If you’ve ever felt like you needed permission to grieve, or your grief just wasn’t understood by others, this book and this episode is for you. In her first book, The Dead Are Gods, Eirinie Carson opens the door on the shock and grief she felt after learning that her best friend died unexpectedly at age 32. In the midst of her confusion, sadness, and anger, there is also love. Eirinie and I get into the particular sting of losing someone young and the complicated job of remembering our loved one as a whole, flawed, messy, wonderful person.
You can find Eirinie’s book and other writing here: https://www.eiriniecarson.com/
Transcript:
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Hi, I am Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page. My guest today is Eirinie Carson, her first book, The Dead Are Gods, is all about the unexpected death of her best friend who privately struggled with addiction. If you've ever felt like you needed permission to grieve or your grief just wasn't understood by others, this book and this episode is for you. Eirinie and I get into grief and the particular sting of losing someone young. She has so much compassion and insight into addiction and grief and memory, and she gives us a blueprint for how to remember our loved ones as whole, flawed, messy, wonderful people. I'm not the only one who enjoyed her book. In 2023, The Dead Are Gods was on Oprah's spring reading list. I hope you enjoy our conversation and her book. Hi, Eirinie, it's nice to meet you.
Eirinie Carson:
Hello.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Well, I will say I absolutely loved your book.
Eirinie Carson:
Thank you.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I love the picture of you and Larissa on the cover.
Eirinie Carson:
We were somewhere in West London in some fancy bougie bar. She was wearing this Roberto Cavalli dress, but I still, I don't know where it came from or how she afforded it, because we weren't making Roberto Cavalli money and the person taking the photo was some dude who was just buying us drinks and we made him take our photo. I remember my hair was really greasy that day. I didn't want to wash it, so I didn't. Yeah, that's that photo. I have it on my phone and it's really funny to look at it now. The cover of the book is very much at the forefront of my mind, but when I look at that photo and see the detail and the close upness, that just feels kind of unifying.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah, it's really, really beautiful.
Eirinie Carson:
Oh, thank you.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So one of the things I say in Peaceful Exit is writers are our translators. For me, your book is the perfect example of that. For someone who is walking us through that grief process, that grief experience. It's so beautifully written.
Eirinie Carson:
Thank you.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I wonder if I could read a little passage?
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It is ironic that my first book, my most precious body of work came out of your death, you my most fervent champion of my writing. Something like poppies growing on graves, something like a diamond being made out of ashes. A steady stream has poured out onto the page. I often wonder in my deep grieving madness, if it isn't your hands at the keyboard, steady and certain, editing my words into something cohesive, something beautiful and something true.
Eirinie Carson:
I know it's a really funny thing now because when I wrote that, I guess I knew I had a book, but it was different than how it is now, where the book is done and it's in the world, and there is this certain amount of sharing and vulnerability in publishing it. So I do feel like Larissa was very much with me while I was writing, and less so now, not that she's not with me, but with the book. I feel like the book is kind of this separate thing. I don't know if you ever read Harry Potter with your kids, but kind of like a Horcrux or something, like something lives in it, but it is separate to the person it came from.
There is a curious thing that happened when I published the book in that, my grief was like this little package now, this physical book that you have on your desk right now that I'm looking at, that was my grief, and I had to kind of dig my way back to a personal relationship with it because for a long time it was this thing, are we going to get a publisher? Have we hit the word count? What will the cover look like? What does your author photo look? It just kind of became this separate entity. So to come back to my grief now and to Larissa seems crucial, and I don't know if I've done it yet. I'm working on it.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Do you feel like it becomes sort of rote because talking to a lot of people about the book as a separate entity, that it pulls you away from the grief?
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, a little bit. The thing that has anchored me are the book readings that I've done because those feel almost like a grief group because people end up sharing, people want to talk about these things, as you know.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yes.
Eirinie Carson:
In the rooms that I've read in, it's felt permissible to do so. So in that respect, it kind of pulled me back into my grief, those moments. There's definitely a wrongness to it though, the way I answer the questions or the types of questions that I'm asked. Yeah, no pressure.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Same sorts of questions.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
No pressure. Thanks for that. Yeah. I mean, losing someone so young is a very unique experience. It's heartbreaking. Layered on with her addiction that you weren't aware of, and there's so many nuances to that. I don't know of any other books out there, or at least not enough out there that really honor young friendships and honor that grief and shock that you experienced.
Eirinie Carson:
I definitely was searching for something when she died and couldn't find it, which is sort of where this book came from. The need as many things do.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. Write the book that you want to read.
