Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted Podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

Catherine:
So I'm really delighted for this episode to be joined by Tom Attig Would you like to just tell us a little bit about where we're talking to you?

Tom:
I'm in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Catherine:
And what is it that you get up to? Do you want to tell us a bit about your background?

Tom:
I'm a serious retired person. And sometimes I write. So I I wrote the book that we're going to be talking about today. uh most of last year and collected together writings that stretch out over about four decades of might Teaching and writing about grief and loss and philosophy. I'm a philosopher by training. My wife is kind of a tough test. She's a co-founder of the first children's hospice in North America. Uh, and she knows people who know grief. If she likes what I'm doing, I must be doing something right. I spent my career teaching and writing I always wanted to be a teacher. There were several teachers in the family. My favorite people on earth were my teachers when I was going through grade school and high school. I thought I was going to be a math teacher because I was really good at math, but when I got up face to face with what it looked like to be a math teacher, I thought If I'm in a university, I I'll be in over my head. That stuff is way too abstract. And if I'm in high school uh I'll be teaching predominantly people who do not want to learn trigonometry, and I'll have to teach them the same problem set year after year after year, and that didn't look attractive to me So when I was at college I drifted over into the humanities, found philosophy. It has to do with, by definition, seeking wisdom. which amounts to seeking know-how in how to live with meaning and purpose Which kind of echoes the purpose of your podcast, um, by the way. So I see why we want to talk to one another. And uh I never thought I was gonna do anything with death and dying, but it became very familiar to me as I was growing up. I can fill you in on that a little bit. My dad was one of ten, my mother was one of nine. So when I was growing up in small, some of dad's family was getting pretty old. And they started getting ill and dying. And at the time, travel to go to funerals and so on was unusual. People didn't have at least in my family didn't have money to go far and his family was far away. My mother's family was in the Chicago area where I was growing up in Wheaton, Illinois And letters would come in and they would announce that someone had been ill, and then maybe later they'd come and indicate that uh the person had actually died. And my mother was not shy about those letters. She seemed to think that young people like me needed to know about these things. So she would read the letters out loud, sometimes three, four, five pages of detail about an illness and a struggle for a family and coming out on the other end with uh a cousin or an aunt or an uncle who had died. And I just became familiar with that. And it seemed to me that was what everybody did. So it wasn't unusual, it wasn't burdensome, it was just what we did. Eventually Mama 's family started to getting into trouble a bit. And so I had a chance to attend funerals and visitations and a chance to go and be in hospital rooms with people who were known to be dying. And we had conversations around that or just sitting there for long periods of time. So by the time I was a teenager, I was well acquainted with death and dying, and it was part of everyday life as far as I was concerned, and some of it was pretty horrible And some of it was pretty consoling and comforting. I remember a cousin of dad's who worked on a farm. And I met him when he came to town and he had been the victim of a combine accident, farm equipment accident. and lost part of his arm and two or three years later there was a letter about that cousin who had been combined to death. It fell into the machine and was farm processed. I really got a sense of the realities of death and dying. Uh no one was pulling any punches. I got also in the large families I was in considerable experience in listening to stories. And I love the stories that were told in my families. some pretty colorful characters, especially on mom's side. Every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthday, there was a big family gathering of thirty to forty people. The women would be in the kitchen or dining room, uh, talking to one another and the fellows would be watching a game on TV or sitting and smoking uh on a front porch or something like that. And I got so I had a real taste for good storytelling. And I just I loved listening to stories. I tried to write stories. I wasn't a very good story writer. when I was a little guy, but I was working at it. And by the time I was a teenager, I was so good at listening, my friends seemed to pick up on Tom's a good listener. Uh and if they had something that was bothering them, they kind of turned to me. So I became like an amateur confidant or an amateur social worker or or whatever. And I was appreciated for that early on. Again, I didn't aspire to do anything with that professionally, but that's part of the background. Once I kissed math goodbye and landed on philosophy when I was an undergraduate, I focused on phenomenology and existentialism. Those are two terms that for most of your listeners are going to be strange, so let me explain as clearly as I can. One, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. by definition. A phenomenologist is a philosopher who was trained in techniques for describing and interpreting experiences. like experiences of knowing, judging, truth telling, seeking wisdom, or just experiencing with sensations in in love relationships, in different kinds of relationships with other people. Existentialism is about tangling with being limited and finite as we are, and uh the challenges of seeking means of living with meaning and integrity, a finite life, one that ends in death. So That makes that kind of core to the kind of philosopher that I became.

