Episode 47
Healing Through Humor: Navigating Grief with Rebecca Soffer of Modern Loss
“Not only does it feel good to laugh, but when you find yourself laughing, whether you realize it or not, you're reminding yourself that you're still in there. It's like, ’ Oh wait, I'm still me.’”
In the final episode of our Uplifting series on grief and loss, you’ll meet Rebecca Soffer, co-founder of Modern Loss, author of the bestselling “The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience,” and co-author of the book "Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome."
«Check out other episodes from the series HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.»
In this conversation, Rebecca and I discuss:
- How her work at The Cobert Report primed her to use humor to navigate the long and messy arc of grief after losing both parents early in her adult life
- How shared grief can be a shortcut to intimacy and deep connection
- How humor reminds us that we’re still here when we’re losing so much of what makes us feel like ourselves
- That there’s no right or wrong way to grieve
- How to take care of ourselves and our boundaries during the many stages of loss
Rebecca
Rebecca Soffer is cofounder of Modern Loss, which offers creative, meaningful, and encouraging content and community addressing the long arc of grief. She is also the author of the bestselling “The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience,” which Gayle King named a favorite book of 2022. Rebecca is also co-author of the book "Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome," Her writing has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, TIME, Glamour, and NBC and she has spoken on loss and resilience around the world, including at Capital One, Amazon U.S. and UK, HBO, and SoFi. Rebecca is a Peabody Award-winning former producer for The Colbert Report and a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumna.
Thank you to Susie Jaramillo for nominating Rebecca as an Uplifter. Please join Susie, me, and a host of other Uplifters on May 17 for Uplifters Live. You can learn all about it HERE.
Transcript
Welcome to the Uplifters podcast. I'm Aranza Savas. And today I'm downright giddy to talk about death with Rebecca Soffer. the co-founder of Modern Loss. You've heard about Modern Loss on earlier episodes on this.
Rebecca Soffer (:So far.
Aransas Savas (:beautiful journey through loss and grief over the last five weeks. ` what Modern Loss does is look for creative, meaningful, encouraging ways to offer content and community to address the long arc of grief. She is also the author of the best-selling Modern Loss Handbook, An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience, which
King named a favorite book of:Maybe unexpectedly, but really importantly, we're gonna talk about the joy and the humor that can be found across the long arc of loss. And some ideas that we can use to creatively and intentionally build resilience on that long journey. Rebecca, thank you for being here.
Rebecca Soffer (:Thank you so much for having me. That was a lovely introduction. I wish everyone could say that before I walk into a room. That's really nice. Yeah. Yeah, and then you like don't have to say anything. You could just like go and just like sit with your drink in the corner and then, you know, everything has been said.
Aransas Savas (:It would be sort of nice, wouldn't it, to be introduced for our passions?
Aransas Savas (:we are missing some key details to this story though. So I don't imagine you or any young woman starts out her life dreaming of becoming an expert and a guide through loss and resilience.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah, I would gather that you are correct in that assumption. There may be, I mean, like look at Beetlejuice, look at Winona Ryder's character. She was pretty, you know, connected to death and grief and all that, but I wasn't like her and probably like many young people. I didn't grow up even knowing that you could have a career or.
Rebecca Soffer (:carve out some sort of meaningful path working with grief and lost communities. I wanted to be a journalist and then I wanted to be a political satire producer. And I also wanted to be an intergalactic DJ, which sadly, I mean, there is still hope. I mean, actually that's the thing that might actually come true more than any of these dreams. But...
Rebecca Soffer (:I started out my career after getting my graduate degree from Columbia Journalism School by working for the Colbert Report. So I started post-grad school working in comedy, in political satire, because one of the reasons that I love Stephen, I mean everyone loves Stephen, and the Daily Show is because,, they managed to convey important
information in ways in which you will absorb that information and you won't like turn off the tv or zone out or go running for the hills and never come back. I was really drawn to that way of telling stories and telling important stories.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Rebecca Soffer (:And you know, I'm a little weird. I was having a blast. And I really felt like I was starting to cook with gas in my life. I had just turned 30. I'd been there for a couple of years by then. I was a field producer and my mom died. Bam. I went on vacation with my parents, camping in upstate New York in Lake George. That was kind of our place. I'm originally from Philadelphia.
