean, he also has, it's so funny, has had a partner and all this, who I've been in communication with his partner. And so that's the other struggle where I'm like, I'm the friend, I'm not the partner, I'm not the sister, I'm not the mother, you know? Yep, those people all exist.

But I was like, it's healthy in some ways to separate yourself from your friends. I mean, you know what it is? Even in relationships, it's easier to talk about when it's not life and death, when it's maybe more romantic, when you give too much of yourself to somebody else and you, like, you seed the entire, like, the crown jewels to somebody. And I feel like I had almost done that with him and then he took them, just to extend the jewelry analogy. And I just, yeah, it took me a long time.

I think it took me, like a couple, like a year or so to be like, I can't believe it. We're really not, it's not this yin yang that I thought it was, but it doesn't mean it's therefore without value. No, the friend thing was an interesting part of it. I know that you say no one was trying to take your grief from you because you were just a friend and not a partner, not a child of this person, not a parent of this person, which I have heard from so many people. That is a very hard.

Speaker A
Losing a friend puts you in this category. Lists, category. There's no specific grief groups for you. There's not a lot of path laid out on how you should do it or how much you get to do it, how much grief you get to have. Yes.

Sloane Crosley
But especially now with everyone, I think it's so easy to blame. Like, it used to be easy to blame the Internet for everything, and now we just can blame the pandemic for everything. Well, you know, post pandemic. But genuinely, I do feel like people's friendships, I mean, their relationships with their families and their partners as well, are all like, pear shaped and weird. Yeah.

It's like this extra layer of struggle that seems. It just gives you this sort of scrim where you just have to wade through so much more before you feel what you're supposed to feel, where you're like, wait, am I supposed to be feeling this? Where. How am I being one of those people that's glomming onto a dead person? You know, there's that, like, death tourism thing that people do where, you know, they post pictures.

The one time I ran into Bob at the supermarket in 1982, he was really nice to me. Here's my twitter post about it. Totally. The problem is he's also trying to hang up my spurs in terms of being, like, a humorist at heart and someone who writes about etiquette at heart and not police people's reaction about grief. Because I'm like, you guys, I leave the party and it's like, that's when the fun begins.

But it's also like, this is a lot of this book, and this experience has been about sort of opening myself up in a more genuine way to what this is like. Yeah, there's some kernel of the judgment thing that I felt. It's weird that we were just talking about that, but it feels like an important part of the book and Russell's life, because if you are a person who is constantly looking at the world and judging everyone, which was part of the beauty of Russell. Right. Yeah.

Speaker A
The friend you wanted to, if you. Don'T have something nice to say, come sit by me. Exactly. But what that does over time, speaking from personal experience, is that you start to not feel like you fit in the world. Judgment, by definition, is a separation, a wall you put up between them and me and Russell, it's like we have this category of person, not that Russell is in any category, but who feels like the world is changing so much that they no longer have any part of it or they don't fit in it anymore.

And is part of that kind of increased by being a person who is extremely judgmental? Oh, yeah. Well, because if you keep going, you know, you keep drawing lines, cutting the paper in half, cutting it in half, cutting it in half. I mean, I feel like there's a. What is it, Zeno's paradox or some physics thing that says you can never actually cut the paper entirely in half, but you can get it pretty small and cut yourself off the list.

Sloane Crosley
That self judgment that you then start to have where you feel like you're not enough. If you run out of people to be critical of you, look around the room, you can't find the idiot. God. It's interesting. He was a little bit like that, but I think so much of it was, you know, there's a great.

One of my favorite authors sort of growing up was James Joyce. Not very original. And he has a. I think about the dead, the famous short story the Dead. And the whole theme of the dead is essentially that this husband is alienated from his wife because she's in love with this child, childhood boy, who, like, died for her, essentially.

And, like, he can never compete with the memory of that person because the dead are perfect. This idea that the dead are perfect, which is different than not speaking ill of them and respect. But that idea, I think Russell took to heart in so many tiny ways that were really beneficial in life. He's one of those people who love, like, old Hollywood movies. He got books back into print that had been out of print print for years.

And he loved the flea market. He loved old objects. He just loved the past. He liked history, things that we generally look around and think of as attributes. Someone who has a sense of the past, that they weren't born yesterday.

