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Death and Getting Dumped with Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman

This mother-daughter, writer-illustrator duo, has created two illustrated books together. The first stemmed from Hallie's painful realization that her mother would die someday. The second from Suzy's heartbreak when her husband of 30 years unexpectedly left her. The three of us talk about the ways that a break up is like a death, all the feelings that come with grief -- including rage -- and how to make your own ritual as a healing tool. Their grief literacy and dark sense of humor made this conversation relatable and models what is possible to talk about in families if only we have the courage.


You can follow Suzy on Instagram @hopkinssuzy and Hallie @hallithbates.




Transcript:

Sarah Cavanaugh: [00:00:00] I am Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about life and death.

Ever since my kids went to a bookstore called All For Kids, and they had incredible illustrations of children's books on the walls. I've, I've wanted to interview an illustrator. And I have to say, my conversation with Hallie Bateman far exceeded my expectations. She's one half of the mother-daughter duo who created two books together, what to Do When I'm Gone and what to Do when you get Dumped.

As a side note, it was fun for me to think about. What book would I have written with my mom? I learned so many insights from talking with Hallie and her mom, Suzy Hopkins. Susy is a writer and journalist who draws on her own personal experience. Her husband abruptly ended their 30-year marriage, and she [00:01:00] shares some well-worn wisdom about building a new life after a breakup.

Welcome to Peaceful Exit. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Suzy Hopkins: Happy to be here.

Sarah Cavanaugh: From my perspective in Peaceful Exit culturally, we don't talk about death enough and we don't talk about grief enough, and we certainly don't talk about grief as it relates to a breakup, a job ending, moving, et cetera. So thank you for helping us have these conversations.

Um, what was your approach to writing? What to do when you get dumped.

Suzy Hopkins: Uh, the book for, for people who haven't read it, is divided into three parts, the end and instead of the middle. It's called the muddle and the beginning. And in the end is when I personally got [00:02:00] dumped after my 30 year marriage. My, my husband.

Came home one day and I was two days from retirement and he said, I wanna pursue this relationship with this old girlfriend from 30 years prior. And I was, this was a surprise to me, to say the least. And, and he was basically gone from that time on so very sudden. And. Development and, and I went into a shock and left the family home and bought a place in the country.

And a a year went by. I got counseling, helped a bit. Second year went by third year and I'm still not doing very well. And so the muddle in the book, which is a pretty big, long section, was where I began to write. In order really to process what I was dealing with because to tell you the truth, I, I thought, oh, I've got all this life experience.

I've been a journalist. I've interviewed all these people, particularly [00:03:00] elderly people about loss and grief, and yet here I am feeling like the most alone person in the world, and I had no idea. That I could find myself in a state that I didn't have what I thought were the tools to just come back from it.

So Hallie got me a tarot reading as a gift, and the tarot reader was not aware that I was a writer even, or that I had been left and said, I think you should write a. A me memoir as a pathway to your own healing, and that turned out to be very prescient. So I, I wrote it in the middle of dealing with something that I didn't really know how to deal with.

That's the very long answer to that.

Sarah Cavanaugh: That's a wonderful answer. In fact, many of the authors that we've talked to on Peaceful Exit have talked about how healing writing is, even if you're not a writer. You know, to actually put words and language to what you're going through. [00:04:00] 

Suzy Hopkins: Yeah, and, and of course writing to me has always been an analytical exercise.

I was trained in journalism. I know how to do synopsis, big picture, view stuff. But this was just a different animal. And also, I mean, really the reason for writing it initially was I didn't find. Out in the world literature that, and I wanted to sit in the quiet of my home and cry in the corner and look at a book at the same time, if possible.

'cause that's what I was doing. And I just, I found books on death to be most helpful, but not very many. And, you know, I, I couldn't process a lot. I just wasn't intellectually in a very good place either. And I thought, gosh, if that's all there is for heartbreak. I need to plot my way through. And of course, Hallie is this graphic novel.