And I'm an only child between my mom and dad. And that night after they dropped me off in my disgusting camping gear, we'd been on an island for like five or six days in the middle of a 32 mile long lake with no running water. I was smelling ripe. I hugged my mom, I kissed her. She dropped me off. She used the bathroom I was gonna see her a few days later down in Philly for a family wedding.
And instead, a few days later, I was putting her into the ground because she died between leaving me and getting safely home. It was terrible and traumatizing and all of the things that somebody would assume that going through something like that would be. My dad was in the car with her. So then I was also just ejected not only into the after of what it's like to live with loss, but I was also just ejected.
also the after of like being so worried about your surviving parent and feeling like you had to take care of them because my dad had just lost the love of his life and survived a terrible accident. So I just started this new stage of life where I just became intimately acquainted with grief, with loss and with especially how allergic we seem to be.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Rebecca Soffer (:, at talking about this stuff in ways that don't make people feel like something is wrong with them for moving through it. And so that is the pivotal moment of my career, which was when I realized how isolating we make it for people to not only like grieve, like deep grief, but just like live with the shit across the long arc. And I decided to make it my mission.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:after several years went by, after my dad also died, four years after my mom, to just kind of help people to feel less alone and not only feel less alone in what they were going through, but also to be shown examples of resilience and of the mess and of all the nuances of what it felt like to live with loss, and for those examples to serve as inspiration to them because we all deserve to live.
great lives, even if we've been dealt hard hands, and all of us have.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm. I'm so interested in this journey, because here you are, this young woman who's future vision has been sort of completely reshaped by situations and context, And one of the things we talk a lot about on this podcast is how we take those moments and we reclaim what has been added to our stories, integrate it with the story we were building or telling and our own gifts and interest and passions and create something
Rebecca Soffer (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:would you remember the moment after that when you started to come out and try to create something out of these tragic moments?
Rebecca Soffer (:I don't remember like what I was wearing I do know the Grey's Anatomy was probably on the air because it's been on the air for like 100 years. So some moment in time over the course of the Grey's Anatomy.
Rebecca Soffer (:series arc, I had this realization., it was pretty soon after my mom died because keep in mind, I was very much in the build mode of my life. I was 30, I was single, I wanted to do all the things. I, you know, 30, yes, I get it. It's like, oh, you're 30. But like, you know, in New York, 30 is like 21. And I had also just gone to grad school a couple of years beforehand. So I really felt like I was.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:embarking upon my career of choice and I was building on that and I'd just gotten promoted. And, I was navigating social life and trying to get a dog and all that stuff. And then all of a sudden, bam, I also had to navigate enormous loss. And I had trouble reconciling how you do the two things together because there didn't seem to be a lot of space in my daily schedule for me to fit the loss in, like fit the grief in.
Rebecca Soffer (:Companies, employers aren't so good at that in general. In my case, it got to a point where,, I really had to rely on the kindness and empathy of the people I worked for and describe to them like what it felt like to be 30, have your mom die on a highway, and have to go back to Philly every weekend to look after your dad and like try and carve out time to see a grief counselor when you're in like a daily TV production.
every single day. That's not a real lifestyle that lends itself to a lot of self care during business hours. But I realized that I had to become my own advocate. I kind of sat around and waited for like the world to serve me like little kittens on silver platters and like, it's gonna be okay and we're gonna, the universe is gonna take care of you. But I realized that the universe doesn't.
Rebecca Soffer (:give a flying fig about taking care of me, just like it doesn't give a flying fig about taking care of anybody else. It just is, you know, things just happen and you have to figure out like, what are you gonna do now that they've happened? And for me, I just realized that eventually I got to the point where I was like, I get it. I've tried the things that everyone says they're sure I should do. Like everyone was totally sure that I should go back to work and...
you know, and keep myself busy, or that I should take a leave from work and like go to a hilltop, or that I should, try and date because that would be hopeful or that I should definitely not date because I'm in a really hard time. everyone had their own opinion of what I should do in the depths of my grief. And I started by listening to them because I was just so desperate for guidance. And eventually I realized, oh, I get it. only I know what I should be doing for myself.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:And also the version of me at 12 p.m. today has no idea what the version of me at 2 p.m. tomorrow is gonna need. Because grief is such a strict mistress and it revels and sneak attacks and it shifts and ebbs and flows and one day you might feel like you're out of your mind and just.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-mm.
