What Grief Teaches Us About Being Human with Author Thomas Attig
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hi there. Thanks for hanging out with me at the Lucid Cafe. In today's episode, I speak with Thomas Attig, an applied philosopher and revolutionary voice in grief studies. His new collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, collected writings on How We Grieve, distills a lifetime of listening, reflection, and teaching into understanding and guidance for mourners, caregivers, and counselors.
Wendy:We covered a lot of ground in our conversation including some esoteric territory I couldn't resist exploring with my new friend Tom, who has quite a large brain. It was fun. To give you an idea of just how large Tom's brain is, he holds bachelor and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis. At Bowling Green State University, Weil Chair, he and his colleagues established the world's first PhD program in applied philosophy.
Wendy:A fellow of the International Workgroup on Death, Dying, and Bereavement, he has received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Death Education from the International Network on Personal Meaning, Death Educator and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Association for Death Education and Counseling, and the Robert Fulton Founders Award from the Center for Deaf Education and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. See, large brain. So please enjoy my conversation with Thomas Attig. Tom, thank you very much for joining me.
Thomas:It's good to be here.
Wendy:Alright, sir. So I would like to I would like to learn a little bit about you. I know you're a philosopher.
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:And I saw that you are an applied philosopher.
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:Can you please describe what that means?
Thomas:Okay. I'll try to do that. My colleagues and I established at Bowling Green State University in 1987, the world's first PhD in applied philosophy. And what we had in mind was gathering together people who are interested in teaching things like medical ethics, business ethics, legal ethics. What were some of the others?
Thomas:Well, death and dying came in there. Political philosophy, moral philosophy spread out over a whole range of topics. And my shorthand way of kind of thinking of what we were doing was acknowledging that there are different ways of thinking about things, and dominant ones at the time and still have to do with working with the sciences where you're trying to figure out maybe even calculate about and count matters in the world, where you do quantitative scientific analysis of all kinds of things. But there are lots of challenges in life that are not susceptible to counting up and coming up with a solution. In my book, I talk about philosophy as in the traditional sense, the search for wisdom.
Thomas:In circumstances where there are no definitive answers, but you need good thinking to get you through addressing challenges that I would call mysteries. You need the skills of a philosopher. What do I mean by mysteries? Life itself is a mystery. Death is surely a mystery.
Thomas:Suffering is a mystery. Love is a mystery. Our souls and the depths of our being are mysteries to us and your soul and spirit are mysteries to me. And if I'm going to be your friend, I have to learn a bit more about them, and so on. But problems can be managed, solved, overcome, surmounted, controlled mysteries cannot be changed.
Thomas:They are what they are. Let's just take four. Change You can ask these questions about living a human life. Is change okay? Is impermanence okay?
Thomas:Is being small and insignificant okay? Is uncertainty okay? Take those. You cannot change them. You have to accommodate to them.
Thomas:And just when you think you've come to terms with impermanence, something turns out to be impermanent that you didn't suspect was impermanent. And you've got to come turn come to terms with that, but the impermanence doesn't change. It just shows you a new face. And that's what death does. And that's what grief does.
Thomas:And that's what loss does. And that's what suffering does. And that's why being philosophical about death and dying has you almost constantly engaging with, how am I going to live with this thing that won't go away? I thought I had a good understanding of it, but now, whoops, boy, this look different. How am I going to live with this as opposed to how am I going to control this?
Thomas:Or take possession of this and so on are quite different kind of question. And applied philosophy, I think in most every area where it's happening has to do with engaging with constants in the human condition that we well, our fellow human beings are mysterious, aren't they? And we don't have the privilege of controlling them. And if we wouldn't want to control them, but we want to learn how to live with them. Philosophers have more to say about that than biologists.
Wendy:Right. Very different fields. Yeah.
Thomas:Yeah.
Wendy:It sounds extremely broad. And so are you saying then that that it's kind of like by applied, do you mean we're trying to understand the mysteries in order to live a better life?
Thomas:Or I think what we're what we're almost constantly engaged in that we don't talk enough about is learning how to live with various aspects of the world around us and of ourselves. My view of grieving is, and this is the originality with which I am credited, I think. I'll tell you a story. I started teaching the full course on death and dying. And I realized that my students, who were nurses and gerontologists and social workers and so on, weren't going to be engaging too much with ethical dilemmas.
Thomas:Should we do this or not from a moral point of view? They were going to be concerned about, am I going to be alright in a room alone with somebody who's dying? Am I going to be able to talk to a family and explain to them, what's happening that is likely to lead to this person's dying, And some of the challenges in daily life and the long term in your life, are going to be kind of new and fresh for you if nobody close to you has died and so on. My students were going to be frightened to go into a room with a dying person or with a grieving family. How can I teach them about that?
Thomas:Well, I had to learn a lot myself. So I joined professional organizations, and nurses and social workers and so on would tell me about what they were encountering. And I would ask people about what was happening in their families. And eventually, I asked my students to fill out journals through the term. And one of the self exploration exercises I gave with them asked them to talk about their three most significant losses in their lives.
Thomas:They're typically twenty to twenty two years old. So there may have been deaths, there may not. But there were losses that they could talk about. And I found that none of them talked about five stages of grieving. That just wasn't what their experiences were about.
