Let's Talk About Hard Things

Anna Sale

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501190254
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From the host of the popular WNYC podcast Death, Sex, & Money, Let's Talk About Hard Things is "like a good conversation with a friend" ( The New Yorker ) where "no topic is off-limits when it comes to creating meaningful connection" (Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone ). Anna Sale wants you to have that conversation. You know the one. The one that you've been avoiding or putting off, maybe for years. The one that you've thought "they'll never understand" or "do I really want to bring that up?" or "it's not going to go well, so why even try?"Sale is the founder and host of WNYC's popular, award-winning podcast Death, Sex, & Money or as the New York Times dubbed her "a therapist at happy hour." She and her guests have direct and thought-provoking conversations, discussing topics that most of us are too squeamish, polite, or nervous to bring up. But Sale argues that we all experience these hard things, and by not talking to one another, we cut ourselves off, leading us to feel isolated and disconnected from people who can help us most.In Let's Talk About Hard Things, Sale uses the best of what she's learned from her podcast to reveal that when we dare to talk about hard things, we learn about ourselves, others, and the world that we make together. Diving into five of the most fraught conversation topics—death, sex, money, family, and identity—she moves between memoir, fascinating snapshots of a variety of Americans opening up about their lives, and expert opinions to show why having tough conversations is important and how to do them in a thoughtful and generous way. She uncovers that listening may be the most important part of a tough conversation, that the end goal should be understanding without the pressure of reconciliation, and that there are some things that words can't fix (and why that's actually okay).

Death

I was sixteen years old the first and last time I saw someone die.

I was at my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party in their community’s Ruritan Club building. On the walls hung group photos of men, sometimes with my grandpa in the center, sometimes with my uncle Bailey, his brother. They switched off leading the club of local farmers in their small North Carolina town outside Elizabeth City, where their daddy had farmed and his daddy before him.

My family had driven down from West Virginia for the weekend, to celebrate my grandparents with everyone in their community—the farmers and their wives, the members of their church, the volunteer firefighters. Uncle Bailey was scheduled for a heart procedure the next week.

Bailey was my grandpa’s younger brother. He had served in Europe before he took over his father’s farm with my grandpa. When Bailey got home from the war, my grandparents had already started dating. That’s how Bailey met my grandma’s younger sister, who became his bride. The brothers and their wives raised their families in two brick houses, with just a cow pasture between them.

We’d just finished taking family photos, the cousins who’d been raised far away from the farm—my sisters and me, the “city girls”—alongside the cousins who lived there. The picture I remember best is my mom and her brother, smiling while they stood behind their parents, who sat in white folding chairs, the place of honor marking their many decades together.

As I eyed the dessert table at the front of the room, I noticed Uncle Bailey there. He grabbed at the corner of the table as he collapsed. There was a scream. Then someone yelled, “June, June!” My mom’s name.

She crouched at Bailey’s side immediately. My mother is a physical therapist, and also the family member who remains uncannily calm in moments of crisis. My aunt, a nurse, and my dad, a doctor, got on the floor beside her. They started CPR. One-two-three. Breath, breath. One-two-three. Breath, breath.

Everyone else watched silently. Bailey’s wife, my aunt Ann, sat in a folding chair just feet away. Her children gathered around her. My grandpa watched too. One-two-three. Breath, breath. One-two-three. Breath, breath.

Someone had called the paramedics. No one talked much, save for a few whispers about whether the rain outside would delay the ambulance. The EMTs arrived quickly, though it seemed like forever, and we all watched as they rolled in a stretcher and pulled Bailey’s horizontal body up onto it. He didn’t move. I remember his brown socks showing between the bottom of his pants and his dress shoes.

A few days later, we gathered again. The same people who’d been at the anniversary party filed into the chapel at a local funeral home. I wore my anniversary-party dress to the funeral—I’d only packed one. In the reception hall afterward, the same kind of dessert table awaited us, with the same portioned-out sweets on individual paper plates. We celebrated Uncle Bailey’s life and said goodbye.