Rebecca Soffer (:need to remove yourself from society completely in another day, you might feel like you need to be surrounded by all the people in the world, That's just the way it is. I think I relatively quickly had the idea, wouldn't it be so great if I had guidance from other people who could show me instead of telling me,, it's gonna be okay. It takes a year. Oh, you should go to work. No, no, no. Show me what you've done.
Aransas Savas (:Mmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:show me what worked for you. Show me how you've changed. And also show me that it's gonna get better, but also make me feel seen in the reality that this stuff is hard no matter what forevermore. make me feel less alone in this mess. I just was like, okay, I think this modern loss idea, I think it's something I can do as a writer and a producer, a publisher, and also just like someone who understands how to convene communities. And also convey.
Aransas Savas (:Right.
Rebecca Soffer (:maybe sometimes boring, maybe sometimes scary, overwhelming information in tones that are comfortable to people, because that is what you do when you work in comedy and satire. you talk about wars, you talk about politics, you talk about like crazy shit that's going on, you talk about boring things, like weird economic things. But by the end of the show, your audience members have learned something.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:And it's like you trick them into learning,? And that is kind of what I wanted to do with the topics of grief and loss. I wanted to trick people into coming into these warm waters of conversation and have them realize like, oh my God, oh wait, it's like totally fine in here. Like, it's not scary. The worst has already happened. This is fine. In fact, it feels really good to have a forum and a community to talk about this stuff. I feel better now.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
So what, what are you saying to allow people to access?
that emotional connection in a way that doesn't hurt.
Rebecca Soffer (:Well, I think that I'm saying, I think I'm just like being really honest with people. I've written two books. I co-founded this site with my good friend, Gabby Berkner, 10 years ago. I've done lots of live events, a lot of live storytelling events, grief comedy events. I speak at companies, I speak at nonprofits, et cetera. the through line is that I am very upfront that like when someone says like, Oh, it's for grief expert, Rebecca suffer. I'm no more of an expert than like, you are, but I'm just as much of an expert as you are, you know, like I, the first, the message that I want to get across more than anything is that grief is not a pathology. It's not an illness. It's not anything that has any
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:Hmm
Rebecca Soffer (:cure, I mean, it doesn't have a tree, it doesn't have a vaccine or like a Pax Livid, you know, it, it's just like a thing that you have to move through. And it's also the most universal thing that anybody can go through. Um, okay, fine. In addition to being born and dying, right. Great. s every single one of us is going to experience grief. Um, if we care about anything.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:Some of us experience profound loss a lot earlier than others and a lot more unexpectedly than others, but we're all gonna go through it. And what I want people to realize right away is that it's messy and that there's no such thing as a linear progression and that there's also no such thing as.
a binary experience and grief. It's never over. There's never closure. You know, it's, people are like,, I got over, like I've tried to get over my grief. You know, I get it., I understand what you're saying, but like that's never gonna happen. And I say that not to be like a Debbie Downer, but.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:almost to be kind and hopeful to that person and make them realize that like if they're still having shitty moments way down the line, guess what? That's totally normal. It's normal, you know?
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:because you still have a living relationship with the person who died or your pet who died or what have you, because you're still alive. And the way that you regard them and remember them and wanna honor them or whatever is going to shift across time as you hit different milestones in your own life. And so just, I want people to know that it's okay to feel the mess. It's okay to,, struggle.
a really long time after everybody in society seems to think you should be doing better, And while things like grief counseling and people with letters after their names can be incredibly helpful to people who are grieving, like super helpful, I think everyone should have a good grief counselor.
Rebecca Soffer (:It's not everything, you know? I think that community is what people need. And I think that...
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:the more people realize that it's a mess, it's a forever 24 seven, 365 day a year thing. I want people to realize that grief is an individual experience no matter what. But when we kind of...