Thomas:What they talked about was what to do with or how to live with the physical world that they're witnessing, and they're witnessing deterioration of a person, or the death has taken place. What do we do with the stuff left in the closets? How can I sit in the same place in church where mom used to sit right next to me? Re learning their physical surroundings, familiar sidewalks, going into familiar stores and other places in town.
Wendy:All those reminders, yeah.
Thomas:All the reminders there, all the reminders in engagements with other persons. They had to relearn their social surroundings. What's it going to be like to be with grandma, given that she just lost her son and I lost my father? It's not the same to lose a father as what she's going through losing her son. I I really want to tell her that I'm I'm concerned about her and love her but I don't know how to do that and if a counselor was there, the counselor would say, tell her those things.
Thomas:Alright, but they don't know that. So, relearning your physical surroundings, relearning yourself. Do I really care about, well, CS Lewis wrote about this in his book, my wife died. Why should I shave? What is the point of a smooth cheek?
Wendy:It is a great question, actually.
Thomas:Yeah, and then we struggle with our place in the greater scheme of things. We thought the world on the grand scale works this way, and it shovels this our feet instead. I've been taught this about Jesus speaking English, And it turns out that that's a translation. Wow, you know, this kind of blows your mind.
Wendy:Referencing before we started recording. Yes.
Thomas:Yes, that's true.
Wendy:He told me a joke about it.
Thomas:But we have to relearn how to be and live in our physical surroundings, our social surroundings within our own skins. The things that mattered to me because mom approved of what I was doing or encouraged me to do them, do I still care? Or was I only doing them to satisfy her and so on? And then there's, I was a pretty staunch believer in x, but this sure calls it into question. What do I really think?
Thomas:What do I really believe? So relearning the world is a rather comprehensive thing. But that's what people are challenged to do.
Wendy:And and it seems like as you're talking, I'm thinking about how sad it is that we have to relearn maybe because in our culture, we don't have a relationship with death. And so we have may maybe what you're talking about is, like, an an intellectual idea of it. And then when the reality Yeah. The reality of it hits the actual experience of a loss. Yeah.
Wendy:It's a much different ballgame. Right? Then it's like, you can't think your way through that with concepts or ideas. It's more of how do I just get through?
Thomas:How do I get through the day? How am gonna be with this house? Do I wanna live here anymore?
Wendy:Yeah. Yes.
Thomas:Am I gonna go into my child's room? And there's just so much I'm not I'm not ready for that. I'm not ready to sort out this stuff and give some of it away and hold on to some of it for dear life, and so on. And you have to kind of sort out what you're ready for and what you're not. Start small, get bigger.
Wendy:Yeah. So it's this abstraction that's there until it's not, until it's in your face and you're
Thomas:Oh, yeah.
Wendy:You're experiencing it. And so that's what it seems like you've dedicated your professional life to exploring the study of grief
Thomas:and It never comes down to these five things or these four tasks or whatever. It's as comprehensive as learning how to live. But there's a bonus in all of this. Have you had any experience in learning how to live? You've spent your whole life living?
Wendy:Yeah, I would say, yeah, maybe a few years.
Thomas:Well, yeah, me too. I'm I'm past my teens now, and, this this older age is is interesting. But, I I think there's comfort in a in a simple message that looks like kind of a slap in the face. How do we do this? We do it the same way we've been learning how to live our whole lives.
Thomas:We've got a lot of experiences in dealing with change, in dealing with growth, in dealing with challenge, and dealing with disappointment and dealing with heartache and dealing with all kinds of things. And we've got some inherent abilities that we've developed. And we have an ability and we know it well by now, to adapt new ways of doing things. We've often had to change and sometimes radically. So I ask my students or audiences and so on, how many of you, when you think about learning how to live, how many of you think you've finished?
Thomas:Could you raise your hand? No one ever raised their hand.
Wendy:Yeah, I've nailed it. I've figured it all out. I'm good. Yeah, I'm not saying.
Thomas:I'm being a smart ass. Are you kidding? Well, maybe not. What would be a reasonable expectation about how long it takes to relearn the world, relearn how to live in the world after someone who's close to you has died? A couple of weeks, maybe a month, maybe six months, a year.
Thomas:No, the rest of your life. And you're going to do two things that can be weighty and so on, are inevitable. You are going to miss them as long as you live, and you're going to continue loving them as long as you live. The first is hard, the second redeems the first. Or the more you can spend time on holding on to the gifts they've given you that no one can take from you, they can take the box on the desktop, or that might break or the car could break down or all kinds of ephemeral things and physical things you may lose.
Thomas:If they painted something upstairs on a wall, and across the room here, we have paintings painted by my wife's best friend who died in 2012. Right here, I have a mosaic made by my best friend, who happened to die that same year. We have physical legacies, but we also have parts of ourselves that are different because we lived with a new and loved and were loved by this person who died. If your mother made you tough and courageous, No one took that away when mom died. You still have that.
Thomas:When you get to the holiday season, we are now, there is typically experience of people feeling not very well connected with their surroundings, because there's all this joy and laughter. And they're feeling terrible because just two weeks ago, their brother died or their best friend died or something like that. And I've spoken to audiences, they resist the idea, but I think it's really true. And over the years, you can get better at it. Work into the holiday season, so in discussion with your family, if a family member has died, about the best thing he ever taught me.