Catherine:
Looking back at the philosophy, I wonder if the elements of the stories that you enjoyed growing up As you look back, can you see a sort of budding philosopher in the little lad who was listening to all of those tales

Tom:
Well, I became familiar with uh a a range of behaviors and expressions. I felt sympathy, empathy, was always trying to understand Different things happened uh during those years. I mean I had some classmates who killed themselves. And uh attended some funerals where that was what people were engaged with and remembering. And I remember a number of my friends talking to me about uh varieties of loss of state experienced, uh accidents and and old age and and illnesses of one sort or another. And I found myself getting comfortable there and understanding for the most part what was going on and growing into that understanding and I felt comfortable helping people. I didn't think I was going to be anywhere near doing that professionally But when I started teaching philosophy, I was teaching the phenomenology and the existentialism, the university where I was teaching, which was Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio They established a new college of health and human services, and they had courses in nursing. social work, gerontology, child and family services, and some of my colleagues were developing applied philosophy courses like of philosophy of medicine, medical ethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, philosophy of law. and the like. And I thought, you know, in these new programs that they're establishing, there's probably room for someone to teach something about death and dying. And my ethics classes, a lot of students were choosing to talk about death-related topics. And I thought, yeah, I I'm gonna propose a death and die course And I didn't have an exact idea of what I what I was going to do, but I had a feeling it would be useful. And I was finding I was kind of a natural as a teacher. People just kind of it was easy. And then I thought, what do they really need to understand? And ethics was part of it, but only a small part of it. So yeah, we'll do a some ethical issues along the way, but What these students are telling me and what I see in them is they're gonna be afraid to go into a room where someone's dying. they're gonna be hard pressed to think of anything to say to someone who's grieving. And if you're a nurse, if you're a social worker People are going to expect you to be not only comfortable with what's happening, but able to say things and do things that make positive differences in these people's lives So I thought I was leaving philosophy behind. The story is I actually came back to phenomenology and existentialism. But for a while I thought, well, I better study psychology and a number of social service s sorts of materials and I became like a a one man interdisciplinary band. Uh and I thought they have to think about their own experiences. Uh and you can do that indirectly when you're reading somebody else's books. But I want them to reflect on their own experiences. So I had them keeping journals through the whole terms and I'll make up some exercises for them to reflect on that'll point them inwardly toward what their experiences have been and what they might be and how they anticipate them and how they want to be in them and so on. And one of the exercises was write the short essays about your three most important loss experiences And after four or five years of having people do this in classes that were growing larger and larger, I had m many hundreds of cases to look at and None of them, not a single one, wrote about five stages of grief.

Catherine:
So for anybody who's sort of studied this, the five stages of grief will be I'm extremely familiar, but I'm aware that for some people they won't be. Do you want to sort of tell us a bit about where that came from?

