How to Survive the End of the World
[00:00:00]Anne Lamott:Thebest advice I could give to anyone of really any age, except for little, is to start to get comfortable with this aspect of our life, which isthat we're mortal and we will die.Every single person you love, literally more than life itself will die. Maybe before you, maybe after you. Maybe they're gonna have to bury your death, and it's gonna be heartbreaking for them, or it's gonna be heartbreaking for you. That's the price of love. [00:00:31] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is New York Times bestselling author, and so many people's favorite writer, Anne Lamott. Anne is known for her piercing honesty, her humor, and her willingness to go to the hard places.In this conversation, Anne and I explore the terrain that has defined so much of her life and writing: loss, grief, faith, and grace. She shares what she's learned from sitting with dying people, including her father and her best friend. Anne has an uncanny presence and a profound ability to stay hopeful in dark times. I think we can all use a bit of Anne's wisdom right now.[00:01:14]Anne Lamott:Hi, Sarah.[00:01:16]Sarah Cavanaugh:Hi Annie. It's so nice to see you.[00:01:19]Anne Lamott:You too.[00:01:20]Sarah Cavanaugh:Welcome to Peaceful Exit.I'm getting over a cold, so forgive me, butI'm writing some comments to share at my father's celebration of life this weekend, and I just wondered if you're willing to share your story about him.[00:01:35]Anne Lamott:Let's see, I met George—I'm not sure what year it would've been, but I think my son was about eight and he's 36 now, so that would be 28 years ago—at the Sun Valley Writing Conference. And we bonded and he liked my sense of humor. And, I, I remember I did a fundraiser. There was a terriblefamine in, in a particular African nation and now I can't remember which one, and I raised a couple thousand dollars. And then George came up to me and slipped me his card and said, “When we're back in San Francisco, if you tell me your total, I'll match it.”And that was just so amazing.I summoned every ounce of courage I had and I said, “Can you recommend someone in the Bay Area who could help me with my financial goals?” Because I'm hilariously incompetent and I actually don't care that much. And, but I had a
son and I wanted to do right by him and all that. And so he put me together with these two guys and you know, I just owe so much to your dad.But I'll never forget that—he kind of sidled up to me, slipped me his card and said, “When we're both back home, call me and tell me how much you've raised and I'll match that.”[00:03:20]Sarah Cavanaugh:Well, I'm so grateful to you too that you were there for him, like in atime of real grief when my mom died.Well, before we talk about your new book coming out this year, I wanted to tell you that, you know, a personal story. Like several years ago at the end of the last century, when you published “Traveling Mercies,” I read it at a time when I really needed your voice and your stories. And I wondered if there's ever been a book in your life that kind of came at the right time for you.[00:03:49]Anne Lamott:So many books and especially poetry, you know.I remember when a, a collection of Jane Kenyonpoems, which was so much about grief and dying and living in whatever your current shape was and the freedom you could find, even if you, your body was failing.And the grieving process with which she was so familiar. I can't remember which collection it was, but I love her so much. Mary Oliver, and I remember also people thrusting some Jane Lever, uh, not Jane —Denise Levertovpoems into my hands at just the right time where I just couldn't believe howprofoundly they spoke to me.[00:04:31]Sarah Cavanaugh:Onthis podcast I talk a lot to poets 'cause it seems like in dire times we often turn to the poets who can[00:04:39]Anne Lamott:Yes.[00:04:39]Sarah Cavanaugh:Somehow articulate that, somehow crack that open. What was your first encounter with death?[00:04:46]Anne Lamott:Well, besides pets dyingwhen I was little, we always had pets and pets always diedand it would just feel like the end of the world. But when I was six years old, my grandfather passed, my father's father, and I had really loved him. Thatwould've been the very end of the fifties.And you never, ever brought up death. It was so unseemly. Then my father got very sick with brain cancer when I was 23, and that was —a friend died in college, but it was, I was very drunk, and kind of drank my way,I drank my way through my twenties. My dad got sick when I was 23 and died when I was 25. And that was really, I've written so much about it, I wrote a book, called “Hard Laughter,”my first novel that didn't include him dying, but when he was diagnosed, it was a metastasized melanoma and he was not going to be surviving that. All I can say