But he lived in it so deeply that this is a bit of a stretch, because, again, it's all conjecture. And like I said, it's math you do backwards. But I think he. It somehow made it easier for him to join the ranks of other people critical of the people here on earth. The dead are perfect.

And I think. I'm not saying it's why, you know, it's. I'm not saying if you read too many, you read too many old books, watch out, you know? But I just feel like it just created a sort of a slide for him that was a little bit easier. Yeah.

Speaker B
I have a question around your processing of grief. My older brother passed away a couple months ago, so I'm in the beginning stages of this thing called grief. And Russell, having died by suicide, I would imagine you probably have been going over every detail of every last conversation you had and trying to understand. To me, that has been the most difficult thing, is trying to understand not just where he went, where did they go, but, like, how did this happen? I guess my question is, especially for anybody who's going through grief or has experienced it, are the questions of needing to understand getting less as time goes on, or are they still ever present?

Sloane Crosley
I am very sorry about your brother. Thank you. For me, I can only speak to sort of my experience, and it mirrors other experiences in my life, which I guess I'm sort of surprised by. We started talking about how I've never experienced a grief like this, which is true, but I'm still me. It's the same prism of my own experience.

And so when I think about other things where I'm like, I have difficulty not writing the script for other people, I have difficulty not wanting to know absolutely everything. Some of it's curiosity, some of it is pathological. And I feel like the same struggles I have not to apply that to everyday human relationships. I have to grief. And so for me, yeah, eventually what you have to do is just accept the stuff.

And it sounds very a credo y, but accept the stuff that you don't know, that you. I just cannot know, and I will never know. And the thing that I realize is it's most healthy to let those questions go after a while, the replaying of the conversations, because after a while, it's like you actually let the analysis of the party cannibalize the party. Not to shoehorn, we were just talking about him. But truly where I feel like my focus on his death, on why and what I missed when other people missed.

I think for me, the most heartbreaking line of the book that I have difficulty or had difficulty reading for the audiobook is the question of, were we all the wrong people for you? Were we the wrong friends for him? You know, I realize it's cannibalizing his life. It's cannibalizing the friendship, and it will eat your brother's memory. Geez, that's very hard to say, but it will start eroding if you're so focused on the death.

I mean, you still want to. You don't want to just dismiss it, but it's a piece. It's not the entire part of his life and your relationship and your memory. And so eventually, you let the questions go, I think, or I have found I let the questions go in favor of a tribute to him, a more fitting tribute to him in my mind. But it's really frustrating.

Yeah, it's really frustrating. What you just said is so true. It's like I'm only focused on his death. Yes. But it's also two months out for you.

I mean, I don't know. I think I'm in my plebe year, and then I'm looking at. I'm like, ooh, yeah. Oh, just the second you said two months, my sort of heart sunk, because I feel like six months is gonna be really hard. You know, it's all very hard.

Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. And there's no way to go through it except through it. And what you just said is really healing to me in that we can get really focused on this last moment, this last thing, their death. And he was alive for 52 years. So much time and memories.

Sloane Crosley
Same age as Russell. Yeah. So much time and love and memories and experiences that I want that to be the first. I want the death to be the last of what comes up first. You know?

I think it is eventually. I mean, I don't even know if I'm there yet. I go back and forth. I sometimes think that I'm not unemotional, but, you know, especially with writing the book and promoting the book, it's this weird, sort of surreal experience, and then something will happen, and I'll get so frustrated and have all these questions that'll just come bubbling up again. Like, I feel like, you know, that it's just sort of, like, almost like a bad habit.

Speaker B
Yeah. I've tried to kick this habit of needing to know absolutely everything about what happened. Yes. But I'm. And I know you know nothing about this, like, extremely competitive and extremely.

Sloane Crosley
I want to know. I want to know. Like, I just want to know the answer. And I want to get, like, the a on the exam. Yes.

Like, the exam. I want to ace what? The grief. Like, it's not. What is it that I want?

And I'm like, it's gonna take however long it takes, and it's gonna be as weird shaped. The other day, I had to send photos of him into a magazine, old photos. So I was digging through them physically in a shoebox. I'm like, imagine, if you will, uphill both ways. And I dug for these photos, and I found one where I'm in a bathing suit, and I'm 25, and it's at night by a pool, and he's, like, jokingly pulling a towel off of me.