Eirinie Carson:
Right, exactly. I'm just really frightened of forgetting the thought, which again is why the book is here. I was scared of forgetting, so it's important to me to document.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Well, let's talk about forgetting and memory. How does that work in this area of grief? You talk about it a little bit in the book, whether remembering is actually an accurate portrayal of what actually happened.
Eirinie Carson:
Well, when someone is a formative friend like Larissa was for me, and so much of my lifes experience was filtered through her eyes, her hands, all of it. She held it all for me. So her dying made me realize that now it's just me, which seems like an obvious remark, but it felt like a heavy weight that I would have to carry these memories and thoughts and these important things because they were so important. These things that aren't even in the book, these life-changing moments that she gave me, the comfort in her presence, the way her hand felt in mine. These things needed to be remembered.
I did not want them forgotten because I felt like if I forgot then that I would forget her and I would just, people die in time, passage of time, and you feel like, oh, maybe, I think we were good friends. That's how I think it was in my head, but it's been so long I can't really remember and I wanted it cemented. No, we were best friends. We were sisters, and I loved her and she loved me. You have to know that. I have to tell you.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Were people dismissive of your friendship or your grief?
Eirinie Carson:
No, I think I did that to myself. Even at her funeral, her mom was sobbing and I felt I couldn't do that also. It just felt like I was... It was kind of imposter syndrome in my grief, it was so ridiculous. I think we're taught that the family that you marry, the family that you birth, that is, those are the things that you can mourn and friendship is like, yeah, sure. She died, but she was a friend. It just seemed so flippant and nothing. It took me a little while to sit with it and realize that my grief was as grand and huge as if my husband had died or something. The breathness was no different just because we weren't really sisters or married or lovers.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
You portray it beautifully because as a reader, I'm absolutely there with you, that your grief is real. Are there any little things that bring her memory forward, maybe something that you and Larissa did together?
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, very much so. I mean, music, it was just a big part of the scene that we found ourselves on. There were members of bands in our friendship group, and so that just inherently brings music in. So I have playlists, galore, on my phone. When she died and we were going to her funeral, I made all her friends and our friends give me songs that reminded them of her. The playlist is very jarring because it goes from Elliot Smith to Lil Kim, and then there's some Brian Jonestown Massacre, and then there's Mob Deep, and it's just very eclectic. Now my husband knows those playlists well. So when I put that on, I'm thinking about her and everyone. Well, he treads a little lighter.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. So I understand you have two little girls.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Do you talk to them about Larissa or do you talk to them about death and dying at all?
Eirinie Carson:
I do. I talk about Larissa a lot. She is the background on my phone, and so often I'll be checking my phone and she's right there. I'll flashcards and be like, who is this? Who is it? They'll say, auntie Larissa. Some days I'm sad that she's dead and I'm crying. I try to explain to them, I'm sad today for this reason, just so you know.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It's so so important to share that with your kids that it's okay to be sad.
Eirinie Carson:
What about you with your children? Were you candid?
Sarah Cavanaugh:
My mother died about 21 years ago, and I was pregnant with our third child and went into labor as we were spreading her ashes on Mother's Day.
Eirinie Carson:
Oh, wow.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It was one of those, I had to set aside my grief to take care of a newborn. So I think while my kids experienced that with me, they felt what was going on, but they had a new sibling and there was so much going on at that time that I don't remember actually what I shared with them at the time. As they grew, I mean part of the reason I'm doing this work now, 21 years later, is that seed was planted that I didn't feel at the time I had the freedom to share that with my kids, and I didn't have the freedom to express my grief.
Eirinie Carson:
I think about the Victorian tradition of when you were grieving someone, you'd have a black band on your arm so that everyone knew, but that lasted one year. When that year was done, you took it off and you moved the fuck on because your time was up. At least that there is something beautiful in that, in that this person has a black band on. It's a visible signifier of grief and loss and an explanation maybe as to why they're talking to themselves in the market or whatever.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Or bursting into tears at the market.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. So you go in and out of writing directly to Larissa, then speaking to the reader about her, and you have emails at the end of each chapter. How did you decide on a structure for your book?
