Life Has Been Lifing Lately
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I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors.

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It has been weeks since I've said this, but hello, ladies. Hello, ladies. It is so good to hear your voice. It's so nice to hear. I have missed this, missed this, missed this so dearly. I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Saeed Jones. And I'm Zach Stafford, and you are listening to Vibe Chat. Vibe Chat.

This is somewhat of a reunion episode. It is. I was out of pocket for a few weeks, and I missed y'all. But in the meantime, y'all had some really good time up the highways and byways, all up through the East Coast in Boston. We were all up and through the Northeast Corridor. Oh, my God. I love it. At least when Auntie isn't around to keep us in check. It's just me and Sy. Y'all were the Amtrak aunties. I was going to say, I was like, Zach, do you remember us hungover, facing down pigeons? Yeah.

in Boston. And let me tell y'all, what I did not know is that to be hung over on a train is a level of hell. You're moving. You see all these trees. What it is, yes, because, and we were sitting in different parts of the train, so we were like texting, trying to commiserate. I thought I was like going to get on, get in my seat, business class, and be like a snuggle. I forgot, it's not just vertical movement. It's also horizontal. I was like, are we going to be jiggling?

The whole. And we also were going down on a Friday, which meant my train car was filled with people going on bachelor and bachelorette trips down the coast. People were drinking and partying. My part of the train was very calm, very family oriented. I was grateful for that. It was awful. But you know what it showed us is that time without you hurts on every level. It's true.

I miss Joe so much. It's different. It's different. Listen, it feels good to be missed. This week, because it's been a while since we've connected and a big life event has happened for me during that time, we're going to have a chat today about grief. As my sisters told you listeners in a previous episode, my mother passed away last month on June 21st.

She was an amazing lady and I want to talk about her with my sisters and with y'all and also use this moment to talk about grief because a thing that I've been realizing since she passed is

is that we don't talk about grief enough and we should all talk about it more. So we're going to go there and it's going to be a good chat. But first, I got to know how my sisters are feeling. What's your vibe? Zach, go first. My vibe is good. I'm excited you're back. I'm excited that we are like, the crew is together and it feels back to its old ways, even though me and Sight have had a lot of fun.

together, but we've been having a good time since like 2013 together. So we need less good times. It's just a lot between minutes just us. But besides that, I'm really good. And I now can talk about something that's really exciting for I think us and the show because, you

you know, we're doing the summer series where we're talking to friends. And my episode was recorded yesterday, which meant I got to spend the day with the one and only Jenna Wertham from the New York times, which that's our guests next Monday. I saw the photos. Y'all look so good. Hmm.

Smiling, glowing in the studio. It is so glowy. And I actually have a surprise for both of you because do you all know what we're talking about? Nora does. I was about to say, can you give us a tease? Can you give us a taste of what you're talking about? So I joked when we first were talking about guests, I was like, I want Jenna because I want to talk about water.

but I took it to a whole new level for our listeners. It's not just about water, but it's about nude beaches because Jenna wrote about nude beaches in the spring. And on Sunday, what I did in preparation for this very special episode is I drove to San Diego and went to a nude beach for some field work. Were you nude? Yes, I was nude. You let the girls out. You let the girls out.

I let the girls out for the girls of Vibe Check. So our whole episode is about my first time at a nude beach. Jenna talking about her first time at a nude beach and why nude beaches as a third space, as an ode to Sam Sanders, are a place that is in decline. But they are a place in which all of us should consider going to really understand what's going on in our own bodies and where we're feeling restrained and where we need a little bit of love.

So that's our conversation is about how nudity can be the way to love. So I'm so excited to share that with you all. And she sends her love. She's a Vibe Check fan and she was just, you know, a good sister of the show. So that comes out on Monday. I can't wait to hear it. I cannot wait to hear it. Oh my goodness. Yes, yes, yes. Saeed, how are you?

You know, it's been, for Vibe Check listeners, people who are all caught up in the podcast feed, it's been quite a month for me too. Very different from Sam and what you've been going through, right? But I think I said to you at one point when you were texting us updates about what was going on in Texas, I was like, life is...

really has been lifing lately, you know, and I just, and even, you know, it's kind of like everyone I know, I just feel like transformation is being asked of us. And that manifests in so many different ways. It can be death. It can be, in my case, relationship turmoil. So I would say I'm good. I'm calm. I've been catching my breath.

And, yeah, I'm now in the place where, and I think I've referred to this poetry collection before, but there's this wonderful black poet, Camille Dungy, that has a poem and a poetry collection titled What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. And I feel like that's what I'm doing. You know, that sense of personal accounting. Mm-hmm.

How can I, how am I nourishing myself, myself? And also what are the poisons I need to identify? How do I treat them? How do I leave them behind? You know what I mean? And so, yeah, that's where I am. I've really been like the live shows and all the travel. It was great. But then I felt like I got back to Columbus and that silence was waiting for me.

That silence was waiting for me and it's intimidating.

You know what I mean? You can go to dinner with friends and drinks with friends and you talk and you talk and you feel like you're a character and waiting to exhale and you've got this. And then you sit down alone in your home and it's like the silence is waiting for you. So I feel like I've been sitting with the silence. I've made peace with it. And now I'm trying to make sense of that accounting, which is good. I'm grateful for that. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Obviously, we're going to talk more generally about like

how you are, Sam. But I guess, like, what's your vibe today? Yeah. So, my mother passed away on June 21st. The funeral was the next week. I was in Texas for about a week and a half. And I had this kind of, like, choice when the family had gone and it was just, like, me and my brother and I was still in Texas. I could...

take more time off if I wanted to or needed to. Both of my shows were quite flexible. But I kind of felt like I wanted to get back to a routine, and I wanted to save some days, be alone and quiet for when I really felt like I needed that again. So I kind of threw myself back into work, and that's felt good. I'm feeling the need to kind of step back for a bit at some point soon in the next few weeks, but right now it feels good to be busy.

But in terms of my vibe right now today, part of getting back to work has been watching more TV and movies for work to talk about them on this show and my other show, Intuit. And a thing I had to watch a bit of for Intuit, but I ended up watching the whole thing for Intuit, was The Idol on HBO. Wow.

And let me tell you, isn't life hard enough? Didn't I just say we were all out here being existentially punched in the face? Listen. Yeah, you've been having a hard week and you watch the aisle. I just don't know what type of masochism you've prescribed. My vibe is if I see The Weeknd on the street, it's on site. It's about to be a day. What did you do? It's about to be a weekday. It's truly one of the worst shows I've ever seen in my life. It was so bad I had to take it in 20 minute increments and then take a break and walk around the house. It

It was so bad. Zach, you watched some of that. I watched some of it, but I began having a visceral reaction on Sunday nights when I opened the HBO app. And instead of, you know, Succession or whatever coming up, it was that. I was like, ew, get me to Peacock. Like, I just couldn't even be in the space of it. It just was so...

And I didn't even like The Weeknd that much before, but I also didn't have an opinion about him. I didn't really care. Now I have an opinion and it's not good. So that's how I feel about it. I like a fair number of his songs. I think in general, he's like always depressed, which is like, all right, if that's your public persona, go ahead. But watching this show is making me actually reconsider how much I like his music. Right.

it was that bad. I will say, in spite of the horrible nature of this show, sometimes things that are that bad are a wonderful distraction because when you're watching them, you can think of nothing else.

- Nothing else. - Yes. All right, so before we get into this episode, we want to thank all of you who have sent us fan mail, who have reached out on social media, who send us messages on threads now. We're on threads. We all like threads. - We're on threads. - So please reach out to us. - Do we like threads? - I like threads. - I like threads. - I gotta post the same thing on four apps every day now. - It is a lot. Honestly, I only use Twitter basically to promote the podcast. - It's a lot. Well, with all that, let's actually get into the show. So welcome to "Vibe Check."

You know, when we decided to do this segment, we left it pretty wide open because all I could really articulate was I really want to talk about my mother and about grief, and I want nothing more than to talk about it with you two. Saeed, I know that your work deals a lot with grief. And for the last few weeks, I've just been like, I can't wait until we really go deep on this. And Zach, of all my friends, is truly the most connected to the spirit world and

in all of its senses. And I was just ready to get that take from you as well. Maybe the best way to start this is just to tell y'all a little bit about my mother. That's exactly what I was going to ask. Because we unfortunately didn't get the privilege to meet her in this lifetime. Yeah, can you introduce us to your mother? Yeah. My mother, Regina Sanders, was born on Valentine's Day in 1956 in Birmingham, Alabama. And

In adulthood, she was a Pentecostal church organist and a middle school principal. And she and my dad owned and ran not just a daycare, but also a funeral home.

Which meant that my mother, on top of having a master's degree in education, also had a two-year degree in mortuary sciences, which meant that she could embalm bodies. A daycare and a mortuary service. That sounds very black. Cradle to grave. Very like small town Texas. It's very small town. Oh my God, not cradle to grave. I'm glad you said it twice. My brain said, what bitch? Yeah.

But she was just this Pentecostal church lady that could. She did everything. And she was like this propellant force in any room she was in. I want to read y'all the favorite graph I wrote about her in her obituary, which I was...

Privileged to write. And I love writing obits because when you write an obit, you can use cliches in your writing and no one can say anything about it. Nope. Godspeed to those editors. It's like, I wish you would tell me. I wish you would. Yeah. Yeah. So with that, a graph on my mother. Regina was a force of nature. Her smile could light up an entire room. Her laughter could break any tension. She was generous with her jokes, her snark, and all of her gifts.

There wasn't a piano or organ she wouldn't play, a song she wouldn't join you in singing, or a punchline she wouldn't help you land. She was always willing to go out of her way to help a neighbor, friend, or colleague, usually quietly with no need for praise. Her hair was always laid, her car was always clean, her heels were always high, and she never shied away from a brightly colored dress suit.

Simply put, there was nobody like Regina Sanders. Wow, that's beautiful. Beautiful. That's so beautiful. She was great. I think one of the things that defined the later years of her life was a disability. She had a massive stroke in 2002, which meant that for the last 20 years of her life, her left side was paralyzed and she was mostly bedridden. And there were some brain deficits as well because a stroke that's really big, it kind of...

cuts off a part of your brain. So she lost parts of her brain that might help you regulate emotions and other things. But all through it, she was just like, she had this gravitational pull. Any room she was in, she was a star. And any room she was in, she made happier and lighter and more joyful. And you kind of always wanted to be on her side because it seemed like her side was more fun. Even to the very end. I love that. And you know, I think I could speak for all of us. And for all of us, I mean, even like a lot of gay cis men and that

We as gay men have a really special relationship many times with our mothers. There's like a really, really strong bond there. And a question I love to ask fellow gay men is when was the moment in which your mother became a person for you? Is there like a special story when she became a real human? Because I know with me and my mom, you know, she was this larger than life person. But I remember my teenage years when she was giving me advice or showing up for me, I was like, oh, you're like a person that's going through things that we're going to be in this together. Do you have a moment like that? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

My parents were married until my father died. And their relationship had its ups and downs, but they really never exposed that to us. But the year that my mother got sick with her stroke, my father also passed away a few months after that. It was a rough year all around. But...

After my dad died, my mother from her hospital bed started telling me in detail about the troubles they had in their relationship and about the times they almost left each other and then got back and about how it's hard and mistakes are made, et cetera. And just hearing her talk about my father and their love and how it existed before I existed, it reminds you that like your parents were fully formed human beings before you got here because that's how you got here. Right.

And it made me respect the entirety and totality of her life. In the same way, at the funeral, a bunch of her old church friends who she sang in choirs with in her youth in Alabama, they came down. And they were just telling me stories about my mother. And she was crazy. She was effing crazy. She was out in these streets even as a church girl.

So they would be driving all the time through Alabama going to church convention and choir concert. Beyonce wrote that song for a reason. Literally. Literally. You don't have to choose. I feel like that's the point. You don't have to choose. Yeah. And so they were just holy rollers but still young, wanted to be young kids and have fun. So their way to do pranks, they'd be on the highway driving down the road. They'd roll down their window. They'd get someone to notice them. And then my mother would yell out at the top of her lungs, ain't that good? She was screaming at them.

And then these cars would either like break or speed off, but she weirded them out. And I'm like, oh my God, you're such a little church nerd. I love it. But that, so like that was also a moment where I realized, oh, she was a prankster and a jokester and not just my mother. Yeah. If that makes sense. I love that.

Now I want to ask, because you mentioned your father passing away. Yeah. I had just finished high school. Okay. And my mother had her stroke September of that summer after high school. And then my dad died that December. Okay. Wow.

Wow. That is a difficult year. It was a year, girl. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess with that in mind, how would you describe your relationship with grief before your mother passed away? Right? Like you've already lost a parent. God.

Gosh, it's such a vulnerable time. It's never a good time to lose a parent. But I would certainly argue that when you are just out of high school, it's definitely not a great time. And then your mother is still with you post-stroke. But as you explained, it's such a huge change. So, yeah, can you talk about that? Because I think our relationship with grief changes.

you know, when our parents are still with us and whatever iteration becomes really important as they transition. I think what I learned with my father is that grief is an ongoing relationship.

Something happens to him once he died in my mind. He died, it was horrible, I grieved it dearly. But then over time, my memory of him became its own character who took on a life of its own.

And eventually my memory of my father, my mind began to morph that character into the person I needed to rely on for support. So there have been moments in the last 20 years where my father was a superhero or a listening ear or his memory was a friend who I could talk shit to. It's hard to explain, but grief of a parent is,

changes over time. - Like it changes color. - It changes color and who they are to you becomes different over time. And I used to be ashamed of that. I built my father up as something almost different than what he was in life in death, but it's like, that is okay. I actually tweeted about this on this past Father's Day

And I said that the record of him that I keep in my mind and heart has beautifully shapeshifted over time to comfort and console me. It becomes its own being with its own plot arc. And I think that's beautiful. And I think that like that allowed me to see grief as an ongoing relationship, which actually makes it better.

I think with my mother, I had to grieve her a bit when she had her stroke because a version of my mother was gone forever. Right. But that was almost like grief in a liminal space because she was there, but parts of her weren't. And as long as she lived after her stroke, we always knew that at some point the same kind of thing would take her out. Yeah. Wow.

What you were describing, it is taking me to Bono of all places. And Bono has this really beautiful quote. I think it's something to the effect of, there's no end to grief, which is proof that there's no end to love and that he ties love and grief together. And it feels like that's what you're offering us is just how complicated loving someone is and how it can transform through death. And how do you keep hold onto that love forever? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think what I learned with my father and what I'm really reminding myself of now is that if grief is a part of love, we cannot be ashamed of it. I think we're taught to get over shit like the death of a parent as soon as possible and move on and live our lives.

We're not allowed to really discuss it in public in the way that you might talk about a child being born or getting married or finishing college. We aren't allowed to fully experience grief because our society kind of shames it away from us. And so what I've been trying to do in this moment is when anyone asks me how I'm feeling these days, I say, you know what? I'm in kind of a weird place. My mom died.

And then I say it, and usually they have something to connect with me on the same topic. My mom died too. My dad, my brother, my sister. Everyone kind of wants to talk about it, but we're shamed into not talking about it. So I want this conversation to remind people that it's healthy and good to talk about things like death and grief.

And to remind ourselves that it's okay to do so, we should remind ourselves that grief is actually a part of love. It's a part of love. - And it's also this reminder that it's okay to not be okay. I think we live in a society, especially Americans,

I mean, we always say, hey, how are you to people? And no one ever wants to hear how someone's doing. My European friends are like, you Americans are so weird. You ask people how they're doing and then you don't want to hear how they're doing. What is wrong with you? Quit asking the question. And I think what you're trying to push us to through talking about this on an episode is a space of not being okay and not being okay with each other. And how do we actually have a real conversation with each other about how are we doing and how do you show up when someone's not doing okay or if they're doing just fine? And that's okay too. Yeah.

Something I was reading recently about, well, someone was talking about race and humor. I can't remember if it was a Twitter. I've spent so much time thinking about this. I've kind of originally lost the forest for the trees in terms of sources. I can't find it. But someone was saying like they felt that white people have a different relationship to humor. I think that's true. And the sense of propriety, what's appropriate.

And I say that because of like what you were saying, like the way we're like made to feel ashamed. Like grief, it's like there are limits. It feels like there are like terms and conditions in terms of like when it's appropriate and how appropriate it is to be. And, you know, one, you and I, all three of us think that's bullshit. But what someone expressed to me and they were like, yeah, look, black people have a certain relationship. Yeah.

to like to calamity to tragedy to danger entrapment and so this person was like some of the loudest laughter i've heard in my life has been at funerals has been at funerals so i guess i want to ask were there moments of and maybe not just the funeral maybe maybe even in the hospital you know bedside sharing stories can you give some examples of a funny moments amidst entangled with all of the grief all of the loss that you just experienced

Oh, yeah. So the church that my mother and my brother and I grew up in, they helped us handle the funeral. And our pastor officiated the funeral. And we've known her for decades. She is family. We call her Aunt Deborah. And so she delivers this eulogy that honors my mother who was dead that, you know, talks about God in the way the church folks do.

But she took a good half of that eulogy to just crack some jokes. So my mother... Were they good jokes? They were good jokes. My mother drove like a bat out of hell, just fast, for no good reason. And we would drive an hour to church every Sunday and Wednesday because the main church was out in Lockhart, Texas. Wow.

And throughout our entire childhood, we'd get to church and there'd be folks there who were like, we saw your mother speeding down the highway. And at the funeral, Aunt Deborah was like, one of my favorite, favorite moments to think back on with y'all's mother, with Sister Regina, was seeing you and your brother, Sam, in the backseat of her blue Mercedes.

With your head pinned to the seat because you couldn't move because she was going so fast. Like you were in a rocket ship. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like those kind of jokes the whole time. Or even her last day in the hospital.

They do hospice now. With some patients, the hospice comes to you. So it was all pretty easy and graceful. We're in the hospital. They start to turn off the machines. I held her hand while she died. But we're sitting there talking about what she was like over the years in various nursing homes and at home. She was that girl even in her hospital bed. We just joked about the pull she had over nursing staff. She was in some nursing homes, and she would convince all of the black nurses to

to come back to her room and braid her hair after hours. - Wow. - She convinced all the male nurses who she would flirt with to bring her secret Mountain Dews, which she was not supposed to have. - I like how mischievous and glamorous she was.

There was one nursing home where she decided she wanted a blacker experience. So she said, I will only be waited on by black nurses and the food will be black. Okay. She was just, she was just, but like we're cracking those jokes. I'm not trapped in here with y'all. Y'all are trapped in here with me and we don't make it black as hell together. Yeah. But there was laughter the entire weekend. There was laughter at the grave site. There was, yeah, it was laughter. That's so beautiful. Yeah. What I've wanted,

Especially in this conversation, talking with y'all, I know that you have dealt with grief yourself, Saeed, and written about it a lot. And I was drawing on some of your words during these last few weeks for inspiration and support, and I appreciate you for that. But I want to ask you...

Where you sit right now with your grief over your mother? We're in the same club now, but I entered it a bit later than you. That's a good question. Let me actually answer it. So why don't we take a break and come back? Okay.

This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands.

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors

at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden.

Here's an HIV pill dilemma for you. Picture the scene. There's a rooftop sunset with fairy lights and you're vibing with friends. You remember you've got to take your HIV pill. Important, yes, but the fun moment is gone. Did you know there's a long-acting treatment option available? So catch the sunset and keep the party going. Visit pillfreehiv.com today to learn more. Brought to you by Veve Healthcare.

All right, we're back. And now we want to talk about kind of where grief takes us. Yeah. In terms of takes us, you know, in the years that follow, the years that come. I'm just over 10 years away from my mother dying. She had a heart attack the night before Mother's Day in 2011. I write it all about it in my memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. And so Sam essentially asked, like, you know, what's my relationship to my mother now? You know, 10 years later, what's my relationship to grief now?

The reason I actually have to think about it is that I think one side, the author has a relationship to sites that is genuine, but it's different from site, the person. And I, I don't, I don't,

Talk about site the person's relationship to his mother very often because I don't think I owe it to people You know, it's like yeah writing the book writing the memoir in particular and that book has now been out for almost four years has allowed me to develop ideas and and almost like a philosophy of grief that I often refer to on the show, but my personal relationship is

But it's different from that. I would say, particularly now that I'm in my mid-30s, I feel that I have fought my way down.

to the experience of my mother as a person. I think what you were saying about your father early makes sense. I think like you lost your father when you were very young, right? And like for a young black man in America, you know, coming of age, there are so many essential dangers

dangerous, possibly lethal rites of passage where you're like, you understandably want to tap into knowledge to learn how to survive and maybe thrive. And so I think that makes so much sense. But also I think more generally, yeah, I think in the years following the loss of someone you really loved, you do begin to put them on a pedestal depending on your relationship, right? If it was a warm relationship with you, lost them. I think you do kind of put them on the pedestal because the pedestal helps you remember, right?

But now that I'm a decade into this, I would say – and now that I'm entering my late 30s, a time in which I have vivid memories of my mom as a single parent in her late 30s. Does that make sense? She's becoming a person again.

decisions about healthcare that my mother made are starting to make more sense or how she treated herself would make more sense. I remember at one point when I was a teenager, I was always really worried because this is very, you know, very nineties, early two thousands. I was excessively worried about the fact that my mother smoked, which did in the end really contribute negatively to her heart health.

And once I took all of her cigarettes out of the carton that I found in the car and I wrote a note. Wow. Asking her to stop smoking.

And she kind of laughed it off with me where she was like, my God. She was like, I can't even smoke a cigarette. You know, like I'm not safe. In my own car. In my own home. She's just like, you know, because I was the kind of kid. I mean, I was so extra. I was the kind of kid who would come home from flowers and she'd be like, oh, flowers for me. And I was like, no, these are for me. These are for my room. You know what I mean? So I was larger than life and she was always teasing me about that.

But now that I'm in my late 30s, I'm like, you know, my mom couldn't afford therapy. Healthcare was hard to come by and often traumatic when she was able to access it. And so smoking for her was a way of dealing with her stress. Yeah. And so now as an adult, my relationship with that grief is like trying to make space for her personhood, not as her child.

But as a person, how I would like to think if I see someone having an exhausted day smoking a cigarette, sometimes you need to say, maybe they need that cigarette. Maybe they need it. Yeah. Well, and I think with all of our mothers –

especially for gay boys, they're superheroes. They are superheroes. And sometimes only seeing them as that doesn't allow us to see the really real and flawed ways in which they're quite human. And it doesn't allow us to see the institutional impediments they encounter as women, as black women. I think what you're saying is that, oh, I'm able to look more holistically at my mother now and see that she was up against a lot of shit. Yeah.

And this shit was hard. And down to the micro, down to those micro moments. Yeah. And maybe all of the things that I saw as flaws in her, or maybe all the things that we see as flaws in our parents, what if they were just coping mechanisms and the best they knew how to do, you know? Yeah.

And I find that going through that thought process with the memory of our loved ones can help us make peace with them and help us make peace with the contradictions. I'm sitting here telling y'all the good stuff about my mother. It wasn't all good. No relationship with a parent is all good. But what I hope to do over time and what Saeed is showing us is that we can see them holistically and see their flaws and all and having that complete vision of them can help us make peace.

make peace with them yeah zach how are you feeling about this i know you have big thoughts on grief

Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to hear you both talk about your mothers because my mother is still very much with us. Thank the Lord. She and I talk all the time. And we love her. She sent the cutest plant. Your mother is a gem. She sent Sam a plant. She immediately called me and was like, what can we do? What am I doing? She's like, I got to take care of Sam. She's such a sweet person. And over the past few years, I've seen a tremendous amount of grief hit my family. I think probably

Just in the past year, I lost my grandmother. I lost uncles. I lost my grandfather. Like, I think I've been at a funeral every few months. And so I've just felt the onslaught of grief. And what's really broken open for me, and my sister and I were talking about that this past weekend, which Sam came to my house. My little brother was visiting. And it was the first time I saw him since my grandmother. Looking just like you. I was about to say, but also, your little brother is like not a little...

Like that is a man. He's yoked up. He's yoked up. And he looks just like that. We like are little twins. And something we were all talking about, because we hadn't seen each other since my grandmother passed. And she was like a mother figure to me. And kind of like, what do we do next as a family now that family's disappearing?

And how do we take this grief and begin to build our own family together? And I think that's something as, you know, Sam, you lost your father early on. Saeed, you lost your mother 10 years ago. I'd love to hear how y'all think about family now in the wake of grief and how do you hold on to the physical parts of family? Well, so this is a less rosy answer. In the last few years of my mother's life,

Because of my family, her family's fierce commitment to homophobia, to Republican politics, I was already at the point where, as I told her, I would only go back to Memphis to visit them if she was there. And so I remember being on the plane at this point. She's had a heart attack and she's in a coma. And I remember being on the flight to Memphis and there was an empty seat next to me.

And I remember turning, expecting her to be sitting next to me as if to say, how am I going to do this without you here? Like in the paradox, turning to her absence and saying, how am I going to do this without you here? Because my mother, and I write about this in the memoir, like the last time you see her alive in the book is like a brunch that she kind of

forced my grandmother and my aunt, none of us wanted to do it. We were not a brunching family, but she got us to sit at that table and we ended up just having a beautiful, lovely, haloed day. And so in my mother's passing, there's that time period briefly in grief where everything is kind of rosy. People are actually nicer. People are calling more frequently to check on you. And again, there's phases. You need to get through that phase and it really helps.

At some point, you kind of go back to something more akin to a new reality. And in that new reality, I'm like, I'm not going to forget. I came out to some family members during that time. I mean, I was already out, but I was like, just so you know. And they're like, we know.

But I feel like since then, my relationship to family is that I decided that I could no longer depend on my mother to define the terms of family for me. And that if these people decided that they loved their politics and their faith more than they loved me.

then I was going to go out there and find a family that could love me, even if I had to make it. And I think that is what I've done. Yeah. That is what I was going to say. It's like, I think the reminder for me about family is,

After my mother's passing is that we are always building our own. You are always building your own family and you should continue to do so. There were people who came out of the woodwork to my mother's funeral telling stories of how she rescued them, how she took care of them, how they did this, how they did that. All of her college roommates showed up. Wow. All of them. That's amazing. People that she went to church with decades ago showed up.

They were her family. And they were at my Airbnb for the little mini repast I put together because they were a family. And so the reminder for me and her death is like...

How am I building my family? And it doesn't have to be a spouse or kids, but how am I fortifying my relationships with the folks that I love? That's a reminder. I've just lost one person who was the love of my life. And I say it in a non-creepy way, but like my mother was love of my life. She's gone. The reminder here is how are you building your love with the rest of the folks who were close to you in your life? Do that. Literally do it.

Yeah. Thank you for saying that, Sam. And it's so, I just feel that so deeply. But it just hit my body so hard because you're right that when you do lose someone in the moments of grief, you do have to choose life and love no matter what. And that doesn't look like the past. It has to look like a future. It has to be a growth moment. It has to be a reach out moment. It has to be something of abundance because if you just stay trapped in like the loss, then it will take you out. Yeah. That's the thing. Grief wants to have us believe that

that it is just scarcity. Nothing is just scarcity. There is abundance, you know? I don't know. It's like there's so much that has opened up to my world through my mother's death. I'm talking to folks I haven't talked to in years. I'm thinking about...

all of the life that she lived. I'm playing music now more than ever. There is actually abundance in grief. And so while we must acknowledge the scarcity that grief represents, it's also a great time to look for the abundance that's there.

Even just being able to have this conversation, I'm grateful for it. Not just because it's good for me and cathartic for me to talk to my sisters about it, but I know that someone needs to hear it. And there is abundance in sharing our stories. We can help other people get through shit, man. Now you got me crying. But that's so important. I think there are gifts there.

that we can inherit from the people we're grieving. And I think those gifts are absolutely defined and created by how that person lived. To grieve someone who lived an abundant, rich life, if you allow yourself to inherit that,

It brings abundance into your life. And the abundance is also to say it makes the grief very overwhelming. Like I remember that the phenomenon of people coming out of the woodwork and learning all of these stories about this woman I loved that I didn't know about while she was here was like, again, there was like a paradox where I was like so delighted, but then I'm grief stricken again. What do you mean I didn't know she wrote an entire novel to teenage Michael Jackson when she was a teenager? What?

What do you mean? You have the notebook she wrote it in? You've kept this notebook? You know, it was just, ah. But when you're able to make space and begin, and it's nonlinear, and you are at the beginning of this journey, right? What happens is, it's almost like I think there are people who it's like you're anointed by grief.

And you're out in the world and you can be having the worst day or the best day or whatever, but it's like you're anointed by grief. And I've seen it happen. I've experienced it myself so many times. It's amazing how you find other people who are grieving. In fact, I can tell before someone even tells me if they're grieving a mother in particular. You know what I mean? Like a specific kind of grief. Right.

Well, and this is the thing, I mean, not to go full church kid, but as soon as you say the word anointing, if we think about it in the biblical sense, which I'm only using for the reason of prose, you know, this is for anyone upon any point in the faith spectrum. But the belief with any kind of anointing is that it's inherently meant to be shared. If you have received this special dispensation, this special gift,

You have to share it. And so how can I say this anointing of grief that I have? Yes, I get to hurt. Yes, I get to mourn. Yes, I get to have space to just be alone and cry. But when it's time for it,

How can I share the anointing of this grief in a way that helps others? And I truly think the way to do it is to fucking talk about it. Just fucking talk about it. I told y'all this off the microphone, but when I went to the bank to pull out the money we had saved for her funeral, the banker's like, so what do you need the money for? Are you buying it? Are you doing house repairs? This, this, that. And I was like, let me tell you, sister. My mama died.

And we talked about it and we bonded about it and tears were shed in the bank of America. And that conversation lifted her. It lifted her. And I feel like the lesson of this episode is like appreciating that as a gift that we can share. If we can take our grief and help it open up parts of other people's hearts and minds and souls and help them find some uplift and

That's a gift and a blessing, and that is abundance and not scarcity. Not scarcity. It's abundance. Yeah. I mean, there comes a point where you realize, and again, the 10-year anniversary of my mother's death was May of 2021 in the middle of this pandemic in which we lost millions and millions of people. And I was really humbled. Yeah.

by that because I knew what it was like for me. I knew how it fully changed and now I've gotten to the point that I can no longer separate grief from the good things, I guess, and I have to sit with that. It's quite a knot.

But I remember being like, well, I remember feeling that because I was able to grieve my mother in an organic way a decade ago, it was like I was able to breathe, take in oxygen, let it out, take it in, let it out. And I was so grateful. And then you realize because of our American culture's relationship to grief, it's like you're suddenly realizing you're breathing and you're surrounded with other people who are like holding their breath. Yeah.

And so that's what happened with you and the bank teller. You helped her exhale. It's wild that we're supposed to walk around holding in all of this. Yeah. And there's so much that we've held in. You mentioned the pandemic. America has not yet fully grieved what we lost in the pandemic. We haven't done it. Countless people. Right? And the same way now when people ask how I'm doing, I say, I don't know. My mom just died. What if people felt free to say when you ask them how they're doing –

I don't know. The pandemic fucked me up. I don't know. I'm still getting over COVID life. We should say that. We should do that. We should talk about that. Zach, I want to have you give a tip to our listeners on dealing with grief. You are my astrology sister. Good luck to the spirit world. I'm not asking for astrology, but...

I think about you and you are connected to the universe in ways that I wish I was. Oh my God. I'm serious. I'm serious. You are a star child. Thank you. Thank you. I feel the burdens and the joy of that connection. But I think for me, what I learned so much writing about crime in America, and I wrote a lot about death. And I was sometimes the first person a family talked to when someone they loved died.

whether they were shot by the police, murdered, something. And what I realized really quickly is that sometimes, I will never forget, I was in Kansas City, Missouri. I was doing a story of a young man named Deontay Green. And I was 25, I think. He was 22, we were years apart. And I sat with his mom on his bed and just let her talk to me for hours. And I think I just held her hand. And I think with the grief,

you have to release it. It's kind of what we're talking about abundance. When you have too much, when you're carrying too many groceries, when your cup is overflowing, you need to release it. You need to drink it. It's too much. And I think that's what grief is telling you, that this moment's too much and you need to reach out and touch someone to tell your story. And I also believe that telling the story of these people is so beautiful. And that's the way that we keep them alive forever. So I think you just need to keep telling those stories over and over. And that was my biggest takeaway during my time at The Guardian is like, you know, I have a lot of mixed feelings about being a black guy doing death stories, but

but I did get to sit with people and help them feel heard. Yeah. Yeah. We've got to a lot and I'm so grateful for this chat, but I want to just share one thing that I've been thinking in the last few weeks about making sense of the heavy shit and the hard shit and the good shit and the bad shit that happens after a parent dies. Some of it is overwhelming. Like there've been moments where it's felt like every single emotion I've ever held for my mother has

came to the surface all at once. And it's beautiful, but it's overwhelming. - It's a lot. - But I think one thing that has really given me peace is kind of looking at this moment, this jarring life event,

as like a moment in which like the fast moving train of our lives like either slows down a lot or just stops you know in adulthood especially we're on a train and we are moving and this train is going somewhere and we're putting stuff in the car and we're getting stuff and the train is full and then something like a death happens and it feels like the train stops and we're mad that the train has stopped and why has my train stopped i have to get over here i gotta go over there i got stuff on this train and like what i've been telling myself in this moment it's like what if

in the train stopping, it's a moment for us to gain perspective and to think about how fast the train should go and to think about what things should be on the train and what things should be off the train. What if this is also a moment, moments of deep grief,

It's a moment to set perspective and to reassess what we need, what we don't need, what we should carry, what we should not. Did you even really need to be going to that destination in the first place? Yeah. There you go. Exactly. Because you may be going somewhere else. Exactly. And if I can look at this deeply hurtful, painful moment and see the benefit and the gift of that, it helps. Yeah.

My mother, in her passing, gave me a moment to stop for a bit and take stock of things and get ready for the rest of my journey. Even in her death, she mothered me. That's what mothers do. So I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for it.

I'm grateful for that too. And I'm so grateful you're able to see this moment as a gift for you to continue on this journey because you do have such a big journey in front of you. And this is just, you know, one stop. With my sisters. A journey with my sisters. Well, we're going to take a break for now. Look, because we got to catch our breath as well. But we'll be right back with some recommendations. We'll be right back.

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We are back, and we want to end the show on a positive note. So we'd like to each share something that has brought us comfort in moments of grief, something that we ran to or discovered or held on to in moments that were really tough for us. So to begin, I'd love to go to Saeed Jones to tell us what he has for us. Sure, sure. So when I was grieving my mother in 2011, 2012, like in that kind of acute phase where you're, you know, I, of course, as a writer, I turned to books. I wanted to, I felt...

I felt one of my early means of giving myself some parameters. So I wasn't just totally overwhelmed with grief all the time was to try on good days to,

Every day was not a good day, but on good days to try to think of myself as a student of grief. And I had some learning to do. You know what I mean? Because I know how to be a student. I'm a good student. And so I wanted to find books. And one of the books that I read that I still refer to often is a memoir titled The Long Goodbye by Megan O'Rourke. Megan's mother died of cancer on Christmas Day in 2008.

It was a long experience. It was different than my experience with grief. And I think that is helpful. I think it's helpful to kind of begin to get a sense of people's different experiences. For example, everyone doesn't have a very sudden event or everyone doesn't have a great experience with their parent. What does that mean? But something she does in addition to the book,

about her own personal experience. She writes about kind of the literature of grief, the science of grief. And one of the ideas she introduced to me via the book was that grief has like a wave structure. So this is something I want to explain to people, including Sam, that will be helpful. And I remember she said it and then I would like, you can chart it. So it would be like, I'm having a good day, minding my own business. I get home.

and all of my mother's mail is getting forwarded to me and so it's like i'd open the mailbox and there's my mother's name or there's some detail about her life you know just and it would not be right then but that's the beginning of the wave right the low point and then as the hours go on the feelings build and build and build and build and maybe two or three hours later now i'm sobbing

Now I'm just, you know, like just fully over. It kind of builds. And then it goes down. So she writes about that. And what happens with grief is, of course, in the early weeks, the early months, the early years, those waves and peaks are, you know, peaks and valleys are pretty intense, you know. But what happens is it's like the water begins to kind of smooth out. Yeah.

It's not to say there aren't moments where I have a little way if something builds up. It's just that now, 10 years later, it might be months or years between. So that's just one example that she shares in the book that's really helpful. But I found that was helpful, like beginning to have some sense of a structure, an architecture of what's going on in my mind, my heart and my body, I found comforting. I like that. It reminds me of something my friend Joanna, Zach's friend Joanna told me.

about having a bad day or being in a bad mood. She said, all emotions are clouds. When this cloud is above your head, it's all you can see. Right.

But the thing is, eventually that cloud passes. It is going to pass. And another one shows up. These things pass. These things pass. But when you're in it, you know, when the clouds block out the sun, it's just like, well, this is what the whole day is going to be like now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and sometimes those clouds produce rain too. So, you know, sometimes it might be a hailstorm. And sometimes your soil was dry and the rain was needed. Yep. Come on.

Zach, what's your recommendation? So my recommendation is also a book. And it was a book that arrived for me after, I would say, one of the big first deaths of my life, which was my cousin Jamie. She and I were best friends. She died right when I went to college. And it was the first time I'd lost someone so close. And also it was weird because it was my first year of adulthood. I was like out in the world. And the book I found was A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Woo!

I remember reading that. Heavy. I feel like that book introduced delusion into my life since Zach and I have been talking about delusion for so long. It is delusion. So that book, if you haven't read, it was the finalist for the Pulitzer after the year it was released. It is about Joan Didion's year after her husband died.

passed away suddenly and her daughter also was in a coma. And it is very much a book for our white girls that are in delusion, our delulu girls, but anyone that's delulu. And it's because when grief happens, memory becomes interesting. It goes forward, it goes backwards, it washes over you. You begin to think and rethink things. And it's to the point that Saeed's making is when you're grieving someone, especially a partner, you know, their stuff is around you. And what do you do with this stuff? And each piece of item takes you back to something.

So Joan Didion lost herself for a year in this magical thinking that her husband was gonna come back while she was also trying to take care of her daughter. And I just thought it was such a wonderful way to kind of find some ground in all of the chaos and the dreamscape and the fantasticalness of death.

that kind of absorbs you, especially when it's your first big death and you've never felt these big feelings before. And yeah. And then right after that, she released blue nights cause her daughter passed away. So Joe did in is kind of the later parts of her life, the queen of mourning and writing. And it's interesting cause that book came out in 2005. I remember reading it in college and,

And I didn't get it. Like, I read it because I loved, I understood that Joan Didion is still, you know, one of our lions of literature and of the craft, but I didn't get it. But then you experience like a seismic grief and you're like,

Okay. Because to me, I think as a young person, young people have such a relationship to the delusion of immortality. Understandably so. There are just so many things that if you were a young person and you really understood how easy it is to die, you just wouldn't do. Come on. You just wouldn't do. You wouldn't become a person. So you need to be protected from that. Then I think as I was a little older and beginning to reckon with my own real grief –

I hadn't understood, like it wasn't a lark. It felt like it was just like at the time, like just an exaggerated metaphor. And I was like, she's pushing this metaphor kind of hard. Like tell me how it really is, lady, is how I felt. And then I was like, no, she was. She really is kind of tough. Like I'm almost convinced that I did not have a sense of smell until after my mom died.

Because smell is such a powerful sense. And only in grieving her did it become this sense that could trigger memories, that could trigger history. I don't even wear scarves. I held on to my dead dad's, one of his old scarves.

Oh my God, I still have it. I've had it since he died because it smelled like him. It doesn't smell like him anymore, but I still have it. Yo, that's real. It's intense. The scent. The scent after death. Yeah, yeah. It's a whole thing. I'll just say, just an example for my... Yeah, it was maybe two years after my mom passed away. I was in San Francisco on my way to dinner with a friend...

And someone walked by me wearing perfume called Angel. It was a very 90s perfume. And just walked by me on the street. Walked by so fast I couldn't even see the person. And I literally had to like...

I was walking, but it was like I had to pull over. You know what I mean? I was late to dinner because I was like so thrown. I mean, it's like the past, the present, the future all mixed up. It's incredible. Colliding. Well, it's a good book. The gift of life when it comes to reading is...

is that meaningful books, like grief, change color based on your experiences. And the long goodbye or a year of magical thinking are examples of books that depending on how your life has changed in the years since you last read that text, it's going to hit a little different. Y'all are so intellectual with the recommendations. My recommendation is not that, baby. I'm so excited. I'm so excited. Yeah.

One of the things that's been getting me through the last few weeks, especially in those moments where all I want is a distraction, has been the latest season of Netflix's Is It Cake? Oh, really? Okay, look, I was just privately praying. I was like, please don't let it be the idol. Please don't let that be the idol. That's where I was like, don't do that. Okay, Is It Cake? That's fun. Some surrealism. And here's why I really recommend this newest season. So the premise of Is It Cake is,

basically based off the TikTok social media trend of you see a thing that looks like a thing, but actually it's a cake. So you think you see a bouquet of roses. They cut into it. It's a cake. They made this a show on Netflix. Of course. And they made people pick between things and say which one was real cake and which one was like the actual object. And they also had...

lay people from around wherever come and try to make cakes that look like other things. In season two, the show has gotten even better because they have a recurring cast of characters. The folks that come to bake stick around for the whole season. The host, Mikey Day, is hilarious, but it's just beautiful nonsense. It's a nonsensical show that serves no purpose other than to make you laugh, but you get invested. You get invested in seeing which is cake and which is not. There's this scene in one of the episodes where

where Mikey Day, the host, is asking the contestants to decide which of three white toilets on the stage is a cake. Go sit on it. No, usually you cut into it. But for this one, he has a sledgehammer. Oh my gosh. And he throws a sledgehammer into each toilet to see which is cake. And as he's doing this, one of the contestants, you can hear her mutter,

how is this a show? And you're like, I know, girl. How is this a show? I mean, T, T, T, T, T. But that pretty much sums up what that show is. It's absurdist and nonsensical, which makes it the perfect distraction. My imagination's so dark. It was like, is that hand in front of you a cake or a real hand? Cut it and find out. Oh, my God.

I think I could do like a whole, you know how people say, what's something you can give a PowerPoint presentation with on the fly and that stuff? I could do one on that show and how it ties into our disinformation and fake news era and how no one knows what's real. Nothing is real. So we're leaning into kind of giving up on that. Also, Americans have no idea of what it takes to make food. We're watching this show where they just make toilets out of cake. And you're like, oh, wow. Our relationship to food is...

interesting. Delusional. No, this show made me laugh. Delusional. Delusional. Yeah. All right. Well, those are all wonderful. Thank you, Sam, for giving some levity to our big academic book. We needed it. We needed it. Had to do it. Had to do it. Oh, no, that's why we missed you. That's why we missed you. I missed y'all too. All right, listeners, what's your vibe this week? What do you turn to in times of comfort or need? Check in with us at vibecheckatstitcher.com.

It's so good to be back. I have missed every single part of this. I've missed reading the credits. All of this feels good to be home. Thank you, listeners, for checking out this week's episode of Vibe Check. If you love the show and want to support us, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast listening platform and tell a friend. We are still accepting submissions of voice notes of you telling your friends about this show. Send it to us. We're nosy.

I would also like to thank all the listeners who have let me know that they are prepared to declare war on the nation state of Australia at any point. Some of you were sending me gifts of emus because, you know, I'm a fan of the great emu war of the 1930s where emus were able to defeat an entire regiment of the Australian army.

I see you. I appreciate you. And I say, stand by, friends. Stand by for now. But also a huge thank you to our producers, Chantel Holder, engineers, Sam Kiefer and Brendan Burns and Marcus Holm for our theme music and sound design. Also, special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher and Brandon Brandesha-Shart from Agenda Management and Production.

Brandisha Sharp. Oh my God. Keep it in, Chantel. Oh, Brandisha said she knows the perfume scent angel that I was talking about. Of course she does. Oh my goodness, I love it. And listeners, as we always say, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheckatshirt.com and keep in touch with us on Instagram at at Zach Staff, at The Ferocity, and at Sam Sanders. And you can use the hashtag, hashtag vibecheckpod. Are those all three of our handles on threads? Yes.

And Blue Sky as well. I think so. We're out there. Find me outside. Yeah. Find you outside. Catch me outside. Whatever these kids say. Oh, Lord. Well, listeners, stay tuned for a special bonus episode on Monday. And until then, goodbye. Bye. Stitcher.

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