And I think I had sort of put all the memories in the book, and I had understood everything about the death, or I thought I had. And I remembered what he said when the flash went off, just the second I saw the physical photo, and it was regarding the bathing suit. But he said, you'll be so happy you have that one day. And I was here. I was digging through a shoebox to try to find pictures for a magazine because he had died by suicide in a barn.

And I know that's not what he meant when he said it. And I was on the floor, absolutely hysterical long after I wanted to stop crying. That's, like, the difference of grief crying. It's like, I'm ready to stop. I'm good.

But there's something where I'm almost looking in the mirror being like, shh. Drop it. Ooh. That is the difference. I couldn't stop it, and I was like, this is insane.

I've written this book doing this press, and it's just I was so mad, and I wanted to know everything, and I became so frustrated all over again. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that.

So, yeah, it's gonna hit you. But you do start learning. You've just learned not to let it take over the whole life. Yep. Got it.

Speaker B
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Speaker A
There'S many images from the book that stick with me. One of them I want to talk about is I know that we just finished talking about how it might be helpful to talk about it more, but let's add that there are ways that people should stop. Okay, I want to talk about not just this particular image, but what it was saying about how we should respond to people's grief. The woman who called you right in the aftermath of hearing the news about Russell to offer her condolences, but was what was she doing? Repotting vinegar or something that I didn't even know people do?

What was she doing? Tell us that. Wait, I don't know. Rebottling. She was bottling.

Sloane Crosley
Just plain, but just run of the mill bottling. Just straight bottling. Well, I don't even know what that is, but can you just tell the story? What is bottling? Just like when you pouring people are bottling things so they get stuff from their garden.

Speaker B
And they put it in bottles. No. Well, that's why I don't know about it. She was making vinegar. You put vinegar in bottles because it's liquid.

Speaker A
Okay, but the point is.

Sloane Crosley
No, I actually. I was. Morgan. My ideal is just actually sit back and have the entire rest of the conversation. Vinegar be like a very detailed, like, olive oil chemistry, chemical breakdown of vinegar that none of us know exactly.

Speaker B
No. So this was like a newer friend. It's like when people say, you know, when something horrible happens, and they say, I don't have the words. I always think, find them. Yes, find them.

Sloane Crosley
Or say nothing. Or find them, like, go get them. Because, you know, even if they're cliche, even if we've wasted. I'm so sorry for your loss. On a pair of headphones or even, like, a job.

I know. I'm sorry that we've wasted it now when we really need it, but, like, go get it. And it was almost like a half pierced ear where she did, like, the first part of the gesture, which is, I should call this person. And then while we were on the phone, it was so loud, it sounded like a cocktail party, but a cocktail party in which someone had dropped a tray full of warm glasses in, like, an industrial way. It was so loud.

And I kind of commented at some point on it. I was like, oh, thank you. There's a noise. I'm sorry. What is that?

What is that? And she said, oh, I'm bottling vinegar. Like, a lot of vinegar. It turns out it was for a larger sort of endeavor. And I finally was like, she's multitasking.

A condolence call. I can't do this. No, I can't do it. And I just hung up on her. But also, like, I did some stuff that was not.

I mean, people. Again, I don't want to police people's reactions, but I just feel like you should say whatever you say and do whatever you do with great care and authenticity. So even if it's cliche and even if we used up all the words, like, just put the vinegar down and no one will get hurt. Yes. Can I say the thing that blew my mind?

Speaker B
In the aftermath of my brother's death, one of my friends texted me, and she had lost her mother a couple years prior, and it was very clear that she knew what not to say, and she also knew what helped her the most. And so she wrote me a text about a story about my brother. And it was this beautiful, lovely story, and it just made me remember the beauty of my brother, rather than being focused, so focused on the death of my brother. And so I just offer that to folks, whoever's dealing with something similar to this, that there are words. You just have to sit and think, think about a story or just say you're sorry.

The truth is, in grief, there's few that I remember. I just remember that one beautiful story. Sharing a story is really good. It was really beautiful and powerful. And so now that's all I do.

When a friend of mine lost her dad recently, and I just wrote this story about him, and I don't know if it felt that good to her, but it's a good idea, but she. Can also keep it in her. The other thing is, even if that doesn't work in the moment, and I think that's so true, just. Just almost declarative, less like digging for how are you? Or, I mean, which is always a nice question, but in that moment, sort of, if it's too broad, it puts the onus on the grieving person.

