Yesterday, I concluded ten conversations about death and grief with writers of various disciplines. For those who would like to read them, here they are:
Jeff Jensen (Graphic Novelist, Entertainment Journalist, TV and Feature Film Screenwriter)
Tricia Lott Williford – Part 1 & Part 2 (Faith-Based Author, Speaker)
I entered into these conversations with an admittedly selfish goal: I wanted to understand death and grief better for my own sanity and peace of mind. I approached these ten artists specifically because I suspected they would teach me from a perspective I wouldn’t be able to manufacture on my own and that’s exactly what happened.
Several people in my life have asked me, “So, what have you learned from this?” I couldn’t really begin to catalogue it all because there’s so much packed into the above conversations and it would be futile to try to distill it into a handful of bullets. But I will say that I have a new appreciation for the diversity of experiences surrounding death and grief. No two people think about it and handle it exactly the same. And none of my conversation partners have any sort of illusions that their perspective is The Ultimate Perspective. We’re all learning; we’re all living through it and feeling our way around it.
But the bits of conversations that have maybe stuck with me the most are the parts that I wasn’t able to publish. Several (possibly most) of the conversations included at least something that I was asked to edit/augment/qualify/omit after the fact: “Please don’t put this in your transcript, but…” “I realized that I didn’t explain myself fully, so please mention…” “I’d prefer my own audience/family/friends/colleagues not read something I said, as they would find it unsettling…” or even simply: “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to answer that question.”
I completely understand and appreciate that. These are the toughest, most personal topics imaginable. And make no mistake, I see each of these conversations as a sacred space that I sort of invited myself into with these amazing people. So, “grateful” doesn’t begin to say it, but I’m indeed so grateful to be able to enter into these spaces with this wise group.
If there are any of these discussions you’ve yet to read, I encourage you to do so. There’s treasure throughout. And to Jeff, Lisa, Wallace, Marla, Dirk, Katherine, Chelsea, Alison, Sam and Tricia: thank you for your gracious transparency. I’m better for having had these conversations.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
I’m not a sportsy guy, but I knew my friend Sam had a job that was related to sports journalism and that was about it. You can imagine my surprise when his name once came up in conversation and the person I was speaking with said, “Sam Miller? As in baseball writer Sam Miller? You know him? What’s he like?” And that was the moment I realized a couple of things: 1) Sam is a bigger deal than I thought and 2) Part of the reason Sam and I get along so well is I have no frame of reference whatsoever for what he does and, at least for Sam, that’s kind of a relief.
And even though he’s a legendary baseball journalist, author and podcaster, I have difficulty associating Sam with any of that. Sam is my smart, strange, funny, contrarian friend who seems to have an out-of-the-box hot take on every possible topic. I have no idea what death and grief have to do with baseball, but I knew Sam would have thoughts on the matter because Sam always has thoughts.
Jeremy: I tried coming up with a baseball-related access point to a discussion about death and grief, but I’m dry here. So maybe I’ll take the lazy path and put that back on you. You think a lot about baseball and I know you think about death. Do these topics overlap at all?
Sam: If you try to trace sports all the way back to their beginning, one place you end up is the gladiatorial games. In A Brief Theology Of Sport, Lincoln Harvey wrote:
Here the citizen—the citizen of a society where three out of five people died in their twenties—could learn how to die well. Of course, the gory nature of the killing would have appealed to the sadistic among the crowd. But the majority of the people were more interested in the dying than in the killing. Here they could witness true ‘manliness,’ the cardinal virtue of virtus again.
You know I’m a film guy and I’m not much for sports movies, as they usually hit me as manipulative and formulaic, but I’ll allow there are some great ones. One of my all time favorites is Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, which is the best examination of what you’re talking about I’ve ever seen. (And Tarantino calls it one of the best films ever made, so I know I’m onto something.) But it makes the case that American football specifically is one of the closest things we have to simulating the life-or-death, gladiatorial mentality of Bronze Age combat-as-entertainment. We see the threat of death in front of us and it moves us.
I think a lot about what the central metaphor of sport is, and my position is that it’s about seeing the process of aging, exaggerated and sped up. In fact, I once wrote a long magazine piece about what specifically happens to players’ bodies as they age, and the whole time I worked on it I felt like I was writing to my therapist about my aging parents. We respond to baseball because we are moved by seeing a scaled-down version of the life cycle. Players quickly go through the phases of maturation, physical peak, then adaptation, then resignation, and eventually the end. The most touching phase is often the last, and every writer’s best pieces seem to be about athletes who are worse than they used to be. With very few exceptions, every player, from the humblest to the greatest, reaches a point where because of age or injury they are failing in front of us. This isn’t a small part of the experience. We try to ignore the knowledge that senescence and death are coming for us all, but our psyches must deal with these facts somehow.
That’s amazing. I knew you’d come through.
In terms of volume, you read more and write more than maybe anyone I know. What’s a book/article/piece of pop culture that’s influenced your thoughts on the nature of death? Do you have anything you can point to that’s made you think, “Ah! That’s interesting! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
This is a very literal answer—it’s not a work of art or of fiction but a self-helpish book about the actual nature of death, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. At least some of my death anxiety comes from the thought that death = lost opportunity. Once I die (and/or as I age), I can no longer do all the things. The way we armor ourselves against this is by trying to do all the things now, as though we’re making progress toward a fulfillment goal. But Burkeman makes the case that this is absurd; that if you try to, for instance, read all the important books—which is definitely a goal I had for a long time, and that I see now was a reflection of death anxiety—you will read maybe 1/1000th of all the worthwhile books there are, and none of the worthwhile books that are going to be published in the future. Other people do this with travel, or career goals, or fitness—but the most extreme traveler will not see more than 1/1000th of this world (let alone the cosmos), etc etc etc. Resisting these truths simply reinforces death anxiety, by constantly reminding us of how little progress we are making or could ever make.