We had already done one book and Hallie was ready to do another with me and said, well, if you do this we'll, we'll do this together. [00:05:00] And so I wrote a first draft and then we began our collaborative process, which, which the first drive took about a year. Then we sold it and began the really detail oriented, which took about another, I'd say two years.

Hallie Bateman: Yeah. So to, to go back to your question of the process of working on this book, these two books are, are similar, but our process with the second one with what to do When You Get Dumped is unique because it's really my mom's story. So my mom wrote this draft and then we met at a cabin for maybe five days to.

Basically work together very collaboratively to create the, to kind of turn the draft into a graphic book. And what that looks like is going over my mom's work, talking about everything, throwing ideas back and forth. And what [00:06:00] you end up with, and this is how I write comics as well, is there's text and then I'm kind of describing.

The artwork, like in brackets, basically it's, it's kind of like a script and then Yeah, it's just, it's, it's unique because, you know, as an illustrator, you know, sometimes I'll res receive a book and I never even speak to the author. The words are locked in and I'm providing the art. And this is quite a different process where, you know, I'm deeply enmeshed in my mom's life and I know.

Very firsthand. I'm a part of this family that experienced this split. So, so yeah, that was, that was kind of, and just to, just to kind of give you a window of like, yeah, it's, it's a lot of back and forth, a lot of laughing, a lot of squabbling, a lot of like frantically sketching something to try to get an idea across.

And then, you know, challenging each other to, to understand the other person's. Idea.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm trying to imagine [00:07:00] you in the cabin for five days. Did were you also processing the loss for both of you? It's very different because you've lost a partner and you've lost a father. What was that like?

Hallie Bateman: Well, just to, just to clarify, I'm, I'm still very close with my dad.

I love him. I certainly lost. This idea of my parents as a unit, I certainly had a lot of my own grief to work through, and my mom was very much still in the midst of her own grief. So it was really cathartic. I mean, there was laughter, there were definitely tears. There was a lot of like, let's take a break and go for a walk.

There was like. Things where I'm pushing my mom to have an answer to something that she does not have an answer to yet because she has not reached that point of healing yet. There's things where I have my own ideas from not being the one who's heart is broken, and my [00:08:00] mom's like, that's not what it's like at all.

Then I have my perspective of my dad as a flawed human being, and my mom has her perspective of my dad as a flawed human being who did something that really sucks and hurts and, and we're bringing, you know, our different perspectives together.

Suzy Hopkins: Yeah. And my, and myself as a flawed human being at the end of the marriage, of course.

And Al and also, you know, I, I couldn't have done one more day in the cabin. It was you to, to write something like this. And, and I, I love working with Hallie, but I would love to work on a, you know, a happy tale, a children's book about little fairies in the forest instead of the end of my marriage and the grief that followed because it was very painful to work on because it was.

In, I, I knew I was in process and had made progress, but it was to, to do a work like this is to examine [00:09:00] things you'd really rather not, and Hallie would often, often in the conversion from a narrative. Book two, a graphic novel, uh, there Hollywood say, well, I see what you wrote on this page, but I can't illustrate that.

I was like, what do you mean you can't illustrate that? Think of something. And then she has trained me to where I can now write. And make it a little bit easier. But that's where we would come and say, how can you, how can I write it so that you can make it a really easily understandable spread and, and I have had to become educated about graphic novels.

In the two books we've done the first time, I, I don't think I'd ever read one and I hardly knew what it was, and I didn't think that's what we were doing. And we ended up on a, we ended up on a retreat and Hallie's saying, I don't need this page or that page, and too many words here. And I'm going, man, I, I'm a [00:10:00] writer.

I wanna keep some, I don't want you to throw them all away. And then when I saw what she did in, in what to do when I'm gone, our first book. I understood at the completion of that project exactly what was happening and the value of, of beautiful graphic illustrations conveying emotion in a way that all my wordiness can't quite, can't quite do.

Hallie Bateman: There's, there's like a. A visual language that can be learned. Like I certainly learned this as I started to study comics and graphic novels. Like, oh, this is a language that you can speak and you can become familiar with. And my mom has, you know, the person who taught me to write, she's an incredible writer and incredible editor.