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:silo ourselves in the conversation and we're like, okay, I'm just going to reserve this for my therapist or that one person. When we don't allow ourselves to get to a point where we're starting to share communally, and I'm not saying, post everything on Facebook or Twitter. I'm saying just let it out a little bit more. Be a bit more open with your colleagues, your manager that you're having a hard time. Ask for what you need and see if you can get it.
Start setting boundaries with people who aren't making you feel great, or try and ask other people to pull you in a little bit more if you need to feel pulled in. You know, the more that you do that, then you are making something that is an individual experience, a much less isolating one. And I tell you, that is like the key to everything. feeling like you're not alone in it.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Yes, I agree. And it's not just grief and loss. As you said, it is everything. every experience of being a human being is easier carried. If it is normalized through the lens of connection with other people who've had similar experiences. And if we allow ourselves to feel whatever dimensions of emotion we are experiencing with that.
Rebecca Soffer (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah, and also I want to say that like, when you feel like your burden is being divided up, like multiple times over and carried on many shoulders, you're gonna feel so much lighter, not like, oh my god, everything's totally fine now, because you have a loss, you know, and that's normal, and that's awful.
Rebecca Soffer (:but you're going to feel so much later with regard to having more energy to dedicate to getting yourself what you need, as opposed to spending so much of your energy trying to get some acknowledgement in your hard thing. if you feel like other people are seeing you, acknowledging you, they're as...
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:Right.
Rebecca Soffer (:, a sounding board or somewhere to put your primal scream sometimes, or just someone you can call on a hard trigger day or whatnot. You just feel like you just have so much more energy to think about what else you can do for yourself to make yourself, you know, feel. I don't want to say stronger because like we're all strong, but like you're building more coping mechanisms to put in your toolbox.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah, I think it's, for me it's about not burning all of my energy on hiding. It's exhausting. Yes.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah, it takes a lot. I mean, it takes a lot of energy to pretend that you're fine, you know, either like disappear or like be everywhere and put on this mask of like, oh, I'm fine. Like, how are you? Oh, totally fine, totally fine. When you're like, honestly feel like you're disintegrating inside. I mean, I am familiar with that. I was a Oscar level pro at that. And I flamed out. My energy.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
All good.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:crashed and burned after about a year or so, because I couldn't keep up with it anymore. I just needed to just let it all hang out. And it was really only when, you know, I went to dinner with a few other women who had all lost parents, and we did get to a point where we could kind of share, honestly and openly, it was like the floodgates had opened and there was this emotional exhale. And it was just so amazing to not have to explain.
Aransas Savas (:Mmm.
like, yeah, I'm telling you about a bad date I had, but like you don't understand because it's so much more complex because it's happening against the backdrop of like a dead mom it just felt so much better to not have to say any of that to these people because they got it. And they didn't know exactly what I was going through, but they knew what it felt like.
Aransas Savas (:Right? Right.
Rebecca Soffer (:to grieve somebody notable and meaningful in their lives.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah., it sounds like they also had in common that they were women and they were around your age group and they lived in a similar place, right? So there's some commonality.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah, that totally helped. It did, I can't lie. I feel like when two people who understand grief meet each other, there is such an enormous opportunity for real intimacy to happen really quickly You feel more comfortable. It's like, oh, you have a loss, oh, yeah, oh.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:And then you just like, oh my gosh, like you kind of like exhale a little bit and then you feel like you're like revealing more and you're sharing more, you're being more empathetic toward them automatically than you might ordinarily be to somebody else whose story you really don't know,?, and everything on social media is like so flattened, like there's no room for nuance. And as I said before, grief is certainly not a binary thing. It's not black and white. There's all the nuance. So when you really do make connections through loss, they can be some of the most powerful, gratifying, hopeful, connections that you could ever have.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:bright.
Aransas Savas (:It's trust. Yeah, it's a safe space.
Rebecca Soffer (:It is, it's trust.
Aransas Savas (:where there's enough understanding. And it's the same thing we hopefully get to experience with our own families, And this is just sort of an acceleration of that because of the context. I know you talk as much about resilience as you do loss.
Why has that become a central theme of your work, Rebecca?
Rebecca Soffer (:Well, because when my mom died, I was 30. And I really needed to know that my life hadn't ended too because hers did. But it felt like it had because she was my person and I didn't understand the landscape of the world anymore. And...