Thomas:The best, the most beautiful thing we ever saw together.
Wendy:That's a way of bringing them into
Thomas:Bring them in, acknowledging that alongside of the sorrow that seems to grip you and make it impossible to enjoy the holidays, you haven't lost let's let's think of it this way. Is it possible to love someone in separation? Alright. That's what you have to do when they've died.
Wendy:Right.
Thomas:Have you got all of your friends and relatives with you in the room right now? I don't have them in here with me.
Wendy:No, no, no.
Thomas:Do you think they stopped loving you when you left? Did you stop loving them when you left? We love most of the people that we love most of the time in our lives when they are not even in the room. How do we do that? We talk about them.
Thomas:We remember them. We laugh at things that come to mind. We do things the way they taught us to do them. We've got practical legacies, we've got ways of caring about others that we've learned from people, ways of the soul, ways of caring, loving, making ourselves at home, making a home for ourselves. And in lots of ways, we've got legacies that they've taught us about how to do those things and influences.
Thomas:But they're still there. They're still in us. And we've got ways of spirit that are still in us because they came to us.
Wendy:Right. I think with somebody who's going through, especially a new loss, would would say is that my loved ones who are still alive but not physically with me, I know that I'm going to see them again physically. But the person who's died, they're not just down the street or they're not just in another building or another city or
Thomas:But was that being with them physically the best thing about knowing them?
Wendy:Right. But I think in in the throes of grief
Thomas:very high on the list. Yeah. But there are a lot of other things pretty high on the list.
Wendy:No, understood. Yeah, I was just trying to put myself in the place of someone who's in the throes of really deep grief.
Thomas:Well, mean, gonna do is hold this out as a promise of something you can get to. And the world wants to be quiet about the person who's died because they're afraid that bringing them up is going to hurt you.
Wendy:Yeah, or say the wrong thing.
Thomas:They're making a world that's full of silence. And if if I've just experienced the death of someone very close to me, and I sense that people are not wanting to approach me because they're afraid of what to say, and so on, I I think I might tell them a story of a couple that used to come to my classes, who eventually founded a little group, a support group, mutual support group for bereaved parents. She said when her daughter died, over a weekend, she was three years old, the world didn't know what to say to her, so they said nothing.
Wendy:And
Thomas:the priest at the church said, Congratulations. What do you mean by that? Well, you now have an angel in heaven. That is not the message she wanted to hear.
Wendy:Congratulations. Okay.
Thomas:Thing that was most effective was a neighbor lady. They sort of gotten to know each other over the fence and so on, but didn't know each other well, but their kids played together. And the woman called her and said, You know, our daughters played together. I know your daughter died this last weekend and so on. Over the years, I've taken quite a few photographs of the two kids playing.
Thomas:How would you like to come over for coffee and we'll look at the photos together?
Wendy:Beautiful.
Thomas:That was the best thing anybody did.
Wendy:Yeah.
Thomas:They're still part of your life. Don't pretend they aren't. And try to connect with the good. And the bad will still hurt, but it will reduce in its capacity to really grip you, the more you find yourself connecting with what you still hold. That is among the most precious stuff that you've ever had.
Thomas:I'm trying to think if there was a yeah. There was another thought that came into my head. It'll come back.
Wendy:Okay.
Thomas:It's kind of a mental floater.
Wendy:I get that more than you know. So
Thomas:Oh, this is it. This is this is my point, sort of put in another way. I have met people who almost fall in love with the pain that they feel. Someone who has died because this is the only way to hold on to them.
Wendy:That connection.
Thomas:Or this is a way of, my sadness is a deep expression of my continuing love. That's the kind of thing they'll say about it. And I think people do get themselves caught up with their pain like it's the only thing they can possibly hold on to. That's a dark place to stay out of love.
Wendy:Yeah, it is.
Thomas:I think that beneath the desire to hold them in sorrow because it seems like the only way to do it, there's a deeper desire, which is a desire to continue loving them. I remember sitting in an audience, a fellow professional whose son had died, and I knew he had died within the last couple of years. And I got to a point where in my talk, was making this point about I think beneath that desire that is expressed in the continuing to be very sorrowful, There's a more fundamental desire, that's a desire to continue loving. And he went, I got it. And he needed to he needed to hear that.
Wendy:Right. I mean, I think you're pointing out a really important thing, that is that emotions are not rational. And so when you get into that place, I'm a mental health clinician, and I've certainly talked with lots of people in deep grief over the years. And the folks who get really attached to their pain, from my understanding, is they're afraid if they let go of that pain that
Thomas:They completely let go.
Wendy:That they're dishonoring the memory of their loved one Yes. Or that they don't deserve to be happy, that they should stay in suffering because it would be dishonoring the memory of that person.
Thomas:Yes. And I I think that's a deep hole to dig for yourself, and a lot of people do it. And
Wendy:Yeah. But, again, it's not rational.
Thomas:I think it's what I think it's what you're doing with the thought or the emotion that's not so rational. Let me talk about emotions just for a moment. Sure. I think that another kind of theme that runs through our surrounding culture is that to handle or come to terms with emotions. What the emotions want is expression.