Sloane Crosley
They got enough work to do already without having to sort of formulate anything. But also that your friend will love it, because then she can come back to it later. You can't really come back to, how are you? That's right. In a few months.

Speaker B
That's right. Yeah. I've reread that text from my other friend ten times. Yeah, it was an effort. It was like a conscious effort.

Speaker A
It was just a gift with no request of you. Yeah. But also, like, don't multitask. I just think you can just say that. That's tough.

You can just say that she's like. Oh, I don't know how I'm going to fit this. Condolences on her to do that list next to it says, like, vinegar slash, call slow. Condolences about. Yeah, I feel a little bit bad because, a, she's actually a really lovely person, of course.

Sloane Crosley
And b, has now gone on to. I mean, she has a vinegar business. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. At least she was more. It was for something.

It's great vinegar, honestly. Also, the fact that it's vinegar, it's just sort of hilarious, given the idea, the sort of symbolism of it. The thing is, is part of the book, in terms of the honest things that I think that people don't want to talk about with grief and with suicide, is I could feel myself, the way I put it was that I was almost not to be trusted. That people actually, beyond the vinegar bottling lady people were actually very genuine and very. There for me.

But I felt they had, as I say, sort of committed this sin of not being able to bring him back. It was only on his side. So I only wanted the memorial service to be the way he would have wanted it. He was supposed to cat sit for me. And then as I say in the book, I texted the cat sitter and said, oh, actually, can you come?

Because my friend can't do it anymore. She said, oh, you know what happened? And I said, I typed to this very nice lady I've met several times of the old cat sitter killed himself. And you see the dots go up and down and up. And so to fix this sort of ridiculous thing I've said, I wrote, I mean, just say you don't want to do it.

Am I right? She's, oh, my God.

I was like, it's so dramatic because I just. I think I was just this constant push pull. And it's in my life, it's in the book. It still exists, of the cylinders of his personality and my personality. And I just still want to be like, isn't this ridiculous?

Look at this ridiculous thing. Yep. Because you, like, you said he was that person I would leave parties with. And it's not that I don't have anyone to talk to anymore, but when we talk about the sort of language of grief, sometimes I look around. Not to turn this into a therapy session, but sometimes I look around and it's not like I don't have good friends, but I almost do this, like, loose head count.

I'm like, something is missing. Something is. I actually miss him. Something is missing. This person that, you know, we both put a quarter of a century into each other, basically, in terms of our friendship, you know, it's gone.

Speaker B
And what a weird thing, because when your family dies, you have to. Being in a family, like, it's a have to, right? But being in a friendship, it's a want to. And the friendships of the world, when you lose a friend, you don't get the same kind of closeness. Or I would even say the ability to grieve that person.

Even in the services. I don't know if you were sitting up front with the family, I don't know what your particular thing is, but it's like friends, they don't get the same kind of rights is what I'm saying. And Sloan, you made such a beautiful case in the very beginning of the book. You said, when you were talking about Russell, you said his. The one whose belief in me over the years has been the most earned in parentheses, he is not my parent.

Speaker A
The most pure. He is not my boyfriend and the most forgiving. He is my friend. And I felt like that is right. And it was such an argument for, wait a minute.

Friendship is kind of the most important. We do it with free will. Yep. Yep. Well, it's how you say, it's almost if you work it in reverse.

Sloane Crosley
Like, it's when, you know the classic line when someone breaks up with someone, says, I just want to be friends. I've never understood that, because I'm like, oh, my God, that's so much work, Peter. I've never just, if I want to be friends with someone, it's like saying, I want to join this club and learn how to cool quilt with you. I mean, it's a lot of work, but I don't know if it's more. I mean, I feel like there is a certain baseline where my family is sort of, you know, they're gonna be my family no matter what, vice versa.

But I feel like you still have to try with them. Those relationships require a lot of work, and in a way, because they are not voluntary and because they are sort of assigned, it's a lot of work you might not necessarily want to do. But I do feel like, yes, there wasn't that much where, again, we discussed. No one was trying to take away my grief. But I just.

I think a lot of the book is for anyone who's felt confused about if they have a right to mourn, which any therapist, my therapist, yours, anyone, would probably bristle immediately at that language. The right to, like, who says, you know? But it does feel that way. I say, I live in the world. I walk around, I see what the hallmark cards look like.