Rebecca Soffer (:She was also my witness to my childhood and the person, she was also the person who I kind of assumed was gonna be there as I hit all of the milestones that I wanted to hit in my life. And so I guess I kind of figured out eventually that I just was gonna have to mother myself somehow, which some days I pat myself on the back about and other days I fail miserably.
Aransas Savas (:Mm.
Rebecca Soffer (:And the resilience part was really just like in, I know it's like a buzzword, it's like a hashtag now, but y, what is resilience? It's the ability to level up with yourself when things get hard, when you're dealt a blow. how can you recover from that? And I'm not talking about how quickly, like, and how can you get over it? No, no, how do you deal with it?
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:How do you keep going?
Rebecca Soffer (:How do you keep going in ways that don't promote you suffering? Because you don't deserve to suffer. Someone in your life dies. That's going to be awful. But you don't deserve to suffer for the rest of your life. You deserve to figure out how to tease some meaning from it. And use that meaning to.
Aransas Savas (:Uh huh.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:carry on and build a life where your life will hopefully continue to expand around your grief and your grief will hopefully, again, I'm not a therapist, I'm not like a clinician, but this is the way I describe it. Hopefully your grief will turn more to loss, which is something that I live with. I live with my loss, but I'm not a grieving woman. I think
Aransas Savas (:Mmhmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:passive, but it feels like something that is taking control over me. And when I feel like I'm living with loss, it's more like it's my companion. It's always there. I'm aware of it. I know that the waves are gonna come and they're gonna be really hard sometimes, but I also now know that they're gonna go. Like they're gonna, you know, it's ebb and flow and I can be more prepared as time goes by to like anticipate those waves.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:not just the expected ones, around Mother's Day or birthdays, but also have tools that I've developed to handle the unexpected ones. Like the ones on Tuesday night at eight o'clock when I see a commercial that totally reminds me of her. Or like, you know, like normally it's like a Google commercial about like family photos and then like, I'm sitting with my kids and I'm like sobbing, you know? I mean, they figured out how to pull at the hard strings. So like a Toyota or Subaru commercial. I don't know, they're like weirdly.
Like they're like weirdly emotional things to watch. Yeah, I don't know, like what's up with them? But you know, like I just like, I needed to figure out ways to kind of handle those.
Aransas Savas (:I feel like Subaru and Volvo especially. I don't know.
Rebecca Soffer (:triggers, which were more unexpected, as well as the expected ones. the coping mechanisms are wide ranging. d it's not just like mindfulness or doing yoga. those are great, awesome. I'm terrible at yoga. more power to anybody who does that.But also ways to figure out how to get better sleep.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:ways to harness like creative endeavors, like writing and music and different, tactical projects, where you're using, your hands, you're moving your body, as you do a ritual that has like a beginning and a closing so that you feel like you're carving out space to honor a moment,, ways to remember,, and connect through memory.
and then maybe ways to honor by creating some sort of bespoke holiday or tradition, ways to pass on memory to my children who will never meet my parents ever.
and also ways to figure out how to stillhave a work life and navigate your intimate life and your social dynamics, and figure out ways to, build boundaries when you need to, or, lower boundaries when you need to,, these are all connected to building resilience,
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Rebecca Soffer (:And not any one tool is going to work every single time. But when you have enough of them and the one thing doesn't work, you have something else to choose from.
Aransas Savas (:Yes, that's what I'm hearing. You have a whole tool belt and when you need a hammer, you go for the hammer.
Rebecca Soffer (:Right. I use the hammer a lot.
Rebecca Soffer (:It's a velvet hammer, but yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:It's important, right? It serves a purpose, but it's not the only tool you have in your tool belt. Maybe some you rely on more than others. And the other thing I'm really taking from this, I don't know how much you've read about the research on the oscillating narrative, that showed that families who tell their stories as a series of ups and downs have greater resilience than those who tell the story of we came from Poland and everything was great, or the ones who said we came from Poland and everything was awful. It's the ones who say we came from Poland, some things were great, some things were bad.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:So it is that up and down appreciation.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah.