I later heard that the day he died, before he’d showered and changed clothes for the party, Uncle Bailey had helped deliver a calf. His dirty work clothes were still in the washer.

The next time I visited my grandparents’ house, I noticed that the family photo taken just before Bailey collapsed was displayed prominently in their living room. I remember looking at everyone’s smiles, how we didn’t know what was coming. My grandma, though, was not going to hide the remembrance of her fiftieth wedding anniversary because Bailey died at the party. Getting a nice frame for an anniversary-party photo was what you did with group photos from a family reunion. Bailey’s death had its own set of prescribed rituals: covered dishes were delivered, the minister put together a service, everyone gathered at the funeral home chapel and then processed in a line of cars to our family’s section of the town cemetery.

It happened, it was sad, and it was natural.

---

I did not grow up in my grandparents’ farming community, so this kind of proximity to death, and the ready-made rituals for marking it, were not part of my upbringing. While my North Carolina cousins lovingly raised pigs and sheep for the livestock fair knowing full well they’d be eventually slaughtered, I was the kid who picked out Old Yeller at the video store because of the Disney logo on the cardboard sleeve, and then, when the family dog gets shot at the end of the movie, tearfully demanded of my parents, “How could you let us watch this?!?”

Today, when I learn that someone I know is gone or grieving, it’s not from local obituaries or phone calls but from texts and social media. Instead of gathering together in a church or funeral home, I most often experience death online. I’ll click around for the context and details, then I’ll end up leaving a clichéd message of care—one that cautiously tries to navigate the grieving people’s religious views and my own. Sometimes I offer prayers, but more often I land on a secular message: I’m “sending my love” or “holding you in my heart.” Then, the next time I talk to someone who also knew the person who died, we trade information about what we know to fill in any gaps.

And each time this happens, it feels like I’m improvising, like I don’t know exactly what to do or say when. This makes sense, because I was not trained to deal with death this way. In my family, after a death, you would go to a service, and then you found ways to be helpful. As a kid, I remember pulling into an unfamiliar driveway and staying in the minivan while my mom delivered a casserole dish to the front door. This was at a house I’d never seen before, and would never see again. Someone had died, my mother explained, so we were bringing them dinner. This wordless care was how my mom reached out to people who were grieving or to those who themselves were at the end of life.

“The most important thing we can do to someone who is dying?” writer Anne Lamott advised. “Show up; listen; nod.” But in my adult life, I live far from many people I love, and showing up at their doorstep is not always an option. My husband and I have two little kids and both work full-time, so we are doing well if we manage to cook for ourselves a few times a week. Suffice it to say, I have never delivered a casserole.

Our experience is more the rule than the exception these days. Across the country, people are gathering around death less frequently than in the past, and when we do come together to memorialize someone, it is increasingly done in individualized, do-it-yourself ceremonies. The funeral home industry in America, for example, is grappling with decreasing demand for both funeral services and burials. “We have become more transient and less traditional, so the notion of cemetery plots for families to visit holds less significance,” US Funerals Online reported in 2018. The group reported that cremation was the choice in a majority of deaths, with cremation providers reporting that 80 percent of their business is “direct cremation.” People are collecting the remains of their loved ones and taking it from there.

At the same time, we are less connected to houses of worship that have traditionally seen us through the hardship that any death brings. As of 2019, more than a quarter of Americans claim no religion, a segment of the population that has tripled in the last twenty-five years, coinciding with decreasing trust in religious institutions. Meanwhile, Americans’ belief in some kind of afterlife has remained remarkably consistent, hovering around 70 percent since World War II. It’s not so much that we are understanding death in a more secular way. It’s that more of us are grappling with the meaning of life outside of religious institutions.

