Episodes 42 and 43 - Picking up the Scraps: Writing Plays about our Grief

LISTEN TO PART 1 of the episode

LISTEN TO PART 2 of the episode

HANNAH: I was rereading your play script today, actually. Yeah it was so funny because I remembered the actors and how they delivered the lines so I was like watching it again in my head.

IAN: Oh fun, okay cool.

HANNAH: [laughs] Which was really cool. I would just love to hear like your inspiration behind writing the play and a quick summary of what you would say it's about.

IAN: Yeah, so contextually, the name of the play is A Virgin Death. And so contextually, it is five friends gathering four years and four months after their friend, a mutual friend passed away. And in circumstances around the play, like virginity, the subject of like, the person who die’s virginity is one of the topics that's part of the title. And this is like, college. That's like the context, so they're gathering and now they're several years out of college. So that's like, the context of what's happening. And you know, people interact in ways you know, reveals happen, etc. But thematically what it's about, , obviously there's the issue of like, grief, talking about how people grieve. And like, all of the characters sort of embodies a stage of grief. That was something that was interesting.

Like, there's a character that’s Denial, they're a very optimistic person, and they kind of are not dealing with the things in front of them. There's someone's character, Ben, who's like Bargaining. He's like, “Oh, if only I had this, I could be happy” and he's putting a lot of stake into potential romances he over inflates the importance of them. I think that's maybe a good segue into what was the sort of core thing that I was exploring with it. Which is the idea of like, seeing people as two dimensional so like, there's this word sonder. It's this beautiful word, this beautiful idea. Sonder is like when you're walking in the city, and you realize that every person you pass has a whole life, a whole experience, everything, like complete complexity, and you're just passing by them and it's just like mind blowing kind of feeling and you're like, “oh my god,” like, suddenly contextualized as a potential distracted or annoyed interaction you might have with someone or like you know, on a phone call line and you get like, frustrated, but it contextualizes that because like, what are they even going through?

HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah.

IAN: And the rest of our lives, we're usually not in that state. Because it's like almost impossible to be thinking about everyone so deeply. You're in a sort of anti-sonder and there's not a word for that, at least as far as that I'm aware of. But to me, I was exploring that idea. The way that we often are seeing people as two-dimensional projections and like, what do they mean for me? Like what's the significance to me? Rather than like, hey, they are a person, all it of themselves. So all of the characters the way they're interacting, there's various ways in which they're not considering the full personhood of these people. And I don't think that's like a huge indictment. I think that's something that's natural that we do all the time, but in the case of like, you know, thinking, “Oh, this potential romance will make everything good for me,” that's making that person into this sort of idea, rather than being a person. And that's also one of the discoveries I had writing in the play, is when somebody dies they are now forever the idea because they can't you know, the conversation is now one sided. Totally. And like even if you wanted to open yourself up to them, they're not currently thinking or being; or if they are, if there's some sort of afterlife or whatever, we're at least not privy to it. So the play’s an exploration of that about grief and all of that, I hope that was a good summary. You saw it, and you’re reading the script – how do you think I did, in terms of how did I do either in what I just communicated or how did I do with the script? Like, does that stuff come across?

HANNAH: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And even if it didn't come across, consciously. It came across subconsciously, if that makes sense. Like, I didn't think while I was watching, like, “oh, one is anger and one is bargaining and one is sadness,” like that hit me subconsciously, but not consciously. And then when I read the script, I was like, of course, that makes total sense. You know, so it clicks. In a moment, I want to read a portion if that's okay—

IAN: Cool. Yeah.

HANNAH: Yeah, because that's crazy, because the fact that you were just talking about the whole concept of people being an idea, because that I think is the part that hit me the hardest in your play, and it was also a very emotional moment. It was kind of like, and maybe I'm using the wrong term, but it was kind of the climax in that one of the friends gave a sort of eulogy to the friend when he was talking about him and reading something that he wrote and sharing his thoughts.

IAN: Oh, yeah, at the very final moment.

HANNAH: Yeah, the final moments, and I just remember being like, “oh my god,” because I had never thought that in those words before I always knew how frustrating that when someone passes away, it is now one sided, like I had those words to put to it, but I never had the words of like “they are now an idea.” And that is like, so devastating. In so many ways, but I didn't even, like honestly, I didn't even think about how we even do it when people are alive when we're so in our own world. And someone is a projection of what we think they're thinking and all these things that they’re also kind of an idea, like that kind of blows my mind to be honest. I didn't think that far ahead. But wow.

