Transcript
Speaker: There is no fix for grief.
Speaker: There is no fix for loss.
Speaker: There's just like waking up and doing it and like fucking up and then doing it again.
Speaker: And then.
Speaker: Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldowney, a.k.a.
Speaker: The Glam Reaper.
Speaker: On today's episode, this is somebody who I have watched.
Speaker: Sounds creepy.
Speaker: I've watched for a very long time and I'm very, very thrilled and honored that she is gracing us with her presence on our podcast.
Speaker: I'm really, really thrilled.
Speaker: So I want to I want to introduce Rebecca from Modern Laws.
Speaker: So she co-founded Modern Laws.
Speaker: She's an incredible author.
Speaker: She reaches out to people in grief.
Speaker: It's just I'm going to let her introduce herself in her own words.
Speaker: But I'm just so thrilled to have her.
Speaker: So welcome, Rebecca.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thanks so much for having me today.
Speaker: So what can I tell you?
Speaker: What can I start out with for you?
Speaker: Okay, well, I guess tell me.
Speaker: So you're author of many books.
Speaker: Your social media speaks to a lot of people.
Speaker: You've met Gayle King, who...
Speaker: Who's awesome.
Speaker: She's as awesome as you want her to be.
Speaker: She actually attended a funeral that I did.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: In a funeral.
Speaker: She was in the front row and I was the celebrant.
Speaker: And I remember just standing up there going, oh, my God, like the pressure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Ripples.
Speaker: She's a tall, physical, like literal and, you know, metaphorical presence, if you will.
Speaker: And she's Oprah's best friend.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like one degree.
Speaker: You just like that one step away.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Tell us, how did you start your journey?
Speaker: How did you come into this?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: So again, like pleasure to be here.
Speaker: My name is Rebecca Sofer and I run Modern Loss, which is, you know, really been around for the last 10 years.
Speaker: We just celebrated 10 years of existence.
Speaker: It initially was started as an online publication.
Speaker: To this day, we've run thousands of pieces that are
Speaker: you know, 99.5% of which are not written by me, but are written by people all over the world who have something to say in a very narrowly focused way about one aspect of the long arc of loss.
Speaker: And there are first person accounts and they're about just like everything under the sun.
Speaker: Like you would think they would just be about funerals or sadness, but no, they're about sex and finance and identity and how do we make decisions and how do we parent and how do we have careers?
Speaker: You know, because
Speaker: The goal is really to show that grief is all.
Speaker: It affects every single aspect of our being because, you know, at the risk of sounding like woo, we are grief, like we are alive.
Speaker: And so it's going to affect every part of, you know, our existence.
Speaker: And this was certainly, you know, since we started this, I co-founded it with my friend Gabby Berkner.
Speaker: In late 2013, you know, as I said, we've published now thousands of pieces on the site.
Speaker: They're all free to access lots of, you know, resource pieces, how to pieces from experts.
Speaker: And I've written two books.
Speaker: I do speaking all over at companies and nonprofits and foundations.
Speaker: And I really love that stuff.
Speaker: I even do grief comedy shows because that's kind of like my real jam.
Speaker: You know, my background is in journalism and political satire.
Speaker: And this was certainly not a path that I would have chosen to take in life.
Speaker: This was something that life kind of foisted upon me as most of us experience, which is like life happens and we make decisions with the information that we have at the moment.
Speaker: And the information I had at a particular moment in my life was learning that my mom is
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: loving life because I really felt like I was starting to cook with gas.
Speaker: You know, my career was officially starting.
Speaker: I had just gotten my journalism degree from Columbia, my master's.
Speaker: I was living in this resplendent, tiny one bedroom apartment.
Speaker: And then bam, I got a phone call.
Speaker: My mom was dead.
Speaker: And I found out when I got to the hospital.
Speaker: And I had just seen her an hour beforehand because we had just been on a family camping trip.
Speaker: My dad was in the car with her.
Speaker: And from one second to the next, I went from somebody who kind of thought she knew what her life looked like to someone who had absolutely no idea what type of terrain she was navigating because her person, which was my mom,
Speaker: was no longer living.
Speaker: And that's what I call the after of my life, which was, you know, being forced to become intimately acquainted with profound grief and loss way earlier than I kind of thought I would be.
Speaker: And then having to navigate it just four years later in an on another level because my dad died from a heart attack.
Speaker: So by the time I was 34, I had no living parents.