Eirinie Carson:
Well, once I realized I had a book, because it took me a while to figure that out, Larissa and I would communicate a lot via WhatsApp, and so we would leave each other voice notes. There are so many just wonderful voice notes I listened to still, and I wanted a little personhood in the book. I didn't want it to feel like a eulogy. I wanted it to feel like a full person. You were meeting Larissa. The fullness of her was in this book, and that I wanted the voice notes in there, but it's audio, and so that doesn't work. So I looked through our emails and we have so many, what's in the book is not even the scratch in the surface. There's so much, and I picked the most appropriate ones, and I felt like it was a natural break in my pain and my grief that is visceral in the book, and the reader needs and deserves a reprieve. You should know that Larissa wasn't all sadness and grief. She was also a lover of really silly nicknames for her friends. So that felt important to me.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I love that sort of wide range. You represent grief as many, many emotions, not just sadness.
Eirinie Carson:
Thank you.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
She does feel like a whole real person. I love that you titled one of the chapters, I Don't Like You.
Eirinie Carson:
That's my favorite one to read at readings. It was an enjoyable process to write that one, which seems a little, I don't know, sacrilegious or something.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I remember my mother's memorial, she was almost deified. People would come up to me and say things about her, and I ended up feeling like, well, she was a regular human.
Eirinie Carson:
The notion of not speaking in of the dead is something we carry along. So it seems dangerous or disrespectful to mention anything other than he was a wonderful husband and neighbor or something. I don't know. But that just seems, it's so flattening. It's such a smushing action to do that. You really lose all of the complexities of a person. I think with this book, I had a hard time, the first time I... My first draft, I did not talk about the way in which Larissa died at all. It felt wrong, and I couldn't advance further in my writing. So I was just stuck. I was like, well, I'm not going to write about this thing, but I'm going to write around it, so I'm just going to keep going and finish this book and I couldn't.
One of my friends said, what if you just wrote about how she died, just to see how it goes? It just poured out of me in this way that made me understand that I couldn't tell the story of Larissa without including that because that is a part of her life. It is. It's how it ended. So I have to hold that even though it's not my favorite thing to hold, including of heroin happens late in the book for that reason, because I don't want you to come with preconceived notions of what it means to use heroin. I want you to know her first so that you can know that she was full. Because we also flatten people who use drugs into this 2D thing.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Two dimensional stereotype. One of my authors for this podcast, actually, W.J.T. Mitchell wrote a book about losing his son to schizophrenia and the stigma around schizophrenia and how his son brilliantly during his lifetime really claimed it and wanted to shift that stigma around mental illness. I feel like you're doing that a little bit with this book around addiction.
Eirinie Carson:
I really hope so. It was a hard one because I was reluctant to include it and then understood why it was essential if I was going to tell this story. But also, I have been reluctant to use it as a selling point of the book. I don't really talk about it frequently. I don't really talk about it at readings. I don't want it to seem like I am taking this thing that happened and making it, this book's also about addiction. Grab it now. Let's see what happens. But now that the book is out and it kind of has its own life happening, I feel more comfortable in talking about those things.
I do think there are stigmas and prejudices that I hold in myself despite having a friend who died of substance use. I too find it jarring. I saw someone shooting up in San Francisco in broad daylight a few weeks ago, and I remember being like, Jesus Christ, are you joking? I've got my kids in the car. Yuck. Then I thought to myself, this person does not want to be here doing this. This was not in their vision board for their life. This is a necessity that I'm watching being performed.
This is how they keep living as they do this thing today here in the street. I feel a lot more compassion after Larissa's death than I did before. I think I talk about it in the book. My father also used heroin, and I think for that reason, and because he was absent, I just thought, I decided that that was the mark of a bad person because what kind of person would choose that over their children? Now I understand a little more about it. Through that, it grew compassion like moss. It's everywhere now. I make an effort to try and understand.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah, I think it's really important that we talk about it. You wrote about it so graciously, and you gave us a really sweet glimpse into your friendship. I'm sure it's curated and censored a little bit, but it felt uncentered in the way that you write. I just love the story about how you two were always making a baked potato and leaving it in the microwave, making sure the other had something to eat. The small sweet gestures and a friendship that it says so much about you and Larissa.
Eirinie Carson:
Oh, thank you. I still love a potato from time to time.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
A baking potato.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, a baked potato if I have the patience. But any other way, when I wrote that I truly made potatoes when I wrote that chapter, because I was thinking about it. About what a boring, cheap, uninspired meal that was. But it made me, I was hungry for it, but they're delicious. Stand by it.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
They are, they are delicious. So let's talk about survivor's guilt. It seems very present in the book.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, it's present here now.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah.