It’s much better to accept the finitude of life, which applies not just to what we experience (the books we won’t read) but to what we are. Each of us mostly already barely exists. We don’t exist in most places on Earth right now; we don’t exist to most people on Earth right now; and we don’t witness or experience most of what’s happening on Earth right now. So when we die to this Earth, in a numerical sense it will actually change very little. I find this freeing. When I get anxious—and I consider all anxiety to be at least partially death anxiety—my mantra is: “Think about all the places you already aren’t.”
Sold. Four Thousand Weeks = now on my Kindle.
I hard-relate to the idea that death is the deadline of the project of building a meaningful life of exploring, creating, building and experiencing. I’m in the midst of a creative project with another artist right now and I recently told them, “I’ve wanted to ask you to do this for years and I’ve always talked myself out of it. I regret that I waited until I was in the latter half of my 40s to ask.” And they essentially said, “Well, the important thing is we’re doing it now, so put your pants on and let’s go.” And it 100% comes down to the march of death coming for me. I’m looking at the clock and thinking, ‘I’m over halfway done. And I’ve done maybe 25%? 30% of the stuff I’d hoped to do at this point?’ It’s a low-burn panic that hangs onto the back of my neck each day.
How much do you think about the afterlife? What aspect of it doesn’t get enough discussion?
I don’t think much about the afterlife. I have a fairly immature/inexperienced relationship to death and grieving, and my death thoughts are definitely more focused on a) fear of the actual pain of dying, i.e. there is a very good chance the the most painful moments of my life are going to be the last thing I experience, and as a fairly committed avoider of pain I think that sucks; b) the fear of losing Earth, all the sensations and ambitions of my Earthly life. Like anybody I sometimes speculate on what the afterlife could be, how it could fit into the meaning of this all. But mostly I just trust that it won’t be cruel. Nothing about my experience with God leads me to worry it will be cruel.
In another conversation in this series, a friend who works with a lot of dynamic, high-performance people mentioned that she’s noticed that a common trait among them is they spend minimal time thinking about death and are much more rooted in the present. So you’re in good company in not ruminating much on the Great Beyond.
The moment of death, however, is something I think a lot of us think about but rarely talk about. In fact, I’ve noticed that older people in my life (and some who have passed away), sometimes appear to talk about death less as it gets closer. There are definitely exceptions to that, but there appears to be a point in life where many/most people tend to close up about it because the reality of it is so immediate that there aren’t really words anymore. And I’ve wondered if that’s an apprehension or fear about the moment of death itself.
But I agree with you that whatever’s next won’t be cruel. While I’m a person of faith, I don’t believe in Hell – or at least Hell in the traditional “hot-place-of-torture-for-doing-or-believing-the-wrong-thing” sense.
When you and I get together, we usually talk about movies and the experience of being dads. What, if anything, has fatherhood done to change or evolve your perspective on death?
There was a point when my daughter was maybe 7 or 8 (or maybe 4 or maybe 11, I don’t remember it precisely) that I realized, “oh, she definitely knows me now, I’m permanent in her brain.” I very consciously realized at that point that I was much less resistant to dying than I had been before. I don’t want to die. But I’m clearly in physical decline, I’m probably in creative decline, my parents got to see me become a happy adult, I’ve had a marriage that has reprogrammed my brain into something less egotistical and alone, I’ve made some lives better, and I’ve experienced enough of the world that I’m almost literally never surprised by how anything feels, tastes, looks, etc. anymore. So when I realized that my daughter understood me and would remember me forever, I concluded that my life was basically complete. I had reached a point where I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see my death as “tragically young” anymore.
Sam’s voice—particularly as it relates to all things baseball—can be found all over the place. From televised interviews to podcasts to articles to blogs to books.
One book, which he co-authored with collaborator Ben Lindbergh, is The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. It chronicles the story of an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, who offered who offered Sam and Ben the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
I met Wallace Demarria about eight years ago when he was casting a short film he’d written and approached me about a role on the strength of my performance in a play he’d seen. Our respective stars didn’t align for that project, but we connected on social media and I’ve sort of fly-on-the-wall watched his career and development as a creator blossom over the years.
His biggest project to date has been COLORBLIND, an off-Broadway play which he wrote and performed concerning cultural systems of racial oppression. Wallace is a NAACP Award-winning artist and continues to create material across various types of media.
Jeremy: You’re one of the most driven people I know. You talk and write a lot about the experience of being black and the role of black-ness in American culture. Your show, COLORBLIND, talks a lot about that. It’s talks about a lot of other things too, but the experience of being black is a major point of discussion. Does your experience as an American black man affect your philosophies or attitudes toward death?
Wallace: I would say so. While I understand that we’re all human beings, I do understand cultural influences and different things, cultural norms, they all play a part. And unfortunately, I saw a lot of death growing up.
Mm.
I saw a man get murdered when I was six years old. And it wasn’t in a bad place. It was the most random of things. Some guy running down the street, someone stabs him to death. I saw a freakishly high amount of death. And I will be honest, I lived in a few very violent cities. So I got an early understanding that every day was a gift because the next day wasn’t promised. You can make all the plans you want.
That will break some people. That will just send some people into a lifetime of depression and fear of, you know, they’re scared to move. But I just feel like you never know when your number’s gonna get called. You could walk out your house and a tree falls [on you]. It’s like a million things. So I try to maximize the moments. I believe that life is to be lived. Being black in America, there were gang activities and this and that. And even if your parents get you away from it, you still have to go to school with it. You still have to go through this neighborhood with it. You know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
COLORBLIND deals with a lot of the police shootings and different things like that. So these are realities that happen. And so for me, I’ve always wanted to make sure the world was at least a little better because I was here. Some kind of mark, whether it’s inspiration, it’s this, it’s that, or whether I left the world with some incredible art, whatever it is… I understood that we don’t have forever.