Thomas:They want to be expressed. And if you can do a really good job of expressing your emotions, you're doing justice to them. And that's the best thing you can do. And I think that emotions are not crying for expression. I think they're crying for understanding.
Wendy:They have a story to tell.
Thomas:They want attention. Yes. And they have a story to tell. And when you listen to them, you can learn about the deep needs of your ego, for example, to control something, to get something done, to be the master of living the everyday life that you're living and be a good problem solver, and so on. And egos have a tendency to inflate their significance and overestimate their powers.
Wendy:Really? You think So
Thomas:they come into real disappointments when they hit something like mysteries that they can't control.
Wendy:Very true.
Thomas:So grieving is a very humbling experience for egos. And if they can learn that, gee, I really am vulnerable. I didn't think I was. There are things I really can't control. I'm not the master of my fate.
Thomas:And so those are hard lessons, but you will swallow them if you experience death a lot. Mean, but our souls, emotions of loneliness, for example, are communicating to you that you have a need to be with other people.
Wendy:To connect, yeah.
Thomas:And to connect and to be grounded in relationships with others. We're profoundly social beings. We need other social beings to love, have fun with, take care of, be cared for by, to make lives and families and homes and communities where we share interests and pursue them together and feel the rewards of being soulful, rewards of being loved and cared about as well as loving and caring others. We need that. And the heartaches in the soul are crying for you can't have the warmth and the love or warmth and love in the family of relationships that you've had with this person, but you need the other people who love you and who you love in your world.
Thomas:Lots of grieving people, I think, sort of focus on the relationship with the person who has died as if it's the only relationship in their lives. And now they've lost that, and they don't have time for their children, and they don't have time for their brothers and sisters, or their mothers and fathers, and so on. And it was never that way when this person was alive. What percentage of your time was actually spent with this person who died? A lot smaller than 100%, probably smaller than 10%.
Thomas:But it was a very important 10%. Don't lose track of that. But you would you would think that you had led a led a very distorted life. If you look back and one person had 75% of your time and your children and your friends and your colleagues and the people that you remember and so on had that only little bits of that other 25%. No one ever lives that way or rarely.
Wendy:Sure. Yeah. It makes me wonder what that person the shrink in me wants wants to know
Thomas:Why this one?
Wendy:Well, is that longing serving them? What is
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:What is that doing for them? Because in their minds, in their hearts, it's doing something. There's a reason why they're kind of dedicating themselves to the memory of that person and putting them in this special place where everyone else disappears.
Thomas:Yeah. I've got that story is coming back to me. A woman I met, oh, five years ago, I had given a talk at an international congress somewhere, and a woman came up to me. She was an Israeli, and she wanted to tell me about the death of her son and what she had done in the aftermath. And he was a dear son, but he had gone to live on a kibbutz, and she was living, I think she was like from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, a major city in Israel.
Thomas:And she would go and visit her son now and again, and she got acquainted with some of his friends out on the kibbutz and people he was living with, and he died. And a part of her experience was longing to know more about her son's life in that kibbutz. She'd been away from home for like five or six years. Oh, and she found the people friendly there. So she decided that she would make several trips, and try to connect with people who thought of themselves and he mentioned as friends of his.
Thomas:Which is, you know, what was everyday life like with him? What was he interested in? What what really made him laugh? What made him cry? What was he devoting himself to?
Thomas:And so on. She knew quite a bit, but she'd like to meet up with the people who were sharing his days to learn more. And she brought a journal or two with her, and she was filling the journal with pages about her son. And she really treasured those journals. And she had an idea of how long she was going to go out there, and then she would have interviewed the people she wanted to interview and really had a good sense of her son.
Thomas:And people were beginning to say, you know, it's like he's the only person in your life. And she says, he's not the only person, he's a valued person, he's a precious person. I wanted to know what I could about him. And I really felt good in the company of people who loved him the same way I loved him. But I've made my last trip.
Thomas:I've got these journals, I can turn to them when I want to. I'm not reading them all day every day. In fact, there are many days now that I don't even pay any attention to them at all. And I think I've got a balanced perspective on sort of where he fits in my life. And if I need some comfort or if I need a special dose of humor or whatever that I can only find in him, I know where to look.
Thomas:And these things help me remember him. But I'm not distorting my life around the death of my son. I've got other children. I'm giving them as much attention as I ever did. I've got friends, I'm spending time with them again.
Thomas:I've returned to a reasonable balance in my life. And there's a difference between what she was doing, which is really touching and more than a lot of people do do. But it wasn't distorting. It wasn't taking over her life. Right.
Thomas:It wasn't my devotion to my son is the only important thing about me. I've got work to do. I've got other family members to attend to. I've got friends. I've been away a bit more than I was before he died.
Thomas:But
Wendy:I'm back.
Thomas:I'm going back to the And fuller I'm bringing a full understanding of him with me. And I'll never forget him. But I won't focus on him all day, every day of my life. That's just not what I ever did. Why should I do that now?
Wendy:Okay, that's a cool Yeah, that's a great example of a way to honor someone and not let them consume you. Yeah, and I think sometimes
Thomas:people can let sorrows consume them. And I think what sorrows are doing is saying, think of the care of the person who's died, your care for them, their care for you, and what they're still giving you and hold on to those things. But recognize there's a wider world that you've always been living in. Bring them with you. But live in that wider world, and it's going be a different world.