IAN: Yeah. I don't think we exist in a binary state. It's like a fluid spectrum between like how much of personhood do you give someone or not in a given moment. And it's also like, again, it's impossible to fully consider, it might be impossible to fully consider a single other person, even one other person, consider their entire existence as an independent thing. Like that might even be impossible for even one to fully do it one-hundred percent.

HANNAH: Like the scope of it at least, like you can know it and feel it and you know, understand it to a degree but you're scraping the tip of an iceberg.

IAN: Yeah, it's absolutely insane for me to think Hannah that like I have had an entire life. Right? You have also had an entire life. Like, what?? You know, there are moments that have happened to me that I have forgotten about that's like how much things have happened. And you also have all those moments that you forgot, like, it's just too you know? But hopefully we live more towards I want to say generosity, but I don't know if that's the right word of like, trying to at least remind ourselves that people have a whole thing. And like you're saying, the devastating thing when someone's gone. I don't know what part that you are going to read, but there's the part about surprise.

HANNAH: Oh, gosh, I love that part, too. Oh my god, that also wrecked me. But they're pretty much the same part. So it's okay if I read that now?

IAN: Yeah, go ahead.

HANNAH: So to contextualize this. The character Ben is giving not really an official eulogy, but it's like a tribute to their friend. Right?

IAN: Yeah, it's like a eulogy. But it's only just like, among the friends.

HANNAH: Okay, here we go. “I've been stuck on something, trying to figure out how to distill Evan down to a speech to talk about my grief, you know, for four years now. Once I'm in the shower, it dawned on me, I had this crystal clear idea, the single sentence that just made everything makes sense. And then I stepped out of the shower and it was just totally gone. Like trying to remember a dream as you wake up. Just gone. All I have left was the memory of that feeling and the terrible suspicion that what I want exists, but it's forever out of reach. That kind of nameless loss, the space between something and the memory of that thing. That's the gap created when Evan died, and that's what I want to talk about, that loss and what to do with it. When someone's surprised us when they don't match your idea of who they are, that's when they really come alive. Death is the end of surprise. A person turns into an idea. I am heartbroken to have no more surprises from Evan. And that's why I hated every draft I wrote of this because I was just saying vague positive things, making him some idea. And I think most eulogies do that and that sucks. It sucks. They ignore everything that makes them human, all their faults their shortcomings. They say ‘he was kind, here's his job. Here's a list of the hobbies he used to fill his life.’ And I don't mean to denigrate those eulogies, to their credit, it's nice to hear good things. It just feels like such an awful flattening of the complexities of existence.”

So I'll stop there. But yeah, that whole section, I mean, it goes on and it's all great but I was just like, “Oh my God.” And I also agree, I mean, this is just such a tiny part of what I just read, but that eulogies can be so frustrating because they are kind of like what he said, sort of like reading a resume sometimes like… Like again, just like he said, this is not to denigrate eulogies, but it just means that the person who's grieving is frustrated because it doesn't show all sides of the person. And like at my friend's memorial service, I just remember being seething with anger during the eulogy, because it was just like, ‘these were her accomplishments.’ And it mostly focused on her accomplishments. So people in the room were like ‘wow,’ and I was like, this is not like, this shouldn't be like her resume! Like, I don't know. It just made me so angry and I felt so like, validated or seen when he said that too, because I was like, “Okay, I'm not just like a terrible person for being angry at a eulogy.”

IAN: Yeah, yeah. The thing that weirds me out is the formulaic-ness of eulogy. In that, it's just like, Oh, we're talking about the thing. It's weird because it's like, it's a total paradox. Because it's like, you just talk about like, ‘Oh, what do they do? What are their accomplishments?’ Which is what they all do. It's like, No, I want something more! I want to honor this person, but like you, you literally can't really do much, other than just talk about them, and I think that's maybe what the character Ben is wrestling with in the eulogies. Like how do you do a eulogy that's like actually honoring the person? And ultimately comes to this discovery that it's like, the thing that I can do is just tell stories about him and just go forward from there.  

I’ll never forget the eulogy that my friend’s father gave him, because the sound, he made almost a yelp, just the sound of complete tragic anguish. Just terrible, and his eulogy was one of great anger. I think he was going through anger first, he was just so mad and he felt like no one was there for the family at that time or something. Which is awful, but I don’t’ know, there’s no way to be for someone when they lose their son. There’s no amount of support that you could give that someone would feel like, “oh, okay”. It’s obviously a not okay thing to happen, you know?

HANNAH: Oh gosh, yeah. It’s also kind of like, I’m also thinking of a eulogy as a metaphor, right? Like how we honor them in general. Like far after the funeral. How do we eulogize them? Like how do we honor them? And kind of like what a couple of the characters in the play were saying was like, you can never fully do it and you can never fully do it right and you'll never feel like you completely did them justice, but you just have to do something.

