Danielle Frum: People not in the alternative universe who don't know how to speak the language, they're struggling for what to say. But they're trying to comfort you. And the thing that you learn is you don't want comfort. You want to be seen. The horror and the, the gravity of the loss is what you want recognized.

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 writer and journalist Danielle Crittenden Frum, author of the book “Dispatches from Grief.” In this interview, Danielle and I talk about her eldest daughter Miranda, who died suddenly at age 32. In the throes of despair, Danielle began covering her grief like a news story, reporting from what she calls the "alternative universe" of a bereaved parent. She describes the intense physical toll of loss, like when she had a panic attack that sent her to the hospital, and why she's found EMDR therapy to be helpful. We also discuss the sudden “muggings” of grief she still experiences, and why people in grief don't necessarily want comfort, but simply want to be seen.

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:01:25] Danielle Frum: Thank you. I'm, I'm glad to be here, I think. It's — I hope I go peacefully, um …

[00:01:32] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, well let's start by having you tell me about Miranda

[00:01:37] Danielle Frum: Miranda was my eldest child and daughter. Shedied at the age of 32 very suddenly. It was ultimately the consequences of a brain tumor that she'd had removed five years before, and she was recovered. There was no expectation that this would happen, but it happened. So I ended up just in such a state of grief that I never thought I could have imagined, as one can't unless it happens to you and, uh, I just started to take notes and write down the pain I was feeling. But Miranda was just such a wonderful spirit. I was very close to her. By age 32, she was as much my best friend as, you know, a daughter. She lived in Brooklyn. She had a wonderful life and losing her has exploded everything. As people who have lost children know, your whole universe just implodes.

[00:02:40] Sarah Cavanaugh: I really appreciate the way you're so generous with who she was, which is so beautifully written. And is a celebration of those kids that don't fit in.

[00:02:57] Danielle Frum: I also think it's important when you're remembering the dead to remember them in 3D, like not deify them. You want to remember them in all their full color. So when I was writing about Miranda as a child — originally, by the way, I didn't have her in the book. I wanted it just to be about maternal grief, and one of my editors, when they looked at it, said, "You have to have Miranda in it." And I said, "Yeah, but how do you write about your child? How do you capture their whole life and their spirit?" It — it felt impossible. But then I just started to write about her as a … she was, she was a very free spirit. She didn't recognize any form of authority, including us. And then she just grew up into this wonderfully entertaining, fun, original person.

[00:03:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: So you're a writer and as you reveal in your book, you couldn't really write or read anything after she died. When did it start to feel okay to write again?

[00:04:04] Danielle Frum: It didn't at all. So this was not ... the reason "Dispatches" is in the title, "Dispatches from Grief," is I was born and raised as a newspaper reporter. When something happens to you, you start to write about it but it's quite different from journaling. I was in the very, very early phases, and I can't quite remember when I made my first notes about what I was going through. But it would be like I was trying to describe what felt like indescribable pain, pain that you could take nothing for that would cure it, pain that just sent you to the floor at times. And so I just started to almost cover myself as a news subject. I started writing, like, what that pain was like, what crying in this way that you cry, there's a word for it, it's called keening. The most deep and animalistic howl — that had never escaped me before. And so I began to describe what that was like. And so I just kept taking these notes. I began to describe people's reaction to somebody, me, losing a child, my family losing a child, and the different types of people who surprised you by vanishing or surprised you by becoming the most supportive person in the world. And as I took more and more notes, I thought, well maybe I might publish this as a magazine article or something. And I showed it to the editor at The Atlantic, who is also a friend and employs my husband, and he looked at it and he said, "Danielle, this isn't an article. This is a book. Just keep going."

[00:05:51] Sarah Cavanaugh: You mentioned keening, and I remember my mother died 24 years ago, and my tears changed. I don't know if you felt that, but it was — it's almost like now when I have memories, I've lost several family members since, but when I think of someone I truly love and was bonded to, they just leap out, and suddenly you're just covered in tears. It's not like, there's no preamble. It's sudden.