These early experiences that you’re talking about, seeing death and being around it. Feeling like it’s closer than maybe most people have the experience of feeling that closeness of death… what I’m hearing is this is helping to shape who you are eventually as an artist.
Yes, it made me numb to it at first, but I’ve always made a point to be very self aware of my emotions, even if I’m blocking them out. One of the first things I ever wrote was What About Us? and I never even finished it. But it was about a group of kids growing up during the gang years of the 90s and what happens when you become numb to death. What happens when you lose the ability to be afraid. And that’s not a natural thing. Fear is an emotion as well. You know, that’s something you’re supposed to feel. And when you don’t feel it, you kind of live recklessly. And when I recognized I was doing that toward the end of my teenage years, I just, I didn’t care. And there’s a shooting over there; I don’t care. You know what I mean? I just kind of developed this numbness. Then I had to stop, reevaluate. I reset my life and just really had to go back to understanding, yes, [I’ve] seen a lot of it, but don’t become numb to it. Don’t become numb to life.
Yeah.
Do the opposite. Feel, love hard, laugh hard, write that script, play that role. There’s a million people who didn’t wake up today who had the same plans as you and they’re never going to get a chance. All the people who’ve lived in fear their whole life and never tried it, never did it. I’m going to do it for all of them.
“Be willing to feel it.” Whether it’s the good, the bad… I’ve been doing a number of these interviews with people over the last couple of weeks and a going theme has been ‘How different people handle grief.’ I wonder if you would talk about that a little. The experience of grief in your life: What is it for you? What do you do with it?
I’ve definitely experienced it. Whether it be from loss of an aunt who was like another mother to me or… [Speaking of] feeling it, what made me notice that I had lost that ability was one of my closest friends died of leukemia.
How young were you when this happened?
I was 19 years old. We had known each other since we were seven. I called his house to talk to him because somebody was like, “Hey, man, I think Doug died.” And I was like, “What?”
I called his house to see and his mom answered and said, “Doug is asleep.” And I was like, “OK. All right.” And I called him back later on. I was going to tell him, “Hey, people saying you died, dude. This is crazy.” And his mom answered the phone and she was crying. And she said, “Wallace, I’m so sorry. I know you called earlier. Doug passed and I’m not used to saying my son is gone yet.”
So I went to his funeral and I couldn’t cry. I didn’t cry the whole time. And I was just looking at him and I didn’t cry for six months and I was at a party six months later and went into the bathroom and all of a sudden I just broke down crying for like 30 seconds and it was there that I said, “Okay, something is wrong here. You’ve experienced a lot, but this isn’t natural. You’ll never see your friend again, at least on this side, and you can’t even cry.” And so that’s when I just kind of made it my mission to break down that wall. I’m a very strong person. I’ve been forced to be. And but sometimes you can be too strong. You can be so strong that you’re not human. And I didn’t want to be that. And so I’ve dealt with a lot of grief.
Grief is different, man. It feels different every time.
I’ve experienced a higher number of deaths than most people I know. When my friend’s mom died, I just pulled over and I wrote a song. I literally called the studio. Cause that’s how we met each other was in music. And so I got the text that his mom had died and I loved his mom and I pulled over and I pulled out a notepad and I started writing the lyrics to a song. I called my brother because he’s also a super talented musician and we recorded a song for him and his brother and that was how I dealt with it.
I tend to lean into art. This last year I lost my big brother. And his birthday was the 5th of July so that made it even more of a double whammy.
I’m so sorry.
Thank you. I leaned heavily into the COLORBLIND rehearsals. You know, I felt my feelings; I did the thing. But at the same time I also tried to remember what good or what lessons I learned from that person. Or even sometimes it’s just a feeling. In my brother’s funeral, you just felt love; you just felt, like, this peaceful thing. Yes, he was gone and yes, we were all gonna miss him but it felt more like peace than grief, if that makes any sense. So I just really tried to harness that and hold on to that. I let my emotions have their moment. I let them feel. If I’m going to cry, then I’m going to cry. I’m not a big public crier. I’m not a public person with my private life and my emotions, though I’m not dogging anyone who does that. I don’t get on social media and say a bunch of things. I’m very private because I like to be with my thoughts and my feelings and I don’t put on a mask.
Right. That does come across. I notice when you’re on social media, you tend to treat your public persona in a way where you’re sort of giving as opposed to taking. “I want to inspire you.”
Yeah, that’s it. If I didn’t do the job that I did, I probably wouldn’t have social media. But I’ve always said if you have a platform, you might as well say something.
Yeah. Yeah.
I do believe that part of my purpose of being here is to inspire, to tell people, “Man, you can do it. You can get whatever it is. You can do it.”
In COLORBLIND, you play a character named Muhammad, is that right?
Clinton Muhammad, yes.
And as you can imagine, I immediately wonder, “Is Wallace himself is a person of faith?”
Yeah, I’m definitely a person of faith. Very, very, very much so. It’s the foundation of everything that I do. I kind of comprise my own. Like I studied Christianity. I studied Islam. I studied Judaism. I’ve read the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. I said, “Well, if it’s true, if it’s real, it’s gonna be true if I research it.” But very much so. I don’t think I would make it without it because I have to have something, at least in my mind, bigger than me, bigger than all of us.
Again, I’ve seen a lot of things that would destroy people, would destroy the average person. I don’t, I’m not necessarily the most religious person, even though I know what I believe in. If you say, are you a believer? I’m going to say “Yes. But from my own research.”