I say that it's a struggle. Yeah. I need to talk about this one thing that you talk about, which I have never in my life heard anyone else talk about, but I have thought about every day of my life, oh, my gosh. Since I was maybe ten when I heard this exercise. I don't know where I heard this, but there's this exercise where you imagine yourself, somebody puts you in a room and puts somebody you love in a different room.

Speaker A
Okay. And they say there's a button on. They sit you in a chair, and there's a button, is how I heard it. On the other wall, on the opposite wall, and over the loudspeaker, somebody says, whoever stands up and hits the button first will die and the other person will live. Mm hmm.

Okay. I don't know if I saw that on, like, the twilight zone or some. So, let me clarify. If you hit the button first, you die or they die, you die, and the other person survive. Got it.

So I. Sloane, you know how there was this thing going on like, what's your roman empire? What do you think about the most? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think about all the time.

I do it with people. I can lay in bed and work myself. Abby, are you aware of this? No. Work myself up into a sweat thinking about what if my sister and I were in both rooms, how would I get to the thing fast enough?

Would that be the right thing? Yes. Yes. Her kids are younger. They would need.

Okay. I do it with lots of people to decide what I would do in that situation. What would you do with me? And then I know you're gonna ask that. And then I always think I would have an advantage, because I've been thinking about it for 30 years, and it would be new to them, so I would have the advantage.

Sloane Crosley
Oh, my God. That's so wrong. It's not new to me now. It's not new to me now that now it's in my mind. Now you've given her the jump.

Speaker A
But the reason why, and it's in your book, and the reason why it's such an incredible exercise. It is a kind of a way, it's a brain exercise that helps you understand, like, who do you love more than yourself? Who do you deem more vital in the world than you? That's good. How do you make decisions about when you put yourself first or someone else?

And I think there's this line in the book where you decide that you and Russell would hit the button at the exact same time. And does that save both people? In my world, it does. Okay. In my world, it does, too.

Sloane Crosley
Can I say one thing, though, which is that just so it's not such a sort of polarized choice, the sort of umbrella of the scenario over the scenario is that if neither of you press the button within 60 seconds, you both die. Yes. So someone has to do this important part. Important part. Yeah.

I feel like I just. I'm trying to let you off the hook here a little bit, because otherwise. You just sit there. You're not trying to actively kill the person. Right.

I was like, maybe it's good to say that, you know, just not having just all these thoughts all the time about everyone you pass on the street. No, you're saving. But also, that's that way, when I think it's bittersweet, I bring that sort of scenario up. I think it's from the sort of pop philosophy, like, they sold it in CV's in the eighties book called the Book of Questions. I think that's what I mean.

I don't know if it originates there, but it's one of the questions in the, you know, it's for road trips, the book of questions. And it stuck in my head too. It wouldn't surprise me if it was. It sounds like the plot of, like, black mirror or the Twilight zone, though. But I think.

I say, I think we would press the button at the same time, which is not part of the scenario in the question, for the same reason that when Abby was asking about, like, the, how do I, like, outthink this? How do I find out the answer? You know? And so it's this sort of bittersweet moment where, like, that's not one of the options. It's just the option that I wanted, but it's just not one of the options.

But it's a way of saying I really. Yeah, I loved him very much, but I also do the same thing you do where I think, like, I start doing weird, sort of rather morbid head counts of who's in his life, who's gonna need him, who's in my life, he's gonna need me. And, like, I don't really know if it's the healthiest measurement in terms of. It's ridiculous how to walk around, like, think of people, sloan. I wake up, but it is an interesting one.

Speaker A
I lay in bed, and then I come to and I think, I am not in this situation. I don't have to figure this out. Okay. I know that you don't do a lot of tips. This is not a book that there's no interview that the person doesn't say.

This is not a self help book. Every fucking interview. Wait. With me or with everybody? With anybody.

It's just like, everybody has to say they distance themselves from self help. Whether it's an interviewer, whether it's not you, the person who's interviewing you, it's very clear to say this isn't self help. I don't read self help. Whatever, which I have some feelings about because I know what everyone is saying. But I also know that there's entire aisles at Barnes and noble that are labeled self help, and that's where a lot of women's books are.