You're like, yeah, I mean, it's like you're telling, but you're really showing, you're showing and not telling. It's like, yeah, when you're telling a family story of challenges and successes and failures, like that is to me showing, not telling. You're not like, oh, it was bad, it was great. You're like, no, like this like great grandpa, Shlomo, came from the shtetl, and he had like two cents in his pocket. And then like, then he started a grocery in the Lower East Side, and then like, oh, it burned down during the Great Thing.
like, but that's, you know, and that is, you're right. It's, it's, it's showing how it can be awesome and terrible and hopeful and, but that the end all be all isn't always the high point or the low point. It just keeps going. Right. if there is such a thing as generational trauma, of course, there is also generational resilience. And I think that is something I really hear in the way that you are translating this into your family dynamics too, and the way you're talking to your children about it. even just yesterday, yeah, I took my kid on a field trip to a presidential library, my fourth grader, and they did this exercise with presidential marketing campaign materials. And they were looking at original versions of the Johnson versus Goldwater bumper stickers and pins and Kennedy. And some of them were really clever.
And it hit me because he was like, oh, this one's cool. Like, I like this one. And I was like, do you know who made some of this stuff?, your grandfather, my dad. My dad did lots of political campaigns. And I started telling him about it., because he's at the age, he's 10. We're like, it's almost like he's 13 already, where like everything is lame. And he's like, wait, really? I'm like, yeah, he was.
Aransas Savas (:Wow.
Rebecca Soffer (:literally super witty, very smart, like very clever like you. And it's just so neat when I see those moments arise that I don't anticipate them. I didn't know we were gonna be like knee deep in campaign marketing materials, but here we are. I think that telling those stories is so important. Yeah, especially when you're, when you have kids and let's say your brother died or your dad died or your partner died, just like talking about them.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:is so important because so frequently we get fixated and stuck in the illness or the death, right? And eventually the hope is that we are able to pull ourselves back and remember the ties that we have to the memories, the better memories. I say that also with a big asterisk for listeners because I'm.
hugely aware that not every relationship is a positive one.When somebody dies, it's never tied up with a perfect little bow, but some connections are much more damaging than others. in my book, the Modern Laws Handbook, I have a whole section on the tough stuff. And I say, only do this when you're ready. And it's a series of questions that really makes you think through, you know, if there's anything that they've, you know, your person ever did to you that they never apologized for. Did they have any regrets? You know, do you have any, it's like really important to think through this stuff.
Aransas Savas (:Mm.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Rebecca Soffer (:because that's stuff that like you don't realize is in you, but then when it comes to the surface, it's something that you might wanna take to a mental health professional and further examine.
Aransas Savas (:I love that. My father died when I was 22, but I didn't have a relationship with him. I never really knew him. I had no positive associations with him. And so I definitely have always felt a very different sense of loss. And I don't feel any connection to people who lose a parent.
Rebecca Soffer (:Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Aransas Savas (:Because I lost a stranger for all intents and purposes. I lost some access maybe to a bit of history. But even that, I just, those people didn't raise me. And so I just don't, I don't have the sense of having lost a parent. And so I really appreciate you representing that because there was a part of me for a long time that felt guilty. Like I think you're supposed to feel bad when you lose a parent. But I didn't, I lost a stranger.
Rebecca Soffer (:Like he should be sadder, yeah?
Aransas Savas (:The more we talk about these things, the more we can experience them with acceptance and without judgment and finding the people who do relate and who understand and create.
y that sense of safety and journey to move along the arc.
Rebecca Soffer (:Yeah, I mean, the whole tenet of modern loss is as long as you're not hurting yourself or anybody else, you do you. Yeah, like you do your grief your way. You do your loss your way. And like, you know, I'm like, don't freaking judge anyone else for the way they're doing theirs. So this is dense stuff. How do you integrate humor into the conversation?
Rebecca Soffer (:Do you want to like, I just like, okay.
I'd love to talk about humor a little bit because I use a lot of it.
Rebecca Soffer (:Very easily. And I think that's because it's kind of who I am in many ways. I mean, for God's sake, I was working for Comedy Central when my mom died. So I'm clearly somebody who enjoys comedy. And, you know, I love dark comedy. I love connecting through.
shared hard experiences and laughing over them, not because I'm making light of them, but because hard experiences are, naturally very messy. And within mess, there's a lot of humor, just like there's tons of humor in the mess of life, there's humor in the mess of death,
Aransas Savas (:Thanks for watching!