And so working together has just been an experience of like. Merging her expertise with mine and I think we together come up with something that's like really different than what we would do individually.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I absolutely, I. Love the imagery. I have [00:11:00] such an appreciation for illustrators and I was so excited when Katie got this organized because I've been wanting to talk to an illustrator because it is a new, it is another language, and you can go through an entire book.

With no words and tell an entire story. Mm-hmm. And so I just wanted to share that. I so appreciate the work you do. Oh, thanks. And the fact that you're working as a mother daughter team is, it's really reflected in the heart of these books. Like you can feel it. And when my mother died 22 years ago and we didn't have a conversation about.

What to do when she's gone. And so I was reading that book and of course getting emotional 'cause I'm like, what if I'd had this book when she was still alive? Mm. I would've loved to have this book. And it's just so nice to see adult books with. With illustrations that have their own message and their own language, and it's not just, you know, the picture of a bird at the beginning [00:12:00] of a chapter.

Mm-hmm. It's actually the, you know, the, the page on breath where it's just green grass, you know? Mm-hmm. It brings you somewhere, it puts you in a place.

Hallie Bateman: Oh, I, I always think of that page when I'm, when I'm thinking about, yeah. You know, why. Why have it be a graphic book? Did you, did you draw as a child? I did, yeah.

I was a very voracious creator as a kid. I was drawing comics all the time. I wrote and filmed movies. I was had a typewriter and I would write little fake newspapers and I had a magazine and I was just going, going, going. And my mom. Would always be like, oh, you're an artist. You're such an artist. And I would be like, shut up mom.

No, I'm not. Like I did not believe her. I didn't understand that I was, that truly junior year of college is when I clicked. [00:13:00] I understood for the first time that illustration was a career that I wanted to do this. And it's so funny because I look back at my childhood and there was. My mom would write.

Submit stories to children's magazines when I was little. And I would say, mom, can I, can I illustrate it? Can I illustrate it? And she would send in my drawings, my little kid drawings to, you know, highlights magazine, stuff like that. And of course, you know, they didn't publish it with my drawings, but the idea that I had that impulse, that my mom and I related on that level, like I wanted to illustrate her words and I didn't understand.

That it was a job until I was almost done college and I was like, oh, maybe I should have gone to art school, but it was too late. But yeah, so long answer is yes. I drew, I drew a lot as a kid.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that you have the passion for it. So, so from reading both [00:14:00] of your books, your family has some grief literacy and we talked a little bit about how, you know, a divorce or a breakup or a dumping as you put it, is um, like a death.

Um. Susie, how would you say, uh, that being left in that way was like a death?

Suzy Hopkins: Well, the way in which I was left was I had a marriage with an awful lot of challenges from, from early on, but to me, I, I wouldn't have made that choice. And, and having a third person brought, brought into the. Equation. Suddenly I learned that there is a woman that is in the room with us, sort of metaphorically that.

And so on the day that he told me, it was the end of my ability to feel safe communicating with my husband because there was another party involved. So that instantaneous and for me. Felt [00:15:00] like, it felt like it certainly was the death of the marriage at that moment. And, you know, perhaps earlier what I just didn't know.

So coping with that and having no opportunity for resolution. There, there, there were some conversations, but again, another person in the room, uh, it's a very helpless feeling for me. And, uh, how do I process that? And I think that really having another person involved was accounted for in part how tremendously long it took me to, to deal with this.

I, I kept trying to apply logic. There's a page in the book about, about forget logic, and I kept trying to do that and went to the counselor saying, I just don't understand. And, and she said, after, you know, months of me. Saying, I really need to understand phases, you know, or what he did and what she said.

And, and she said, you're trying to do logic here, that's just not gonna [00:16:00] get you anywhere. And then I understood. 'cause that's been my lifelong, uh, task in journalism as you applied logic and analysis to it. And, and this was a different situation, so,

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hmm. I wonder if it's the journalist in you that's like, what's the what, what are my thoughts and what are the, what's the truth?