And then the exact same books that my male counterparts write are all under leadership. So I have some feelings about the separate. Oh, wow. Yeah. Of that.

Anyway, I think there's something gendered in. Of course, the. I mean, there's something gendered in everything, right? Yeah. Well.

Sloane Crosley
Cause the suggestion is that women just need to be functional and. Okay. Cause they're hysterical. Right. Just word ever.

And, like, men need to, like, excel. They're already at the baseline. Yep. That's right. Yes.

Speaker A
They don't need to fix this. They're trying to go above the baseline. They're trying to go above. And we're just trying to get there in the bed. You poor girl.

Speaker B
Just trying to get there. That's right. Yeah. But I have, by the way, I distance myself from it not out of any sort of disdain for the genre, because I don't want to mislead people. Yes.

Sloane Crosley
It's not like I don't have advice or things that I would suggest to other people. I just try to, like. I just. I worry that if you expect there to be, like, a physically laid out chart or bullet pointed list of things to do, you're not going to find it. Yeah.

Speaker A
Which is why it's helpful. Yeah. You're like. Because it's so specific. But you said this was a tip.

All right, listen, fod squad, there is a tip. All right? You're going to take this with you. Sloan Crosley self help author tipster. Tipster.

I have read the grief literature, and God helped me listen to the grief podcasts, which made me giggle so much, which we're doing now. And the most practical thing I've learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float. Nothing is missing. Nothing is hypothetical.

What do you mean? What does that mean in real life? Yeah. Yeah. When I say nothing is missing and nothing is hypothetical, it's like I had this moment where I had this jewelry missing, physically missing from my home.

Sloane Crosley
You know, it's very easy to point to that it's not here. And Russell being gone, I couldn't call him, couldn't talk to him, and all this sort of terror or upset awaited me as the sort of consequences of these things unfolded that would be in the future and he was gone in the past. And if I just. I think that I might have accidentally sort of tripped into self help, just sort of, like, face planted myself into it, only because to answer your question, I think. I mean, like, just being in the moment and breathing and just being like ten fingers, ten toes.

I still have the outline of my body. I am still here. And I think so much it's related to me later in the book, saying that so much of grieving and loss is about recognizing that not all your tissue got damaged in the axe, that it still hurts, but you can. It's not everything. It's actually not everything.

And in a way, that's horrible when you miss someone so much because you feel like it's a betrayal of them or a betrayal of how much they meant to you to almost function in a way in those, like, initial hours, but it's actually a sign that you will be okay. And so I feel like that's what I mean by, like, in the present, that people were like, there was so much in the grief literature and the grief poetry, even about the past and looking back or like, what are things going to be like? And this is how, you know, these are the stages of grief and all that stuff. And I'm like, the only thing that helped is being like, in this one moment, if I'm just here, there's no such thing as a missing rustle or a missing piece of jewelry. And there's no such thing as the pain.

It's just 1 second. I'm just here. I don't know if that's very articulate or not. It is. It's like this moment of bliss.

Yes. And I know it's so. It's like a moment of just saying, this is not too big for me. Yep. Yep.

You know? Yep. And then your brain comes online and you're like, fuck. Yeah. No, no, it doesn't last long.

It's just like one of the things. It's helpful. It's not true because obviously you are. Your entire past is contained within you, but it's helpful in the moment. It's also helpful.

Speaker A
You talked about a time when you decided to choose the living or to be on the side of the living. Well, to not text my cat setter and just make jokes about death. Yeah. Cause I was not considering her feelings whatsoever. Funny, sure.

Sloane Crosley
But also probably not so great if you're her. Yeah, but also. But it was a loyalty choice too, right? Like your insistence on staying with Russell. Like being with Russell.

Speaker A
Being with Russell was a loyalty to the dead. Yes. And probably felt like disloyalty for a while. To enter, reenter the land of the living. Like an abandonment.

Sloane Crosley
Yes. Well, I say that, you know, by living, I was sort of by default leaving him. But also, I mean, I was saying before, part of the disconnect of realizing that being on the side of the living, realizing that we are not the same, is like that ability to sort of just untie the balloon, let it go, you know, and it's like you're going to get carried away with it. And it's not that I was necessarily in danger of what he was obviously in grave danger of, but I am not helping myself or helping him by not recognizing the people who are still here and still around me and the friends and the family that I do have. But it was scary to me because in those first few months, yeah, I don't mean to do a button type of analogy, but if you've been like, oh, you can throw this person under a bus and save your friend and bring him back.