—it was the end of the world. Our father was the be all and end all. He was like our higher power. And so I had to, even though I was drinking a lot,I had to try to survive the end of the world. When he got sick, I, I did what one does, I'm sure you do this too, Sarah. You go to the library, to try to find people who've written books that are in any way similar to what you're going through.And there was just nothing about death. This is, he gets sick in ‘77, I'm 23, and Iwent to the library and there was exactly one book about death. It was by a great English novelist who I loved, and it was a journal of her chemotherapy. I read that 10 times. She did the deep dive into what it was like and what was coming, how she was handling that, how she was handlingthe grief and confusion it was putting her family through, how hard it was to need her daughter to be her mother. God as my witness, it was the only book on cancer and dying that I could find. And then, I mean, death doesn't really come out of the closet till the AIDS epidemic,and then the gay community says, we're sick and we're dyingand you are pretending not to notice. Andthere was such a incredible response in terms of social services and in terms of the writing, both by people who had AIDSand by the people who loved them,and by the medical community. And the medical community's response, I mean, after some initial terror and nervousness, was so beautiful. Then, let's see, I had a baby at some point. Let's see, I think that was 1989. And about six or seven months in, my best friend since I was like 14got metastasized breast cancer. Andshe had a baby, you know, andmy doctor, actuallythe woman who delivered my son, Carol Gertissaid, pay very close attention to Pammy right now 'cause she's teaching you how to live. And I got to be with somebody who was very consciously closing up shop and bearing up and imagining leaving her little girl. There was an organization, there still is, in our town called The Living Dying Project that Dale Borglum started.And it was about people who had some training going into families where someone was gonna die,and being there both for the person who was so sick and for the family members and saying, there are really ways to change yourselves so that you don't have topretend your father or your child is not as sick as he or she is.And there are ways to have an awakening that will mean your person and your family can experience the dark night of the soul, and experience the resurrection, and experience that grief never ends, and experience that it won't be so acute. It will turn into something else that you won't want it to end because you are so open and permeable, your heart's open in the aftermath, and that's one way that they stay alive is —you're experiencing that with George right now—that they're, after a little while they're so alive again. And if you sealed off your heart thenthey wouldn't be. Youknow, I'd do anything to keep my people alive in my heart.[00:09:06]Sarah Cavanaugh:I so wish I'd had that conversation when my mother was sick.She had cancer for a year, and nobody knew, like, how to talk to her or what to ask her or even find out what she wanted. So I'm curious why
you wrote a novel about that experience with your father. Was it too hard to write nonfiction?Is that why you chose —[00:09:24]Anne Lamott:I was young. I thought of myself as a novelist and I wanted to be a novelist. And there was someone in the extended family who I couldn't stand, and so I couldn't really write about her in nonfiction. I had to really change that dramatically. Also, I think I couldn't bear the fact that my father never was going to heal from his melanoma, and so I wanted to write about it in a way where there was some chance that he might come through. The miracle for me was that he was alive and coherent long enough for me to sell it, and for him to read it, and I wanted to write it in such a way that it would be a joy for him to read it.[00:10:05]Sarah Cavanaugh:What's been revealedto you during the time that you've cared for dying people?[00:10:12]Anne Lamott:It'sjust such an honor. It'sfunny, a little bit off this subject, but when I first met my husband in 2016, I had a close, close family person and family I was helping through a death, an impending death, and he was a hospice volunteer. So we had bothhad a huge amount of experience with dying people and weren't afraid of it and felt that we, you know, we knew how to show up.We knew how to listen, we knew how to not give advice.What's usually appropriate is listening and not running away, and hearing what is needed, and asking if they can let you offer that to them.Andit's such an honor. I, for some reason, I guess because I came through my dad and Pammy, so many people, 20 people have asked me to be there for them after they've gotten the bad diagnosis.And their families have wanted me to be a part of the experience because I'm not afraid and because I'm just, I'm a very friendly face and I'm not in terror. I've had a lot of experience with itand what I've learned is that towards the end of life, people aren't talking and sharingand thinking about all of their great accomplishments. Like I'm sure your dad was not obsessed with his professional life. That people are thinking about the love that they felt, they received. The miracle of having been so deeply loved, and having had a few people that they loved beyond their wildest dreams. It'sjust funny, I mean, dying people do teach you how to live because we're so raised to think about our accomplishments and having people really admire us, respect us, be jealous of us, whatever. When all is said and done, it has nothing to do with the depth and wealth and richness of a life. It has to do with just the qualities of love and the beautiful memories. The memories of the places you've been, probably with the people you love. That's one of the most profound things that I've learned.