Speaker: And I was incredibly familiar with how stigmatized the topics of grief and loss are in our culture.
Speaker: And I felt like that stigma was incredibly stupid.
Speaker: And I got sick of it.
Speaker: And so years later, in 2013, we launched Modern Loss.
Speaker: And it was really a direct response to feeling like there was a white space in the conversation about grief and loss that
Speaker: didn't anchor itself in platitudes, which I think have helped a total of zero people over the course of history, in cheesiness, you know, in just like clinical coldness, in like religious circles and like in and of themselves, some of those things can be helpful to somebody who is
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: not just in spite of what they've gone through, but because of it sometimes, and are kind of being insistent on figuring out a way to tease some meaning from the mess of it all.
Speaker: And so that's what the goal of modern law is, is to just obliterate the stigma, make people feel less isolated in what is already an individual experience,
Speaker: And make them laugh along the way because we can't be so solemn all the time about this stuff.
Speaker: There's just no possible way.
Speaker: Like that means that you're just simply not gleaning any enjoyment or lightness out of your life.
Speaker: And you don't deserve that.
Speaker: You deserve to be reminded that you're still in there somehow.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, I'm really proud of what we've done.
Speaker: I'm really proud of my work.
Speaker: And I started it during a time where I got a lot of
Speaker: really odd looks from people wondering why on earth I would want to work in this space.
Speaker: Well, I can fist pump you on that because I also get that.
Speaker: I think my parents sometimes look at me like, could you not have just gone work for Google?
Speaker: Could you not have just
Speaker: you know right it's like I was only just talking to somebody before you where I said you know my brother ticked all the boxes he had you know got the wife two kids the dog house all that sort of stuff nine to five job getting promoted I'm like I'm off to New York to start a funeral business bye guys
Speaker: Yeah, each of our journeys is individual.
Speaker: And it's interesting, actually, that you said that, you know, you touched on something there that honestly, my TEDx talk that I did was predominantly about it, which is grief is so unique to us all.
Speaker: And it doesn't have to be the death of somebody.
Speaker: It can be a divorce.
Speaker: It can be, you know, what I specifically and I'm spoiler alert here.
Speaker: But, you know, I was talking about pet loss at the time.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: It's dinkum out to it and still does, honestly.
Speaker: But yeah, it can be the loss of a beautiful piece of jewelry that your mom had or your grandmother had.
Speaker: It can be anything.
Speaker: And it's and I even, you know, in some of my celebrant talks, you just said, like, grief is who we are.
Speaker: It's the human experience.
Speaker: It is love.
Speaker: grief is just love in an entirely different form it's just it's a part of who we all are and every one of us is going to go through it so I think what you've done with modern loss and you know I'm going 15 years which is why I creepily said I've been watching you but you've almost I've grown with you guys um you know you've you're I mean you're up at like 40,000 followers I think on Instagram I mean you're you're everywhere I mean it's incredible like I said you're you've met Gayle King and she's
Speaker: approved your book in its highest form.
Speaker: It's it's such a it's been such a joy to watch and and watch people watch a community like that grow because it is so important for people to feel like they have a place whether it's online or in a book to grieve with like-minded people you know.
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: And the reason that there are so many different genres of my work, you know, digital, not just digital, but like publication, like online publication, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and then written books.
Speaker: and then live events is because I always want to keep figuring out new ways to connect with people and have people connect with each other and themselves in different ways.
Speaker: It's fun to play around with that because I use, say, a different language on the Instagram account that I do in some talks or in written essays that I might write for, I don't know, like Time magazine.
Speaker: I take on different tones and
Speaker: Because grief is like has endless permutations and combinations and loss does too.
Speaker: And, you know, it's like if you're talking people like, oh, is it morose to talk about grief and loss on this time?
Speaker: And I'm like, not really, because talking about loss is like talking about life.
Speaker: Like you could be talking about anything.
Speaker: It's what falls down.
Speaker: underneath that umbrella, you know, like, what are you talking about that stems from loss?
Speaker: And that could be anything.
Speaker: So, you know, I do have a lot of fun with it.
Speaker: And that sounds really weird to use the word fun.
Speaker: But I do because I feel like I feel very strongly that this is not something that I would have chosen to do in my life for a profession had it not been for personal experience.
Speaker: And as somebody who already had dedicated
Speaker: you know, in her mind, her career to telling stories and helping people tell stories, you know, I was going to do dirt.