It’s like my acting style. I’m a Meisner graduate and I also studied under Ivana Chebok and I took both of those methods and then I mashed them together and then created my own little things and I jokingly call it Functional Schizophrenia.
[Laughter]
Right? Like I let the characters come to life and be real and talk to me and I have to always say, “I have to meet [them].” I had to meet Clinton Muhammad. That’s kind of how my faith bank came about: I read this, I read this, I researched this, I understood this, then I broke down the translation and said, “Well hold on. If this was written in English, what did it say in the original? All right, let me figure [this] out.” So once I did that, I formulated my version of what I believe.
Yeah, that makes sense. In fact, the whole vibe that I get from you is you’re not a guy who shrugs a lot. You want to get in it, you want to understand it, you want to be inside it and you want to get through it. It’s a unique way to be.
That’s one of the things that I really admired about you and one of the reasons I said “Yes, I want to do this [interview].” It was just talking to you about wanting to really understand death. I understand that because if I’m going to do something I want to know about it. I want to look at it from all perspectives and really formulate my own opinions and thoughts on it… How to handle it and how to deal with it. That’s just me. And I see that in you as well.
Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.
I also wanted to ask you a little bit about fear. You strike me as somebody who almost treats fear like a fist fight or something like that. You have this sense of perseverance, so I wanted to ask you: What actually scares you?
Man, it’s funny you say it’s like a fist fight, because that’s how I look at it. I literally think of it like a fight, you know, there’s fight or flight. I don’t have flight. It’s not in there. I don’t know why it’s not in there. So when I have a problem, I’m going to face it. When something scares me, I’m going to face it.
Does death scare you?
Death? Yes, terrifies me. I know what I believe, but believing and knowing is different. I’ve never been over there. You know, what if it just goes black and that’s it? And I’m cognizant of it. Or what if it’s nothing? Or what if it’s everything I hope it is? I don’t know. It scares the crap out of me. So I try to live every moment. I believe there’s a God on the other side of this. I believe there is a transition, but I don’t know exactly what that looks like.
So what I do try to do is something you’ve probably heard as an actor: If you get a script and your character is supposed to die, my acting teacher said you have to ‘earn the right to die.’ You have to earn the right to die as a character.
Hm. Tell me about that a little bit.
Well, I’ll give you an example: So the first lead in a feature I was in, I died. And in the next script someone sent me, I was dying. I said, “What is this?” And it went like three in a row and somebody said, “‘Cause you die well.” And I said, “What the hell does that mean?” And they said, “It means that people care when your character dies. They’re hurt. They’re like, ‘No!'” And that tells me that I earned the right to die as that character.
Yes, okay, I see what you’re saying.
You get what I’m saying? So I try to live my life that way. It’s going to end. Every single one of us are going to check out of here at some point, all right? I hope I’m super old when it happens, because I have kids and I want to see my kids become grandparents, all right? But when my time comes, I don’t want to be bargaining and asking for more time and saying, “Man, I wish I had tried this.” When the angel shows up for me, I just want to be like, “All right, let’s go. I have worn this thing out. I have no regrets. I have no things I haven’t tried.” Only then will I have earned the right to die.
That’s very intriguing. Yeah.
You mentioned being a father a second ago. And we’re both fathers. When my children died 13 years ago, I made a tribute video about them and published it online (it’s since been removed), mostly for loved ones who were unable to attend the memorial. The video showed images of our childrens’ bodies/remains, which was surprising for some. But the video went briefly viral, which I never intended or predicted. I was contacted by various news outlets about it and found myself giving interviews to The Daily Beast, Good Morning America and BBC World Update to talk about the practice of publishing post mortem images of loved ones online.
At the time, I wasn’t sure why there was so much interest (and truthfully I’m still not), but a question occurred to me that I can’t shake: would this story have been a story if I wasn’t white? Does the idea of three non-white baby bodies hit different in our culture than the idea of my children’s bodies? I wondered if you might have a perspective on this.
It’s a great question. Unfortunately, I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have had the same effect. It should. We’re all human beings. But [as] I said once: “Racism is so ingrained into the fabric of America that only God himself could actually remove it.”
Half of us walk around with perceptions and stereotypes without even knowing we’re doing it. And it works that way across the board. That’s one of the things that COLORBLIND is about. We were all pitted against each other, right? So [if] it’s white, it’s good and it’s holy. And if it’s [black], it’s bad and it’s savage. And these images are passed down for generations.
One of the hardest things in the world for a person of color to be is an individual because we get judged by the worst of us. So ‘black guy’ means ‘horrible crime’ or ‘gangbanger’ or whatever. Somebody might say, “Well, Obama,” you know, “[he’s] an exception.” No, he’s not an exception. He’s an individual too, right? But we’ll be judged by the worst of us. But it [isn’t] the same if you’re white, right? I asked the question, “Who commits the most mass murders in this country?” It’s white males.
It’s white males by a wide margin.
It’s a huge margin. But we don’t look at every white male and say, “Potential mass shooter.” Like, I’m part Irish, right? Well, I can say that there have been people who treated me differently opposed to darker friends of mine. It was something that I noticed.
But I commend you for even asking that question because most people would not. And I want to say, I have the utmost respect for you. I know it was 13 years ago, but still my deepest condolences.
Thank you.
All the respect in the world for you. And equally for that question. Because it’s much easier for us to put blinders on and not look at the things. Or it’s easy to play victim. But we’re human beings. And that’s one of the things I try to do with my life and with my art is tear down some of these invisible walls. Let’s erase some of these lines. Because I don’t think you can actually deal with the problem if you aren’t willing to address it. Let’s have the conversations.