Thomas:There will be some friends who will disappoint you, or people you're counting on, understanding what you're going through, who will just not know what to do with you and walk away. And if you tell them what you need from them and they still walk away, it's probably a good thing they're walking away. You've got other people in your life to live with.
Wendy:Yeah. Throughout our conversation so far, you've referenced the word soul and spirit a few times.
Thomas:Yeah.
Wendy:So I'm curious about spirituality
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:In grief. What you've discovered. I'm curious too, are you a spiritual guy?
Thomas:We all are, but there are ways of expressing spirituality that people stereotype as the only way.
Wendy:Very true.
Thomas:Yeah. Which is problematic. I wrote a book called How We Grieve, Relearning the World, and we've been sort of talking around that in in a lot of ways. But I I had a dear friend whose son had fallen off a roof and died, And he he wrote wonderfully about just how his it felt like his whole world had was like a piece of glass that just broke. There was brokenness everywhere, and it it was powerful stuff.
Thomas:He liked my book, but he talked to me and he said, you know, in lots of ways you emphasize helplessness, and egos are helpless. And there's a lot in your book that's ego, and ego is about controlling, solving problems, managing every day, and so on. And I thought about that for a while, and I said to myself, he's really right. And I did a good job there of introducing the idea of grieving as relearning how to live in the world with all these different dimensions to it. And I started reading books by I think the guy's name oh god.
Thomas:It's his first name is Thomas, so I identify but I can't remember the last. Four or five different books about the soul of this, the soul of that. And so I was reading them in the 90s.
Wendy:Was it
Thomas:The Enchantment of Everyday Life. Thomas More.
Wendy:Thomas More. Yes. Thomas More. That's I was gonna the name was on the tip of my brain, and I couldn't
Thomas:I I was Wasn't
Wendy:he a former monk? Or
Thomas:Yeah, yeah, of some sort. I think. Anyway, he was writing about soul and spirit. And I thought, everything this guy is writing about makes absolutely good sense to me. There are these dimensions of living that I didn't really touch on in my book.
Thomas:But then he talked about soul as if it was the same thing as spirit. I thought, no. So I started thinking really hard. And by the time I wrote my second book on the heart of grief, Death and Search for Lasting Love, which I think is the central thing that you really struggled for, I decided that soul was one thing and spirit was another. Soul, you root yourself.
Thomas:You ground yourself. You connect. Spirit, you overcome. You rise above. You better yourself.
Thomas:You soul is going down and spirit is soaring. Soul is grounding itself and spirit is reaching out for the new, and the special and the extraordinary adventure and so on is something that spirit does and soul, you return to your favorite chair and hold the hand of the person who's sitting next to you and just love and feel loved. I finally decided that those were two different things. Soul is within us all. We are all grounded in the world.
Thomas:What does that? The soul does that. We are loving. We are caring. We are generous.
Thomas:We are nurturing. We are friendly, we make ourselves at home. So when I was talking about relearning how to live in the world, I talked about reshaping our daily lives because they can't have the shape that they had before. Soul does a lot of that work of returning to what's still working there and still nourishes us and where we still feel grounded and at home. And the spirit sort of navigates our life story, and we are moving into the new and moving into the next chapters of our lives.
Thomas:When someone has died, the next chapters are going to be inevitably different because major characters have now left the scene. They can be present in our hearts and minds, but they can't be physically present. So we reshape our daily lives, and we move into new chapters, and our spirits are the ones that are doing that. And they engage with change, and they engage with growth and overcoming of problems, adventuring into the new, exploring curiosity, all those things are things of the spirit. And when you think of spirituality, I think in this last book, Seeking Wisdom and Death's Shadows, that we're talking about, or because I wrote it anyway.
Wendy:It's the book you're just releasing, yeah.
Thomas:And it's what was I, I was about into the new chapters of your life. I thought about spirituality and people often connect that with religion. And I thought I better speak about this. I think spirituality is a combination of the soul and spirit within you that do all of those things that I just talked about, But a core idea in spirituality is seeking meaning, and seeking meaning in two senses. One, understanding of who you are in the world and how it all works and and how it got to be the way it is, origins, sources of being, and and the like.
Thomas:And meaning as understanding is one is one aspect of meaning seeking, which our souls and spirits do, and the other is meaning in living. Mhmm. And I think what an awful lot of talk about grief and loss, sort of ignores is the the deep challenges to understanding what we take to be the best reasons for being alive.
Wendy:That's a great point. And I love that you covered meaning so much in your new book.
Thomas:Uh-huh.
Wendy:Because I think that's such a that without meaning Yeah. We don't have much.
Thomas:People write a lot about it in the literature, and they've even written whole books about attachment. And attachment gives us security in living so we don't feel like we're in danger of being blown away or drowning or starving and so on. And we we put a lot of effort into getting means to security. But you have that, and you don't have anything like if if if you had that and that only, pretty soon you'd be wondering, but why do I wanna live? And the question, why do I wanna live?
Thomas:Is answered by completely different stuff. It's not the the food that comes to your table. I want food so that while I'm living, I can realize what what's most meaningful to me. Mhmm.