[00:06:18] Danielle Frum: A friend of mine, when he lost his father, called these types of attacks “muggings.” He said, "It's so weird. I'll just be walking along the street, and then suddenly I'll have a memory of my dad or whatever, and I feel mugged. I just start crying or, or gasping or..." And, and that just happens all the time, and it still happens. This was two years ago when Miranda died in February. And I've talked to mothers much farther down this awful road than me, that never really goes away. It may become less frequent, but I never wake up without being shocked that she isn't here. Among my first thoughts when I wake up, are still like, "Miranda, Miranda isn't here. Miranda doesn't exist anymore." And I, I find that my brain just doesn't want to ... it's hard to fathom, you know?

[00:07:13] Sarah Cavanaugh: Are you still writing about Miranda after this book has been published?

[00:07:18] Danielle Frum: I've been writing a lot of articles related to the book. That was the other weird aspect of this, like, having written the book, then you have to do the publicity for the book and it felt, and especially at the beginning, incredibly weird to be going out and — speaking of muggings —repetitively talk about Miranda's death. I haven't yet been able to write anything not related. And I'm hoping as, as I call it, my grief tour winds down, um, but although it isn't showing any signs of winding down because suddenly when you're in this alternative universe, as I call it, there are so many people in grief and so many people suffering. I think they have found comfort in being recognized because I just was so graphic. I read a lot of grief books, of course, right after Miranda died and I found them very unsatisfying and not helpful because my main thing was: how and when is this pain going togo away? Because I don't think I can keep living with this kind of pain. And the grief books promise there'd be stages to it, and you'd get over it, and like ... and you realize you're not looking for that. And also, grief isn't tidy, especially grief of this kind. It turns the universe upside down. Actually, the book that I eventually modeled mine on was a classic by C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed," where he writes this in the months immediately following the death of his wife prematurely from breast cancer. It is a graphic telling of, “there is the armchair in which she sat only three days ago.” And you have that feeling, especially when I would wake up in the morning and everything in my world looked the same, but it was completely different. And you see that person and that child in every corner and everywhere. The first time I went to a supermarket, I freaked out. When Miranda would come and visit us, I, I would buy these horrible energy drinks she liked and these cans of coffee and I just started passing them and I,I had to leave my cart and I had to leave the store. And I've had a lot of mothers come to me and say, "Thank you for this, because now I have something to show people." Because if you're not in this universe, you do get a lot of like, "Why aren't you over this?" Actually, somebody literally said to me, "Are you still doing the grief thing?" This was a way of, I think, part of me trying to explain to almost like a foreign correspondent, if you want to put it in reporter's terms, that I've been deported to this horrible, horrible land, foreign land, this, again, this alternative universe, and I'm trying to tell you what it's like. I'm trying to tell people who aren't in it what it's like. Many people in grief generally are so lonely because, you know, after the first week, months, six months, year, everybody else's life is going on. The world is moving on as it should and as everyone should. But you're not moving on. And then you feel quite lonely and even self-conscious about even expressing or continuing to express your grief.

[00:11:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: So tell me about this Alternative Universe you found your family inhabiting after Miranda died. That's with a capital A and a capital U. I love that you created a place because you do feel out of sorts, you feel alone, and it turns out there's all these other folks, and you write about in your book, that you learn had the same experience and can, create community. What did this alternative universe reveal to you about grief, about yourself, about other bereaved parents, and about your husband and kids?