I thank you for all those words. Last thing I wanted to ask you is you already know that I’ve communicated to you that the reason that I’m doing all this is because I just I genuinely, deeply want to understand death and grief better than I do. This is why I’m going to people that I admire and saying, give me your perspective because I want to understand this better. Is there anything on these topics of death and grief, before we close, that you didn’t get a chance to say?
It’s going to happen. Every single person you know, you love, you care about, you meet, you admire, every single person is going to check out of here. It’s fine to grieve. Please do, don’t hold it in. I’ve seen that destroy someone that I cared a lot about. But continue living.
It’s been nonstop since my brother passed. At one point I was like, “Are you helping me out over there?” And it hurt, hurt like hell. It hurts right now to talk to you about it. Losing a sibling is like nothing I’ve ever felt of all the death I’ve ever experienced. Losing a sibling is different.
But keep living. That’ll be my advice to anyone.
Wallace’s revival of his stage play, Secrets, comes to Macon, Georgia’s Douglass Theatre later this month.
In honor of the 13th anniversary of our sons’ birth and passing, I decided to do something different this year. Rather than stumble through another annual rumination, I’m undertaking something significantly more ambitious: Interviewing 10 people I admire – all writers of extremely varied disciplines – and asking them for their perspectives on death and grief.
I’m starting with a heavy hitter.
Jeff Jensen has the career that guys like me dream about. He cut his teeth writing comics for DC and Marvel and went on to win an Eisner Award (the comic book equivalent of an Oscar) for writing the original graphic novel Green River Killer: A True Detective Story. From there, he became a pop entertainment journalist for Entertainment Weekly and adopted the online persona “Doc Jensen,” where he became best known as a LOST theorist when the show was in its heyday. This caught the attention of writer/showrunner Damon Lindelof, who invited him to co-write the feature film Tomorrowland for Disney and the limited series Watchmen for HBO. Awards by the wheelbarrow line Jeff’s shelves.
A brain tumor took his wife Amy’s life a decade ago and the strength he demonstrated throughout was both heartbreaking and beautiful to behold. And recently, newly married with the most amazing and potentially rewarding aspects of his life and career ahead of him, he was hit with a colon cancer diagnosis of his own. As of this writing, he’s battling through the last of his chemo treatments.
Jeff also happens to be one of my dearest friends. He’s among the smartest, biggest-hearted people in my life and I hate the role that death has played in his incredible story thus far. Nevertheless, we spoke about death and grief.
Jeremy: Before you and I knew each other, I have a memory of your giving a speech at a faith-based event I attended where you described what it meant to be a person of faith in Hollywood. At that time, Amy had only recently passed and you talked about the experience of grieving in the midst of famous people. With my own loss, I decided grieving out loud and publicly was a thing I could do and I found it therapeutic.
What do you think about public grief?
Jeff: For me, grieving publicly, you know, when I think about that kind of defining experience or first experience of grief, which is Amy’s cancer – and then ultimately her death – I think the story of how I understand the idea of public grieving begins [there].
At the end of her first round of diagnosis and treatments, she had pretty much received an ‘all clear,’ that the growth of any remaining cancer cells in her brain had been stalled, and hopefully they would never grow again. During that season of life, we decided to be relatively public with our community. We started a blog and we wrote about it largely as a way of communicating with people and our family who live apart from us. We were challenged to lean into our friends and our community to help us get through it.
Now cut to the second part of cancer by 2012/2013, Amy’s cancer had come back very strong. I remember some dear friends, in particular [my friend] Steve Porter, saying, “You know, Jeff, this time seems more serious. And the last time you went through it, you leaned into your community, but my experience of you was you were still doing it largely on your own, like being Mr. Caretaker, trying to be really strong, being Superman for your family. And you could really benefit from help because we need to start thinking about the fact that this bout of cancer will lead more quickly to Amy’s death.” And it was against this backdrop of being challenged in this way that we became maybe even more public about cancer and what it was doing to us and what we were facing.
We started keeping a Caring Bridge blog that was more extensive and open with the nitty gritty, painful, gross details of what was happening. More open, more vulnerable, and more dependent on people in our community to help us get through this.
Another huge influencing factor in trying to be as public as possible, was a documentary that came out in the fall of 2013 called Time of Death. It was a docu-series on Showtime, very acclaimed. And it was all of these profiles of people who were facing death and they just followed them all the way to the point of their death, including photographing and filming their actual death and how each of these different people approached dying and the certainty of dying in different ways, some more healthy than others.
Hm.
And one of the huge lessons I took away from this incredibly powerful documentary was the people who decided to close ranks and make suffering, lamenting, and grieving a very private thing… all regretted it.
Wow.
They felt like they hadn’t prepared well for this and they had gone through something that, by shutting out other people and not being known, they had set themselves up wrongly for what had happened. Whereas the people who were very public about it and wanted to do things to create a meaningful experience for them and their family [felt] like, “I just need to be known. Forget about ‘creating meaning.’ I’m going through a life changing experience here. My life is being destroyed. My loved one is dying, but my life is in transition.”
That’s the phrase that it comes [down] to: “I need to be known in this for my own sake and survival and sanity.” And for me, that’s what it became about by the end, by the time Amy died.
Yeah.
So, I was grieving and we were lamenting in public. And I’m like, “I’m that person now.” I remember having a conversation with a colleague as I was kind of facing that prospect of this looming thing where I’m about to lose my wife and I wasn’t working. Like, “How do I work in the midst of this? I’m gonna be a single parent. How do I do that?” I wrote, “I feel like I’m being erased. My whole sense of identity is being negated. And I don’t know what my future is as a husband, as a father, as a friend… [my] career. What’s going to happen to me?” And I just felt like I couldn’t keep that private. Being public about that was keeping me intact and alive.