Wendy:And Which is when you're not in survival mode, a luxury, right, to be able to
Thomas:And when people talk about attachment relationships, they talk about your ties with your mother and father and with your children and with your spouse or life partner, and so on. And what makes those things meaningful for you is not that they give you security. It's what when you're securing them, you're able to do in giving and loving and receiving and
Wendy:And who you're able to be as a result of that. Yeah.
Thomas:Yeah. And I think that's spirituality. And in this world, there are religions that have emerged through the ages. And for some people, they turn out to provide both understanding and reasons for living that work for them. And other people don't find the world's religions providing them much of either.
Thomas:And some people have had horrific experiences in religious context, which is not to say they haven't had horrific experiences out of religious context. Religion isn't the only source of unhappiness, but it is a source of unhappiness for a lot of people. And I think if we help people who are grieving draw upon religion, if it's something that works for them, that is a good thing. But we are not neglecting their spirituality if they have an understanding of how things are working that works for them, and if they have reasons for living that are really important for them, that aren't destructive of other people's lives. And it's really tragic to see people who seem not to have a reason for living other than conquest or accumulation and so on, but we won't talk about
Wendy:You just described our culture!
Thomas:Yeah. Well, I moved to Canada twenty five years ago because my wife happened to be living here doing good things. And it was a time when I could retire from my academic life and still have a good life. And Canada and The US, in my experience, are quite different. Don't want to
Wendy:Seems that way. Yeah.
Thomas:I don't I spend more time with friends. I spend less time worried about funds. Mhmm. It
Wendy:and trust me They're very different.
Thomas:Easy easy to build, but we don't wanna talk about cultural contrast here.
Wendy:No. No. That was just a side comment. You just sort of hit on one of the problems in American culture is that drive to be successful and accumulate a lot of wealth and material stuff and blah blah blah. But It's
Thomas:hard to love stuff. You can be motivated to accumulate it, but it it doesn't nurture you.
Wendy:No. It it doesn't. It doesn't. Maybe for a moment it might bring you some joy or happiness. Alright.
Wendy:So I'm curious, do you have a suspicion or an intuition about, whether or not consciousness survives death?
Thomas:I know that people believe it does.
Wendy:There's my
Thomas:And I'm suspicious of that. You're suspicious. I I I remember I'd I'd been teaching for about ten years, and I I gave a little talk. And I pulled out the cartoons that I'd been accumulating for those ten years and the quotations, they were all in a shoebox. And I put together a talk, and I called it Fragile Humanity, Handle with Care.
Wendy:Okay.
Thomas:And I talked about four questions. I tried to repeat them before. Is impermanence okay? Is small and insignificant okay? Is not knowing okay?
Thomas:And is suffering okay? And I remember giving a talk in London and a couple of other places based on thinking about those questions. And people can say no to those, or they can say a kind of a reluctant yes to all of those.
Wendy:Sure, yeah.
Thomas:Or almost an open hearted yes to all of those. And I argued that a good solid route for unhappiness is continuing to say no to any of the four. Because in doing so, you're saying to know you are saying no to who and what you are. You are a being that is small and insignificant in the scope of things.
Wendy:Absolutely, yeah.
Thomas:Will suffer and will not know lots of things you really would like to know, and your time will be short, you will be impermanent. And I ventured to say, and the counselors in the audience, and there were lots of them, people who tried to say no to any of those things fill couches in counselors' audiences. That's what they wind up talking about. When boil it down, this is an intolerable not knowing for you. This is an intolerable you don't last very long for you.
Thomas:This is an intolerable suffering is inevitable in your life, and you just have no tolerance for that, or you you don't know what to do with it or how to live with it. And I I I ask myself now and again, does that entail that I should be okay with my life as a finite thing. I think in general, that's true. So then when you introduce the idea of a conscious survival of this thing that you've trained yourself to be accepting of, it's being small. So I think I would say something like, if it could be meaningful and loving, I would welcome it.
Thomas:But I think it's better to live so that you're you're surprised if it actually happens. That I think that's the way that's the way I live.
Wendy:Yeah. No. I was just curious because, I mean, you've spent so much time
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:Answering these questions, looking at this the topic of death and and loss.
Thomas:I remember I had an exercise I gave students.
Wendy:Yeah.
Thomas:I asked them to describe a life that would go on forever after you lived this finite life, that you would really want to live forever. And I remember I had there was a Doonesbury cartoon, and they were all in the bar and they're talking to one another, and they're wondering about what comes after. And they really had very little to say about that. And in the Western imagination, hell has been imagined very richly, and heaven has been under imagined. So they talked a little bit at the bar about what they envisioned.
Thomas:They said, well, it'd be like a big party, and you're reunited with everyone you ever loved and and so on, and you're getting along, you're having a good time. And then somebody says, well, what about after the party? And one of them ventures, well, maybe we all go bowling?
Wendy:Well, you what you're describing is it's it's like, what if what if there is an existence after your your physical life is over, but that existence has nothing to do with being human and that there's no time there?
Thomas:Yeah. What would and what would it be like to experience that? Well,
Wendy:it's hard to imagine it from a human perspective. You'd have to have the direct experience of it to understand it, I think. But if that were the case, then
Thomas:And if there's a good one and it comes my way, I'll welcome it. And if there if there are ways of misbehaving so you don't get that chance, I'll I'll try to avoid misbehaving.