[00:12:13]Sarah Cavanaugh:Beingwith someone who's dying and caring for them, it requires us to process so many different emotions at once. I mean, you've written a lot about your experiences, the small things that you do. I wonder if you'd share a little bit about how you take care of yourself as a caregiver.[00:12:31]Anne Lamott:Oh yeah. The thing to do when you or somebody you adore and can't live without gets a terminal diagnosis is you call hospice. I'd also really recommend The Living Dying Project in, um, Fairfax, California. But you send for the cavalry because it's the hugest thing you're gonna go through, maybe right up there with the birth of a child if you are a person who has children, but you can't do it alone. And Hospice works with a person who's sick, but hospice also works with the family and they have so much wisdom about staying healthy yourself and staying in radical self-care so that you're not being with your person from a place of depletion and hopelessness. That you're getting the care you need, that you very well may need counseling. You need things you do every day that keep you strong. And that's what these organizations do, is they help you keep filling up, keep having your life, keep being as centered as you can. And having other people that can help you with the terror. You know, what's it gonna be like them when they're dying? What am I gonna do if they panic? What am I gonna do if the pain gets to be too much? What am I gonna do if I can't bear it? Whatif I have a nervous breakdown afterward? What if, what if,what if? And hospice: they're there and they go, oh, I'm glad you asked. You learn to take it one day at a time and uh, and some days are really hard to get through.[00:14:03]Sarah Cavanaugh:I love what you say about what if, it's like death is the big what if, you know.[00:14:09]Anne Lamott:I know.[00:14:10]Sarah Cavanaugh:What if, Ugh.[00:14:12]Anne Lamott:I've never seen a miserable death though. So much falls away. So much drops off when you're dying, such BS that you used to care about.You know, it's like you're flying in an airplane and it's suddenly flying very low, just above the treetops, and you have to throw everything out of the plane that's gonna keep you from going down.[00:14:33]Sarah Cavanaugh:You wrote that your son Samhas seen darkness, even a dead body, and this was back in the turn of the century.And when you asked, or when he asked you if you were going to die and you told him that you
probably die first, he said,“If I'd known that I never would've agreed to be born.”It's so beautiful.What is Sam's take on mortality now that he has a son?[00:15:00]Anne Lamott:Um, my Sam is gonna be 37 this year, and I still have that frantic desperation of losing him that I had fromthe first time I lay eyes on him, so that doesn't go away. And so he has that with Jax. But, well, Sam didn't have a father tillhe was seven. And that was like a very grievous loss. That was like a death. And then he met him and they began a relationship. But he'd had an adoptive grandfather 'cause my dad was dead. So when he lost his grandfather, who he called Papa, it was just devastating, you know, he felt it, it was so sad. And then it passed and we had animals and they, we were just both crushed when they died. And then it passed. And then my mother died who he was close to, and then his adoptive grandmother, the wife of the adoptive grandfather died. And it might be in “Bird by Bird”actually, the story of us visiting this little baby who'd been born in a vegetative state because of a botched delivery, a lack of oxygen for too long. And we spent a lot of time and what's gonna, he was about six, what's gonna happen to the baby? Well, he's gonna pass, he's gonna—and I believed in God and heaven, so I would say, you know, it's just really sad, but we're gonna just keep showing...and we read to him. He didn't have, his brainstem was destroyed. And he's been very exposed to death. And his best friend, he grew up in church and his best friend was a kid his age named Michael. And Michael got very, very lost. Sam did too. Sam came out of meth addiction, but Michael never did. And he died underneath the bridge on my 60th birthday. So that's 12 years ago.We've grieved a lot of people together. A number of Sam's friends from teenage years died. Uh, you cannot believe in this tiny town how many people that he went to school with have died, you know, the drug overdoses. Andwe've just, you know, we deal with it. We cry together, we save their memorial programs. We always speak at their memorials about our love for them, and our hopes for them, and the shock we feel, and the gladness we have for the relationship we had and have with them. [00:17:07]Sarah Cavanaugh:Well, thank you for sharing all that because it's so—it's so the antithesis of how I grew up and I love that you talk to him about it and it's so important that we talk to our kids and our grandchildren and make it a normal part of life. [00:17:20]Anne Lamott:It would've changed my life dramatically if my parents had talked to me.[00:17:24]Sarah Cavanaugh:The opening of “Dusk,Night, Dawn,” —it centers on the feeling of “now what?”in a world that feels joyless, hopeless, faithless. What helps you get through your moments of despair?