It's like you're, you're able to check the facts 'cause you're a journalist, you know? And I think that. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I was thinking of. Oh, well,

Suzy Hopkins: I mean, I think I didn't know some of the facts and I, I knew what my experience, it's like any marriage, you know what your experience is, but can you really know what the other person's experience is?

And in, in struggling through the recovery period, I was just struck by how. Mostly the, the, the, the book is not about the marriages. The book is about one person's movement toward trying to build a new life. That's a completely different life [00:17:00] at, at, in my case, at a later age. And I think that when I started to write.

I had to say, okay, what has worked so far? I'm, I know I've healed some, what has worked? And then I, you know, I wrote down X number of things that did work for me. Exercise and counseling and talking with friends. But then I. Other things were either got in the way of recovery, sometimes intervention by other people was not helpful to me and I needed to change relationships, to leave some relationships in order to feel better.

I'm a person who's pretty capable, and yet here I found myself completely incapable of figuring out the next steps and sort of having a faith that there was something at the end of the road. Was there any moment?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Because it feels like Hallie's Wisdom came in here to say, let's do a book.

Hallie Bateman: Well, I wanna say that this book [00:18:00] was my mom's idea, what to do when I'm, when you get dumped.

And what I think was happening, and mom, you can say, but like in the period before I got her the tarot reading. She was throwing around book ideas. This was three years after the divorce, and I would visit her at home and she would be like, yeah, I could do a book called What to Do When You Get Dumped. I also have this other idea for a kid's book and like I am, you know, the obnoxious, pushy, middle child and I was just like.

I was like, I am so down to do what to do when you get dumped or, or we could do a kids' book. Like, I was just like really ready to work on the next thing. And it drove me crazy to watch my mom like spending all day chopping, literally chopping wood when I was like, you're a writer and you're, you're overp pouring with ideas.

And so it was always her idea. I, and it was, it was something that I think, yeah, I was fully on board for, but she had to. Had to find her own [00:19:00] reason for doing it well. And, and what would you say Mom? W

Suzy Hopkins: Well, I'd say the big, the big reason for me moving forward, the tarot reader got me off the, you know, got me off the chair to, into writing.

So I interviewed a half dozen people, couple hours a piece, and each one of them was. Very emotional and, and what I got from that was it, it took them in. They would, I'd say, how long did it take before you felt like you, you were embarked on a life that was yours again. And it felt good, pretty good, didn't have to feel great, just pretty good.

And they would say 5, 8, 10 years. So number one, I was stunned by that. I thought I could be done with this business in, you know, a few, like a fewer than five years, certainly two weeks maybe. Two weeks would be, yeah, so and so, and at the end of that I asked each of them if, and they were very frank about what had happened to them and what they learned from it.

And I felt, honestly, I [00:20:00] felt much less alone having talked to those people. 'cause they were the only, my, my family didn't understand as well as, as I did what had hap, everybody wants you to get over it of whatever grief you're in. I think people would love it if you would just. Get done, stop talking about it.

And, and these people understood and I felt so much better just talking to another person with a comparable experience. And so I said, would you have read a book like this? And they said they would've loved it because there in some cases. You know, they hadn't really talked about it in great detail because of all the stigma and shame.

And so after that I thought, well, I think I'm gonna do a book about my experience just to see where it gets me and if it helps me get through it. And in fact, it, it did. So, um, yeah, not, not a pleasant process necessarily, but, but it did, I did [00:21:00] see that I. I had made progress and it took me about four years and a couple months.

The book has a countdown and I actually did it to the, until one day I woke up and something I sort of had an epiphany that yes, I really do feel now I am unbroken and that is accurately numbered in the book. And I hope that nobody takes as long as, as mine, but I think for longer relationships it can.

It, uh. It can take a very long time, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. It's something to understand that you have to be patient with yourself and very compassionate toward yourself.

Sarah Cavanaugh: When my mother died, the best piece of advice I got was give yourself three years. Mm-hmm. And in that moment, it, it was the first time I realized how long grief.