[00:11:34] Danielle Frum: The first thing I learned was how many people are in this universe, and not just strangers that you meet who have had something like this happen to them. But even among friends, and I mean really, really good friends and people you've known 20, 30 years, will suddenly say to you, "Yeah, when I lost my sister..." And you say, "What? I didn't know you lost your sister." After a point, it's just not something that you tell people, even very close friends, especially if you didn't know them then, like why would you bring it up? Those friends were the ones who really knew, and they knew how to not just talk to us, but just be with us. And you're much more open to receiving people's stories. It's like telepathy. You just start to recognize each other and you know, it's like speaking a different language. And part of the things I write about in my book is the people not in the alternative universe who don't know how to speak the language. And I, by the way, I'm very sympathetic to this. I mean, this is not like blaming or anything, but they're struggling for what to say. But they're trying to comfort you. They see you upset, and they love you, and they want you to feel better. And the thing that you learn is you don't want comfort. You want to be seen. The horror and the, the gravity of the loss is what you want recognized. You know, I love it when people talk about Miranda, tell me stories. It's awful when they feel they can't talk about her because I love hearing her name. I love hearing the stories. That's something that I've learned. I've also learned, I keep using sort of explosions and bombs and meteorites, but it is, it's an apt metaphor because when you lose a child and a family member it's like having a hole blown open in your family, and you all have to regroup. And so I have a younger daughter and a son. My son is now 32, the same age Miranda was, and my younger daughter is 24, so there's a big age gap. So you're just all kind of left reeling, each sibling suffering their own aspect of loss. One of the things that I just, I wrote about this too, just feeling, as a mother, so terrible that not only could I not, for the first time in my life, offer my children words of comfort — I wasn't capable of it. The other thing is, of course, the marriage itself. Some marriages can't sustain this kind of loss. David, my husband and I just reacted in different ways with our grief and he kinda went more into himself and into his head and I was obviously more theatrical and crying. But my impulse was to pull away and just like wanna be like a cat hiding from everything and, and he came to me very early on. He said, "We can't let ourselves disappear into our own silos of grief. If we do that, we won't get through this together." That really struck me. After that, every time I wanted to pull away, I wouldn't. And when he went into his own mental universe of grief, I'd pull him out of it. So it was like I guess people in a shipwreck trying to survive by holding onto each other, you know, through the waves of it and buoying the other up. As he also said, he said, "You know, we are the only two people in the world who know exactly what the other is suffering." We know the person, we know the loss, and so that has become a comfort but I can see very easily how it could have gone the other way.

[00:15:37] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your younger daughter Bea was there for some of the hardest work after Miranda died, and specifically helping you pack up her apartment. What fascinated you about the way Bea and your son Nat were grieving compared to yourself and David?

[00:15:51] Danielle Frum: It was different for Nat because he, he, he's married, and he now has a child, which is magical. New life.

[00:15:58] Sarah Cavanaugh: Congratulations, Grandma.

[00:16:00] Danielle Frum: Yeah. Thank you. No, it's, it's a beautiful moment.

[00:16:03] Sarah Cavanaugh: I have a six-month-old, so, my first.

[00:16:05] Danielle Frum: Oh, yeah. Once something like this happens, for me going forward, every joy is going to be mixed, you know? So even when you're holding this unbelievable new life in your arms, your mind can't help but drift back to the time you held, you know, or I held Miranda in my arms and also thinking of her as the ... sorry. She so wanted to be an aunt. She would be such a fabulous aunt. So, Nat has had more support in his grief because he is married, and now he's a father, which isn't to say he hasn't grieved heavily. Bea was so dramatically younger and on her own, and she was in her junior year of college but she was actually on her, a semester abroad, she was in France. She and Miranda, despite the age difference of 10 years, were ... Miranda to her was like her much younger, cooler mother. So Bea had to come back from France with this horrible news and had to navigate this, you know, with us and at a time when I, as I mentioned, I wasn't, especially helpful. She had to hear — I mean, hearing your parents cry under any circumstances is I think just one of the most upsetting experiences you can have as a child because you think, "Mom and Dad are not supposed to cry," like, "They're not supposed to do this in front of us." And she would hear her dad howling through the wall at night. When we talk about grief and it going on, like, people also forget the tasks that are associated when someone dies. And Miranda, because she died suddenly, and she was in Brooklyn and we were in Washington, D.C. where we live, we had to get up there, try to get up there before the police left, otherwise they sealed it off. So in order to access it, we had to get a court order, which we did, but I was just haunted by, like, did she leave food on the counter? Like, how is it possible I'm not allowed into my own daughter's apartment? I offered to go and do all these things alone 'cause I just, I didn't want to put Bea through any more than she'd been through, and she, she was amazing. She came with me, she helped me. It was very hard for her, but I'm just, I'm really just so impressed with how she's handled it and continues to handle it. We've all had, we've all gotten therapy. And I also write about how important and probably the only reason I can sit here and talk about all of this is, I did EMDR therapy. I still do EMDR therapy, and that's for trauma. It's specifically meant for trauma and to help your brain process trauma, and that has been very, very helpful.

[00:18:58] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm gonna shift for a second 'cause I really want to talk about the physicality of grief. You describe it really well in your book. And a few weeks after Miranda died, you had what felt like a cardiac emergency, but it was in fact a medical grade panic attack.This was in addition to other very visceral physical symptoms, like profound exhaustion and brain fog. I don't know if you've ever read Mary-Frances O'Connor, but she just released a book called "The Grieving Body."