[00:17:37]Anne Lamott:There's just really no other question for me right now is that: how do we keep the faith in goodness and in life itself, in the face of this catastrophic period of time we're in right now? Where everything that is of value has been destroyed or besmirched or defunded or torn down. We stick together, we help the people who are, are having a much worse time than we are. We feedthe poor. We lookat our dinner tables: who's suffering, who needs an ear? We try to get out for a walk every single day, get into nature, which the acronym is the great outdoors. We breathe, we go left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, and we read poetry, and we do what we can.I've said this story so many times, but when Bill Wilson was getting AA off the ground, he had a priest friend who was not an alcoholic named Father Dowling. And one day Father Dowling said to Bill, “Sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” And so what I remember to do, we both wearglasses, and I wake up, I saymy prayers, I put on my glasses—100percentof the days I do that. And if I wake up in a state, like when I was coming up, peoplewerealways talking about, so they'd say, oh, Sarah's in a state. You know, if you were being, if you were tweaked or being distant or cranky, oh, Sarah's in a state.And if I'm in a state, I thinkabout putting on a better pair of glasses, you know, metaphorically. I think about going around and looking for the beautiful, looking for what still works, looking for what remains, no matter how much has been taken away.[00:19:07]Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk for a minute about forgiveness because I feel like at the end of our lives it's a doozy. AndI know you've said forgiveness is God's love on steroids. Areyou still waiting patiently for several people to come to you begging for forgiveness? [00:19:22]Anne Lamott: To come crawling back to me, I believe is what I said. I'm still kind of waiting, but not without much energy. You know, I have a really dear friend, David Roach, and he's, he's the, you may know of him, he's the monologuist, R-O-C-H-E.And he's, he's the pastor of a church he founded called the Church of 80% Sincerity. You know, and I just live by that. And80percentforgiveness is a small miracle, just a small miracle. And I work on forgiveness, and I have gone around systematically andmade sure that I, I've forgiven and been forgiven and I put energy into that. And I put more energy than anywhere else into forgiving myself, which I think is the hardest work we do for all the things we failed, for all the time we've squandered, for all of the really stupid decisions we made. And I work on that. I work on being incredibly friendly and forgiving with myself.And then with other people that might've done something really significant to me, or that I might've really significantly injured probably during my drinking days, I'vemade amends. And that has been very painful to go and to say, I don't expect for you to forgive me, but I want you to know how griefstruck I am whenever I think about what I did to you and your family, and, um, if there's any way I could ever make it up to you—
believe me, I'm right there. My son said something that was so profound, I thought, when he was a teenager, a young teenager, he said, “When somebody forgives you, it's so incredible because they've had to re-experience what you did to them.”[00:21:10]Sarah Cavanaugh:Wow. So true. Your writing features a lot of musings about grace. What does grace mean to you and where do you find it? And how do we think about grace in the context of grief and death? [00:21:24]Anne Lamott:So it’s this very sneaky love energy that sneaks in through a crack in the turtle shell when you're at your absolutely most helpless and clueless. I've always described it as being spiritual WD-40, where you have that long thin red straw at the end and it gets into the places where we're so clenched and doomed and it spritzes us with this stuff that loosens up the clutch and the clench. We seegrace whereverwe see generosity, we see forgiveness. Whenever we see the fruits of the spirit, which are sacrificial love, which are people grieving and not, not pretending that they're okay when they're not okay. People being real. The ancient Greeks called God, the really real. When we see people at memorial services and they can't be comforted, I see grace there. And when a family has endured the end of the world, and I see them resurrect, we see grace there. When a community has been devastated by a shooting or a closing of a plant or a fire, and they are surrounded by helpers and drivers and cooks and coffee makers, and sitting-with-you people, I see grace there. I just see it everywhere.[00:22:48]Sarah Cavanaugh:So how, if at all, did getting married at 65 change your view of mortality or your fear surrounding death?[00:22:57]Anne Lamott:Now I know that, if I die first, that he will help me in my transition and while I'm on the path of sickness and death. And I know that no matter what happens to him, I'll do the same. My son would always be there for me as I would be for him, but it's great to have somebody who's not your kid who's on deck. Getting married just made me feel that now I have a partner in death and if he gets sick before I do, it will be the end of the world. But I have the tools now to help somebody cross crossover. Ram Dass famously said thathe thinksthe reason that we're here at all is to walk one another home. And I know Neil will walk me home and that I will walk him home, whatever order that happens in.[00:23:39]Sarah Cavanaugh:In all the interviews I've done, there's a real difference between talking to someone who's 69 or younger and 70 and older.