Yeah. And you work in a community of people that–I don’t know, I don’t want to say it in a tacky way–but sort of thrives and gets energy out of making the internal not just external, but far-reaching external and there’s a psychology under that.
Sure, yeah. It’s interesting you should bring that up, because I was blogging obsessively and crazily about LOST, right? And in season three of LOST, there was an episode called ‘Not in Portland,’ where we learn about the character Juliet and her sister. She has some kind of cancer and she’s dying. And Juliet is visited by some mysterious people who tell her that if she comes to this remote island far away where this community is suffering a fertility problem – that she as a fertility doctor can help them solve – they will give her the means that she needs to cure her sister.
And Amy was just a couple of weeks coming off of her first surgery. And I think what touched her in this episode was this hope in the midst of this darkness. And we’re just weeping watching this episode. And I don’t know why I did this… maybe it’s just the way that I relate to writing or the way I was relating blogging to loss. But LOST had become this crazy, personal thing in an impersonal way where I was dumping my crazy brain onto the internet for readers to read. And it just felt like a natural progression then to sort of acknowledge that my experience of this episode was completely impacted by life circumstances. And I decided to share that in a recap, that I watched this with my wife and this is what we went through. And the response I got from readers to this share was just overwhelming.
Wow, amazing. I didn’t know that.
They were greatly moved by it. They reached out, they tweeted at me and said, “Wow, thanks for sharing that. That’s really powerful, thinking of you.” Internally at [Entertainment Weekly], that decision to share like that got a really positive response. And it touched me very much, that the readership would reach out and just say, “I’m thinking of you and your wife.” And that would continue throughout the life of LOST. That became part of the story of Doc Jensen. And I was just very grateful.
Yeah. It reminds me of the experience of blogging throughout my wife’s pregnancy. The reason the blog existed was because I wanted to understand. I was terrified, frankly, of being a dad of triplets. I’m like, ‘I can’t even imagine.’ And I wanted input and I wanted feedback similar to why I’m doing this project about death and grief. You know, ‘Tell me what I don’t understand. Teach me.’ And it was kind of slowly gaining readership.
Sure, yeah.
But then when the pregnancy was in crisis, that’s when the numbers became huge. And I remember on the day that our sons were born and they passed away, it was such a massive peak in traffic to the blog. I looked later and I was like, “My god, is that right? That can’t be right.” And it was all over the world; people were sharing this experience and reading what was written.
And a couple of weeks later, we had a memorial for our boys. We had written things that we wanted to say and people had flown into town for this memorial. And I kind of wanted to say something about the internet at the memorial. I know that sounds weird, but I feel like I wanted to kind of tribute how many people… not just commented. A lot of people commented, but also the people that just read. And I’m choosing to assume the best of all these people in terms of why they were coming. I’m sure there was a lot of morbid fascination, but whatever the case, I just was like, “I don’t know, is that weird to say something about all of those people?”
In the end, Carey was a little uncomfortable with that. She felt like, “I don’t know how that would come across.” I suppose it could seem like I was bragging on my blog at the memorial or something. Which I understand. And it’s a complicated thing, but I remember that feeling of being deeply, deeply moved at the idea that thousands of people all over the world that I’d never met were sitting down for a minute or two with our story and interacting with it, many of them sending their condolences and their sympathies. It still moves me very much, 13 years later.
Yeah, even if you’re going through it with other people, inevitably, grief and loss like this is so huge. You can’t possibly express it. You feel distance and othered from other people because it’s isolating. So to either be known by your community of people or be known by a readership or an audience and for them to reach out and connect with you or just pay attention, right? There’s something comforting and life-giving, like ‘I’m not alone in this, even though I think I might be,’ and that’s so important.
Mm-hm.
The other reality is… and this might be a way in which being public in our grief feels maybe natural to people like you and I, but can be kind of viewed as a little bit like, “What’s this really about for you?” For other people, it’s like we’re artists, we’re writers, we do things for an audience.
Right.
We have to learn how to manage that relationship and how to have a healthy relationship with our audience. But in a way that I don’t think is bad. We’re performers, right? We’re kind of wired for better or worse to have an audience and feel validated and affirmed and known through audience feedback.
Exactly. Even this conversation we’re having right now about death is not just for you and me.
Right! Yeah. I acknowledge that there’s a lot of complicated psychology and desire bound up in that that we may not fully understand about ourselves, but it does lead naturally to writing about it or being known by it. And for me, I’ve just kind of come to the conclusion that it’s better to be public and known in your grief than private and isolated in your grief. Because I think the alternative to being public can be kind of messy and weird. And yeah, you have partners and families who are like, “Do you have to share all of this? Like, what about me? This is part of my story too, you know.”
Yeah. Yeah.
Amy was always really supportive about [it]. “Sure, write what you want to write. I don’t mind people praying for me. The more people, the better.” But I can understand how, for other people, that can be complicated.
Yeah, it can be. Maybe even for most people it would be very complicated.
So, speaking of blogs and cancer… I wanted to ask you about this. Now cancer is in your life. And you’re blogging about it.
Yeah.
And to a person, every person I’ve had the ‘Jeff Has Cancer’ discussion with… they all have precisely the same reaction: “You’ve got to be kidding me. Why Jeff? This isn’t fair and that’s insane. Of all people, why Jeff?” And I wanted to ask you about that a little bit.
I mean, certainly in my life, you’re one of the most vital and important relationships that I have. I treasure our relationship so much. But I’m not the only one who feels that way. So many people feel that way about you. Do you ever feel singled out? You know, “Fuck this guy in particular.” You seem to be handling it sort of gracefully, but what do you think?
Well, first of all, I feel the same way about you. It’s very sweet and it’s reciprocated.
Thank you.