[00:19:26] Danielle Frum: Oh, no, I would — I'm fascinated by this, yes.

[00:19:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's a fantastic book. Her first book, "The Grieving Brain," is also fascinating. Talk about what it felt like for you to go through and how you're doing with it now.

[00:19:42] Danielle Frum: Yeah, the physicality is something that really takes you by surprise. When you talk about, what do you learn when you're in the alternative universe? People who aren't there see grief as almost purely emotional. What they don't understand is physically what it's like. So when I talk about that pain I was feeling and looking for a cure of the pain, that was a physical pain. I compare it to, like, having an ice pick stabbing in my chest all the time. It was excruciating physical pain. You start to feel that being dead would be preferable than living with this kind of pain, and you also just stop caring and you stop taking care of yourself. But yeah, then I had, in the middle of the night, and actually weirdly at the same time she would've died, at 3:00 in the morning, I woke up and I thought I was having a heart attack. I called 911, you know, David then woke up. I couldn't breathe properly and, uh, medics, you know, rushed in. They took me to the hospital and my heart was physically fine. Of course it was broken, but I asked the cardiologist like, "What, what was that about? What, what's going on?" When she especially learned what had happened, she said, "Yes, you're having a medical grade anxiety attack, and I'm gonna give you some sedative, and you just lie here for as long as you need to." So that was something that never happened to me before. What you have from this kind of tragedy or suddenness is PTSD. People associate PTSD with soldiers coming back from war and a car backfires and suddenly they're back in the battle and they're freaking out. But it's anything that has traumatized you, your brain literally cannot process the thought. That's why people can remain in shock for years and years. Uh, like we talked about the muggings, you know, that you see something, you're just thrown to the floor again. You, you're going like, "Oh my God," and you're gasping because at some level the brain, when it gets a traumatic memory, the brain doesn't know what to do with it. It doesn't file it away, and it keeps it omnipresent in your brain. It's always real. As my therapist said, she said, "Think of it as a song that gets stuck in your head. The only way to get the song out of your head is to listen to the song the whole way through," which is something I never knew. So by talking through, so let's just say, "Danielle, the phone call, let's talk about that. Tell me where you were. Tell me what happened. Tell me your reaction. Where are you feeling that right now as you talk about it?" And what was so strange, it was like witchcraft or something because at the end of the session, I didn't know what had happened, but I felt lightened somehow, and suddenly I could talk about that incident, that aspect of it. It doesn't make you less sad, but it makes you able to function better because your brain is, is learning to accept this otherwise unimaginable and inexplicable tragedy

[00:23:05] Sarah Cavanaugh: There's a beautiful moment in your book, it feels like a turning point, when someone shares with you about not the gift of Miranda's life, but the gift of your own life, and that feels like an inspiration or a moment for you that, that helped you. There were lots of examples of things that didn't help.

[00:23:27] Danielle Frum: Yeah.

[00:23:27] Sarah Cavanaugh: But that feels like a really important moment.

[00:23:32] Danielle Frum: Yeah. When you enter the alternative universe and you connect with other mothers, which I think that's really important because, again, they're the only ones who know and understand what you're going through and speak the same language. But you, I feel like you become a kind of intake officer, so you tell them to the best of your ability what to expect and, uh, what to expect when you're not expecting. Um —

[00:23:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that line.

[00:23:58] Danielle Frum: And, um, so this mother reached out to me, and she had just lost her son, suddenly and tragically. And she said, “I try and tell myself I know my son's life was a gift, but I have to remember too that my life is a gift. It's a gift to be alive. It's a gift to be here. And even if I don't feel that right now, I need to keep thinking about that." And that really struck me. In that sense, we reversed roles, and she became the intake officer for me because what you have to do if you're going to survive in any meaningful way, is you have to learn how to live again. Yes, you, you're a different person completely. You've been changed forever by this tragedy. I'll never be the same again. So how do you learn to live with that? And that's why I found this mother's words so striking is remembering that life is a gift and especially when you have other children, and now a grandchild, that there are so many times I don't feel like going on still, and I just remember what I do have to live for

[00:25:14] Sarah Cavanaugh: You admit in “Dispatches from Grief”that in a way you miss the intensity of that earlier grieving period because it made you feel closer to Miranda. How do you reconcile the unavoidable distance from that early intense raw phase?