It's a really interesting inflection point at 70. [AL: yes it is.]I'm 60, so I have a decade to go, but I just wondered, has your relationship with death changed?[00:24:05]Anne Lamott:Well, as I said, when Neil and I met, I was 60, was I 61? Yeah. 61. He was 60. We had both been so involved with death and dying that we, we were talking about our, our memorial services on our second date, 'cause we both wanted Ripple to play by the Grateful Dead and, we were talking about death on our second date 'cause we, it's just part of, it's like such a huge part of our spirituality is that,as my dad said, we're all on borrowed time here and it's good to be reminded. It changes how you live and, yeah, 60 is so young. And I felt at 60 that I was still really young and I feel, uh, at almost 72 that I'm a very young 72. I'm very athletic and very plugged in and you know, my skin looks like hell, but I don't really care. I, you know, I don't care as much anymore. I used to care what my butt looked like. And now it's thefarthest thing, most of the time, the farthest thing from my mind. So many people have died in the last 10 years since I was your age. I do feel like sometimes there's a sniper in the trees just picking off people that I adore. So many people and every few months—that's what happens when you're old, is that people die fairly often and sometimes you didn't even know they were sick. Or sometimes they had heroically been sick for years and years and borne up underneath it. And, and I have two people right now in my life who are dying and, they're much, much younger than I am, and I am blown away by their elegance and their, the grace and their humor.You know, and I've always written that laughter is carbonated holiness. And I hear —they're laughing at stuff and I am feeling sacred ground beneath my feet. I've been pretty calm about death for a really long time, and I've, I don't know. The thing is no one knows how long they're gonna live. Do Ihave five more years? Will I die at 77? Do I have 10? Will I be 82? Ninetymakes me nervous. I, I have seen a lot of really heroic 90 year olds. A old man, Jesse, down the street passed last year, and I loved his life. And he walked past my house every single day. We talkedand talked, and he was in deep gratitude for the beauty of the day. You know, there's a bumper sticker I've seenand t says—I saw it in Texas, of course—says, we don't know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future. And I'm very, very plugged into a daily walk with God as I understand God. And so I don't feel like I'll ever be alone, even in the dark of night. But the best advice I could give to anyone of really any age, except for little, is to start to get comfortable with this aspect ofour life, which isthat we're mortal and we will die. Every single person you love, literally more than life itself will die. Maybe before you, maybe after you. Maybe they're gonna have to bury your death, and it's gonna be heartbreaking for them, or it'sgonna be heartbreaking for you. That's the price of love. When I fell into the abyss when my dad died, that was sort of, even though it was the end of the world, that was when my life began. That's like, wow, that is what happens to people. And he was a person.