Can be acute. And it was a week after the three year [00:22:00] mark that I, something settled in me in a, in a, in a new normal way. Like it became, it, it became kind of my new normal. It didn't go away at all, but it was less acute. And I thought that was just a beautiful piece of advice like. We all need to like stretch our concept of how grief works in our bodies, and it doesn't go away.

We don't ever forget what happened, but it, but it shifts, its energy shifts in your, in, in your system.

Suzy Hopkins: I feel, I feel like it's an integration that happens or that's been my experience. Yeah. Yeah. Not a day goes by that I don't think about my marriage and my husband of 30 years because it was a long, long, it was, you know, much of my adult life.

Yeah. But I think you, you just have to have faith that it does change, and talking to people who are at the far end mm-hmm. Who have experienced the changes can be really [00:23:00] encouraging. Right.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. There's a lot of resilience and humor in this. In this book, I'm remembering the page of shopping at the Used man store.

When you talk about dating and there's images of different profiles, of different potential dates, a lot comes from the illustrations. I was just curious, are those fictional dating profiles or those real Oh, no.

Hallie Bateman: Well, they are, that's, they are distillations of very real. Real, oh, very real. What's real men? I would say trends and patterns that are Yeah, absolutely true.

Yeah.

Suzy Hopkins: We, yeah, we, we could have done another half dozen, I'm sure, because they're just, you know, guys with like a guy with a, a set of knives right over his shoulder, like guy's holding weapons, guys with fish. So you can never see their face. It's all these, they're, they're just what you see when you're, you're in my age, in the online dating world.

Did you,

Sarah Cavanaugh: did you two ever talk about humor? Were you like, this book [00:24:00] has to be funny as well as what is the role of humor in the grieving process and how you came about this? I

Hallie Bateman: don't, yeah, I don't think that there was ever a thing of like, should the book be funny? It just, it would. It just would always have been funny.

Suzy Hopkins: I think it just reflects our particular collective sense of humor.

Hallie Bateman: It feels like sur survival. You, you have to, I would ne I wouldn't even want to ask someone to read a book that wasn't funny. Sometimes I, I'll watch like a movie or something and I'll be like, no humor. Even in the darkest movie, you want a riff of a, of a, of a, just like a faint, even stylistic, like even I, I don't know.

I think that's also why I love, I love combining words and images because. You could have completely deadpan words, but just in the zaniness of a line, you can also be like, oh, I'm not to take this dead seriously. Like I'm to, [00:25:00] I'm to take this with a bit of humor and

Suzy Hopkins: a bit of lightness and, and, and in, and in the, in the course of all the things that happen in your life, even the really horrible.

Difficult things like that's I'll, I'll just tell one story. 'cause my mom had a good sense of humor and, and, um, and she, she was dying. So she was maybe a couple days, three days away from dying and she'd had an imaginary feud with her only sister. And the imaginary feud, we understood it was. From sort of dementia at the end of life in, in the last days.

I think at some point my sister and I said, mom, do you, do you wanna call her and bury, bury the hatchet with your sister? 'cause she's your, you know, she would love to hear from you. But my mom had really gone into this imaginary thing. She, uh, woke up briefly and said. Bury it in her head. Like it, it, she was, she just had that kind of [00:26:00] gallow sense of humor and she was making a little joke.

Honestly. She, she was back to herself, which was this, with this kind of dark sense of humor, which she had used to cope with a really difficult life. And so I think it's, uh, kind of passed down.

Hallie Bateman: And then like yeah, I would say like the, the, the thing that enabled me in my early twenties to approach my mom and say, Hey mom, can you write me a book for, for when you die telling me what to do, which became what to do when I'm gone?

The only reason I could ask her that and have her be like, oh yeah, sure is like, we just grew up Yeah. Talking about. I, I, I think dark stuff was always on the table. Sense of humor. I mean, my brothers are both really funny. My dad's funny. Like it's just a, a part of our, the way that we connect and communicate.

And my, my husband is like very, very sweet and loving. And I, I remember at one Christmas he was home [00:27:00] with us and he was like, God, your brothers are like being so mean to me. And I was like, that's how they show love. I'm sorry. Like it's, it's just kind of our, our thing. But I mean, with. With the, the.