Eirinie Carson:
I try not to compare my grief to anyone else's. In that same breath, I think that there is something particularly painful, special kind of pain when you lose someone who is young or a parent losing a child, but it's not happening in the sequence it's supposed to and it feels jarring. Yeah. I definitely feel that as my life continues and I do these fun things, I wonder what she would've been like or what would've happened next. That's kind of the cruelty of grief, is that robbing of possibilities.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
How has this loss impacted how you view death or grief, or how has it changed for you?
Eirinie Carson:
Well, it's a lot more present than it was. I mean, when Larissa died, I was... Just stepped a toe into my thirties. I still considered myself immortal. So I think now I know that that's not the case. I talk about this in the book too, of this kind of obsession with imagining all of the ways I could die, which sounds so dark, but actually I feel like it keeps me in the moment. Yeah. I think mortality is prevalent for everyone. The idea of mortality post COVID, for sure. I think we've done a really shit job of grieving COVID and processing what that meant.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I completely agree. I have a kid who was a high school class of 2020.
Eirinie Carson:
My husband and I were just talking about how robbed those kids were. Suddenly, it's over and you're in college. What? You didn't even get to do the cool stuff I did when I left high school. You missed so much.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Well, it's a really important ceremony, that ritual of passing that time and all of those years in the early years being in school and what can we do about all of this grief? It's like pervasive grief after COVID.
Eirinie Carson:
It's pervasive and it feels insurmountable. It's just there's so much. Where do you begin? I don't know, because I think we'd have to acknowledge quite a lot about what happened and how we behaved and the people we left behind, and I don't know if we'll be able to do that fully in the broader sense of grief. Something that I do that I consider like my step one is when someone tells me they lost someone, I ask the name of the person that feels like the very least we can do when we hear that. I actually haven't asked you the name of your mom.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Jane.
Eirinie Carson:
Jane. Yeah, because that's a connection now. Now I know her name was Jane and she lives in my head now a little bit, tiny bit because I don't know her, but I know her name. It's a way of continuing.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. She died at 67, which feels very young to me.
Eirinie Carson:
Too young.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Too young and died of cancer.
Eirinie Carson:
I'm so sorry.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah, no worries.
Eirinie Carson:
No, Sarah, not no worries. See, you did it too.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I did it too.
Eirinie Carson:
You brushed over this thing because you wanted me to feel. Okay. But it's okay.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
It's true. No, [inaudible 00:23:35] we're working through it. We're working through it. I know. It's interesting because lately I've missed her a lot more. I think maybe that's because recently became empty nesters where everyone has moved out. It's the new phase of life.
Eirinie Carson:
Do you think that now you have space for your grief in a way that you didn't before?
Sarah Cavanaugh:
I've been writing about her a lot more too. The book I'm writing is the story of when she died and why I'm doing this work too. So of course she's more present.
Eirinie Carson:
I'd love to know a little fact about Jane so I can file it with her name.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
So I took a photograph of her after her diagnosis, and she still had her hair. She had long hair, but she would wrap it on the back of her head. She had on a sweatshirt that I'd given her. It was green, and I was following her on a single track trail through the rainforest here, and at one point she just turns around and I snapped a photo of her. She loved that trail. It was one of the last longer conversations that we had, just the two of us, until she got caught up in all the medical establishment and she loved to be out in the rainforest. That's where she found her peace.
Eirinie Carson:
That's really lovely. Do you feel closest to her when you're there?
Sarah Cavanaugh:
We spread the ashes along the trail that I took this picture on, so I will always feel close to her on that trail.
Eirinie Carson:
That's really lovely.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Yeah. So I'd love to know, especially after translating what was a very intense grief experience and still is for you into this beautiful book, what would a peaceful exit mean to you?
Eirinie Carson:
I think surrounded with people who know you, really, really know you and love you anyway, and just all agreeing that it's time. That seems peaceful. I love these stories of people deciding, people living with terminal illness who decide that they're ready to die, and being in places where they get to make that choice. I love the confronting of it. I love the idea that death is a door and we could walk through it. That's quite nice.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Well, thank you for this.
Eirinie Carson:
Yeah, you're so welcome.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Thank you for this conversation and I just really, really appreciate your time because that's the greatest gift is your time, so thank you.
Eirinie Carson:
Oh man. Thank you, Sarah. What a trait.
Sarah Cavanaugh:
Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. You can learn more about this podcast and my online course at my website, peacefulexit.net. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This episode was produced by Larj Media. You can find them at larjmedia.com. Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. More of his music can be found on Bandcamp. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.
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