Speaker: I was doing journalism or I was doing comedy, let's be honest, but satire, which is, you know, God's work to the world.
Speaker: I had decided that doing it through this niche was
Speaker: category was the way in which I almost like it was like it was like a mission for me like I felt like I really had the skill and the personality and the drive to be able to help people tell their stories through this realm and I see the connections that have been made over years I see people supporting each other on our Instagram feed in the comments every single month I do a prompt you know like Elmo was just in the news
Speaker: God bless them.
Speaker: Love Elmo or her.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know Elmo's gender.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Does anyone?
Speaker: God bless Elmo.
Speaker: Who does not adore Elmo?
Speaker: And Elmo asked, you know, how is everyone doing on Twitter?
Speaker: There were like a billion responses and people were like traumatizing Elmo with all of their hard things that they were sharing.
Speaker: And that just goes to show that people are just waiting for an invitation to share their hard thing and talk about it and not for anybody to fix it for them.
Speaker: You know, the person who put said, hey, Elmo, like not great, Elmo, like I'm at the hospital, just found out I had a brain tumor, does not think that Elmo is going to excise that tumor or fix it for them or whatever.
Speaker: But they had somewhere to put their feeling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: someone to witness that.
Speaker: And every month on our Instagram feed, every single month on the first of the month, I put something up there with the same prompt, which is like, which tough dates do you have to get through this month?
Speaker: And so I've been doing what Elma's doing for years, every month.
Speaker: And it's
Speaker: I think, a real valve release for people because they need to put it somewhere.
Speaker: You know, people are always bracing themselves for the tough dates or like the Hallmark holidays or like whatever.
Speaker: And modern loss is meant to be this like really soft landing pad for them where they know that they're always going to be treated with different personalities for sure.
Speaker: But with like an I get it kind of attitude and you just need people who get it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And it's I mean, it takes a red furry teddy bear effectively to open up the Internet.
Speaker: I mean, when I saw that, I was just grateful that maybe Elmo could break the Internet and not Kim Kardashian's ass would be nice for a change, you know?
Speaker: And let's bring proper etiquette, I don't know, is the word back to the Internet.
Speaker: It is fascinating and everyone deals with it in completely different ways.
Speaker: And I love what you said about it.
Speaker: It's almost like putting a bucket out into the world and just getting dump whatever you got to dump in there.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: And I mean, even they talk about that in terms of supporting a friend in grief or whatever.
Speaker: You know, even just a partner and it doesn't have to be necessarily grief.
Speaker: But I mean, as you and I both know, it is part of grief.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be the death of somebody.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, you turn to your partner and you say, hey, you know, I had a bad day.
Speaker: I don't need you to solve it.
Speaker: I just need to get the words out of my mouth.
Speaker: And I just want you to sit here, listen, open the bucket, let me dump into it.
Speaker: And then we move on with our day.
Speaker: We have a glass of wine.
Speaker: We go for dinner or whatever it is.
Speaker: And I definitely think the female is a little bit more prone to needing that from male counterparts.
Speaker: It seems, you know, in my studies of psycho, psychology, I guess, whatever I be, of the male, female brains and stuff like that.
Speaker: It's we don't necessarily need somebody to solve all our problems.
Speaker: We just need to be seen, heard, and that's it.
Speaker: And then we can move on.
Speaker: We don't need you to solve, you know, come in on a horse and solve everything.
Speaker: One question I had is you worked with
Speaker: You've obviously met a lot of incredible, influential people over the course of the last 10 years, but you did say you started working with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report, and he obviously has had his own grief and disgust.
Speaker: What's your thoughts on that?
Speaker: Have you...
Speaker: Have you done anything with him?
Speaker: Is that something that you would consider doing?
Speaker: I mean, and I'm touching on this with like the likes of Anderson Cooper and, you know, these celebrities are opening up.
Speaker: Celebrity men, actually, which I find to be fascinating and great, are opening up grief and doing podcasts on grief and shows and stuff.
Speaker: What's your general thoughts on that?
Speaker: Oh, my general thoughts.
Speaker: I don't know, like if Stephen ever wanted to do something with me, obviously, I would say yes in a heartbeat.
Speaker: So sure, Stephen, I'm available for any of your grief oriented projects.