Indignities and the humiliations and the insanity of being heartbroken and crying on the floor and, and dealing with all, you know, there's, there's parts in the book that are very true, but are about like, crying in front of random people and then you're, and you're back on a dating website and you're looking at these men and I mean, you can't swipe through a dating website for, for probably for any age, but for, you know, for my mom's age range and not just.

Scream laughing because otherwise, I mean like it, it's just insane.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Oh my gosh. Did you help her out? Which way to swipe? I don't know if you swipe right or left. Oh, I

Hallie Bateman: would. I was like, I was like, gimme your phone. And I would, [00:28:00] and I used to be like, mom, don't be so negative. Like, what's Go on? Yeah. Like let's get you on these dating sites.

And I would take cute pictures of her and I would help her write her profile. And I would kind of be like the enthusiastic one. But honestly, especially since my mom moved here and I had more access to her phone, I started to completely, I thought my mom was just being negative. Oh no, it is so dark and so dire.

I, I said, oh, we gotta get you off. Like, this is horrible. You're. None of these men are even remotely in their league. None of them have daughters who are taking nice photos of them. The photos are, I mean, we could do a whole podcast about this. The photos are just dreadful.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. We used to, we used to live in Alaska.

We lived in Alaska for like five years in the nineties, and they used to say the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Hallie Bateman: The strange thing is like, it just feels. I mean, if there's any like [00:29:00] semi-normal man, single man out there listening, Susie Hopkins is available, but Jesus, we're not gonna find you on the website.

Like it's not gonna happen. No.

Sarah Cavanaugh: You have, uh, wonderful advice in your book, what to do when you get dumped. A one of those, actually, I think it's maybe in both books to seek beauty. As part of the process. What do you mean by beauty? I think that can often be trivialized, but I didn't find that in your imagery or your

Suzy Hopkins: words as a journalist.

When I started as a young reporter, I, I took all my photos. It, this was many years ago, and we used to handle a camera, and so I, I, I've always kinda loved photography. If you followed me on Instagram. You've been subjected to garden and flower and butterfly pictures, and it's just a bunch of boring stuff, but to me it's absolutely spectacularly beautiful and it helps me, particularly in the part when I was coming through the heartbreak, it helped me focus on [00:30:00] something that was.

In it, it's a piece of art to photograph a butterfly or some other gorgeous thing at a microscopic level and or, uh, and, and it, it reminded me that there's great beauty at a time when all I can see is this, you know, my loss. And so I think whatever practice or way you look at something that you find beautiful doing that in the course of.

Recovering or even your daily life now is sort of a meditative practice that helps focus your ener, your energy and your appreciation. It kind of helps you move into the gratitude space for how beautiful the world is, just despite the fact that your world is shattered.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Mm-hmm. That's beautiful. I think that's such wisdom for our time right now when it feels like,

Suzy Hopkins: oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. [00:31:00] Absolutely. It feels like the world is burning. You're going to look at what's right in front of you, but whatever it is that you're focused on for that moment, you're not focused on all the chaos. Um, the other thing I noticed, and I really appreciate, we talk a lot about grief rituals, and when you burn the cardboard record mm-hmm.

That's a ritual. And it was so original and, and the fact that you had the cardboard in the shape of a record and that it was the song that you wanted to, you know, let go of that was related to your relationship. Anyway, anything I. We can do in our grieving and as we hear things in the outer world that come at us and feel really devastating, you know, what are those rituals that we can do?

Hallie Bateman: I, I think that the whole book is kind of my mom reporting on what her own. Grief rituals were and just what the steps were. And [00:32:00] the hope is that for the reader, it's not necessarily that you'll do the exact same things that my mom did, but more that you will pay similar attention and maybe find your own.

You know what, instinctively, what's a ritual that would feel good to you? And maybe giving yourself permission to take like a, a lot of these things like might feel silly if you That's right. Yeah. If you were just kind of opening the book and coming to 'em, you'd be like, wait, you're, you're smashing an object that you had with your ex?