[00:25:30] Danielle Frum: You don't, you don't miss, I don't miss the ice pick in the chest part of it. I mean, I get the occasional ice pick in the chest, but I don't have the constant ice pick in the chest. You don't miss that, and the immediate horror of it. But I compare it like, Miranda's gotten off at her station and the train keeps going, and the farther and farther away and the, the scenery changes and the world changes around you, and then things happen like she could've been an aunt right now or there's another birthday she's missed or she would've loved this or whatever. The world just changes. In those immediate days, the world still looked physically the same. It was still as she knew it, and the farther and farther away you get from that day, the less she would know or recognize.

[00:26:23] Sarah Cavanaugh: There's a very unique bit in the book, it's at the very end, where you have gone through the Jewish ceremony of burying your daughter, and then you decide that's not the right place for her, and you move her body. Can you talk briefly about that experience?

[00:26:46] Danielle Frum: We have a summer cottage where all of my children grew up spending every summer at, and we, David and I, had just begun thinking about where we wanna be buried. It's not a pleasant thought and no one wants to think about that. But we were sort of cemetery shopping near where our cottage is, and we're Jewish, so there was only one Jewish cemetery in the area. So when this happened, and in, in Jewish tradition, you have to bury quickly. And so we said, "Okay, well, we were looking at the Jewish cemetery near us," and so she was buried in this cemetery. Then you have a year in the, again, in the Jewish tradition, to put a headstone on. It's like, okay, you have to race to get them in there, but then you have time to think about and get through that first year, and then you have actually a very beautiful ceremony called an unveiling ceremony, where they literally pull the sheet off the headstone and, and that's when your mourning officially comes to an end. We were planning to make, I wanted to make a beautiful wildflower garden and maybe just have a bench, because I like to sit with her. I don't like just going up to a stone and looking at it and then not knowing what to do. I can sit and have glasses of wine with her, you know, on a bench surrounded by beautiful flowers. And the cemetery was a little more orthodox than we knew. They said no to the wildflower garden, uh, or any kind of garden. They just wanted her to have a black granite headstone like all the other black granite headstones in this quite small cemetery. And then I found out about another cemetery, which wasn't Jewish, but it was non-denominational in ravines and parkland. It was stunningly beautiful. And they said, "Why, yes, of course you could make a wildflower garden. That would be lovely." And so I just, I said, "Okay, that's it. That girl's moving." And uh, as, as one of her friends joked, she said, "Yeah, Miranda loved to travel." So it was a very ghoulish day. We weren't permitted, but we didn't have to see the exhumation of it. That was handled, and a rabbi was present, and she got in another hearse, and we drove to the new spot. It was in October, and the sunlight was beautiful, and there was this cathedral of trees over where she was going. And then when she went in again, it was actually quite beautiful because I didn't expect to be physically close to her ever again. And it felt that she was now in the right spot. And now there is just a beautiful section of wildflowers and little benches and this cemetery is like a, a park. People just walk through it, and people now stop, and they'll tell me that they sat with Miranda. So she's still making friends, you know. Like, she was a great connector of people and maker of friendships, and so she continues to do so even now.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:30:15] Danielle Frum: I want to go the way my stepfather went, Pete. I never understood what people meant by a good death. How can a death be good? But he was in his 80s. He had been a physically strong, naturally athletic person. He had this incredible hatred of old people. It was actually getting comical, like he would just get so angry when he saw someone who was really old. And I'm like: "Pete, what's your problem?" But he just, he, he's so — I think he was so horrified by himself as being some sort of broken-down elderly person. So when he got a heart infection and the doctor, his doctor told him, it's either hooking you up to life support or not, and then that's just gonna be a series of decisions for your family to make," he said, "Nope, I'll go out." We were able to say goodbye to him, and he had a message for each of us, and with Miranda, when she walked in, because she had lived with him at one stormy point in her adolescence, and they were very close as a result. She walked into his hospital room to say goodbye, and he looked at her and he said, "I'll see you down there," and he pointed to the floor. And she sort of looked horrified, and then she started to laugh. And then he hugged her, and he said, "I couldn't have loved you more." Then he died, and when she died, she died on his birthday. And I've always wondered if he was there to catch her. That's how I want to go out. I want to go out wanting to go out, ready to go out, and able to say things to the people I love. So that, to me, is a peaceful exit.