Speaker: No, he's been super supportive of modern loss and
Speaker: He wrote like a cover blurb for the first book, which was called Modern Loss, Candid Conversation About Grief, Beginners Welcome.
Speaker: And for the second book, my second book, which is called The Modern Loss Handbook, An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience, which came out about a year and a half ago.
Speaker: He was incredible.
Speaker: Like I just got like a billion notifications on my phone one evening and
Speaker: And saw that he had tweeted it out saying like what something like this is a new book from an old friend who does this beautiful job of talking about grief and loss.
Speaker: And I mean, yeah, that was probably one of the high moments of my life.
Speaker: And yeah, I mean, I think that it's great.
Speaker: You know, when Modern Law started 10 years ago, this topic was something that was really in the shadows.
Speaker: It was really, I think, relegated to the people who kind of really needed to talk about this stuff.
Speaker: It was very much a niche.
Speaker: type of conversation, which is ironic because it's like the most universal thing that somebody can experience.
Speaker: And as you said, grief is not just death loss.
Speaker: I mean, if it feels like grief to you, it's grief.
Speaker: It's to say that it isn't.
Speaker: And I think that, yeah, fast forward many years, I do think we still have a long way to go, especially in terms of how we support each other at the workplace, you know, bereavement leave policies, stuff like that.
Speaker: I think we certainly have a long way to go.
Speaker: Our culture is really set up as a can do fix it type of thing.
Speaker: And there is no fix for grief.
Speaker: There is no fix for loss.
Speaker: There's just like waking up and doing it and like
Speaker: fucking up and then doing it again and then doing it better.
Speaker: I mean, that's just the way that it goes.
Speaker: And the hope is that as you fumble through it, you are kind of like picking up these random tools of resilience and coping that you can put into like a box.
Speaker: And then when you're having a really hard moment, you can pull from that box and try something from it.
Speaker: And I think that, but even though I still think we have a long way to come, you know,
Speaker: I do think that the pandemic has really forced us to contend with the reality of grief because it's everywhere we look, it's everywhere around us.
Speaker: And, you know, you throw a pebble and you're going to hit 30 people who have a story or 10 to share with you.
Speaker: And so people like Anderson and like Stephen, who are
Speaker: talking about this are really just being excellent grief role models for people.
Speaker: And the reason that I've always done stuff with, say, celebrities or people doing really cool things are not because I think it's really cool to do things with people who are, you know,
Speaker: well-known comedians or actors or whatever.
Speaker: You know, we featured so many well-known people over the years.
Speaker: And yeah, sure, it is cool.
Speaker: But more than that, it's like, let's see if you see that Mindy Kaling had something great to say about the Modern Lost book.
Speaker: You're like, wait, I love Mindy Kaling.
Speaker: She's awesome.
Speaker: She's really funny.
Speaker: I love her stuff.
Speaker: Wait, if she can talk about this stuff or if she's willing to open up, maybe I can do that, too.
Speaker: It's really meant to be
Speaker: Kind of like an unspoken encouragement to just kind of share your story with people who feel safe to share it with because you have no idea the support that can come out of this and you're not going to know until you try.
Speaker: And it's not fair because.
Speaker: When you have a really hard thing that you're dealing with, your pet died, you had a miscarriage, your husband died, you had this terrible divorce.
Speaker: It's fair to wish for the world to just cut you a break for the foreseeable future and for everybody to intuit what you need and preempt your sadness and hard days and text you and come with casseroles.
Speaker: But that's just not the way it goes.
Speaker: We're all just trying to keep our act together, everybody in the world right now.
Speaker: And so it really is up to us, the people going through it, to figure out ways to not only ask for what we need, but also to accept it.
Speaker: That's just the only way to go through it.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's working with communities like what you've set up and stuff like that can really just provide that support, give that strength, I guess, for people to be able to sort of ask for help and receive it.
Speaker: As you said, I mean, it's the receiving and the accepting of it that can nearly be the more difficult part.
Speaker: I know as an Irish person, we're not very good at that part of it at all.
Speaker: What is what are you working on now?
Speaker: What is the future?
Speaker: What are we what's the plans for Mother Laws?
Speaker: Oh, my evil plans to take over the world.
Speaker: Yeah, well, so my second book came out about a year-ish ago, a year and a half ago.
Speaker: And everybody's like, wait, are you writing another book?
Speaker: And I'm always like, God, writing a book is really hard, you guys.
Speaker: Like, I don't know if you noticed that.