Like, isn't that a little dramatic or something? Uh, but that, that's really true. My mom really. Did that, I think, I mean, it, it

Suzy Hopkins: worked, it worked for me. A sledgehammer. It worked well. Why the cat box?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Why the cat box?

Suzy Hopkins: I was just, I was so angry that particular day. I mean, one thing I, you know, uh, that I, my experience in grief has been, I'll be going, oh, doing better today.

Yes, tomorrow's probably gonna be, yep, yep. Tomorrow's doing pretty good. And then boom, just a collapse [00:33:00] where I would be just covered in rage. And I had one of those days and just felt like smashing something. And I, and I think a lot of the book is about the permission that. I had to give myself to do things that if you came along and saw me at that moment, it wasn't a particularly pretty picture.

Nobody was there to watch me do this, so I could really have at it, but I, I, I just. Said, we ought to give ourselves permission to manage our grief in a way that works because it's gonna come back on you. It's not like, okay, well I had that rage day and now there's no more rage days. Well boy, there is a bunch of rage days and, and you know, I think that applies to a lot of other kinds of loss as well.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, even in your book, you know, you fight denial by making a what is true list, and I love that idea. Like that was, it was helpful actually. Yeah. Where did, how'd you come up with that idea? [00:34:00]

Suzy Hopkins: Um, I journaled very extensively from the moment he left because I was so confused by everything I was trying to, I.

Make sense of it. So I, everything that he said or did I, I kept a running journal and some of that was stuff that was, I, I, I look back later and go, wow, this was, there were a lot of signs here. He was saying things or doing things and also I. Uh, after, after he left in communication with them, stuff that just struck me as crazy.

And so, so I wrote down the list of things he actually said, because when you're left, sometimes you go, oh my gosh, is there a chance that we could get back together? Is he gonna come back? Is this a, you know, you're. You're trying to undo the death. Right? And so then when he said enough that, you know, seemed like [00:35:00] kind of crazy stuff to me and I wrote it down, I said, this is, he's showing you what actually happened.

It's not a picture of somebody that we're gonna get back together. That there were deep problems. And he maybe made the decision quite a ways before. So it was a way that helped me. Piece when I was feeling particularly like, oh my gosh, I miss him so much. I've got this incredible yearning. My life is just, I, I just, I wanna talk to him.

Then I would look at that and I go, that's who I'd be talking to, is somebody that has said and done these things. I carried it around in a scrappy little list in my wallet, and sometimes on a sad day I would look at it and it did kind of help. So,

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hmm. Yeah. Let's talk about your first book a little bit.

What to do when I'm gone.

Hallie Bateman: You know, the book was really written, me asking my mom questions about, okay, so you're dead and I'm about to have a kid. What are you, what are you gonna tell me? Okay, you're dead. I I'm really missing [00:36:00] you and I wanna tell you something. What do you say to that? And by having those conversations and by making this book, I, I think that we're, I don't know, like, it, it.

There's my mom. I'm sure we'll have some great conversations when you're dead bed, but there's not gonna be, you know, oh, the, the clock is ticking and, oh, what do you got? What, what do you gotta say? Like, it's, it's, we're, we're talking about it now when everyone's around. And I think that our big goal with this book, and which thankfully we've heard from a lot of readers.

Has happened is that it's a conversation starter between parents and their kids or kids and their parents and allowing. Maybe a little entry point of, oh, look at this Easy to read illustrated book that's about this really heavy subject. Like, [00:37:00] what if we had this type of conversation?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Absolutely. And that's my hope for this podcast.

If someone hears it. Mm-hmm. It'll spark a conversation,

Suzy Hopkins: which is beautiful. That's my own. Yeah,

Sarah Cavanaugh: that's my hope. You know, you write in this book, your Parents' Death is Nature's way of breaking the shocking news that it's your turn. Next. And it sounds like Hallie, you're a kind of ex existential dread about losing your mom prompted you to write this book mm-hmm.

Together. Now that you're a parent, what's your relationship with death these days?

Hallie Bateman: Hmm. Well, I think that, you know, I'm. I'm kind of a, an example mom. I wonder what you would say to this, but I'm like a 30 5-year-old who still appreciates being very actively parented. Like I feel like, I feel like through the process of doing both these books with my mom, I don't know.

I [00:38:00] think that I. For a long time after the book came out, I was still really terrified of losing my mom. I was still like, mom, the book didn't fix it, mom. And she would just be like, tough shit. Like, sorry, we did it. It's there. And I, I think in the last year, I remember my mom and I having this conversation where I was like, I think I kind of, for the first time.

Think that I'll be okay and honestly, I heard, I think I heard a story or I just, yeah, I heard a, a snippet of something that stuck with me where. You know, it was like a description of someone's biography and it was like her mom died and she never got over it. She never pulled back from that. She was different for the rest of her life.

And I thought, oh my God, that couldn't be me. My mom would hate if that were the case. [00:39:00] I think having twins, having babies and, and becoming a parent and watching myself be capable of so much more than I ever thought. Like I think that that does play a part in it and has maybe a part in me thinking like, okay, like.

My life's not gonna end when my mom's life's life ends. And like Lord knows she's prepared me enough.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So the question I ask all my guests, and you can answer in whatever order, you know, moves you, but what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

Suzy Hopkins: A peaceful exit to me is, is not really about the circumstances that surround the moment of my death because, you know, I could go tomorrow in the bus crash or I could, I could have a physically drug assisted [00:40:00] peaceful exit.

But you know, since I don't know what that is, to me, I think of a death with dignity, meaning I. I have some say I'm a believer that if circumstances warrant that I, I ought to be able to end my life on my terms. That constitutes a certain piece to me because it has a dignity to it that otherwise might be stripped away.

And, you know, a lot of measures are taken. And I also, there's, there's something that. Comes to mind, which is that I have a, the real peace would be at the time of my death if I've come to some acceptance of whatever issues were really outstanding for me, whether and all to do with relationships. You know, have I have, I really left my relationships.

In a way that did, I tend them while I was living in a way that I wanted to and that felt [00:41:00] good and that was in line with my values, if I had done that, would constitute a certain piece as I made that transition.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Oh, thank you,

Suzy Hopkins: Hallie.

Hallie Bateman: I think a younger version of myself would've said that a peaceful exit would be like, well, it means that I published 25 books and I said everything I had to say and I capped it off perfectly with a little finale and like, like I feel like my younger part of my life was like so ravenous and.

I really terrified that I wouldn't have time to say everything that I had to say or something. And more recently, I, I don't think I, sure, I'll always wanna draw another book or something. I don't think there will probably be enough time because I love being [00:42:00] alive. But I think that I would measure a peaceful exit by I.

You know, not, I mean, I, I certainly think there's like, love that goes into my work, but that I, I loved the people in my life. Well, that's really the core of it for me is like yeah, living alongside the people I love and, and taking care of them and loving them, and yeah, hopefully, like knowing that and coming, like my mom said to like.

A sense of of acceptance around it. I think that. The idea, I don't know. It's hard to imagine the idea of like white knuckling, like clinging to life when in fact we're all, we're all going to, we're all gonna say goodbye. And it, like, I don't, I'm an agnostic. I don't really know what's going on, but I definitely have a sense that I'm a young soul.

I don't know what I, why I, I, I just feel [00:43:00] that, I think that there's, there's something very like childlike in me and. That is a little bit interesting to me to think like, oh, I've got a bunch of different lifetimes. Maybe, maybe just at the beginning I.

Sarah Cavanaugh: It is been such a gift to see your relationship and how you work together creatively, and I am taking away so many lovely gems.

So thank you so much for your time.

Hallie Bateman: Thank you. Thank you for reading our books.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find me on Instagram at @APeacefulExit. And you can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net. Our senior producer and editor is Katy Klein. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin.

Original music provided by Ricardo Russell, with additional music and sounds from Blue Dot Sessions. If you'd like to support our show, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does make a difference. And as always, thank you so much for listening.

 

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