Tom:
There's a woman named Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who was a psychoanalyst and uh she worked with dying people uh in their families, uh in hospitals, uh, and spend a lot of time with them as people were on their way. to die and being the psychoanalyst that she was, interested in how egos function, she focused on and observed in people who sh she was working with that They went through five stages of responding to what they were wondering might be a dying experience. that they're having. And she described the stages of being depressed, being angry, trying to sort of negotiate your way around what's what's happening. She called it bargaining. And then depression and finally acceptance. And it works when you're thinking about people dying. You don't know if what the doctor is saying is really right or not. So there's this possibility that they've got it wrong and if you go into denial You can say, yeah, the doctor really got it wrong, and I'm not gonna deal with this directly. Then you realize, yeah, looks like maybe he's got it, and I'm really ticked. And one of the things you do if you're a good ego is with your anger you try to control things So if this is happening, I'm gonna take it by the throat and do it my way and keep it off of my back as long as possible. My will will protect me, etc. And then that doesn't work. And you can't really negotiate the non-negotiable, but you can try. So people try that. And those are three ego defenses, fight and flight You know, with it with your anger and with your denial, you're trying to just keep this out of your life. Fight. Bargaining, I can get away from this somehow. It doesn't work. Now In a case where someone has actually died, you can't do those five stages. It makes no sense to deny what's in the box, in the church, as you're attending the funeral. Uh, you have to have especially uh strong ego to think you can make it all go away in circumstances like that. But people don't usually do any of that kind of stuff. Now in about the year 2000 or so, Kugler Ross had been working with a man named David Kessler, K-E-S-S-L-E-R. And together they came up with a conclusion that the five stages also apply to grieving. And I resist that in the strongest possible terms. I th I think that's absurd. It's not a matter of your ego trying to come to terms with the thing. And there's no ambiguity and uncertainty about what's happened. There's a death that really took place. And if you're going to come to terms with it, it's not going to be with your ego. Your soul and spirit are affected by uh what has happened. Absurdly The two of them, Kessler and Kugler-Ross, uh concluded that uh when you get to acceptance, that is, the death is real All right. That's the end of the coping process. And one would think that that would be the beginning. And before you get there, you're not really t coming to terms with what's happened. And if you finally get to a point where you say, There's a death that's taken place, that can't be the end if you're coming to terms with it. That's where you start And whatever you do with something other than those five stages you say have been leading up to this. But that's the background on that stuff. Anyway, my students didn't talk about stages. What do they talk about? Several talked in in this area. How am I going to speak to my relative? Let's uh let's say my grandmother Uh how am I going to speak to my relative about what's happened and my my pain and sorrow when the person who died is my father and that's my grandmother's son I don't know how to talk to her in these circumstances. Or Mum left all of this stuff and Dad doesn't know what to do with it and it's it's in the closets in a room and so on. He doesn't even want to go in there. How are we going to deal with this part of the world that's now in upheaval? I'm not sure I want to go to church anymore because they preach certain things that don't seem to be speaking to the experiences I'm having. In fact, they seem to want to insist that I experience things in certain ways that I don't want to go near. How are we gonna make it now that the breadwinner is gone? Uh where's the money gonna come from so we can continue? Are we gonna have to move? Things like that is what they were writing about and It's as different as their particular lives in particular life circumstances. And uh I started feeding back to my students, you're as different as th the very particular lives that you are living in it's all in an upheaval, but it's it's different if you're uh in this role as opposed to that role if you have this position in the family or that, if you have these means for living or these background experiences together or separately That's what you're writing about. And you're writing in general about upheaval in a world that's been changed bigger than you ever thought it was gonna be cheese. I'm gonna it's like the whole of your world is in upheaval And you've got to figure out how to put it back together in a way that will support you again and be respectful of the person who's died. You don't wanna forget. How are you gonna go about remembering, etc. I finally started using phrases like, relearning the world. And the student said, that's it. That's what's happened. And that's what I've I've got to deal with and when we talk in this collective h here in the class, people are living in different places uh in different contexts in in their worlds and my world's not hers and hers isn't his Uh and so on. And if you're gonna help us, another thing that we need is appreciation that the world has changed in a radical way and that we're profoundly different people. I hear this person over here talking about what he or she is able to do, and that's not quite me, and I'm thinking about I do this and And it works pretty well, but I need to adapt over here. And we if we're gonna work together, we have to learn about each other's particular circumstances, or a group isn't gonna work And then they start th thinking of all kinds of things when they recognize how big it the challenges are and how differently equipped each of them is, uh, to deal with those challenges. And I started writing about grieving as relearning the world and it turns out I was doing gr groundbreaking work. I wasn't the only person thinking about those things. But I was one of the very few who was focused on the complexity of it all. It's not just that oh, one of the things you have to do is relearn how to live in the world. And another thing is and so it's it 's not that way. So that's where I was and w once I started doing it, I I started writing an essay here and there. in going to professional conferences. It turned out there were people who were uh also teaching and counseling in this area. I met the very best of them and had had the privilege of working with the very best of them They started listening to me eventually. So it was an interesting conversation.

Catherine:
Well, you'd been doing a huge phenomenological study, hadn't you, with your students? And actually Before that, yeah as a growing up, you'd you'd been immersed in the phenomenology of grief.

Tom:
Absolutely. And rarely surprised. people who are living in very bizarre circumstances. Oh, and then what happens when your closest relative or best friend in that context dies? That must be quite quite complicated and difficult. Actually it turns out there's there there's been a fair amount of talk about complicated grief uh along the way. And I've got a very simple take on that. All of our experiences are complicated. And what what people seem to be wanting to say when they want to call something complicated is like there's something wrong with it. uh like a medical complication and that's very rare. Um but virtually every human experience has multiple a aspects and dimensions and so on. So it's not a sort of up and down black and white yes or no. kind of uh an understanding that's required. But uh I think in cases where there's serious trauma Uh and so on, you get reactions uh and responses that are strong enough to require attention that's and professional caregiving. But But grief usually it's complicated. Lots of religions, lots of people involved and lots of things to think about.

Catherine:
As I was listening to you, I was wondering whether as you've been observing people sharing their experiences of relearning the world, whether there are patterns and threads that you can see that are f fairly common in terms of how people do that

Tom:
I I think there's a tendency to oversimplify almost any human experience you want to respond to in a meaningful way. And uh I think there's In some cultures perhaps more than others, uh, there's a strong tendency to want to just simplify. And if we can get it down to three or four X 's. and and you pay attention to it to those three or four, you're gonna do just fine. I think that caregivers like to have formulas in mind when they go into people's rooms to be attentive uh and so on. And I think the more successful caregivers are the ones who were able to listen in and pack into their understanding as much complexity as they can bear If you find a few things that turn out to be very helpful and they'd open your ears to hearing th things fine. But Grieving is just these three things. And once you master them, no problem, you'll be just fine in anybody's room, and nobody's going to cry on you because you did it right. Uh I think those are the hopes that people have when they're say early in their training as nurses and social workers and doctors. If I get these three things right, almost every time things work out just fine uh and I don't get very much stressed uh and the like. But that's a terrible aspiration if you really want to get to know a person who's always complicated. uh multidimensional, uh and so on, you want to be open to all of it. I think uh around grief There is a very strong tendency, and I was fighting this very strongly in the early eighties when I was starting to publish things, to think of grieving as The bad stuff that happens to you after someone dies, the feelings that come over you, the feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, choicelessness. sorrow, almost paralysis, um, enervation. I don't know what to do, I don't know where to go. I feel as if the world is caving in on me and that's grief. And what you want to do with grief is get past that. And once you're past it, you've dealt with your grief. And a good part of what's been happening in the last forty or forty-five years of thinking about grief and loss is it's not just the bereavement. It's not just the taking away or depriving of you of the companionship of this person that you've loved and spent your life with. It's the steps you take in response to what's happened, where you choose to go. in difficult life circumstances and what you take with you and what you have to let go of. So it's a combination of reaction and response. And in response We're not in a situation where we're choiceless. We have lots of choices. Part of the overwhelm is there are too many choices. There 's so many different ways we could go and how do we pick 'em and who's going with us and why aren't we on the same page and how do we deal with not being on the same page with the people we love who are so we're surviving with When there's all this other pain we have to deal with, uh part of the overwhelm is the scale of what you have to contend with is larger than you ever imagined. And uh it feels as if you got you gotta catch your breath. Yeah. Give me give me uh moments, give me days, give me weeks, give me months. This is too big. I can't do it all at once Uh but we have choices. And I think uh people who see us all dark and shadowy and grim and weighty and heavy are underappreciating how they are prepared actually to deal with what they're challenged to do if you have learned how to live a life as all of us have, we should be able to relearn how to do it. The skills we acquired in learning how to live a very complex life are the ones we need to do what grieving requires. But we just gotta get ourselves back into I've got the energy now, I've got the time, I've got the support. What enabled me to become an adult is largely what I need to help me relearn how to live in the world. If you think about a few important things, some almost mythical ideas that people have about grieving can be made, I think, to go away and that's part of what I've been working on. I will have an audience. I will ask them, all right, we're talking about relearning how to live in the world. Raise your hand , uh anybody in the room, if you feel as if you have finished learning how to live, no one somehow ever raises their hand Okay, all right, then if grieving is relearning how to live in a world, uh what are you betting on whether it's something that you finish? with if you if you never finish with learning how to live and if you never finish with relearning how to live and grieving is relearning how to live Then let's change our framework a little bit, coming to terms with your mother's dying, your best friend's dying, and so on, likely to be a lifelong enterprise That doesn't mean it's going to be lifelong cloudiness and pain any more than learning how to live was always cloudiness and pain. Uh chances are it's going to be a mix of of the heartening and the heartbreaking. And uh that's the way living has always been. So you're ready for this. All right, let's talk about love and love in separation. My view is that the biggest move to be made in grieving is moving from loving in physical presence or the possibility of physical presence and separation. People say, well Niger kind of reaction is you can't do that. You can't love people when they're not here. And and say, here's a couple of questions. hear the two of us talking today. Did either of us crowd everyone we know and love who's alive right now into the room with us when we came to have this podcast? If I could come to where you're broadcasting and asking me questions and so on, in that room would I find everyone that you currently care about and love in your life? and you could have me shake their hands um when we're all done with the with the podcast. No, that's an absurd idea, right? Well, two other questions. When you left them, you pretty sure that they uh stopped loving you? I don't think so. Did you stop loving them when you left and came to do the podcast? No. Well then we've just had a short conversation where we all agree that loving people is possible and separation from them. And in fact we're separated from them most of the time in our lives it's it's a privilege to be with them when we have the chances to be with them. So if we don't stop learning how to live through the rest of our lives and if we don't stop loving the people that have died. And we don't stop missing them after they've died. What is it that we want as closure on grief? I mean how plausible isn't grieving as something that ends? That's not one of the targets. That's not one of the aspirations. What you're aiming for is The goodness in relationship with them that's still possible, given that you won't be physically present with them. And almost every gift we've ever been given that we really cherish in relationships with those we love, our children, our friends, our partners, our parents, our mentors uh go on and on and on. Most of those gifts uh are ours, uh, even when they're not physically present with us. So you can then have people respond to a simple question like, All right, here we are now. We've kind of agreed that we didn't bring everybody we love with us, uh, and so on. How do we love them when we're separated from them? Well, and you get simple answers and then more complex answers, but among them, uh, we talk about them. We remember them. We laugh and cry with and about them. We are are moved by them, we're inspired by them, we're taught by them, and we've learned things about how to live and how to be good parents and companions and good children and we have legacies. And I I wrote a whole book. It was called Uh The Heart of Grief, Death and the Search for Lasting Love. We have physical legacies from our loved ones. We have practical legacies. They've taught us how to do things. They've modeled for us. They've inspired us to do various things. We have what I would call soulful legacies. They've taught us how to make ourselves at home. They they've taught us how to be deeply caring, how to be loving, how to be sheltering, how to be All those good things that the depth of personal relationships uh allow us to express and give to one another. We have spiritual legacies, inspirations, we have Encouragement, we have hopes, we have dreams, we have tendencies or and abilities to be adventurous and to try the new. and to grow and change constructively. That's what our souls do. And a lot of that we learn from others. And loving them while they're not here is among other things, drawing upon those aspects of soul and spirit they that they've touched and shaped. And I like to think of human beings ourselves not as atoms that float in social space around one another and so on, but never really connect. I think of us as from the very beginning the Incipient webs of connection in the world, welcomed into a huge web of webs that connects everything to everything. And lifelines begin pouring into us from the very beginning. We get fed simply, we get watered, we get hosed on, we get warmed. We we get comforted, we get nourished, and then gradually we start interacting and the lines are going both ways, but at first it's all coming into us and as we mature we get to be sort of balanced. Uh quite a bit coming in from lifelines of all kinds and quite a bit going out in lots of directions. And when somebody dies, h here we are sort of up in the Up in the corner of the room, this web connected to this large thing, and some of the the lines that connect us to the earth and to the world around us. have been severed, but many are still in place. Some others that connect us to other things, like if mom dies and we're still dealing with dad Dad's broken more than we are, and we're supporting one another in weakened states, and there are large things that are supporting us that continue to support us. and things closer in, some are broken more than others, and what we do in grieving is reweave the web, and it's never going to be what it would be or would have been without this loss that's that's taken place. The real challenge that I've been thinking of eventually in the the back end of the book that we're talking about today on seeking wisdom in the shadows. is that we are finite beings and we we want to be careful to accept the remarkable fact that we have a finite life to live at all as a fo as opposed to feeling bitter because it all ends. What a remarkable thing that we even get for a moment to be self-reflective uh or to recognize another human being and look eyeball to eyeball and say, I'm with you. And I think we have to be ready to say positive responses to is it okay to be small and insignificant? I mean, think of the universe that we're part of. Is it okay to be just this little notch over here? Is it okay to be impermanent? To be mortal, is it okay that we suffer? And is it okay that we don't understand everything And I think counselors' offices or or living rooms wherever they're doing their counseling are filled with people who are trying to say, no, it's not okay. to one of those four things. If you wanted to put a fifth one in there, is it okay to be imperfect? And I think if you talk to counselors they will tell you that most of what they talk about with people who are feeling troubled about how they're living and how they're living their lives, they're not finding it acceptable in one of those dimensions.

Catherine:
So what was the catalyst for this book, Seeking Wisdom in Death Shadows?

Tom:
Well, um w one of the things I I noticed was I had several writings. There are fourteen of 'em in the book. uh that were pretty good that are kind of lost because they went off in anthologies and you know in professional journals and and the like where ordinary folk probably would never find 'em. And a good part of the best I've ever written is in those fourteen. And I noticed along the way, starting from the very beginning, that you wind up deepening your thinking or broadening your thinking, and that process doesn't get captured So I've written nine other things in here. So what you have is early less mature materials, and then you can see the development like uh intellectual biography or autobiography by me. And part of what I do in this book is reflect on, well, how did that philosophical seeking wisdom. How'd that turn out? I've been concentrating on death and dying for decades. Where did I start? Where do I think that I actually made some progress? Did I really succeed in harvesting some wisdom? And the last part of the book is like three essays. One is on twelve uh dozen good things about grief. Another is grieving from the point of view of traditional philosophical thinking. And where are we with metaphysics? Where are we with uh theory of knowledge? Where are we with uh religion? Where are we with ontology, where are we with ethics and politics and so on. And then the last chapter is about the wisdom you can kind of c hold close to your heart. And I found quite a few things that I'm sure that I wouldn't have come upon or focused on or grown into. One of them was that little thing that I was sketching a while ago about finiteness and fragile humanity handle with care. We are fragile, we are finite. Living a human life is a wonderful thing, all within limitations. And I I kind of spell it out, and that's part of what I leave folks with in the in the last chapter in the book. And I'm I'm glad they put it all together. I'm I'm glad I I walked the roads and engaged with fellow human sufferers and people who care for us. I think I've lived a better life because I've paid attention to stuff that people tend to ignore Uh and I commend the idea to my readers.

Catherine:
Hmm. So who are you aiming your book at? What is the question that people might be asking or the itch that might need scratching that your book would be for?

Tom:
Well, you've if you wonder about what's this life worth Anyway, what's what's the good in living a life given that uh the bottom line is it ends in death? A lot of people fix on that. And I spent some serious time wondering about it. And I think I and engaged with Lots of other people who share their wondering. And I've collected some pretty good teases for your own reflections. I asked people from around the world, to read this manuscript and offer some comments. And when when people in the field turn to you and say, you've been my teacher Uh, given that I wanted to be a teacher, when people say that to me, I think, well, I must have done something right. And when uh a very prominent figure, editor of two different journals and author in his own right. And so I said this book is a masterpiece. There's one woman from Oregon who's run a the the Center for Bereaved Children just talks about reading the book as It's like sitting down with a dear friend and just wondering together about what's worth wondering about. And it's it's comforting and it's sometimes challenging and it's sometimes amusing. And read it yourself and see what you think.

Catherine:
Thank you. Thank you. So you did say when we were preparing for this that actually people can get a discount on your book depending where they get it from. So you it's Oxford University Press, yes

Tom:
Oxford University Press. And if you have in mind the name of the book, "Seeking Wisdom in Death's Shadows", you can go to their website and begin ordering the book and you'll be taken to the shopping cart page. And when you get there, there's a code that you can enter. and instead of paying thirty five dollars, we'd pay twenty five dollars. It's a thirty percent discount. So the code is five letters and two numbers. A, U, F, L Y three zero. I'll repeat it. AUFLY30 and you'll get uh you'll get a discount and Oxford wants you to have the book, and so do I.

Catherine:
Yes, yeah, thank you. That has been that's been really profound and really interesting

Tom:
Thank you.

Catherine:
There's a lot that you said that I think many people will really, really identify with. I think particularly that sense that actually everybody's grief is different because everybody is relearning a different world. I think that that really struck me. So yeah, so thank you very much. Just checking for a moment that there's nothing that you feel we've left unsaid at this point.

Tom:
I think we got to a a good core of what's going on. I mean, a a book of three hundred and fifty pages touches on a lot of I mean we we said nothing about a very nice essay in there about the ethics of uh assisted suicide, but it's in the book. I mean there's just a lot of stuff we couldn't touch on at all, but I think we got to the heart of it.

Catherine:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom.

Tom:
You're welcome.

Catherine:
That's been really, really interesting. So, so if you want try the book, it's seeking wisdom in death shadows by Tom Addig

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted at gmail. com You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted. com and that's also the place to go if you're interested in the Loved Called Gifted course. or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching. Thank you for listening.