Speaker: But writing 250 pages in 80,000 words, that's a lot of work.
Speaker: And the book that I wrote, the second book is really it's a handbook, which means it also has some interactive portions in it, which I want people to to do to write in.
Speaker: It's not like a workbook or a journal, but it has places where you can write.
Speaker: And so I've just been having a marvelous, meaningful time for the last year and a half going all over, like all over the world.
Speaker: You know, I've spoken to.
Speaker: in a lot of different places and countries.
Speaker: My book is available in other languages.
Speaker: And I've just been so moved and gratified to meet so many cool communities along the way.
Speaker: And I feel like in real life, interactions have been where I've been kind of focusing my attention.
Speaker: I do a lot of speaking at corporations, nonprofits, foundations about, you know, creating and
Speaker: empathetic work communities and, you know, specifically, yeah, like parenting through grief, pulling each other through friendships, how to create support systems, stuff like that.
Speaker: And there, it's what I really love doing right now, because it's just like, you can actually see the energy in a room change when you realize that people in it are having like an emotional exhale and realizing that they're the weight of their burdens
Speaker: can feel so much lessened if they are being divided up and shared and carried on many other shoulders.
Speaker: So I'm just kind of like evangelizing the whole like, you need community and hard things kind of thing.
Speaker: And I've really been loving it.
Speaker: So, you know, I would say that my speaking career is something that I'm putting much of my focus on.
Speaker: And yeah, there's always, you know, like I do, I do live comedy events and variety shows.
Speaker: I did a phenomenal job.
Speaker: thing called the Modern Lost Variety Show in New York City last year with Broadway singers and comedians and actors.
Speaker: And it was so phenomenal.
Speaker: And I hosted it.
Speaker: And it was a lot of like improv and like grief juggling.
Speaker: And it was just really, really fun.
Speaker: And so I just love getting the chance to play with that stuff.
Speaker: Because as I said earlier, I really like reaching people in ways that they find counterintuitive to how they feel like they'd be seen.
Speaker: in their grief and loss.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And anything, anything, literally anything that brings that to the surface is a good thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Juggling.
Speaker: It doesn't matter.
Speaker: Well, it is amazing to have you on.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: And we're going to leave all the links so that anybody wants to get in touch with Rebecca or book Rebecca for her next speaking or variety show.
Speaker: We'll leave all of those down below.
Speaker: Yeah, it was just amazing.
Speaker: We love what you do.
Speaker: We're here first and can't wait to see all the great things that you're going to do in the future.
Speaker: And as somebody writing my fourth book at the moment, I... And it's so funny because people kind of just, oh, just write another one, you know.
Speaker: Right, I'll just like fall out of you.
Speaker: I guess it's just like, you know, there are some people who just they want to write lots and lots of books and that's great.
Speaker: I just I want to write when I have something to say.
Speaker: Well, and that's exactly it.
Speaker: But it's also I know you and I were kind of kindred spirits.
Speaker: It's we're doing all these other things.
Speaker: So for me, like if I could take a month vacation and go to a remote island, the book probably would fall out of me.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: But, you know, we've got podcasts, we've got speaking gigs, we have, you know, day to day jobs to do parenting, maybe not for me, but, you know, all these all the things, all the things.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: You know, that's that's the that's where the book gets gets stalled for Uno Memento.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, the good news is it's like I would say my book, it's pretty all encompassing.
Speaker: I mean, it really has three goals.
Speaker: It's to help people stay connected to their person or their pet, stay connected to themselves and stay connected to the world around them.
Speaker: So it really is about like, you know, memory, ritual, but also like literal self-care, like, you know, managing anxiety, good sleep.
Speaker: you know, doing creative types of DIY therapies and then also like figuring out how to manage your social circles.
Speaker: Like how do you navigate friendships and intimate relationships and your work environment?
Speaker: So these are all like real things that people do need to figure out for themselves when they're moving through loss.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I think the good news for me about this book is that it's pretty evergreen.
Speaker: It's not going to be out of date
Speaker: next year as it were it's not like I wrote about like the latest shoes that everybody has to have which by the way is an amazing thing to write about I'm just I wouldn't be good at that I love you oh god you're great well thank you so much for the energy you bring to the space thank you for coming on the podcast we're very much fangirling over this um and yeah just thank you Rebecca and we look forward to watching this space thank you thanks so much for having me you