Wendy:I think it's hard to imagine if there is if consciousness does survive physical life.
Thomas:Yeah.
Wendy:And then just imagining that that our human minds can't imagine what it would be like because we're no longer human.
Thomas:Yeah. Well, imagine being nonphysical. I mean, that's a that's a big stretch.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. Well, imagine I
Thomas:won't say this. I I won't name any names. But I know some people who are very dear to me, who enjoy psychedelics. Ayahuasca in particular.
Wendy:Right, Right.
Thomas:Plant from Peru.
Wendy:South America. Yeah.
Thomas:And I know them well. I trust them when they talk to me and explain what their experiences have been like, and they sometimes surprise me by telling me things about myself, that it's hard for me to imagine how anybody came to know them, but it's accurate.
Wendy:And
Thomas:so there's more in this world than this philosopher can imagine.
Wendy:It's mysterious. Yeah.
Thomas:Yeah. That's a Shakespeare line. But it's as if these people, as they talk about their experiences, are having incredible visions and so on, which says to me eyeballs, and they're moving, which says to me body, and so on. So I I just in my head, I say, I'm not wildly enthusiastic about following them into the same practices. That's fair.
Thomas:If it turns out they have features like that, and that can happen to me after I check out, that will be a completely new thing. And if you wanna call it a life, you could call it life. But anyway, it it does.
Wendy:No. Was just I was just curious. Yeah.
Thomas:My pin. I just don't know.
Wendy:That's territory I I I explore a lot. I'm interested in that.
Thomas:Well, I I appreciate the interest completely. Yeah.
Wendy:I was just curious about your take on it. I gathered from how you've been presenting your philosophies
Thomas:Yes.
Wendy:That that is how you felt, but I just wanted to confirm because I didn't wanna make an assumption.
Thomas:Yeah. One of the things I just have little tolerance for, and I never get physical with anybody, and there were times when I could have been dangerously so. But people who hammer one another for differences in understanding some things that are very difficult to grasp.
Wendy:Yes.
Thomas:Appreciate, be humble and highly tolerant of disagreements about fairly fundamental things. Don't be dangerous in your believing. Well, I'll tell you. You'll probably wanna can this from your filming. But while we're talking, I I wanna tell you this story.
Wendy:Okay.
Thomas:Alright. My doctoral dissertation adviser happened to have an interesting man as his Sunday school teacher when he was growing up in Switzerland in the 1930s. His Sunday school teacher was Albert Schweitzer. And he was in a Lutheran church, and they were studying church doctrine and around the sacrament of communion. There, in some quarters, there is a strong belief that there's a literal transformation of what is being consumed from wine and bread into blood and body.
Thomas:And my doctoral dissertation advisor said, came this Sunday when I was going to swear before everybody and take my first communion that I believe that. Schweitzer asked him, do you believe that, my son? And he says, actually, no. I'm afraid I'm gonna embarrass my parents, and I'm afraid I just I can't go before the church and swear that I believe that.
Wendy:Because then I'll have to go to confession because I just lied. Well,
Thomas:believed that if if he took it and he didn't really believe it, he would need to go to hell. Schweitzer said, you're not the only one who has come with this kind of concern. Are you familiar with the beatitudes and the sermon on the mount? Yes. Do you believe those are important tenets of in leading a good life?
Thomas:I do. He said that's good enough, son.
Wendy:Okay.
Thomas:That's the way I feel. Taking a particular belief about what happens in certain circumstances as a life or death matter is a mistake.
Wendy:Yeah. You're hitting on terror management theory, I think.
Thomas:Of course. Yeah.
Wendy:Right? You're familiar with that? Yeah. Yeah. Just how threatened we are when when there's opposition to belief, especially belief around death.
Thomas:Oh, yeah. Yeah. And and when you have institutions that are reinforcing terror, to me, those are questionable institutions, but that's another discussion.
Wendy:Yes. It is. Yeah. I didn't mean to get off track, but it just, yeah, it just popped into my head as you were talking.
Thomas:So how did we do? Did we do alright? You wanna talk some more? We can talk some more.
Wendy:Well, I was actually I was just gonna
Thomas:actually the film. You know?
Wendy:I was just gonna wrap it up. Just as a reminder.
Thomas:Mhmm.
Wendy:You have a a new book coming out called Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows. And it's a collection of writings that you've done over the years. Yeah.
Thomas:It's a collection from four of the very first back in the eighties. And then the evolution of that thinking. And there are 14 pieces that have been published before, and nine that have never been published. So it's collected writings. But the last book I wrote before this one was a reedition of the first thing in about 2012.
Thomas:So this is capturing at least the newness of the last fifteen years or so. And it's it it traces my thinking and my writings, but it it is also kind of an intellectual autobiography. So you get to know me, and where I started and where I wound up. And I hope to be around for a while longer, but the numbers available to me are growing smaller.
Wendy:Yeah, I hear that. I think that's happening to all of us, right? I'm Some more than others, depending on.
Thomas:I was 80 years old in July.
Wendy:Well. Good for you. That's awesome. Yeah.