[00:27:29]Sarah Cavanaugh:Are we well attuned to listen for hope?[00:27:32]Anne Lamott:You know, I've written a whole book on hope so I'm sort of probably plagiarizing myself, but it's about that new pair of glasses, you know?You can intentionally decide to see what still works, what gives you hope. The beauty of nature always fills me with hope and reminds me of these cycles of life. Art gives me hope. I read a book, I'll see a painting, and I'll just, oh, I'll be so moved. And that feels likehope. It'll be vibrational in me.Something inside of me, deep inside me will stir, and that's hope. So, no, I don't think we're naturally attuned to it. I think hope could be a decision. [00:28:09]Sarah Cavanaugh:I want toask about pet loss and what is it about losing pets—do you feel like your grief is the same or different with an animal?[00:28:19]Anne Lamott:I really think that the love of our pets is the closest we come to experiencing the direct love of God whilewe're here. And I mean that literally. Our cat, who's an indoor cat, was missing for 24 hours just a few nights ago. And I felt like I was being strangled by terror—-she's young, she's not even two—that she wouldn't come back. You just have no emotional defense against the degree of loss when a cat or a dog dies. But it passes a lot more quickly. Whereas for a person, I don't think you ever get over certain deaths. And I think that's the good news. I don't think you're supposed to. The culture tells you you're supposed to and you will, but I think that's just a crock.[00:29:02]Sarah Cavanaugh:Well, if we shift back to humans for a minute—watching your friend Karen, who wasvery, very sick and dying, you wrote that you were struck by how to notice your own life force now, rather than be consumed by fear. What does this idea of life force mean to you? [00:29:17]Anne Lamott:Well, when somebody is breathing, they are having one kind of life force. And when they're no longer breathing, they are, it's like the Jewish may their memory be a blessing, but when they're no longer breathing, their life force is disseminated into the world, into the hearts of everybody who loved them, into all of the things they wrote or gave you, or always made you laugh about, or always reminded you,the photos that you have. It's all, it's disseminated.But Carolyn Mace who wrote, “Why People Don't Heal and How They Can,”she said something 30 years ago that I live by.She said, every day you get a hundred dollars in the account. And I think of that as thelife force account and you get to spend it however you want to. Everything costs though, so that you canget together with somebody who you really dread spending time with because you're feeling codependent or
whatever. And you get to do that, you get to have a meal with them, that might cost you $18. So suddenly you have $82 worth of life force. So you're gonna make yourself go for a walk even though your knee hurts because you're feeling fat, but that might be another $15. And we all are gonna squander a lot of our time and our life force doing stuff that we swear we'd never do again. But a lot of the time if you could just remember—you're here and this is it, it's here now.Are you? I often wear a little red rubber band around my wrist, a loose one. And when I'm tripping too much on, on the future or the past or grievances or, or terror, like I'm really, really very anxious about publication, I will gently snap the red rubber band really gently, not like in a punishing childhood way. I'll gently snap it so it'll make me gasp for breath. And then I'll be back in the now, I'll be back in my breath. I'll be back in my beingness.[00:31:07]Sarah Cavanaugh:Well, I'd love to ask you a question I ask all my guests, which is, what does a peaceful exit mean to you?[00:31:15]Anne Lamott:Oh wow. A peaceful exit means that I have been awake for whatever the process involved. That I'd, as in my earlier years, did not just keep hitting the snooze button. That I was able, probably 'cause of grace and the blessings of great friends, able to bear the uncomfortable. The great exit for me will have a hospice around with their incredible wisdom, both for me and to help the family so I don't have to help my family be okay with it. I can help me be okay with it. I can experience it. Ideally for me, I'll be writing about it. As I said, I've written, I mean, I've written a lot about death and I've written that I'm not particularly afraid of it. I mean, I'm a Christian, so it's just a very major change of address for me. But I want tobe present for it. I want to be in the memories of love. I wanna be free of pain, which is why I would love for hospice to be around. Because of the modern era, because of your podcast, because people are talking about it and, and there are workshops, and there are classes, and there is hospice, and there's been a great consciousness raising about death and dying—that's what is available for us now.And that we don't have, in my experience, we don't have to fear it. My best friend's 23-year-old son passed a couple years agoand she came through it, and sometimes she still cries. I think it was four years ago. And she still aches for him and she still feels him all the time around her. That's, to me, like the end of the world. And yet this story is birth, death, new life, rebirth. She's been reborn. Her son Mason has been reborn. We feel him. We, you know, we laugh sometimes at, at his appearances. Death be not proud because we've got the tools now and there's a lineage of teachers on death and dying. And there's poetry that we've been directed to about death and dying. And it's just one day at a time. We're all gonna be okay. We were here for a while. We experienced life. We gave, we received, we fell down, we got up, we helped. And then it was our turn to kind of rejoin the ocean as, as a wave. Rumi said something I love, of course, he
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