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Loren Rhoads
173 Plays4 years ago
It is my distinct pleasure to welcome back Loren Rhoads. Loren first appeared on Episode 49 of SRTN.
In this conversation we discuss her new book This Morbid Life and dig into issues of how to deal with death, what it means for our life, the meaning of things, flowers, anatomy, something and nothing.
https://lorenrhoads.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome Back
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing. Creator and host, Ken Vellante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer. You ready to want to rock and roll? Sure, let's do it. All right. This is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing episode.
00:00:25
Speaker
Gosh, I'm really excited to have Lauren Rhodes return to the show. And I had to double check, Lauren, which episode it was. We're over 100 episodes now. And it was like episode 49. And I just love the conversation we had. I wanted to welcome you right off the bat, Lauren, back onto something rather than nothing. Well, thank you so much for having me back. I just remember when we had that last conversation, it got really deep and it was really fun. So I'm looking forward to this one.
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Exploring 'This Morbid Life'
00:00:57
Speaker
And you got a new book and we'll get into that. But for the listeners, we had a great conversation summertime a while back. And Lauren is an author I read many, many years ago by finding her book, which was a collection of her magazine, Morbid, Curiosity, Cures the Blues. And
00:01:23
Speaker
Uh, just love that. And I always remembered your name and then read some of your science fiction and we got the chat. So we're back now. And like I said, let's start with the, let's start with the new book. Um, uh, this morbid life and, um, just released, uh, we're here in late August, 2021. And, um, as a way to introduce, um, this book and allow you to talk about it, I have a question related to,
00:01:51
Speaker
to putting it together and creating it as about your life and about creating art and about cemeteries and just different unique, fascinating events.
00:02:09
Speaker
For you as an author and as a person going through that and putting it together, did you have the experience by the end of being like, whoa, now that I put all this together, what is all this type of thing? Yeah. This book didn't come together like a normal book would. I saw a piece of art last fall that I had to have. And I don't have the final cover yet, but it's a piece by Lynn Hansen that's
00:02:39
Speaker
a body with a big excision so that you can see the rib cage inside and the ribs are full of butterflies and wildflowers. And it was so beautiful that I had to have it. And so I had been wanting to do
00:02:56
Speaker
kind of a memoir for a while, but I didn't want to do a traditional, you know, I was born and I grew up and all of that. I had all these essays that I'd written over the years that were pretty much every highlight of my life I wrote an essay about.
00:03:14
Speaker
I decided to pull them all together into this memoir. And so yeah, there's a lot of stuff in it. There's dealing with my dad's heart attack and my brother's death. And my daughter's birth, she was premature and we were both really sick for about the first month of her life. And yeah, so there's a lot of emotion tied up for me in the pieces. But there's a lot of fun stuff too.
00:03:43
Speaker
I had a friend whose brother taught a gross anatomy class and he invited me to come and spend a couple of days in the lab going through the cadavers with him. And so one of the central experiences of my life is I got to hold a human heart in my hand.
00:04:03
Speaker
had a religious experience. It was so cool to see how complicated humans are. So I threw that in the book, too. It's it's it is morbid. It's definitely on the dark side. But I just find all of that kind of beautiful, you know, that we're mortal and fragile and have to take care of each other. I just think that's cool. Yeah, yeah. Well,
00:04:32
Speaker
You know, I think now I just want to speak directly about it. I mean, you're going to be an expert in the reactions of people talking about when you talk about death and how people respond to you and these type of things that we truly wish to avoid. And one of the things I wanted to ask you, Lauren, was that, and I personally relay, I had a friend,
Personal Stories and Cultural Attitudes on Death
00:05:01
Speaker
a close friend of mine recently died. And when that happened, and it was tragic, and it was recent, I started to think that I really wanted to spend time with what had happened. And the realization I had, and I knew this interview was coming up, the realization I had is that
00:05:23
Speaker
I know for sure that any death that I've come in contact with, even a person was rather close to me, I just moved on. I put my head down and I'm like, oh, I'm so confused and that sucks. But I'm pretty darn sure with some of these things. I just put my head down, went ahead, somehow this person wasn't around anymore and just forged ahead.
00:05:51
Speaker
I don't think it served me well, like, over time. And at the same time, being interested in your work, Lauren, and being interested in, you know, horror and macabre, ever since I was a little kid, I felt like I, it's not like I'm ignoring, like, mortality or anything. But I really feel like I'm super comfortable with it as depicted. And I haven't really done anything as a person to kind of
00:06:20
Speaker
What is it? Like I'm the type of person, even if I knew the person well, I'll even skip funerals because I'm like, I can't do it. Like you're totally about me. I was like, I can't do it. And so I found myself recalibrating my, you know, my relationship and thinking about this, which of course is timely and talking to you. But, um, on that point, uh,
00:06:42
Speaker
Do you find that, let's say Americans, you know, you write a lot of stories about Americans, do people either like go right into and deal with death or they run for it or what's going on? Because culturally, we seem really confused and scared or something.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. One of the stories that's in the book is about my friend Blair who died of AIDS back in the epidemic. And he and his husband asked me if I would be with them in the last week of his life and help with his medications and nursing and all of that because he wanted to die at home. And I was 30 at the time.
00:07:27
Speaker
And I'd never undergone anything like that. I mean, my grandmothers had both died in nursing homes and my dad had been sick, but he pulled through, you know, so I had done death kind of from a remove.
00:07:43
Speaker
which I think was age appropriate, but Blair's death was the most incredibly intense thing I had ever undergone. For a week, there were four or five of us that were up 24 hours a day giving him morphine. And it really, it took me a long time to like,
00:08:09
Speaker
come to terms with it because he was young. He was 27 when he died. And, you know, his whole life was ahead of him. And I was just a little bit older than he was. And, you know, still now I look back and I think, geez, 30, I was just a child. What was I doing nursing somebody to death? But, you know,
00:08:31
Speaker
People had two reactions to it. Some people came over and they brought food and they helped. However they could, they got Jeff out of the house so he could go to a movie and be away from that for a little while. And other people just vanished. They didn't return calls. We didn't see them.
00:08:50
Speaker
And not just at that last week, but in the following time, they didn't know how to respond, what to say, so they just vanished. And for Jeff, he could kind of see, okay, these people are real friends and these people are not, and where to spend his energy is he recovered from it.
00:09:11
Speaker
It was interesting to me because my folks are definitely the sort that, at any time anybody was sick, they went to the hospital and they were all about visiting and all of that. But when my grandmother was dying, they had a vacation scheduled. So they left, they went on their vacation. And my aunt called me from Michigan and said, come home now if you want to see her. So I did. I got there. My folks were gone. I stayed in their house for a couple of days until they got back from their trip.
00:09:42
Speaker
And that's so very American. You want to be there while somebody's dying. You don't want to deal with the emotions that it brings up. And all this time later, my dad's still kicking. His first heart attack was at 52, and he's just turned 81 earlier this year. So I mean, my entire adult life, I've been dealing with my dad's mortality.
00:10:11
Speaker
And I think I deal with it pretty well, but he's convinced he's going to live forever. There's going to be another medical miracle and he's just going to go on and on. And to your situation, I think sometimes it's easier just to think about what do you do next? Even if you're intimately involved in it, dealing with the funeral and paying the bills and settling the estate and all the steps, as long as you can keep moving, you don't have to think about the loss.
00:10:42
Speaker
And I think worse, we don't think about our own mortality, you know, kind of make some plans and figure out what's important to get done. When my daughter was born, I was hospitalized for the week before she was born and my blood pressure was really super high and I could not get it to come down.
00:11:06
Speaker
So they pretty much told me, don't roll over, you're going to have a stroke. And if you have a stroke, you may cut off her oxygen and she may die. So basically, there was nothing I'd do except lay flat on my back and try not to kill us both. And it gave me a lot of time to think about, what do I want to do with my life? What do I want to accomplish? And so it kind of lit a fire under me to get my work done, get my books out.
00:11:35
Speaker
and not rest because time is short and the clock is ticking. And, you know, I just since then have really felt like I have to get this done. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you
Philosophical Exploration of Life and Death
00:11:50
Speaker
for that, Lauren. I felt for me, I felt in general, like a lot of immediacy towards life, but I found with the pandemic, I'm on a mission in a lot of areas of my life. I'm like, for me, the bell is wrong.
00:12:05
Speaker
And so I really appreciate what you're saying there about how it crystallizes. I wanted to mention something about philosophy, and I don't know if we got it into it that much.
00:12:22
Speaker
when we first talked. But philosophy is an odd enterprise, and it's odd enterprise for Americans, right? Because it's not practical. It's conceptual. It doesn't seem to produce things. But the big connection, I think, of philosophy and to the topic we're talking about, death, which is really life, life and death, that philosophy is completely predicated on death.
00:12:50
Speaker
And on a classical view, and I actually subscribe to this, so if you take a look at a philosopher like Plato, and he brings Socrates, the voice of Socrates, back to life and his plays. Socrates, of course, was executed by the state for corrupting the youth of Athens. And of course, you know, dying, mortality, his great teacher and all this loss.
00:13:17
Speaker
You know, even the most, maybe the most preeminent philosopher in the Western canon starts from death. It's philosophy is about death. And, you know, his, the Republic is basically him trying to theoretically create a just society that wouldn't like execute people like Socrates, like a just society.
00:13:41
Speaker
So, and you think of the existentialists, and I know you bumped around with some of that stuff. Death is right there, you know, and then thinking about these big questions is right there. And I want to mention one more thing. Your definition of art when we first talked, and it was so, it was, you had said that it's a celebration of the beauty of being human.
00:14:10
Speaker
And it surprised me then, both for its conciseness and truth. And now as well, these life and death, you talked about the cadaver and the flowers. Yes, we're talking about death, but
00:14:33
Speaker
You're talking about life a whole lot more than most people I know. I was so shocked at one point. Somebody called me death obsessed. Somebody I knew well called me death obsessed. And yeah, a lot of my work is about death and our fear of death.
00:14:51
Speaker
But I am the most life-obsessed person you have ever met. I mean, I don't like to let a sunny day go by. I want to go outside. I want to see the sun. I want to hear the birds sing. And I want to smell the flowers and just kind of revel in being here now because the alternative is kind of a drag. I don't want to be dead forever. I want to be alive right now. So yeah, I really think it's all about life.
00:15:21
Speaker
That's so central. Yeah. And that's the piece where to kind of open up the space to talk about this, even what I said about what I told, I'm 49. So what I told you about death, I said about my reaction to death as I perceive it throughout my life. I said that for the first time my entire life last week to my, to my, to my girlfriend. That's what I said.
00:15:43
Speaker
And then as it came out of my mouth, I said, I've only thought about that in my own head for 49 years. And it's interesting to have these realizations that come about. And I just want to say a lot of what you write about is really helpful to exist in that space and not to feel so weird about it, right? Because I'm a weirdo.
00:16:12
Speaker
you know, I'm an obsessive weirdo. And, you know, that makes me like a lot of other people, you know, that that makes, you know, that makes us human. Well, it's one of those things where we we don't have real rituals for grieving.
00:16:30
Speaker
There isn't, you're not really encouraged to grieve, you know, you've got your week off after the funeral or whatever, but you know, then get back to work, you know, and, and we're not really given time to absorb something that's so huge. So I'll give you, I'll give you a practical, funny example of that. So I bargain contracts for a living and there's bereavement leave that I bargain.
00:16:54
Speaker
And you get five days off, but they're going to be consecutive. And for me as a philosopher, I'm like, this is this is simply absurd. Like what? What if I'm fine with the passing of my uncle? And then a month later, I remember all the shit that he did with me. And I was like, good, good memories going to the ball game. Everything I collapsed. I'm horrifically depressed because I'm bereaved now. So well, and grief is really cyclical. You know, you're when my brother died, you know, I
00:17:23
Speaker
I came back here and I had like a week where I just walked around San Francisco and talked to him. I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. Um, we had a conversation where he called and would not get off the phone and he wasn't feeling well. And I think in retrospect that he knew he was dying, but I didn't know. And so, um,
00:17:50
Speaker
my folks will never call me when somebody's hospitalized. So after we talked, I guess he went to work the next day and was feeling really awful. And so one of his friends brought him home and he collapsed on the sofa and they couldn't get him up. So they called the ambulance and a whole lot of things happened. I talked to him on Sunday, Thursday, my mom called and said, your brother is dead, come home.
00:18:19
Speaker
And I had no indication that, you know, this is where we were headed. I just knew he wasn't feeling well on Sunday. And it was, it took me a while to like process that because I didn't get to say goodbye. And I believe in ghosts. I believe in spirits and that he didn't come to me. He never visited my dreams. You know, I didn't see his spirit.
00:18:46
Speaker
So I didn't have that closure and it was really strange. You know, people would say, oh, I just heard about your brother. Right after his death, there was a lot of sympathy, but as time went on and I was still kind of grappling with it. People thought I should be over it, you know, and my folks thought I should be over it. They were over it. Shouldn't I be over it too? Right.
00:19:15
Speaker
It comes back. Something happens and I think about, oh my God, I gotta call Ellen and tell her about this, but I can't really. His birthday comes around or his death day comes around and he's been gone almost 20 years. And it still blindsides me every now and then that, geez, my brother was 36 when he died. That seems so young now. So... Well, yeah.
00:19:44
Speaker
You know, life is long. My adopted, I kind of adopted her, my best friend's mama. Her name's Florence. I adopted her. She became my oldest podcast listener. She's 101 and listened to recently. Oh, a blessing. That's great. She's always, always wonderful to talk to.
00:20:07
Speaker
Lauren, I got a question that I want to ask you in particular. I was asking around the time I interviewed you, pandemic was in full swing, pre-vax, 8 billion things have happened since then, of course, but I've kind of gotten away from the question a little bit, but I wanted to ask you again, here in August 2021,
00:20:35
Speaker
And the general thoughts about what the role of art is right now, particularly in a pandemic. We talked about what art is, but in the pandemic, do you see what you need from art being different right now or the situation being different? Well, we got out
00:20:59
Speaker
Let me back up. My kid has a chronic illness. And so we were in really tight lockdown the whole last year. I remember that. Yeah. She didn't get her final vaccination until May, early May. So we didn't go out. And over the summer, an exhibit opened at one of the local museums about Pompeii. And
00:21:28
Speaker
She studied Italian and went on the seventh grade trip to Italy. But when she was there, she had a headache and couldn't go the day they went to Pompeii. So it's like this magical place for her that she's never been able to experience. So it was really important to me that we go leave our little bubble and go out and look at the art from Pompeii. And it was an amazing day.
00:21:59
Speaker
have not gone anywhere seen any art that you know we don't actually own in the house yeah well it's it was called Last Supper in Pompeii and so it was primarily about the food that was carbonized there and
00:22:20
Speaker
the exquisite dinnerware they had, and there was one of the couches that they laid on to eat. And just these...
00:22:30
Speaker
tiny little tesserae murals with crabs and sea creatures and you know food things that were huge but the squares were like a quarter inch they were these little bitty squares and so it was all this amazing art from this place that was killed by a volcano and the only reason we have this art is because the volcano
00:22:57
Speaker
you know, buried it 20 feet deep and preserved everything. And so, you know, it's beauty and death and her regret that she didn't get to go the day the class went to Pompeii. And
00:23:14
Speaker
It was such a gorgeous day. It was a beautiful San Francisco. We don't get summer days. We get fog in the summer, but it was like 17 that day and the sky was clear. And so we went and got a picnic and sat in the park in the grass and it was the perfect day.
00:23:37
Speaker
And then, you know, now we're locked down again and not going to leave until the Delta is under control. That day is wonderful though. It is. And it was such a, you know, if you only get to see one thing, if you only get to experience one art exhibit,
00:23:58
Speaker
in this whole year, that would have been my choice. And it was everything I wanted it to be. So I think the importance of art in the pandemic is to remind us that there is history behind us and the future in front of us. And the moment that we're in is still precious, even with that. Even with all the illness and the bad behavior and
00:24:29
Speaker
Out here we have wildfires and the hurricane just hit land yesterday. There's a lot of bad things and you could dwell on them.
00:24:43
Speaker
That doesn't serve you and it doesn't really serve anybody else. And so I think art is a way of taking us out of our lives, out of the moment that we find ourselves kind of enmeshed in and showing us that there's more. There's all of humanity out there if you just look up and see it.
00:25:02
Speaker
Thank you. That's actually a really helpful answer. Thanks for that, for the practicality of it.
Future Projects and Cultural Reflections
00:25:08
Speaker
That was a long way to get to the answer. No, no, I enjoyed the journeys with you. That's why we're talking again. What I wanted to ask you, Lauren, so all right, so you get this morbid life. We talked about that.
00:25:26
Speaker
Lauren's new book. So you got that out of your system. So what are you thinking now? I mean, you don't have to divulge what you're up to, but like... No, no. I've got about six. I don't know. I'm not sure which one I'm going to do absolutely next, but
00:25:45
Speaker
There's another book of essays that I'm thinking as a companion to this one, and it's called Jetlag and Other Blessings. So they're just travel stories, and they're longer than the pieces in this book.
00:26:05
Speaker
traveling to Greece with my mom. She had always wanted to go to Greece and so she booked us on a package tour and we went. My mother's very religious and so it was interesting we were there during Easter and so navigating the way the Greeks celebrate
00:26:29
Speaker
versus the way my mother would celebrate. And I've done a lot of study on religion. And so I was kind of the interpreter in the middle between the two. And so there's an essay about that. And I was telling you earlier, my husband is a musician. And so the title essay is about going to Japan. The first time we went,
00:26:59
Speaker
I don't know if it was food poisoning or jet lag, but I was really sick the first day. But he had a show scheduled in Tokyo and I wasn't going to let him leave me behind. So I went with him into Tokyo for this show and just wandered, you know, this enormous city at night alone while he sound checked and talked to the musicians and stuff like that.
00:27:25
Speaker
And before we went, I'd never been anywhere as far from home as Japan. So I was worried about getting lost. I was worried about the food making me sick. I was worried about the language barrier being a problem. And I discovered in that first night that it didn't matter. I could walk around at night by myself and be perfectly safe.
00:27:55
Speaker
and not feel threatened and, you know, risk getting lost. But people were really helpful. One of Mason's friends saw me and she knew I wasn't feeling well. And she just kind of took me under her wing and mated her business to take care of me. She was such a good friend. And
00:28:18
Speaker
it was magical, you know, to realize how free I was that I had had all these fears about traveling and they were all completely unnecessary. So there's a bunch of essays about my adventures outside the world, you know. Yeah, like a kind of like a freaky Rick Steves type. Totally, yeah. Yeah, I could dig that. Yeah, you know, Rick probably doesn't go to as many cemeteries and
00:28:48
Speaker
I know he works in a couple, and whenever he does, I'm like stopping the video so I can see. Where are we here? This is cool. But yeah. So it won't be, I don't think there are too many cemetery essays in that book, but there is one about, I had a friend who wanted to go up to Tule Lake, which is the, it's the California concentration camp.
00:29:17
Speaker
There's not much there. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, it really is. I used to live in Klamath Falls. Oh, did you? Yeah, for a short spell. Well, she lured me up there with the promise that there was a graveyard at Tule Lake, which there is not, but we spent a really long time looking for it. And it was, I don't even know what set me off now, but I had
00:29:47
Speaker
I had just shaved my head before we went up there. And it was the sort of thing where I felt really unhappy and it was either me or the hair and the hair went first. And I felt better after that, but I looked really freaky and people up in Tule Lake
00:30:07
Speaker
were not prepared for me with my shaven head to be marching around up there. So it was really we got some really interesting reactions because my friend is this tiny little thing and you know she was wearing these cute little sun dresses and here am I and my docs and my shaven head and you know aspersions were cast but but it was a you know it was a really interesting trip because we were there to see
00:30:35
Speaker
what was left of the Japanese internment. And, you know, prejudice was still alive. It was just focused in a different direction at that point. But that said, we were up there in August to see the Perseid meteors. And so, you know, the sky was just on fire with these meteors
00:30:59
Speaker
you know, every time you blinked, you missed one and then there'd be six more and it was just gorgeous. So it was this, you know, weird balance between the lake itself is beautiful and it was all full of waterfowl and
00:31:16
Speaker
you know we were caving and the caves were gorgeous and there was a wildfire at the edge of the canyon and so you could see that off in the distance at night you know all these beautiful things and then this weird prejudice about where we lesbians and you know what difference did it make yeah you know well one of the things is it's interesting i i go i went just speaking of tule because it's it's such a i
00:31:43
Speaker
I'm fascinated with that area and with its terrible history. But one of the things I found in my study is there I learned about it just reading through a book prior to living on the West Coast. I was probably on the East Coast at the time.
00:31:57
Speaker
And there was a book about Dylan S. Meyer, but there was a huge overlap between what that person ran. He was the administrator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but he also administered Too Late Late in the US concentration camp, of course, you know, that affected
00:32:17
Speaker
American citizens, Japanese descent in this country. So it was, I was really just, I remember a lot of details around it being spellbound by the kind of pernicious racism, you know, like within that same administrative mind in both cases. So this is, I got a weird vibe from the lands there, but I'd never saw the lake. So it was pretty. And, you know, we stayed over in, um,
00:32:45
Speaker
in the national park, maybe it's a state park. So there's a lot of history of the modal. And I knew about that because there's a national cemetery in San Francisco where the Buffalo soldiers, the black soldiers that fought against the Native Americans are buried. And so, you know, it's just layer and layer of history and prejudice and just a fascinating place.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yeah, it really is. So, wow, we got a lot to vibe on. But one of the things I wanted to do, honestly, is to just zero rate in on
Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
00:33:31
Speaker
asking the question again only because I've been talking about this why is there something rather than nothing question and it's such a for me it's like an annoying question because I annoy myself with it but it's funny and also like I don't know maybe in a yogic way allows people to expel here and just like the breathe again because it's such a daffy question but I
00:33:53
Speaker
I don't often get to ask the same question twice. I'm just going to ask you the question again. Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, I think there is something rather than nothing because of stories, because stories sing everything into reality.
00:34:17
Speaker
And they stitch us together, right? The stories of who we are, the stories that we tell in our families, the stories we tell our friends when we introduce ourselves to them. I think there may not actually be anything except stories. And stories make all of us humans, you know, one people, despite
00:34:46
Speaker
history and all the accidents and mistakes that were made. Yeah. Again, I really vibe with the stories. I appreciate being able to talk to you again, Lauren. It's a great conversation and it's a great pleasure. I think it's a regular check-in at least.
Conclusion and Recommendations
00:35:09
Speaker
At least, you know, for me, I know my audience loves you as well. But there's a personal indulgence that I can allow myself to say hello here and there. But I just want to thank you again for spending some time. And everybody check out this morbid life. I'm actually reading it right now. And I'm really enjoying it. But I just wanted to say thank you again for coming out, Mark.
00:35:38
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for having me back. Yeah, I just I had such a great time the first time and it gives me so much to think about. So thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, thanks for saying that. And actually, I am now going to continue with your book. So have a great evening. Excellent. Thank you. Bye, Laura.
00:36:06
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.