Thomas:The pickers, you know, things are still working and they tell me that my body is still working. So the doctors threatened me with another fifteen years.
Wendy:They threatened you, Yeah.
Thomas:And I'm
Wendy:Oh, thinking how dare they?
Thomas:Well, I'm thinking by then that most of the people I know won't be around.
Wendy:Yeah. But but you have all of all of these philosophies to help you manage them not being around.
Thomas:Yeah. Eventually, I'm gonna start throwing things, think. But right now, I'm
Wendy:That's fair. And very human. Yeah.
Thomas:I I I think I've been blessed with a fair share of equanimity. I'm not going to go wild in any circumstances. If threatened, would do things to protect myself or especially my loved ones. But I'm pretty mellow in this life. It's a good place to be.
Thomas:And I can meet people and we've been talking pretty well, don't you think?
Wendy:I think so. Yeah, I hope Good. Yeah. It's
Thomas:really been nice to meet you.
Wendy:It's been lovely to meet you too. I really appreciate you coming on and chatting with me and sharing all of your your philosophies with me.
Thomas:Well, now there there's another thing about philosophy. Everybody needs wisdom. And philosophers from the very beginning in ancient Greece identified themselves as seekers of wisdom. And there's a difference between being a seeker of something that we all need, that is know how in living a challenging life with challenges in them that don't go away but keep showing you something else, and claiming to have acquired heaps of wisdom. I think I suspect that I've come upon some wise ways of living in the world.
Thomas:But my ways may not be very suitable for lots of other folks who are meeting different challenges and different life circumstances.
Wendy:That's fair. That's very fair.
Thomas:I would say that if you have some of the skills that I have that I think any person can acquire, you can talk wisdom with anybody. You can talk wisdom with little children, and they will have perspectives on their meetings with some of these things that don't go away in life, that will often surprise you.
Wendy:Absolutely.
Thomas:And you will sometimes sort of swallow hard and say, god, I wish I knew that when I was six.
Wendy:No kidding.
Thomas:Right? Yeah.
Wendy:So And sometimes a lot of that wisdom comes from loss too.
Thomas:Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Wendy:Because loss gives you it gives you perspective of what's important in your Yeah.
Thomas:And sometimes it will surprise you. You know, what I miss most about so and so, I never quite appreciated so much when she was alive. Yeah. And she had a way of just sort of being in a room that made it different. And I wish she could be in the room with me now.
Thomas:It is quite a plausible kind of realization. Not appreciating fully what you have when you have it.
Wendy:Yeah. It's a great point. Wouldn't we be well served if we could take stock of of all the gifts that all the people in our lives are offering us all the time.
Thomas:I I used to
Wendy:Before they die.
Thomas:I used to quote quote a little song lyric. I can't remember the singer. Remember old friends, the gifts they've given given stay with you every day. Whether they're or alive.
Wendy:Yeah.
Thomas:That's a that's one of the parts or the main reasons for having friends, I think.
Wendy:Yeah. Friendships are pretty amazing thing.
Thomas:Well, then then you you can give in return. And alternate Mondays, I I meet with a colleague who's six or seven years older than I am.
Wendy:Alright.
Thomas:Worked in this death and dying field for a long time, and we talk for an hour on the phone like this. Sometimes it's trivial and sometimes well, like this last one, he's he said he's got about 25 different things in his physical condition that people are concerned about, And he's losing, many of his abilities, and so on. But just having a chance to face to face with somebody on a regular basis, is wonderful.
Wendy:It's beautiful. Yeah. Well, I'm
Thomas:not even snacking while we're doing it.
Wendy:People wanted to learn more about your your work, the books you've done, Oh. You have a website. Correct?
Thomas:I do. It's called grief'sheartwithnopunctuation,uh,.com.
Wendy:Okay. Awesome. I'll put that in the show notes so people can can look at it, and then they can get your books on there. Yeah?
Thomas:It will tell you how to get them.
Wendy:Okay. Yeah. Will point them in the direction
Thomas:of And getting your the people who got me into my publicist got me into doing this stuff told me to get my son to revise my
Wendy:Update your website?
Thomas:Website I hadn't touched for for ten years. And so we've got stuff on the new books, and we've arranged stuff on on older things. There is you need to know about this because you're not gonna go to my website and look at all this kind of stuff. But you deal with you counsel with people. Right?
Wendy:That's part of what I do. Yeah.
Thomas:Can you see that?
Wendy:Catching your breath in grief
Thomas:Yeah.
Wendy:And grace will lead you
Thomas:home. Yes. The book is small meditations accompanied by nature photographs.
Wendy:Beautiful. They're gorgeous photographs too. Alright.
Thomas:Thank you.
Wendy:On that note,
Thomas:Tom joining me.
Wendy:Thank you very much for coming on and chatting with me. I don't know about you, but I enjoyed that conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Tom or to get a copy of his latest book, Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows, his collective writings on how we grieve, You'll find a link to his website in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and a big thank you to Lani for her generous donation to the podcast. If you're enjoying the show and would like to offer your support, you can make a donation of any amount by clicking on the support this podcast link in the show notes.
Wendy:You can also help by leaving a positive review, letting your friends know about the show. It's all super helpful and super appreciated. In the next episode, we're going to explore the art of manifestation. Until next time.