More personalized, individualized death ceremonies mean that communities of grievers have no guidebooks, rituals, or straightforward to-do lists to center them in their moments of greatest vulnerability. “After my mother’s death, I felt the lack of rituals to shape and support my loss,” author Meghan O’Rourke wrote in her memoir about her mother’s death, The Long Goodbye. “I found myself envying my Jewish friends the practice of saying Kaddish, with its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.”

And then came Covid-19. We lost the ability to sit with one another at the end, or to gather and memorialize the people we were losing. People who belonged to houses of worship were no longer able to gather there. We weren’t even able to follow Anne Lamott’s advice, to just show up to accompany our dying loved ones. All we had were words and the seeming impossibility of knowing when and how to start that difficult conversation about death.

The pandemic accelerated trends that were already happening. We are now more on our own in navigating grief and healing in our relationships. When someone in my life died during Covid, and when people in my life lost loved ones during Covid, no matter how much I would have preferred to show up at a memorial service and offer a quiet hug, that wasn’t an option. I had to step up and struggle for the words to acknowledge death and loss. I had to learn to talk about death.

The objective of hard conversations about death is to express care. Before death, with people who are aging or who become ill, we have to ask what kind of care they need and want. When death is circling, we express care for those who are leaving and those who will be left by telling them what they mean to us. When death has happened, we show care by grieving, checking in, and remembering together. That’s what we can do.

Still, these exchanges are delicate. They are happening within newly fragile relationships, and you have to pay attention to pick when to listen and when to speak. What you need to say may be too painful for someone to hear. A dying person may not want to talk to you about how they are dying; that may be the last thing they want to consider, even as time runs out. A well-meaning friend might try to offer you comfort while you grieve, but be too afraid to acknowledge the finality of death. “You’ll get through this,” they say, unknowingly diminishing the loss instead of being able to sit with you in it.

We are often tentative in our conversations around death, so they end shy of real connection. Or we long to problem-solve our way around pain and loss or decline, but we can’t. We have to just talk about, and witness together, what happens when death comes into our lives. It happens to all of us eventually. As William Faulkner wrote in As I Lay Dying, “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” Death comes for each of us, and no words can change that fact. Skipping the conversation about death because the words aren’t coming easily is shirking away from death’s ultimate challenge: to use our time well and with intention.

But while death is unavoidable, it comes in many forms that change its meaning and impact. Death can be sudden or protracted, too early or at long last. It strikes through accidents, suicides, overdoses, or, most often, in hospital beds. We lose our partners, children, parents, and siblings; we lose pregnancies, coworkers, high school acquaintances, and famous strangers. How and when we encounter death reveals who is taken care of by our society and who isn’t. I explore these distinctions in this chapter, but I try to avoid the silent hierarchical competition that can bog down discussions about grief and death. I treat all deaths equally, because if a person is grieving, a person is grieving.

Over the years, I’ve sought to learn from those who have navigated death and loss, trying to understand which kinds of words helped and which didn’t. I’ve also talked to people in my own life about their losses and their fears of death, as a kind of challenge to myself to have conversations that I otherwise would have put off. They were helpful and elucidating, and also, unsatisfactory. I wanted to be able to feel better about loss, or impending loss, by acknowledging it. But this didn’t work. Instead, I learned that skillful communication about death starts with the awareness that nothing you say is going to fix it or make it go away. The best way to talk about death is to make room for that unsolvable sadness to just be there, to offer comfort and dignity alongside it, and to say what you need to say while there’s still time.

“It’s okay you’re not okay.”

After a death, we are left to find the right way to acknowledge it—and the gaping hole it leaves—with those we love. At a time of so much pain, we often cause more by withdrawing or trying to resolve death with a neat turn of a phrase.

“The glaring wrongness was just so stunning,” Megan Devine told me of her casual conversations after her partner Matt drowned in a river at the age of thirty-nine. “Largely, the people that I expected to have better skills actually had really shitty skills.”