When I first got the diagnosis that I had cancer, my first reaction was, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I immediately thought of [my] kids. They’ve already lost one parent to cancer 10 years ago. Now they’ve got another parent who has cancer and while my prognosis from the start is less dangerous than Amy’s cancer was and my prognosis is so much better than hers… You know, hers was, at best: ‘You have two and a half years’ and we got seven more thanks to medication. With mine, it’s like, “Hey, you get a surgery and a little chemo, you’re going to live.” So, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of death per se, as much as ‘My kids have to go through this again.’
So it’s more outward facing. You’re not thinking, ‘Why would a guy like me…?’ You’re thinking, ‘Why would you touch my kids’ lives like this?’
Right. And, more philosophically, my attitude has always been, ‘Why not me?’ Like, you know, especially with this cancer, this cancer is on the rise. And more and more people our age and even younger are getting it. I’m part of a statistical trend; it makes sense. And spiritually, I don’t know, I think I’ve always held a kind of belief that I’ve been blessed with so much fortune in my life, misfortune is ultimately going to become an inevitable part of it. I’m going to get an illness, something is going to happen. It’s inevitable. Now, maybe I thought Amy was that hit. But the truth is, I feel I had some kind of murky philosophical framework where bad things don’t just happen to good people or bad people. They happen to all of us and, somewhere along the way, the bad thing is going to happen to me. So, I’ve never really been burdened too much by ‘Why me?’
I also have tremendously low self-esteem, Jeremy, so I don’t think of myself as a good person. You know, all those years stealing comics when I was a kid, this is it. This is the punishment. The wrath of God.
[Laughing] The retribution is gonna go straight up your ass.
[Laughing] That’s right!
And it makes sense that, of course, this is not the same situation [as Amy’s cancer] all over again.
But I’m interested – and maybe I’m asking Jeff the Writer here – about this idea of death… or the “spectre of death” or something like that… as an entity. You’re famous for writing about a serial killer. And death is of course not just something that’s been in your life, but it’s something that, creatively, you’ve had to spend time with. I picture you thinking about death as a thing in a different way. You know, there’s the [Ingmar] Bergman Death who’s playing chess. There’s the Neil Gaiman Death who’s this cute, funny, young girl. There are all these different ideas of death and I wonder if you connect with any of those ideas?
It’s interesting that you would liken it to a force, an entity that is stalking us and then ultimately doing something to us, right? I’ve watched three people die in my life. I watched my grandfather die. I was by his bedside when they took out the incubation tube and he died. I watched Amy die. And she was like just hyperventilating and trying to catch her breath and saying to me, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” before we got some morphine that allowed her to relax. But she continued to hyperventilate. And then I watched [my] good friend Danielle die.
In all three of those events, there was something kind of haunting and menacing about it. It felt like a ravaging. It felt like I was watching someone being assaulted and, at their most vulnerable moment, having their agency stripped away by some unseen entity, right? And it felt horrifying to me to witness. And in turn, it fills me with a hopelessness and despair because you’re empathizing with this person. There is an event happening and it cannot be stopped and it will not be stopped. And it’s happening in front of your eyes and there is nothing you can do about it. And it makes you feel small and helpless. It robs you of your own sense of agency too, right?
And in those moments, it does feel like death is an entity, a force that is doing something to [people]. Now, doctors would tell you what we’re actually witnessing is called “active dying,” right? In just the same way that your body naturally knows how to give birth to life, when a body knows that the time is over, it begins a systematic shutdown and it looks terrible. But it’s actually your biological programming shutting you down.
Mm.
The writer in me is witnessing this invisible entity having its way with someone I love. And it’s just terrifying.
Yeah.
Whenever I think about death, Jeremy, I go to a spiritual place. And I refuse to believe that death is actually part of the design of the world. I think that death is something that entered into the world. And we can get theological about it, but I’ll just stop there. I think death is unnatural and not the design and fundamentally outrageous and infuriating. And in this regard, it could be a supernatural, an abstract-yet-real supernatural force. Death ultimately owes its existence to some sort of supernatural event that changed the world, right?So it’s evil. And I [look at] Jesus, because here’s God incarnate and his friend Lazarus dies. He sees his friends grieving and wailing and anguished, and he’s anguished for their anguish. And he’s also upset that his friend Lazarus died. And there’s anger in him when he goes outside that tomb and calls Lazarus out, because he’s angry at Death the Robber for causing all of this pain and suffering.
And I feel like I take my cues from Jesus there. There’s something ultimately wrong and unnatural. And similarly, [he’s] in the garden praying. He knows what’s looming and he doesn’t want it to happen. Why would he, right? And then dying and feeling forsaken and all of that, all the cues from Jesus tell us that there’s something wrong about death.
And there’s a stoic response, like, “Well, death is a part of life,” or “I’m going to be strong and not let it affect me.” Bullshit. Death is outrageous and wrong and evil and it deserves that response from us.
Yeah. The concept of death in a biblical sense is sometimes described as not just an enemy, but an enemy to be ultimately defeated, which sort of humanizes it.
Yeah, I know the scientists are working on the Immortality Project, you know, and Life Extension Project. But it’s ultimately an enemy that we cannot defeat. It’s not the devil. It’s not a boogeyman. It feels more like an abstract, fourth dimensional, Cthulhu monster having its way on the world. We can’t see, but it has its way with us.
Right. So, you won a huge award [an Eisner] for Green River Killer, telling your dad’s story in a lot of ways. You’re a writer who’s now in a pantheon of writers who’ve told a Death story, which was extremely well done. But I’m a creator as well and we both know you’re sort of starting from zero and there’s so many ways you could tell a story and you see this buffet of ways to tell it. And eventually you pick a lane and you do it, which is what you did and very successfully. But I wanted to ask you about death in popular entertainment. What have you seen and thought, “I’m interested in what they’re doing with this topic.” What’s worth paying attention to?