I'm a little scared of what my answer might have been right away. Yeah, that's honest and fair. So I want to end with this because I feel like this is like Sloane in a nutshell. And it makes me so happy. I've thought about this a lot, and I feel like I didn't know Russell.

Speaker A
Based on what you've written about, russell think that he would appreciate this part of the book. But you said Rilke warned that we must learn to die. That is all of life to prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death. Of a death where chance plays no part of a well made and enthusiastic death. Of the kind saints new to shape, unquote.

And Sloane writes, that's nice, but it's hard to throw together something like that at the last minute.

Sloane Crosley
I mean, okay, so I. I love it. Obviously, I'm a fan of yours right back because I'm, like, being sort of, um, a little more giddy than usual. And I have been caught. Maybe you're the first person of all time who's gotten me to laugh at my own jokes.

Just humiliating. So thank you. God, it's so good. Well, because, I mean, both. I'm quoting it.

Because it's beautiful. Exactly. And you would never do it if it wasn't that. Because I trust you that much as a writer. And I appreciate that because you do a little bit of darkness and cynicism, but it's so only the true stuff.

Speaker A
And then you also embrace the beautiful light stuff. You don't shy away from that because it's cheesy or it's whatever. It's like, whatever's true. But I do. When I read your writing, I kept thinking about the vinegar lady.

I was like, if Sloan has a thing of lemonade. And she's like, this is sweet, but she's like, no, I gotta add some fucking vinegar to this. Well, I feel like it's how you get through. Yes. You reach the most people that way, too.

Sloane Crosley
Like, how I describe things is through humor. I mean, I'm sure I cannot possibly be. You know, I know you've had other guests that I've also been a fan of on this podcast, and I know that, you know, I think when people cry the most at funerals or when things are terrible, someone makes a joke that cracks them open, that shows them the sort of kind of bird's eye view of what they're doing right now, which is, let's say, crying on the kitchen floor or whatever it is. And that little piece. Piece of ridiculousness without mocking why you're there, without not taking it seriously or not being formed by it, you're still like, oh, God, this is the scene where I do this, huh?

Yes. Okay, great. So good. So horrible. Slow.

Speaker A
You know, you're so good. The story is so good. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. It does mean a lot coming from you.

Sloane Crosley
Thank you. Absolutely beautiful. Everybody go get grief is for people. Honestly, I just can't wait till whatever you do next. Yep.

Ah, thank you. Well, thank you so much, both of you. It's a delight to talk to you both. And, Abby, I know I don't. Not to change notes too sharply, but I really am so sorry about your brother.

Speaker B
Thank you so much. Yeah. And, you know, at some point, I'm gonna come back and discuss it on this podcast. I'm just not there yet. Yeah, it's been a wild, rough couple of months, for sure.

A lot of hard stuff, but also, oddly, like, a lot of beautiful stuff, too, which is interesting to me. I'm a little confused by it. There's. It's, like, almost very. I don't know.

I'll. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. People will, by the way, before we trash all people and all parties, occasionally they will say the right thing. Yeah.

And I feel like that's the thing. And whatever the right thing is to you. Yeah. I don't know what I have felt. I give people the benefit of the doubt of not knowing and also the benefit of the doubt of being in grief and saying the wrong thing.

It's like, yeah, I'm not making you responsible in this moment. Right, exactly. My parents, they were saying a lot of stuff like, oh, well, at least he didn't have cancer. And I'm like, it's just. At least.

Speaker A
And then anything after that. At least. Exactly. Exactly. It's the framing at least.

Speaker B
I'm like, okay, there is. It is possible to say the wrong thing, you know, get over it. That's. That's the wrong. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. I just don't think anybody would say that quite yet. But anyways, they do. Okay, Sloan, go and do whatever you need to do next. But thank you for this offering and we love your work and we will read every single thing that you do.

Yeah. I am completely delighted. Thank you for having me. Truly. Thank you, pod squad.

Speaker A
Bye.

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Grief: How to Move Through Losing a Friend with Sloane Crosley

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction and Guest Introduction

2: Exploring the Themes of the Book

3: The Role of Personal Stories in Understanding Grief

4: Societal Views on Grief and Suicide

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript