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July 24, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:41:08
HOW TO FIND LIFE IN DEATH
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So I wrote to you, I said, Dear Stefan, I could really use your help.
My cousin had her first baby on July 8th of this year.
Sadly, the baby passed away due to exposure to herpes simplex 1.
He was only 12 days old.
The funeral is a Saturday, and I will be in attendance.
I desperately want to say something to comfort her, but I don't think any words can help.
What should I say?
What can I do? Do you have any advice?
I was thinking about writing a letter to her saying to love the memory of her baby strong enough to try again and not to give up.
But is that too strong?
Too soon?
Unasked for advice? I am truly at a loss.
I cannot begin to comprehend the grief she and her husband are feeling.
Any advice, no matter how small, would be helpful.
Thank you. God bless.
Right. Again, I'm so incredibly sorry for you and her and the whole situation is heartbreaking beyond words.
I did a bit of reading.
Obviously, newborns are very susceptible to grave danger from this virus.
They lack immune systems that can deal with it, and there's not a lot of medical intervention sometimes that seems to be able to help.
Do you have any more details about what may have happened?
I don't have any specific details of like how the baby could have possibly been exposed to it.
I was doing some more just kind of research myself.
I was on a couple medical websites and testing for herpes simplex 1 and 2 can be very difficult especially if either the mother or You know, some of the people are asymptomatic because it can spread through viral shedding as well.
And most of the time, how doctors will test for HSV-1 is through swabbing of the affected area, which usually manifests itself in blisters.
And that's the most accurate way to get a diagnosis.
But blood work can also be done to kind of find that.
It's very complex because you can test, like the things that I was reading is, say like during birth, A mother might have antibodies for HSV-1 and not HSV-2 because this would be like an initial outbreak.
Not saying that my cousin has HSV-2 because it can also spread just through, say, if someone had HSV-1 and maybe kissed the baby or touched the baby because some of the things I was reading that even staff could possibly spread it to the baby.
So I have no idea how the baby contracted this horrible, horrible virus.
I just know that the baby was feeling ill and had a high fever and a lot of the times the babies will stop feeding and so they took him into the hospital.
He continued to decline and so they Emergency got him to a hospital specific for children, where he was put on breathing, kind of life support.
But they, of course, you know, they measure brain scans while on those kind of machines in his brain.
Activity was severely plummeting, and they tried to put him on antibodies and antivirals, but they had no effect.
And then he went into organ failure, and that's when he perished, Wednesday morning.
It's just appalling.
I mean, listen, I really, really appreciate your sensitivity to what your cousin is going through.
And it is hard to know.
I mean, I had a guy I worked with when I was up north.
He was jogging.
He was going to get married. We were working up there in the summer.
He was going to get married in the fall.
And he was going for a jog and a bunch of kids had stolen a Truck and just ran him over in this sort of dark country road and killed.
I knew the family.
I knew the father. It's really hard to know.
All your words seem inadequate to the tragedy at hand.
But at the same time, you don't want to just say nothing because that also seems kind of cold.
I really do appreciate your sensitivity regarding this and I thoroughly appreciate how How difficult it is to come up with words that can be comforting.
So, you know, I don't have any magic answers.
We can maybe sort of puzzle it through together.
And it's also good not to improv this stuff, like just wing it.
Mm-hmm. Coldly,
so to speak, but I think it's sort of like, if you're going through it, I mean, this is a silly example, but if you're going through a really bad breakup saying, well, there's plenty of fish in the sea, is almost a way of hopscotching over the suffering that the person is going through.
Yeah, it's never very helpful.
No, I mean, for sure, for sure.
Now, let's talk a little bit, just before we get into maybe some of the specifics, a little bit about the other untimely deaths that you have, that you and your husband have had experience with.
Oh yes, we've had quite a plethora in our lives of untimely deaths.
So I guess the first untimely death was when I was 16. 16.
My best friend had a younger brother, so altogether she had Four siblings, an older brother, herself, her younger brother, and then her youngest sister, all maybe separated by like two years or so.
And her brother was also my brother's best friend, so we can just call him Bob, I suppose.
So, me and my best friend, Bob, and my brother were all very close.
We would, you know, hang out a lot together.
One day Bob was at home with his little sister and his cousin and they were messing around and his cousin was high on weed and they always kept a loaded rifle in their house because um it was their grandparents house and when the grandmother was young she was sexually assaulted so everyone knew about that gun in that family i knew about that gun even though i had never been to that house and and where i'm at um in the united states it's not uncommon for people to have firearms in their homes but everyone knew that that gun was loaded but the cousin decided either because he was high or i don't know why he just abandoned All sense.
And he aimed the gun at my best friend's brother, Bob.
And Bob had said to him, hey, that gun is loaded.
Like, don't play with that.
And he fired it anyway.
And it was a low caliber gun.
So the thing about Guns that a lot of people don't realize is that lower caliber weapons are generally more deadly to people than higher caliber because they don't have exiting power.
So the bullet didn't exit his body.
Instead, it played ping pong around and the bullet bounced against his rib cavity, punctured a lung and then buried itself in his liver.
And instead of calling 911, the cousin fled the scene and left the sister, who I think was...
So Bob was like, I want to say 14 or 15, just started like 8th or 9th grade, and left the youngest sister, who I think was probably between like 10, 9 or 10 to call 911, try to perform CPR on her brother, who was expiring.
And because the cousin, the perpetrator of the crime, fled the scene, the ambulance did not arrive in time before he died due to internal wounds.
And I found this out.
And of course, it was the worst The worst day ever because it was April 1st so everyone is playing jokes on everyone and I was on the internet and this is when it was kind of before texting so it was like IM instant messenger was big it's kind of in the very early days of YouTube so that's how I would spend my Evenings after homework is I would get on YouTube and I would listen to music and then I would chat with my friends and one of my friends IM'd me and said,
Bob is dead. And I was like, no, he's not.
You're just like, this is a sick joke.
Like you shouldn't joke about that.
And then she called me and she's panicking and she's like, could you get a hold of like our best friend and all this stuff?
And I was like, oh, okay.
So When I called them, they were at the hospital and he had just expired.
And then I had to look my younger brother in the face and this traumatized him for a really long time.
And I had to tell him that his best friend was dead.
And because he looked at me You know, which is like disbelief, because he was like, nuh-uh, like, that can't happen.
Like, someone can't just be alive and then dead.
I'm like, no, I'm really sorry.
You know, brother, that did happen.
And he just, like, sobbed, and he gripped me, and he was like, I don't want you to die.
And he was very afraid for a long time that, you know, other people were just going to disappear from his life.
He's doing a lot better now.
It's been quite a few years.
But it was still quite a shock to everyone involved.
And what happened to the shooter?
He got off.
Accidental shooting?
It was...
So... When the police were interviewing the oldest brother, so the oldest brother was very, very bitter towards the cousin, obviously, because he shot his brother.
But while talking to police, he said that his cousin was retarded.
And like the slang derogatory term, not the actual medical clinical definition.
But the police took that as the medical clinical definition.
And so he was never brought up on charges or anything.
Wow, that seems like quite a loophole.
You'd think you'd want some verification of that from a professional, but what do I know?
I know that he was clinically tested in certain things, and of course he had really high anxiety in different things, but I never was privy to any of the things that they said that he specifically had.
So, I mean, this goes back further into history, but our school, so I don't know if you know this about certain public schools, but public schools will get government pay cuts and benefits, financial benefits, for how many people they enroll in special needs programs, regardless on if they are actually special needs or not.
This happened to both me and my husband because we went to the same And we were both diagnosed as mentally slow or special needs, even though when my husband was taken to a private tutoring school, he was actually tested as mentally gifted.
Yeah. Well, you used the word plethora earlier, not usually in the lexicon.
Yeah. And because I was...
I was um I couldn't read until sixth grade and I was told my whole life I would never be able to read and so I remember in sixth grade they started us you know writing our own uh stories and I couldn't spell it I couldn't write but I wanted so desperately to write my own stories because I thought that it was a great escape for some of the stuff that I'd gone through and so I said you know Screw these teachers that say I can't.
I'm going to do it. And so I just read that whole summer and I went from the very bottom special needs grade tier in my class to I graduated the top 10 of my class.
So there was a lot of misdiagnosing and special needs kids at our school because of the government funding and tax cuts.
And he was a part of that program.
And, I mean, it didn't do anyone any good because of the No Child Left Behind policy.
He was allowed to graduate even though he never turned in any assignments or did anything, but that's like a whole other ball of wax.
Right, okay, okay.
Your friend died at 22.
Your husband's best friend committed suicide at age 22?
Yes. So my friend, and this is kind of...
I don't want to say like my fault per se, but I used to work at the hospital as a nursing assistant and that's when I met my friend that passed away.
She had cystic fibrosis and I remember the first day I met her she was a patient at the hospital and I was her her caregiver and I remember Um, you know, going about to go into her room, I would receive my assignment for the patient and we get a brief description of, you know, like their needs and their medical condition and stuff.
And the nurses at the nurses station were casting lots to see what time in the night she would die.
And I thought that that was disgusting and grossly unprofessional.
And so I went in there and she, um, I don't know if you know what cystic fibrosis is but cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that you can take in oxygen into your lungs but you can't actually absorb that oxygen into your blood so your red blood cells can't carry the necessary oxygen to your organs that you need to survive so So she was hooked up on a ventilator and she was in a coma and I was her caretaker a couple more times.
And I just remember sitting in there and I just would read to her.
And then the next time I took care of her, she was awake and I just made a point to myself because her family was in a different state and couldn't be near her, that I was going to be her friend and I was going to make sure that she, you know,
Didn't perish alone and so I would go in there on my days off and it was around Halloween which was her favorite time so I decorated her room and I met her whole family and her two-year-old son and and one day I just got a call from her mom saying that she was sick in a different hospital and she had pneumonia and she probably wasn't going to make it and the parents requested me to To be there because they had to drive down and they didn't know that they would if they would make it in time.
So I was there and I watched her die.
And then my husband's best friend committed suicide and he was 22.
My husband tried to do a lot of good things for him because he had a lot of a lot of trauma and I was friends with him in high school as well.
He would have been like a 10 out of 10 on the ACE scale.
Like 11 if it could go any higher.
Like there was nothing that this kid didn't suffer.
And he was addicted to marijuana and my husband would constantly kind of have interventions for him and be like, hey, let's go up to the country house and we'll play video games all night long and you're not allowed to, you know, Smoke weed or anything while you're up here with me, but you'll get, you know, three meals a day and what have you.
And he had been in prison once before for marijuana.
I think for at least a couple of months to up to a year.
And so my husband hadn't heard from his friend for a while.
And I remember him calling me and He was like, I haven't heard from my friend in a long time.
I hope he's not in jail, or if he is in jail, then he's okay.
And I was like, well, because he had made a promise to him the night before that they were going to play an online video game together.
And he's like, well, my friend never breaks his promises.
He's always there. And I'm like, well, maybe just give him some time.
Maybe something came up.
And then the next day, there was a Skype call from my husband and it was from his friend and he was like, oh good, and he picks it up and it's his friend's mom telling my husband that his best friend had killed himself.
He had hung himself in his closet.
It was like a day before the funeral, so me and my husband, we dropped everything and made the preparations.
And we went to that.
And that was probably one of the hardest funerals I ever went to because his family didn't know who he was at all.
Wait, what do you mean? Like, so...
Oh, sorry, I said his name.
My... My husband's best friend was a very poetic person.
He would write poetry, and he was very sensitive, and he loved to play video games.
And the funeral, they only had pictures of him, he was 22, or right around in his 20s, and they only had pictures of him when he was like 9.
If you were a stranger and you walked into the service, you would have thought that a child had died.
And they kept saying this phrase, and I had no idea what it meant, and it was so irksome.
They just kept saying that he was all boy.
He was all boy.
Like he liked to play sports.
And he was really outdoorsy.
And he wasn't. He wasn't anything like that.
But of course it was that lack of visibility that probably contributed to his nihilism, right?
Mm-hmm. Like no one could see him.
And even there was one story.
So one time my husband's best friend was walking to...
Or he missed the bus.
So I live in the Midwest.
So towns are...
Very spread apart.
You have to take a car, really, to get anywhere unless you already live in town.
And the high school that we went to was a country town, so all the small neighboring towns and even the big city that's closest to us, a lot of the kids would go to this school.
Well, he lived in the big city and he missed the bus one day.
And his mom said, well, you have to go to school, so you better walk.
And so he started to walk to school.
It's like a 15-mile walk just there.
And one of the teachers drove up and saw him walking on the highway and picked him up and drove him to school and drove him back.
But no one said anything about it.
No one called the police.
No one talked to the parents.
When that kind of abuse is so blatant and in your face and no one does anything, it's kind of hard to not be nihilistic.
There's a moment of despair when you realize that you may not be able to escape a crazy family into a sane world.
Yeah, and like I said, he was a single mom, kid, you know, boyfriends in and out of the house, rapey boyfriends, boyfriends that molested him.
So there was no sin that wasn't committed against him.
But he was a very, very sweet, sweet boy.
You and your husband do seem to have a wee bit of a habit of, in a sense, caring for the doomed.
Yeah. Yeah, we do.
Why, do you think?
I mean, there's some real good that you've done, so I'm not saying it's a bad thing in and of itself, but it is a bit of a downcurrent on the old emotional buoyancy, right?
Yeah, that's why I left the hospital job that I started working in.
Food service, other things like that.
So me and my husband both have pretty extensive ACE scores.
I believe mine was a 7, and then my husband's was a 8 or a 9.
For those who don't know, that's the Adverse Childhood Experience score.
So you can go look that up, just because I've always got those questions.
What does an ACE mean? Okay.
Well, I'm sorry about all of that, of course, right?
Mm-hmm. So I think that's...
Because I remember...
I started listening to you a couple years back.
My husband introduced me to you and he's like, you have to listen to this Stefan guy and I started listening to you.
I'm like, oh, he talks a lot about politics.
I don't know if I'm so into that.
Back in the day, yeah. I used to have a hard time focusing on kind of, like you have a very low and relaxed, calm voice.
And so when I first started listening to you, I'm like, oh, I'm falling asleep.
Yeah, I can see that.
I'm sorry. But I used to really heavy rock to drone out things.
But then while I was in my college painting course, I started listening to your call-in shows.
And I was like, oh, these people are so dysfunctional.
I can't believe people like this exist in the world.
And then the more I listen, I'm like, oh, that person's a lot like...
Me, or how I acted in this situation.
And I'm like, oh, I've been really judgmental towards these people that are actually a lot like me.
I can learn a lot about myself through all these people.
And so I would have a really bad habit of making friends of like co-workers and stuff that were alcoholics and really wild and I remember having this one friend and I'm like, I just can't stand to be around her.
And my husband looked at me and he's like, do you know why you're friends with her?
And I'm like, no, I have no idea.
He's like, well, she's a lot like your mom.
And I'm like, yeah, but I don't really like my mom.
So why would I be friends with her?
And he was like, well, you're trying to save your friend.
So you're trying to save your mom.
And I'm like, oh, well, that makes a lot of sense.
Well, and now of course with regards to your cousin, you want to be able to in a sense save her from her grief.
And don't know how.
And that's, I mean, acutely uncomfortable.
Like, and I'm with you there.
Like, completely. Like, I mean, I tried to save a crazy mother.
I just spent 15 years trying to save a crazy world.
And it's always the possibility of, you know, what I call Simon the Boxer from real-time relationships or repetition compulsion, as some people call it, that...
Trying to master craziness is the way that you, or the way that I, would get a sense of control or efficacy in my life.
And you always do have to be careful that you're not taking early childhood experiences and casting them wide over the world and thinking you've grown all the way up, right?
And I know that I've had a personal problem with projection in the past.
I would... Like, when me and my husband very first started dating, like, I would put, like, how I would feel in the situation onto him, and he wouldn't feel that way at all.
So, like, for an example, one of, we've never really fought, but, like, one of the early things that happened to us is a conversation that I think men and women have a lot, a conversation that men and women have a lot is, I made a statement to my husband saying, I feel fat. And my husband looked at me and he's like, well then, work out.
And I'm like, oh, he thinks I'm fat.
And I freaked out. And the important part there is not the fat, but your feelings, right?
Why do you feel fat?
What happened? What changed?
And then my husband was like, well, it's so obvious that you're not fat, but you feel that way.
So if you work out a couple of times, you'll feel better.
But he was very problem solution and I was very emotional driven.
So I would project that onto him.
And now... Through your help and just listening to a lot of the call-in shows and more of men's side of things, I'm able to project less, but I can at least recognize when I'm projecting now, because that's what I was worried about with my cousin, because I tried to put myself in her shoes, even though I have no idea how to even come to terms with that.
I just remember not wanting to be particularly crowded when the other kind of tragedies had happened around me, but that doesn't necessarily mean that she won't want to be, like, what she feels is crowded is different than what I would feel is crowded, so she Might need more of that support, but I'm projecting my more isolationist view on it.
Yeah, we'll get to that in a sec.
Just something popped into my head regarding the statement you had, I feel fat, and your husband like, here's the solution.
So if you want to understand men as a whole, like we evolved to be hunters for the most part, And so you can think of two guys, Bob and Doug, out there in the woods and they're trying to hunt deer, right?
And Bob says, hey look over there, there's a deer.
And Doug says, I don't see the deer.
What's Bob going to say? It's right there.
Right. The solution, like, because he sees that the guy who can't see the deer, his problem is he can't see the deer.
So he'll say, like, it's right past that tree that looks like an old man bending over with the, you know, and it's, you know, it's kind of hidden in the bushes and so on.
And so the problem is that Doug can't see the deer, so Bob wants to help him see the deer, right?
It's a technical problem of perception, right?
Of direct perception, right?
Yeah. Or as opposed to, you know, maybe Doug then says, no, no, it's not that exactly.
I just, I feel bad that I can't see the deer.
And then Bob's like, I don't know what you mean.
Yeah, yeah, because then it's like, no, it's right over there.
Because the thing is, Bob is thinking that Doug can't see the deer, and so just tell him where the deer is.
He sees the deer, the problem is solved.
But if Doug is going through an existential aging crisis, that his distance vision is beginning to fail him, and he's wrestling with questions of mortality and his utility as a functional hunter if he can't hunt as well anymore, and whether he's getting too old, and what's going to happen to his attractiveness, and what's going to happen to his status in the tribe, and all of that, right?
So I can't see the deer...
It could just be, I can't quite figure out where it is, or I can't see the deer because I'm aging and mortality and status of the tribe and attractiveness and life cycle and all of that.
And so for a lot of times, the man is thinking that the woman is saying, I can't see the deer, right?
And he's like, it's right over there.
And then the problem should be solved.
But sometimes, of course, the woman is saying, well, I can't see the deer because...
My eyes are aging and mortality and all that kind of stuff, right?
And so one of those is Simple Solutions right over there.
The other one is a lengthy conversation about the cycle of life and mortality, which kind of brings us back to, I guess, the original question.
But knowing the difference between those two things is really important.
I think it's really important for women because...
I don't know about all women, but I know in my experience, at least from the awful, awful advice that my mother gave me, is like, no, it's the man's duty to understand you and your needs, and you have, like, no duty to understand him.
And I think that a lot of the problems that are in relationship nowadays is just men and women's inability or unwantedness to understand one another and to just embrace our differences.
Yes, I think that's very true.
So, I mean, your question, like you say, I feel fat.
Well, you didn't say I am fat.
You didn't say I've gained 10 pounds.
You said I feel. And so the key part there is, okay, what's my relationship with food?
Am I overeating because of some emotional challenge?
Is there some trauma that's reawakening itself through anxiety?
Physical laziness perhaps, a lack of desire to exercise, maybe a incipient depression or low self-esteem.
So you're not sitting there saying, well, you know, my butt's hanging a little low.
You're saying that there could be a whole lot of complex stuff going on of which the feeling of weight gain might be just one tip of the iceberg, right?
Yeah. And understanding those two things is really important.
I remember once in my business career when A job had been quoted with, it was 10 hours, 10 hours to hook this my system up to an external database, to export the data, have the external database run its program and reimport the data and keep a history and so on, right?
Now, I was not involved in the estimate of this 10 hours.
And yet I was responsible for making sure that it all worked.
And that was a real mess.
It was a really complicated mess.
And it just, you know, I blew past the estimate and the customer was not particularly happy.
And, you know, the salespeople never like going back to ask for more money, but I'm responsible for budgeting and all of that.
Anyway, so after wrestling with this for, I think, close to a week, I was getting close.
But anyway, I got off the phone and the customer was still unhappy.
And listen, I mean, of course, I could understand that.
He'd been quoted 10 hours and I was saying it was going to be longer.
And he's like, well, I'm talking to you, so I'm mad at you.
I can't just say, well, I didn't approve this because I'm the tech guy, right?
So the idea that he had quotes that weren't approved by the tech guy for technical work.
Anyway. So when I got off the phone and I just like I threw a pencil across my office and I was really upset and the upset of course wasn't over the 10 hours versus the number of hours that I was working on this.
I went out for lunch with a friend of mine and we had like a nice juicy two-hour lunch talking about all of the problems in the business and It went pretty deep.
And it went deep, of course, not just in the business, but into my history, my childhood.
Sometimes it is just the tip of an iceberg.
If you have kids and you're walking along the road, particularly if it's a gravel road or a dirt road or a path or something like that, your kids will usually be rock collectors.
They're just shiny rocks, cool rocks.
Maybe there's gold in this one. Maybe there's a fossil.
And so what happens is you spend...
About an hour going about a hundred yards, because you've got to stop and dig up all these little stones.
And sometimes, of course, what happens is you try and dig up a stone, looks like it's just a little stone, but it's the top of a big boulder, right?
And you can't, like you're either going to try in some way to dig all the way around it, or you just can't get it out of the ground.
And knowing the difference between the pebbles and the boulders in conversation, even though on the surface they may look similar, is pretty important.
It could be, of course, the case that it's a stone.
You just pick it up. Oh, you lose a little weight.
Yeah, it's probably a good idea. Or it could be something deep and major.
And knowing those two is pretty key.
And, of course, all the gradations in between.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that because I do know that a lot of people have these challenges when it comes to communication in relationships.
And a lot of people, and men in particular, Feel that they just want to, you know, just pick up a pebble, right?
It's like, whoa, that thing's huge.
How far down does it go?
How wide does it go? And then suddenly, you know, like you see these videos, there's a flood, you know, someone walking along, and they suddenly walk into a manhole, an open manhole or something, and bloop, they just kind of disappear into the depths, and knowing the difference between the two is kind of important.
Men oftentimes will think it's a pebble when it's a boulder.
A lot of times, women will think it's a boulder when it's a pebble that can be easier to solve, but negotiating those two is pretty important.
Oh yeah, I can see that for sure.
And a lot of the conversations that I've had with people and my husband, too.
Because sometimes I'm like, look at this boulder!
Ah! And he's like, but it's just like this tiny thing.
Like, just calm down for a second and think about it logically.
And then I do. And I'm like, oh, that's why I married you.
Right, right, right. And other times, he'll say it's just a pebble and it is a boulder.
And he needs to dig deeper, I would assume, to solve the issue.
All right. So I appreciate that little sojourn, that little sideswipe, but let's get to your cousin.
Now, I don't know what to say to her, obviously, because it's your relationship with her and it's you, so obviously there's no point giving you a script.
It wouldn't mean anything and it would probably be worse than saying nothing at all.
But the thoughts that I had about all of this hopefully will have some utility.
Now, there's stuff that I would, like when I have something challenging to say to someone, there's stuff that I will know for myself that I won't communicate to the other person.
It just gives me a kind of context.
So the context is, we were evolved for a lot of time.
Mortality, a lot of infant mortality, right?
As you know, before sort of the modern era, and by that, like maybe 150 years of medicine, maybe 100 years of medicine and so on, like up to half the babies died.
And they would die in just this kind of way.
You know, there's a quote, I think it's from Sartre, or maybe it's Camus, who says that the natural state of things is microbes.
You know, cleanliness, health, soap, plumbing, that's all willpower.
Everything else is just blech, right?
So we are kind of evolved and there's a wonderful moving passage in Uncle Tom's cabin where there's a mom who's got the drawers full of the baby clothes of the babies who didn't make it.
She can't bear to throw them out.
It's very painful, but we have some evolutionary capacity to survive infant mortality because it was so common throughout human history.
Now, that's not a perspective that I would say to your cousin.
It's just something that I would have in my own mind regarding all of this, right?
It's sort of like mortality.
As we all age, we ourselves feel that mortality and death is a sort of personal disaster.
But there have been hundreds of generations of human beings who've all lived and died and a lot much earlier and with much more suffering than we'll ever have, and they managed to navigate it.
So although it may feel like a personal disaster and a personal tragedy, we are kind of wired to go through the arc of life and find a way, even to our own demise, In some manageable context.
So that's the one thing.
Now, the other thing, of course, is that infant mortality has become so astonishingly rare these days that although we have this evolutionary capacity to process this kind of grief, because if we became paralyzed with grief every time a baby died throughout our evolution, we wouldn't survive as a species, right?
We have to have some strength within us to surmount these things Just evolutionarily speaking, but because they've become so rare, the horror of the situation has become so intense and so personal that that's the challenge, I think, that she's facing.
You know, if we have 50% infant mortality, you know, there's some cultures, they don't even bother naming a baby until it's six months or a year old.
Why bother? Well, that's where, like, you know, the traditional birthday comes from is it was before it was a naming day.
Right. That's right. That's right.
So we didn't even really get attached to all of that stuff.
And it's just so crazy because like really, really advanced like children's hospitals because I've worked at a lot of places that, you know, we raise donations for for these hospitals and you have the little you wear the premature diaper on like your work vest and it has a little sticker on it that says you know ask me about this diaper and it's just this tiny little diaper it looks like it would barely fit on like a barbie doll and these are little preemie diapers that mothers will give birth and like You know,
barely over their second trimester and they can save these little babies that weigh like maybe three pounds.
And one of my co-workers, he had, his girlfriend was giving birth and his baby's intestines actually formed outside of the baby's abdominal cavity.
So the hospital was able to perform a surgery and, you know, get everything, all the Plumbing back in order and the baby lived.
And so when you're surrounded by these almost miracle...
They are miracles relative to all of our history.
Absolutely. And you have these miracles, so your hopes are so high because the infant death rate is so low, which is so great.
I would not want that to change at all.
um but yeah so that just almost makes it even harder because you hear about these miracle these miracle babies that can live right and then you're like wow it's just a little virus baby was born healthy normally you know no heart problems no you know signs of illness like just happened to get a fever at home and then It's like just a gust of wind,
like, sweeping the dust away, and just all of a sudden, it's gone.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I, when I was a kid, I knew a family, the daughter at the age of two, perfectly healthy, gets meningitis, half her brain is gone, and it's...
I mean, that's a never-ending, in many ways, kind of tragedy.
Yeah, so we are not particularly great at understanding the fragility of life these days.
And we've had this kind of congenital inability to I want to say process suffering, but to look at someone who's suffering and not feel, well, we must move heaven and earth to stop that suffering.
I mean, obviously you can't do anything to stop this woman's suffering because you can't turn back time, you can't make the baby alive or anything like that.
But just as a whole, I'm sure that she has it within herself to deal with this loss.
And so... It will always be a source of immense pain for her, but we have found ways in our evolution to survive, I mean, sometimes the deaths of half a dozen children, you know, back before birth control when there was this sort of mandate to not avoid pregnancy and so on, when women could lose five or more babies over the course of their life.
And that's still part of who we are.
It's not like those genetics have completely vanished.
And again, this is nothing I'd sort of say, well, compared to history, you know, like that's not going to help at all.
But I think just as a whole, it is always a big challenge as to how much we participate in the horror that people are experiencing.
Because if they're experiencing horror and we're like, oh, you know, this is the worst thing.
In a sense, that's a beast we feed within them.
And again, this has nothing to do with anything you would say to her.
But I think it is kind of important to remember that while this is a tragedy virtually beyond words, we do have the capacity to survive and even to some degree flourish after these kinds of situations.
And that's always the big challenge, is how do we turn these kinds of situations from the sinkhole of horror that could take us down forever to something that can...
Give us a renewed commitment to life.
That's always the big question.
And so I'll just give you the thoughts that I've had and you can let me know what you think.
So, you know, there's two aspects to life that are...
I mean, you obviously get them to a large degree despite your youth because of the history that you've had with people who've died.
But we are both... Innately decaying and intensely fragile as human beings.
And, you know, you get hit by a bus.
You get a sudden ailment.
Some people, like your kid goes to a party.
I was just reading this in the paper the other day.
Your kid goes to a party. You come home, the kid comes home, and next thing you know, everyone's infected with COVID, and most people are doing okay, but the dad ends up on a ventilator in the hospital.
He can't breathe, right? Or the Broadway star who got COVID and lost a leg and ended up dying.
He played tough guys in Broadway musicals, I think it was.
And so we are innately decaying.
In that we're going to grow up, we're going to age.
You know, my entire sprinting at full tilt days may be behind me because when I sprint full tilt, it's like it feels uncomfortable afterwards.
It's not quite pulling a muscle, but it's just not quite solid, right?
And I do my bike machine.
But you know, 54 coming up.
It's just the way of all flesh, right?
So we are going to decay.
We are going to fall apart.
I always remember when I was younger playing tennis with older people and I was like, why don't they just run for the ball?
Oh, that's why. Because your body could really make you pay for it in ways that you don't even think about when you're young.
Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say that it is just wild.
Because when you're a child, you think that everything kind of stays the same because you're growing at such a faster rate than everyone around you.
I remember one of the best compliments I ever paid my dad is I was at my grandma's house and there was a picture of him in high school and he had a perm, a mullet perm, which is kind of funny because he has a mullet to this day.
And I was like, Daddy, look, you look the same from when you were in high school.
And he was so excited because he was, you know, in his late 30s or whatever.
But now I'm watching him and he's still a very fit man.
But like, you know, hair starts to get thinner and you have to work out twice as hard to keep that muscle.
So just like that...
Well, and I have to, I really, just over the last maybe four to six months, I've had to pull back about 10% on my workouts.
I just have to, because I can't keep doing the same.
I mean, I've been basically doing the same workout since I was 17 or so, off and on, and just, yeah, it's just not the way things go.
And, you know, if you keep injuring yourself or keep Getting aches and pains is not going to help your exercise much at all, right?
So that's just natural.
I mean, obviously even Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't do the same workout that he did in his prime.
A guy wrecked his knees with all those deep knee bends and all that.
I don't think he juices like he used to.
No, I would hope not.
I would hope not. And I think it's something that, gosh, even Tiger Woods was saying the other day when he was asked, what do you regret?
He's like, well, I really regret running so much in my 20s because my knees are just destroyed, right?
Because it's really, really rough.
Yeah. The general decay, you know, because she's a young woman, because you're a young woman, because this was a baby, that's not, I think, part of the general equation.
But there is something about giving birth that reminds you of mortality, right?
Which is, oh, look, here's a new baby.
Why is there a new baby? Because I'll be gone one day.
Right? That's why, right?
You know, it's like your old car is not very happy about you Shopping on auto trader for a new car because it means he's going to the junkyard, right?
So there is an intense sense of mortality that is associated with just becoming a parent and a lot of people who are really alarmed or scared by mortality will avoid things that mark the passage of time.
Because the passage of time, you know, there's that old Friends episode where Rachel is turning 30 and she's dating some goofy young guy who rides skateboards in the hallway and stuff.
Depressing, right? I did a show recently with my daughter about, oh gosh, that woman from, well, she was a girl back in the day, the Harry Potter.
Oh, Emma Watson.
Emma Watson. Thank you. See?
A couple of years ago, I'd have had that right on the tip of my tongue, I'm sure.
But, you know, she's passing 30 and Taylor Swift's hitting that.
A lot of people like to avoid that kind of stuff.
And avoiding becoming a parent is a way of avoiding mortality.
Because why do we need babies?
Because we're going to die. Why do we need new people?
Because the old people don't make it.
And we have, of course, sealed away a lot of, you know, old people go into old age homes or you barely see them or whatever it is.
So we've kind of sealed off that Late conveyor belt, fallen off the cycle of life thing from people, right?
Now you, of course, working in the hospital and having death around you, are very, perhaps too aware of the fragility of life.
So life is fragile just in the passage of time.
The decay is inevitable. But life is also fragile in that you could...
Have a heart attack during this call, right?
My cancer could come back tomorrow.
I doubt it. But, you know, you've got to live like, you know, my father just died.
I mean, pretty good. Long life.
It's a really good one, but long life.
And so, for me, the question with regards to this awful death of this baby, it is a complete reminder that Of the fragility of life.
Now, what do we do when we stare straight at the house of cards called our life?
Like our actual physical continuance of life in this universe, right?
Because when you're a kid, you know, you feel like the Empire State Building.
Like I could take a plane to my belly and I'd be fine, right?
When you get older, you realize that it's not concrete.
It doesn't go 300 feet into the ground.
It doesn't have steel buttresses.
It's a house of cards. And, you know, we can do things to protect ourselves and exercise and eat well and so on.
And that does a lot.
But we are a house of cards.
This baby was a house of cards.
Like one person with one cold saw kisses the baby one time and the baby burns up in a fever.
I mean, that is the fragility of life.
And it is, frankly, tough.
Because we either live these shallow lives avoiding the reality of that, which has become impossible for her, and of course has been impossible for you for some time, as is the case with your husband.
We didn't even get into his father's death a couple of years ago in a motorcycle accident, but I think we kind of get that we're aware of the fragility.
Of life. And what do we do with the knowledge, the sort of deep knowledge of how fragile life is?
For me, it wasn't that I was surrounded by...
I mean, I do remember as a kid... Playing...
I lived... It sounds like a fancy-schmancy thing.
It wasn't. It was a pretty...
It was a rent-controlled low-rent. It was called an estate.
It was a bunch of council homes. And I was playing sort of outback.
Outback where the guys on welfare or unemployment would sit around in their no-armed t-shirts drinking beer all day.
And... I was playing back there, and kids were like, there's been a car accident!
And I ran up to the street, and there was, in fact, on the main road, there was a car accident, and they were pulling a woman out of the car, and she did not look good, man.
She had blood all over her, and it was not...
You're kind of pulling her out of the car, and you're thinking, like, maybe there's no bottom half to her.
It was that bad, right? And, of course, I was a little kid, and I don't know what happened and all of that.
And I do remember one other time seeing a woman just stretched out on the sidewalk, not moving, people gathering around her.
And again, she could have just fainted, could have been in a number of things.
And as I've said before, a friend of mine, but I hadn't been friends with him for some time because of his violent tendencies that emerged sort of mid-teens.
But yeah, he died in a motorcycle accident after spending a good deal of his youth doing crazy dirt bike tricks.
Just kind of caught up with him, I guess.
I remember you talking about him.
Yeah. So what do we do?
But for me, sorry, for me, the big fragility was sanity, right?
That's going to get taken out of context, I'm sure, but that's all right.
I can see the CNN headlines now.
Yes, that's right. Podcaster admits mental fragility.
But no, seeing the fragility of people's sanity.
You know, I mean, I saw my mother, of course, and a couple other people around just went either loudly or quietly crazy over time.
And seeing the fragility of sanity is something that is pretty sobering.
It is pretty sobering, and it does, of course, I hope at least it did for me, try and give you sort of best practices and be rational.
Because here's the thing, going back to your cousin, and this is all orbiting the topic, right?
The temptation, of course, is from the religious perspective that the baby has a soul and you will rejoin your baby after death and your baby will be God's baby and it's a temporary parting, not a permanent.
Right now, as you know, as a non-religious person...
I can't get to the rejoining after death aspect of things.
And I know that you have some religious thoughts, some religious beliefs, so we don't have to get into that particular debate at the moment.
And it really does depend, of course, what your beliefs are relative to your cousins.
If you are both religious and believe in an afterlife, that's certainly one approach to take.
But that's not something that I would be able to go up and say to someone.
But what I would say is, Life is incredibly fragile, and we forget that a lot because we've been shielded from mere, raw, brutal nature for almost all of modernity, certainly since post-Second World War.
I did a speech many years ago at the University of Toronto called Mother Nature is a sociopath, and she kind of is, right?
I mean, this stupid microbe, this virus, right?
Sorry, this herpes simplex 1 just tears through the baby and ends the baby's life.
But there's no malevolence, it's just reproduction, reproduction, reproduction.
We have been kind of shielded from the raw brutality of this kind of stuff a lot, and when the lightning does strike, particularly in this kind of context, it just reminds us that we are all to some degree hanging by a thread.
We are all hanging by a thread.
Now, we've got a pretty strong thread, so to speak, because we've got modernity, we've got antibiotics, we've got surgery, we've got...
Beep, beep, beep in your car when you back up something.
We've got the blind spot lights on the mirrors for some people.
All of those things help, and I'm not trying to diminish any of that.
Life expectancy, it's falling now, I think, for some demographics in America in particular, but as a whole...
So people forget that in the past, if you made it past the age of five, you probably were going to go the full distance as a whole.
I mean, absent war and disease or starvation or whatever it is.
So we have been shielded from this for so long that we kind of think of life as a whole lot more robust than it really is.
But this is a very powerful reminder of just how life We all are.
And so what do we do with that knowledge?
What do we do with this very deep and very powerful knowledge, A, of the inevitable decay, and B, of the Bottomless fragility of our existence.
Well, for me, what I do is, A, I try not to waste time, but again, that can become kind of a workaholic obsession to the point where I can't waste any time.
It's like, well, can you enjoy it?
No, but I can't waste it. So that's, you know, got to have your relaxing and enjoyable time too.
But in particular, to me, the brute force decapitation scenario that's either a short term through some disaster or illness or long term just through the passage of time That reminds me to truly invest in and maintain the quality of my relationships.
That's really, really important for me.
I mean, what can you get out of something so absolutely terrible in this context?
Well, I think you can get out of this, life is short, We are very fragile and don't leave things unsaid that need to be said.
Don't avoid making apologies where you need to make apologies.
Don't avoid asking forgiveness where you need to ask for forgiveness.
Don't avoid standing up for yourself if you need to do that.
Invest in your life, in your courage, in your morality, in your integrity.
Invest in your relationships.
And, you know, that old saying about married couples, don't go to bed mad, it's not a bad idea.
If you've got to stay up half the night to work something out, do it.
Because like that old poem that I recited when I was a kid, an hour I lay me down to sleep, I pray my soul the Lord to keep, and if I die before I wake, I pray my soul the Lord to take.
And this, if I die before I wake, I mean, it's a little weird, giving that to kids, but we understand that this came out of a time where that was a whole lot more probable than it is now.
And, you know, in the past, you know, you get one bite from a rat, and you could die.
You eat one piece of bad food.
I'm sorry? I said one bite from the flea on the rat.
Yeah, one bite from the flea on the rat.
Yeah, yeah, black death style, right?
So, I wouldn't necessarily give the invest in your relationship speech on Saturday.
But what you can, because you don't want to give, I mean, again, just my suggestions.
Obviously, you're the final decider.
But I think if I were you, I would talk about your thoughts about it.
Like, this reminds me of the fragility.
This reminds me of our need to speak and to be courageous and to love and to forgive and to, you know, what is the opposite of life?
The opposite of life is not death.
The opposite of life is pettiness.
The opposite of life is erasing the potential grandeur of your days with little upsets, little fears, little vengeances, little, little, little, little.
That to me is the opposite.
Death is not the opposite of life because death and life are two sides of the same coin.
It's like saying that the tails is the opposite of the heads on a coin.
No, they're both still on the coin, right?
So we only have life because of death.
We are only here because...
You need new people. You and I happen to be the new people.
You're newer than I am. But we're only here because of death.
So you can't say that life and death are opposites because they're innately intertwined.
It's like saying the two trees that grow together are opposites.
They're not. So what is the opposite of life?
The opposite of life is wasting life.
The opposite of life is wasting life.
And how do you waste life? Usually through pettiness, through avoidance, through fear, through living small.
So for you, what's the best that can be done to honor this poor, poor baby who died?
It is to try and extract as much commitment to life out of the presence of death as possible.
I mean, it doesn't make the death, obviously, any less awful.
But it is always the question, what is the greatest potential good we can extract out of these terrible, terrible situations?
What is the greatest good we can extract out of these terrible, terrible situations?
And to me, it does fall to just a brutal reminder of our decay and fragility.
And I think the first video I ever did was Live Like You're Dying.
If you have some illness that's diagnosed with you tomorrow that doesn't give you much time to live, what would you do?
Well, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Like one day. With good luck when we're old, but one day that doctor's going to come into the waiting room or to our hospital bed and he's not going to be carrying anything.
It's always good when the doctor comes in and they're carrying something because then they've got something to discuss.
But when he's not carrying anything, And he comes in and he says, well, like, I'm sorry, but we've done all we can do.
We can make you comfortable.
That's all we can do. That's going to happen.
Or something like it, or maybe you'll die in your sleep and it will be unexpected and the poem will have come true finally after many decades.
But I think about this, and of course I didn't think about this when I was younger, but I think about this now.
When an ambulance goes screaming down the street, given that Doppler shift, well, one day that ambulance is going to have you in it, and it's a one-way trip.
Most times, hopefully it's a two-way trip.
Oh my gosh, I've never been in an ambulance, but you get to the hospital, they fix you, you go back home, right?
But one day, it doesn't go back home.
There's nothing to take you back home, because you're in the hospital, you stay in the hospital, and you die in the hospital.
It's going to happen.
One of these scenarios is going to unroll, without a doubt.
And I mean, I've obviously been thinking a lot about regret lately, and I just can't quite get there.
I can't quite get to regretting things that I have done, because the option is simply then to silence yourself about important issues out of fear and a thirst for the approval of censorious people.
And so I hope that this kind of death can give people a sense of how much we do need to commit to life and how much, when we remember our fragility, it doesn't have to be something that paralyzes us.
In fact, I think that the paralysis is the pretend immortality that we generally have floating around in our heads, a lot of times encouraged by a pretty feckless media.
But How do we honor the smallest grave in the family?
How do we honor the smallest coffin in the family?
It has to be something to do with shaking off pettiness, resentment, guilt, shame, and committing to as deep an embrace of a transitory life as humanly possible.
That doesn't do anything, of course, to bring the baby back, but it does do something, I think, to bring more life to the people in the room.
I think that's really profound.
I think that that is a big place where there's an answer in there To at least, because what I was struggling with, and this is, it was a dangerous mindset, and my husband pointed it out to me, and luckily since he pointed it out, I've been able to deal with it, but there was...
There was a lady I used to work with and she used to, she was like a meth addict and she had four kids, all from different dads.
The baby that she had just turned one years old.
She entered into the relationship with a married man, broke up their marriage and had his baby.
And the day my cousin's baby died, I saw just that post on Facebook, like her baby turning one, and I felt such a rage of injustice because I'm like,
there's, you know, this married couple that came together under God, you know, out of love, not out of, you know, any kind of...
I mean, of course, there's always lust involved in relationships because hopefully you find your partner attractive and...
That's part of life, too. It's why we're here, right?
Mm-hmm. But it's like, so how come the meth and You know, the meth addict who broke up a marriage for selfishness, her baby gets to live.
And this other baby doesn't.
And that's, like, life's not fair.
Like, I understand that.
But it's still just hard to not feel that injustice.
And that is a very dangerous mindset.
And I think that's one of the great temptations is, To feel that way and is a way to...
Because even with all of the other deaths that me and my husband have both gone through, there was always someone at fault or like a reason behind it.
Like even like the suicide, there was that profound suffering and how my husband's father died.
A lady just pulled out in front of him and he was a skilled motorcycle driver, but he couldn't get out of the way in time.
And he just...
Slammed into her and she also didn't even though she got community service even though she didn't look both ways she just pulled out in front of someone and he tore his aorta and with my friend who was in the hospital like She had a genetic disease that was progressive, that is known for its horrible peaks and valleys.
Like, they look like they're soaring on top of the world, they don't need oxygen, and then suddenly they, you know, get a cold or get pneumonia, and then they're in a coma on the vent.
And, like, of course, like, the virus is what caused the baby to die, but it's not like...
It's not like, even like with my friend, it was the cousin that pulled the trigger.
He had a choice in it, he chose the wrong thing, but then you can, it's easy to cast a blame on someone or something, and that's like, I think the easy default way that people handle grief.
And so I think the admission to The innate decay of humanity and just the fragility of humankind.
I think that there is a lot of grace in the understanding that because people don't really talk about grief.
Even my friend, the matron of honor at my wedding, in the middle of my wedding preparations, she miscarried her baby.
And, um, like women, they don't talk about their miscarriages or how it impacts them.
And of course, I mean, my, I just like, I told her, I was like, don't worry about anything.
Like, I'm here for you.
I, I was, she, I took over her, her planning kind of schedule.
It was easy. You know, we always, we made it work.
We're very, very close.
Um, But, you know, it's just so...
such a different kind of thing to have this little one that didn't...
Right. And the miscarriage thing, of course, that's still something that is beyond the realm of most science.
A significant proportion of pregnancies, as you know, and in miscarriage, I've heard a variety of estimates, 20%, 30% or so.
It's way more common than they make it seem because even so, I was working in the restaurant industry in middle and upper management and it's pretty physically demanding work and most of the women that were pregnant either had very complicated pregnancies due to the stress or Or they miscarried.
Me and my husband, we've been trying to become pregnant.
I haven't had any luck so far, but I made the choice to go ahead and leave that field even though it paid extraordinarily well.
But I thought that the stress alone might terminate a pregnancy.
And I kind of weighed the paychecks as opposed to the risk.
And I kind of thought, you know, any risk of that wouldn't be worth it, because I don't know if I would have been able to forgive myself because of that.
You look for the cause of death, so you can either try to avoid it or, you know, put blame, and I think that that is just the temptation of Trying to rationalize death instead of at least recognizing that it is a part of just our human fragility and our decaying nature.
Or the woman you knew who was the drug addict who'd broken up a marriage, who had a child and the child lived.
This is something that I thought about in my Christian days, and there's still a pretty solid Christian part of me.
And it goes something like this.
Why are we good? Why do we tell the truth?
Why do we honor virtue and try to embody it?
Why do we do that? Well, we don't do it because we shouldn't do that because we're afraid that our babies are going to die if we don't.
You can't bargain with truth or virtue.
It is something that should be pursued for its own sake.
And so saying, well, you know, if you're bad, your baby's going to be more likely to die.
That's not virtue anymore because you're not choosing it for its own sake.
Because then it's cause and effect and not virtue.
You're being threatened or bribed to be good.
The moment you're threatened or bribed to be good, it's no longer good, right?
It's no longer virtue. It has to be pursued for its own sake.
And sometimes against odds and obstacles that seem perhaps insurmountable.
But we do have to pursue virtue for itself.
And if we're like, well, you know, but...
My baby's much more likely to survive if I'm good.
Well, then you're pursuing the baby's survival, which is perfectly understandable, but the virtue is not for itself then.
It's the old thing, like, what they say, virtue is what we do when we can get away with not being virtuous.
Virtue is what we do when we're alone.
If you knew for sure you could get away with some immoral action, would you do it?
That's the interesting question, because if we say, well, sure, I'd steal this whatever if I knew I wasn't going to get caught somehow.
Well, then we are not pursuing virtue in that situation.
We're simply trying to avoid negative consequences.
There are some aspects of catastrophe that are under our control.
As you know, no disrespect to your father-in-law, of course, but riding a motorcycle is risky.
And nobody wishes ill and nobody wants to justify anything.
But there is risk involved.
And having a baby, getting pregnant, having a baby, there are risks involved.
And, you know, sometimes we just come up with snake eyes.
And that's part of the natural universe that God himself should not fundamentally be choosing whether babies live or die based upon the personalities of the parents. - Mm-hmm.
I mean, you understand that if a human being tried to do that, we would consider that pretty monstrous, right?
Oh, you're a bad person, so your baby gets to not live.
I mean, that's not just a fear.
We would just call that the DNC.
Yeah, I guess so, right?
So, trying to find...
Look, we always want to find causality in these things, and sometimes it's right.
You know, hey, if we don't wash our hands, we tend to get sick.
So we want to find that causality.
We want to wash our hands and not get sick, at least not get sick as much.
So we are drawn as a species to try and figure out the causality of what goes on in life.
That's perfectly natural. It's perfectly healthy.
But you need the Aristotelian mean in these things.
So if you never try and provide any causality, right, that you're trying to figure out, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, okay, why is it that I'm drawn To doomed people, right?
Okay, well, maybe to do with my mom, maybe to do with being a caregiver, some sign of the box of repetition, compulsion, whatever.
That's good. I mean, that's fantastic, right?
It's really, really important to try and figure out the causality.
So if you don't figure out any causality, you just bounce around like a pinball from stimulus and response, usually historical, usually unconscious.
So you want to find some causality, but you've got to walk up that seesaw and stop in the middle, because if you go too far, Then we go from self-ownership to superstition.
Ah, there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow!
And then we start looking at tarot cards as readers of the future, and we start having magical thinking.
You end up with OCD or something like, I can't step on a crack, I'll break my mother's back.
So you do want to focus on causality to where you can, but you don't want to overleap causality to superstition, because then The randomness of the world ends up controlling you and you lose any rational free will.
And there is that temptation and mysticism that I've seen in some of my relatives.
And just like Pierce, you know, they're all like, I'm a life coach, but their lives are falling apart.
I'm like, I don't think I would want you as my life coach because you live in a trailer.
I remember one woman who was a kind of lifey coachy person saying, You chose your parents for a reason.
And it's like, dude, that is not how reality works.
You don't sort of sit there saying, I think I'll choose that person to be my parent.
That's taking causality and ownership way too far.
It's just like, I mean, the logical fallacy behind that, like some...
You know, baby is up in the ether and it was like, yes, I do believe that this impoverished African family, you know, where the whole village is starving, that is my ideal.
Or like, oh yes, this abusive family with like an absent father, that is my ideal.
Well, your friend whose single mom brought pedophiles into the home, the idea that he would know that was going to happen but would choose it anyway, that's just appalling, right?
So we do want to look for causality for sure, but you've got to stop at the rational bounds of human will and of linear time and what we can predict and control, right?
Because we do, you know, something like this happens and we try to find some causality.
And sometimes that's a very helpful thing.
In this situation, I can't see how it is.
And so I'm a Christian.
My cousin is a Catholic.
So Catholicism is essentially the same.
They just have some extra doctrine.
I think it's just Christianity kind of with extra steps.
But, so, in Christianity, you know, being brought up Christian, that the world is of the devil.
And, you know, heaven is God's domain.
The devil kind of does his own thing.
God himself is omnipotent, but he doesn't exactly, like, pick and choose, as we were talking earlier, what babies get to live or die, because, well, the world is of the devil, so there are miracles in the world and tragedies in the world, but I think that that can also be a pitfall into nihilism, into thinking that, oh, well, the world is of the devil.
I just have to focus on maybe my heavenly realm and if I pray enough or or that kind of thing then all my problems will go away and that's just a part where I struggle um a little bit and because there are so many temptations around to try and find Like, the truth, because I want to seek the truth wherever it leads me.
But that is to reject suffering as an important part of life.
And it is.
It is an important part of life.
I mean, as I said to my daughter when she was young, she said, why is there pain?
It's a good question! Why is there pain?
Why does your toe hurt when you stub it so you don't stub it again?
It's an aversive mechanism, right?
It's an aversive mechanism. And to reject suffering is to reject wisdom, is to reject learning, is to reject growth.
You know, like these old books I read by Stephen R. Donaldson called The Covenant Series, where the guy had leprosy and he had to do what was called a VSE, a visual search of extremities.
He had to go and check because he couldn't feel.
His nose was so he had to check.
Oh, have I cut myself?
Have I hurt myself?
Do I have a sunburn?
Do I bruise myself?
He couldn't tell.
And so in the absence of the physical pain that gives us feedback on good for body or bad for body, we end up becoming kind of OCD, checking everything all the time, right?
Mm-hmm.
And without a doubt, you know, I mean, I hope that she will choose to have another baby.
And without a doubt, not that she did anything wrong with this baby, but she's going to be extra super duper, you know, like a lot of people don't remember you want to handle baby go wash your hands.
Oh, yeah. Like, I just I can't even imagine like, not doing that, especially.
And she may have done all of that.
Of course, I'm sure she did. Right.
But but a lot of people don't remember that babies are really, really, really fragile.
Well, and I don't even think that the baby really had a whole lot of exposure to people outside of the immediate family because, I mean, my family is a very, very large kind of a traditional Catholic style.
Like, I have like 42 or more first cousins, so by blood, because my father, including, has 11 brothers and sisters.
So, um, but, but me and this cousin, the cousin that had the baby, we were, we were really close growing up.
The rest of us were kind of spread out.
So, um, I think that she just had exposed the baby to maybe like the immediate family.
I don't know of any of my family.
I mean, it's just most likely extraordinarily bad luck.
It seems that because I was doing just some research and it was like less than 1% of babies die from this kind of...
I was looking at...
Oh, even if they're infected, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Because even...
So, because there's a lot that you can do if you know, like say if it's like HVS2, most of the time...
I mean, it was HVS1, but like if they know that the mother would be...
had HVS2... In the past, they would do a cesarean, and so that limits the contact.
Yeah, there's antivirals you can put into the baby's bloodstream after birth and so on, right?
Yeah, there's all different kinds of...
And they just know to kind of look for it.
And of course, like...
It's just kind of crazy and you know sometimes hospitals are the dirtiest places in the world because I knew working at a hospital because oftentimes you have problems with MRSA which is a staph infection that's highly contagious and then also when I was working at the hospital C. diff was a problem that went through our floor which is a a gastrointestinal reaction to the heavy use of antibiotics because it will the antibiotics used in the hospital will kill off the good bacteria in your gut and then when you are exposed to bad bacteria the c diff bacteria then it will just wreak havoc on the system with like gi distress so like the whole nursing staff you know Have to really,
like, halfway, like, step into a fumigation chamber to try to decontaminate in between patients just to reduce the risk of spread.
But when you're dealing with microorganisms and micro, you know, viruses that, you know, scientists still are torn to whether properly, like, say if they're alive or not because they have aspects of life that aren't technically alive.
Just like the amount of carefulness you have to be All the time.
And even with... I know it was a big scare when I was in high school in biology, like, not to let pregnant women even clean out the cat box because...
Right, right. Talks about plasmosis, right?
Mm-hmm. Right.
So, yeah, just like...
It's definitely made me, like, more scared and more cautious about who I plan on, you know...
When I become pregnant, who I'm going to let around my baby within the first, you know, two weeks to month or year of life?
Yeah, and I mean, given that over time hundreds of thousands of people are going to listen to this, what can we get out of the terrible death of this child is perhaps other people will be more careful and possibly dozens of babies' lives could be saved.
It doesn't make anything okay, obviously, but is this the best good that we can get out of this kind of situation?
And if you can aim to get the best good out of a terrible situation, I don't know what else you can work with.
That to me is...
I hate to say it was the best outcome, because there's no such thing as the best outcome in this kind of tragedy, but it's the best that can be done, or the least worst, if that makes sense, that can be done.
Well, and it's kind of like some of the people that come on your show, that it's like a cautionary tale.
Hey, please don't do things the way that I did things because I was wrong for a long time.
I mean, it's not a cautionary tale, of course, because it was basically kind of an accident because it's not like it was really out of neglect because I could have done everything right and things still wrong happened.
But I think getting...
Mothers and people to openly talk about grief is really important, especially for maybe some of the male listeners that are listening, because I know, like my family in the males, and even my husband to a certain extent, the pressure to be stoic and to kind of harden your heart against grief.
These things and to be a pillar of strength, I think that is sometimes a little bit too much.
Like, they try to push their feelings down so tight to allow other people to kind of feel around them that they just condense their own feelings until it manifests in another area.
Yeah, and we do want to be acutely aware of the passage of time.
And given that this poor child had so little time in the world, hopefully it helps us just remember to embrace and enjoy.
Or if we're not enjoying, at least richly suffer.
And try and gain the lessons out of that suffering.
Life is a pretty serious business.
And suffering is...
It's the twin of life.
Suffering is not the opposite of life.
Suffering is entwined in life.
And there is an old saying about mental health, that mental dysfunction almost always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
And your suffering, your cousin, of course, is suffering infinitely more.
And it is something that we should embrace.
It is something that we should Recognize as it's the price of life.
The price of life is suffering.
You know, you love someone. They're going to die before you.
You may die before them. You're going to suffer.
You know, you have a child.
You suffered that anxiety of the world, the future, your child, how things are going to go.
And there is no path to depth or richness or wisdom without...
Accepting suffering. And yet we have tried to inoculate ourselves against suffering through distraction, through drugs, through promiscuity, through inattention, through vanity.
That's all just like putting a house of cards up on a train track thinking you're going to stop the train.
I always, because I'm remembering when you first started to talk about the death of your father, which I was profoundly, you know, sorrowful for you, and I know that you weren't particularly close, but what you said was, maybe not exactly in this, you know, verbatim, but, you know, the greater the love you have for someone in life, the greater the suffering.
So, Since you and your father weren't particularly close, you still felt an impact, but it was different than, say, if You know, someone that you really cared about was to pass away and there's almost a temptation there that, you know, I love this person so much I feel like I can't, you know, live without them.
But you have to be grateful for the love that you had in life and you have to, I feel, hold on to that love despite the grief and the pain of them passing.
Otherwise you surrender everything that's great about life before you're actually dead.
And I've seen so many people that walk around as if they were dead because something has happened to them and they let it into them and it just hollows them out.
Yeah, I don't want to surrender one clod of my funeral soil before I have to.
I don't want to give anything up out of fear that I don't have to.
And I think that's beautiful and I want to feel that too and I think that I do and I want other people to feel that because there's this constant parade of Just distraction in front of you and then you blink and then your life is over.
I remember, sorry to interrupt, but I remember a story of a friend of mine from many years ago.
He was getting married and his mother had been always this petty witch of a human being, you know, stirring up trouble and all of that and Being difficult and squelching on everybody else's potential joy and all of that.
Are you sure you don't meet my mother?
Well, maybe. Long lost friend.
So he got married, and he kind of invited his mother out of an obligation, but she proved to be really, really difficult.
So he didn't exactly disinvite her, but he said, I'm fine if you don't come.
And he kind of thought she wasn't going to come.
And then she showed up with, you know, one of her tag-along remora jaw friends, you know, like those little pilot fish that snap up the scraps of a shark's meal.
And she came, and she demanded this, and she demanded that, and she was dressed inappropriately, and then she drank too much.
And, like, she was just there...
To wreck the day. I mean, just a bitter person who sees happiness and immediately wants to, you know, like you have a fire and you're going back in the house or you're going back in the tent, you have this fire.
You've got to make sure the embers are out, otherwise it could be dangerous, right?
So she's like, oh, there's a fire of happiness.
Well, I can't let that go because that's dangerous, so I've got to...
I just remember that story.
I remember him telling me that story.
I was in my mid-twenties, and I just remember thinking, he was older than me, and I remember thinking, gosh, so you can still be in your 60s and 70s.
I think she was in her late 60s or early 70s.
You can be that age.
And you can still be a complete and total joy-killing minister of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me.
Like, you can just be a complete joy-killer.
Even at that age, there's no guarantee that you gain any wisdom from getting older.
You might just entrench your pettiness and become more destructive.
Or as the old saying in King Lear, thou shouldst not have been old before thou were wise.
And the idea that life could just continue on that way, or I remember being on a bus once and seeing some 60-year-old woman having a stupid fight about nothing with her 80-year-old mother, and just thinking, I bet you they've been doing this for 70 years.
Well, you know, that's...
She's been doing that for, yeah, 60, 80, 50 years.
They've been doing it for 50 years, right?
Half a century, they've just been having these same stupid fights and nothing's changed and nothing's jumped the track and somehow...
They're very obvious mortality.
I mean, the older woman was kind of croaking.
You could see sort of one foot in the grave and this swirly, dark whirlpool of death coalescing up around her legs.
But you could just completely miss that you're going to die.
You could just completely miss that you don't have forever to correct your mistakes.
And I just remember looking at that and thinking, oh man, I cannot.
I cannot. I can't end up like that.
I don't care what happens in my life but I can end up like that.
I see that too because I admit fault a lot when I'm wrong, and my husband will do the same, and we will work together to build an even better relationship.
We've been together for eight years, and I feel like it's only gotten better the longer we've been together.
But I was thinking about that the other day, about how people can just live their lives like that, and I broke it down to three categories.
You can correct me if you disagree with this premise, but it was just something I was thinking about.
I broke them down, and this was just like...
Not just with life suffering, but just kind of like political laziness and just like lack of self-knowledge.
But I broke it down into the ignorant who they don't know what to believe because they've been told a lot of different things.
their life it's kind of like an npc class and then there is the the willfully ignorant who they know that they have a problem but they choose not to deal with it they just they willful um like by it by a choice they remain ignorant and they're just totally opposed to any other facts that you might bring to the table any counter arguments and aren't willing to change their opinion at all
and then there's the uh the pretend ignorant that they um they really know the truth but they they won't admit it to to anyone and And it's kind of like certain political affiliations, like say with welfare, for example, like they know that it's bad for the poor in the long run, but they pretend that it's a solution For impoverished people,
they pretend that it's going to help and they get the ignorant or the willfully ignorant to buy in at really the expense of their own freedoms or their own self-knowledge or their own self-improvement.
And so that's how I was rationalizing it the other day.
I thought that... Yeah, it's like the ignorant, the avoidant and the sophists.
Yeah, I can see that. Well, listen, I'd love to chat more, but I'm cognizant of the listener's time.
Obviously, I can't give you a speech.
It wouldn't make any point if I did.
But is at least this kind of perspective helpful in terms of thinking about what you might say?
Yeah, I think it's really profound.
I think, of course, I think the funeral will be really sad, and I'm sure that there will be a lot of people.
It's going to be a very, you know, highly stressful time, so I think that, you know, I'll give my condolences, and I'll think about what I want to say, and then maybe when things calm down for her, just thinking about The importance of maintaining the relationships that really matter, I'll just reach out to her on a more personal level.
How are you doing? What are your thoughts?
How did you sleep? Did you have any dreams?
How's your heart today? All of that kind of follow-up I think is really important when people are suffering like this.
Well, I mean, in general as a whole, but particularly in these situations.
Well, especially like the long-term because in the different kind of grief things that I've gone through, it's kind of like a hot potato thing.
It's like everyone jumps on it right away.
Oh, yeah, then it's gone, right.
Yeah. And I don't think that's not how grief, because even, you know, the Jewish people had a tradition that if a spouse had died, then they grieve for a year to two years, and that is your official grieving period, and we kind of lost that.
Now you're lucky to get three days off of work.
And there's always this vague annoyance, it's like, well, aren't you better yet?
Yeah, aren't you better yet?
Like, how come you're not just like...
Oh yeah, and it's different because different people deal with grief in different ways.
Some people like to work and some people, you know, can't even get out of bed.
And it's like you were talking about that chronic fatigue is also a, I mean, last night you were talking about it as a, you know, a potential long-term effect of COVID, but it's also a potential long-term effect of grief.
And so making sure that your family members are like taking care of themselves and Doing all that.
So I think if I put my own personal touch, and we were close when we were kids, so kind of maybe rekindling that.
Yeah. You can have a renewed commitment to a relationship that can, again, what good can you extract out of this difficulty?
Well, thank you so much for your time.
I want to just express my absolute gratitude and so happy to talk to you and thank you so much for your help and Thank you for giving me this, you know, little time on the platform that you work so diligently to make.
You're very welcome. And please let me, I mean, probably just don't even bother passing along my condolences.
I think they're implicit, but because she probably doesn't want to, you know, some stranger or whatever.
But I really appreciate your time today.
And do drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
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