Megan is a therapist and grief counselor who runs a wonderful website called Refuge in Grief. Its welcome page offers two buttons—“I am grieving” and “Someone I know is grieving”—to demarcate those two distinct experiences. For both audiences, her site’s welcoming message concludes, “Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” She urges people who are grieving or who are trying to care for those in grief to push beyond the urge to offer soothing platitudes, and to instead witness the horror of loss. “People feel really helpless in the face of someone else’s pain and they want to make that pain go away so they can stop feeling so helpless,” she told me when we talked. “If we could just stop pretending that things are fine, things would be a lot better.”

Megan was a therapist before her partner Matt died, but it was that experience of loss, and the repetition of ham-handed condolences afterward, that made her reimagine her work “by shifting the focus from grief as a problem to be solved to an experience to be tended,” as she wrote in her 2017 book It’s OK That You’re Not OK.

Megan’s loss was sudden, unbelievable, shattering. She and Matt were hiking together in the woods outside Portland, Maine, in July 2009. After six weeks of rain, the river was higher than normal. Matt went in for a swim while Megan watched their dog Boris move in and out of the water. She was turned away from Matt briefly to watch the dog when she heard coughing and a call for help. She turned to see Matt clinging to a tree in the river, then letting go. Megan and the dog jumped in after Matt and they were swept about two miles downriver before they were able to climb out and call for help. Three hours later, rescue crews found Matt’s body.

Megan did not know what to do next and neither did anyone around her. A social worker arrived along with the first responders. As soon as Matt’s body was located, Megan told me, “The young crisis worker walked over to me and handed me this packet and said, ‘Now that you’re a widow, you’ll need these resources.’ That was the absolute wrong thing to say in that moment!”

Then came the series of wildly ill-timed assurances from many corners that she would “find someone else.” That started as soon as Matt died, including at his funeral. The intention, Megan knew, was to comfort her that she would not be alone forever. But to her it sounded like a callous denial of the relationship she’d lost. “How that landed for me was, he was not replaceable. You can’t fix the pain that I’m in right now by plugging another human into it,” she explained.

Often the misguided comments came from her therapist colleagues, “because they thought they knew what they were doing because they were therapists.” She remembered what felt like “unintentional condescension,” including, initially, assurances that it was okay to be sad. “Like, one, I’m not stupid,” she told me. “If you know me at all, I know it’s cool to be sad after having just watched my partner die.”

More than anything, she resented having her experience narrated to her by others, rather than just having someone stop, acknowledge, and listen. “People make an assumption about what you’re actually struggling with, and then they solve that struggle for you, never having checked out if that’s even real or relevant,” she said. “I think that’s a really common thing that happens for grieving people.”

Megan knew that people were grasping for the right thing to say that might unlock some healing, or at least a smile. Still, people’s clumsy attempts cut particularly deep because of the rawness of her grief. “When you’re grieving, when your life just exploded, you’ve got nothing. You have no barriers, no stabilizers, no ability to roll with shit. You are stripped down. And everything is painful. So you notice stuff a lot more,” Megan explained. “You are suddenly in a whole new world, but everybody around you thinks it’s the same world. And everything they say that doesn’t help really illustrates that gap even more.”

For Megan, the conversations that felt the best were direct and honest. She remembers one short exchange with the owner of a local bookstore. They ran into each other at a café, the place where Megan had met Matt, so she was already electric with emotion when she stepped inside. As she waited in line for coffee, the bookstore owner came to stand beside her. “He said something along the lines of, ‘He was a really great guy. I didn’t know him very well, but I was very impressed with who he was,’ ” Megan remembered. “Then he said, ‘I just want to tell you this is going to take a lot longer than anybody will tell you before you start to feel normal in any way again.’ ”

Then he got his coffee and left. “It was great to hear somebody tell me what I already knew to be true. It was a validation of reality,” Megan said. “And to me, that is the best thing that you can do.”

This instance was both nice and rare. Megan noticed how often people offered a cursory, “Let me know if you need anything,” as they exited conversations with he...