Rebecca Soffer (:when we launched Modern Loss, we got a lot of attention right away because our tone was very unapologetic. we were very tongue in cheek, we used a lot of humor and you know, we always said to people, for those of you who ask, when is it okay to laugh?
Aransas Savas (:Mm.
Rebecca Soffer (:after a death, who cares? whenever you need to laugh, who's saying it's not okay? We also assure you that you're gonna feel really sad. if you find yourself laughing at a funeral or having a laugh on like a death anniversary or something or laughing about a memory of when someone was really ill and they couldn't take care of themselves forever.
Aransas Savas (:Yeah.
Rebecca Soffer (:That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means that it's a coping mechanism for you. You can't always just like rend your clothes over something you don't deserve to, that means you're suffering. And I feel like when we're able to connect through humor in the wake of grief and across the arc of loss.
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:That is when we are able to make those real deep connections with other people, not only because humor is fun, like who doesn't love laughing? Like I can tell you so many funeral stories about my mom and my dad's funeral. And people, who don't get it. They don't know if it's okay to laugh when I tell them when I went to say like, goodbye, in heavy quotes to my mom in the coffin, I noticed they put the wrong shade of lipstick on her and I flipped out. And I ended up
taking out my lipstick and putting it on her dead body so that she didn't have to like go to all of eternity looking tacky in the wrong shade. is that morbid? Absolutely, like, did I ever think I was a human person capable of doing something like that? No, but did I find myself doing something like that? Did my body move in that direction? Yeah, and is that funny?
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:you bet it is. When else would I have ever done that in my life? And so when you can talk about that, doesn't mean I don't miss my mom. Doesn't mean I wouldn't give at least one to three limbs to have her back with me, so that she could be a part of my life. But it just means that I figured out a channel where I can put my feelings and it feels a lot better than
Aransas Savas (:Mm.
Rebecca Soffer (:the channel where like I lose my mind through my feelings. Sometimes I don't have a choice. Sometimes I do feel like I'm losing my mind and it's really hard and I can't find the humor, the lightness and that is fair. Those moments exist for a lot of people and especially for a lot of people who have children who die or,, lose people to terrible things that is incredibly traumatizing to grieve those type of losses. But in general, we do use a lot of humor because we know that not only does it feel good to laugh, but when you find yourself laughing, because whether you realize it or not, you're kind of reminding yourself that you're still in there. And you're in this...
Aransas Savas (:Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Soffer (:experience that's otherwise completely foreign to you.. But when you find yourself laughing, it's like, oh wait, I'm still me., it's like a little spark. It's still there.
Aransas Savas (:Hmm.
Aransas Savas (:I'm here. I keep picturing you since the beginning of this conversation zooming off as an intergalactic DJ. So.
Rebecca Soffer (:Oh my God, from your mouth to the universe's ears.
Aransas Savas (:No, you fully manifested that today. It's happening. We are coming to your set.
Rebecca Soffer (:Okay. I need to learn how to use all the equipment first, but, yeah, I would rock a Hall of Notes slash Taylor Swift mashup. I don't even know which songs those would be, but.
Aransas Savas (:I mean, all of it, all of it, all of it. I feel like there's some major platform she was involved at the very least. Thank you for the work that you're doing in the world. Thank you for sharing your story
And as you said, it's something we will have the opportunity to practice. And I take from this personally a reminder that when I am in those times, I get to trust the uncertainty and the mystery and the wildness of that ride as it continues. So here's to just being human. Here's to being human. Uplifters, thank you for being here. Thank you for being on this grief and loss journey with us over these last five weeks. I hope you'll tune in to the other episodes from this series where we hear from folks at the dinner party, we hear from folks who lost infants and children and the team at Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep and the team at Be Present Care who are helping people make decisions in their last days.
And that collectively we find ways to still be uplifters for ourselves and for each other, even through the toughest moments. And I can't wait to come together and to connect and celebrate all of our humanness and our beauty and a safe space to be honest and raw.
and vulnerable and messy together on May 17 in New York City. And if you haven't gotten your tickets yet, check the show notes. They'll be there. Or check us out on Substack.