Well, given that most people haven’t seen it, I returned to the docu-series Time of Death, which [may be] hard to find, unfortunately. [*Note: it’s available to stream for Showtime or Paramount+ subscribers]
It’s so powerful. It asks you to sit with these people who are dealing with death and respond to it in your own way. And it doesn’t judge these people at all. I just can’t recommend it enough. It’s like the Bible of Dying for me.
I think that The Leftovers, written and created by a good friend of mine, Damon [Lindelof], deals really well with the anguish and alienation and weirdness of grief and what it does to you and how it unravels you and how it sends you out into the world, grasping for, “How then do I live my life after this event?” and all the tragic ways, absurd ways, successful ways, unsuccessful ways that people respond to it.
In my experience, I have found that the best solace for death and the grief that comes with it is community and having people that you can just lean into and trust and carry you and support you. So to that end, a story that my youngest son, Nathan, and I just read together, is just a beautiful thing. People might think it borders on the sentimental, but I do think its wisdom is incredible, [and that’s] Because of Winn-Dixie.
Yeah.
So current stories in the culture, I wish I had a better recommendation. What I think, though, is interesting about our culture right now, Jeremy, is that I think that people are trying to deal with it more. I feel like pop culture is giving more attention to themes like trauma and post-traumatic stress and how it affects us and impacts us. And maybe it’s because it’s a post-9/11 culture and a post-economic crash culture, but I feel like that’s just been a major theme in all of our pop culture. And I see people kind of dealing with it and writing stories about it.
Right. You know, when you were talking about reading with your son, I completely forgot about this until you were talking, but when my girls were pre-teens, I used to read to them every night. We read, I think, a couple of the Narnias, and maybe The Hobbit. But one of the books that I read to them was Bridge to Terabithia.
Yes!
And I remember reading that when I was probably around their age, maybe a bit younger. But as an adult coming back to that book and reading that story to them, I was really surprised at how honestly it gets into death from a kid’s point of view. Also, showing adults that are dealing with it imperfectly and trying to understand it. I think we also read Where the Red Fern Grows, which again deals with death.
We’re reading that now!
Really?
Yes! And before that was Bridge to Terabithia. And we get to some of these chapters late in the book and I’m trying to hold it in. I’m crying. But now we’re reading Where the Red Fern Grows. I’m looking forward to seeing what tears [will be] shed.
Yeah, yeah, it is funny how many of these perennials that we read as kids are kind of death-specific.
I like what you said about Bridge to Terabithia and the adults not [being able to] deal with it. “How do you grieve?” Well, what a question! There must be good answers to that, that [can be] known. I feel like I know them. Having gone through grief, I could probably rattle [some] off there:
Lean into community. Talk your feelings out. “Stay low,” as our friend Keith Douds says. Which means, ‘Maybe don’t give yourself over to rash actions or huge life changes or, jump into anything that maybe you shouldn’t jump into.’
There are a lot of common sense things that can help you grieve. Yet we don’t [always] do them. I remember when Amy died and I felt like I was doing the caretaking thing. Well… I was doing the suffering thing. I think we did her funeral really well. And I felt like, ‘Okay, I’ll be able to navigate what comes next really well.’
And during that span of life, my house was constantly filled with people. My parents were living with me at the time, helping out and all of that. Lots of people were here and supporting. But then the funeral’s over, the family who came to town leaves, my parents leave, friends have to get back to work.
Within a week or two of Amy passing, my kids go away to summer camp, my oldest two. And I remember a dear family friend saying, “Hey, why don’t I take Nathan for five days so that you can be on your own and kind of have some time, take a breath, do what you want?” And I thought, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ And it was. It was a wonderful gesture. And I remember dropping off Nathan at the friend’s house and then I went and did some shopping. And so I went and bought a bunch of new clothes and I came home for the first time in I don’t know how long to a house that is completely empty and it’s dark and there’s no lights on. And I was immediately struck with two feelings at once: Loneliness and terror. I was afraid of the dark, you know, like my empty dark house… and I’m immediately turning on lights and I’m not feeling great. It just hits me like a truck.
Mm -hmm.
“What is this? This is the worst thing.” I just felt… it was nothing concrete, in terms of an idea. I just felt so suddenly discombobulated and unmoored. “I’m all alone. I’ve got to do this on my own. Like… no.”
Yeah.
I look back on it now and realize I had no clue what I was getting into. And I would say the next six months, I felt like I was really lost. “How do I do this and do this? I’m so well supported and so well resourced, yet I’m just now ‘in it.’ How do I grieve? How do I live? What am I doing?” And I made some choices and did some things that I would not do again.
But it’s all to say that grief is messy. Grief is hard. Death takes something away from you and changes you and impacts you and now you’re grieving and perhaps there are great ways that you can prepare for it and live well. But somewhere along the way, there was some work I didn’t do. I don’t know what, but all I know is that when it finally hit, I felt lost and it’s messy.
So what do you do then? It’s even more important to lean into your community, have people in [your] life that you’re accountable to and just accept help and ask for help. It’s gonna be messy. It’s a hard thing to prepare for and chances are you won’t be as prepared for it as you should be. It’s gonna be flawed and it’s gonna affect the way that you deal with your kids and stuff like that. But be open to that, accept it, don’t feel ashamed of it, but just work it out.
Be open about it—my God—with your kids, with your community, with your family.
Jeff’s most recent graphic novel, Better Angels: A Kate Warne Adventure, chronicles the story of America’s first female detective, a trailblazing working woman trying to make a living and do some good in a tumultuous, sexist age, and whose mysterious life and tall tale exploits are truly the stuff of legend.
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