IAN: Yeah, yeah. And that's, hopefully the ending note: we have to do something, right. But the part that you read that jumped out at me because, I think it’s interesting to talk about, is like I stepped out of the shower, like I had this crystal clear idea and stepped out of the shower and it was gone. It was a thing that happened to me. I was in the shower and I was thinking about the play and thinking about my own experience with like, what does death mean? Like this desire to settle the question and have like the ultimate final thing, and I did it, Hannah. Like I had it. I was like “oh, man, this makes so much sense, everything makes sense.” I had this like, it was just pure. I was like, “This is awesome.” And I got out of the shower and was like wait, what was it? And I was just gone, I had this thing, you know? And maybe who knows, maybe if I revisited it I would be like, maybe that wasn't good, but it felt like I was like, “Oh, this is it.” And I couldn’t trace my thoughts back to that thing.

HANNAH: You found the answer to death and now you can’t spread the word about it!

IAN: Right? I mean, exactly. Right. Who knows how good of a thing it was, but yeah, that was the experience. I don't know. I think that's the thing that it's easy to want to try to make meaning, I think ultimately of a meaningless thing. And I don't mean that like, in a nihilistic way, like life has meaning, but just like, you know, I personally don't subscribe to the belief that things happen for a reason ahead of time, that someone's death is a thing that's productive.

HANNAH: That makes me so angry.

IAN: Yeah, I think yeah, it's really frustrating. Which actually also in the beginning of the play this character talks a little bit about that. Actually no the character has the opposite feeling that they think everything happens for a reason that hopefully maybe have that character dismantle that by the end. But yeah, that characters says like, “terrible shit just keeps happening.” I'm not so sure where I'm going with this. I think just the idea that like, you want to make meaning of it, because that would make it easier. But I think the true thing is that it isn’t so much of a meaning and it's just a byproduct of loving something in someone is tragedy. Just because things are not infinite.

I think the thing to me that I guess I’m thinking about now more with grief and loss is the absence of the person in the future and them like not around for things. One thing that I also think about is, my friend who passed; I have lost contact with a lot of friends of college, and I think I would have lost contact with him. Probably. And I think about him more now. Because he died than I think I would have if he was alive. And that kind of makes me angry in a way or like you know that seems like wrong and messed up. It tips into that thing of like, this idea, right? I think that was a major, certainly the play is not about him. But my feelings with that, my reaction with that is like an inspiration to the play and it brings a lot of character to it. But you know, I had this play that was I think people liked a lot, I was really proud of, really cool, but it’s not worth a life. I would much rather not have the play and have him around, which I don't know is maybe such an obvious thing, or maybe not. Maybe it's not obvious, I don't know.

HANNAH: Totally. I have so many thoughts coming up like, first of all to go back to like, not believing everything happens for a reason. I totally agree. I think that meaningless tragedy happens. And sometimes we're able to scrap pieces of meaning from it, but that doesn't mean it happened for that meaning. You know, it's like the opposite, if that makes sense. Yeah, like I would of course, I would rather this podcast didn't exist, and my friend still be alive. Because I wouldn't make this podcast if I hadn't had the experience. But that doesn't mean like, “oh, like wow, a beautiful thing came from her death.” It's like no, like, I just, I'm trying to find scraps of meaning, right? And I think that that's different.

And the second thing is, I feel so seen because of what you just said, where are you said like, “I think of him more now that he's dead than I did when he was alive.” Because I've had the same thing, like I wrote a paragraph about it. And to kind of paraphrase it: “I didn't think about my friend every day when she was alive. But I also don't every day think about the taste of coffee or the color of my mom's eyes.” Right? But if I lose it, then I would think about it every day and like I think about her every day now. And then that also makes me grapple and wrestle with the whole thing because I'm like, well, you don't know the future or like the past possible future where like, we might have lost touch, but who knows? Right?

But like, because there are all these infinite possibilities that I will never know. You know, we could have been lifelong, best best best friends. We could have lost touch. There's literally infinite possibilities. And those possibilities will keep you thinking about it and ruminating and keep you sad about it and, and sad about her. And it's tricky because just like you said, I have complicated feelings about it. And I'm kind of like one of the characters in your play is like, I feel kind of selfish in my grief, like I'm making it about myself. And I kind of feel that way about this too. Like I don't know, am I just…I'm totally rambling, but I don't know if any of that makes sense.

IAN: Like is the act of get picking scraps up selfish? I don't think so.

HANNAH: It’s survival.

IAN: Yeah. I think it's, we're both people that are taking creative pursuits potentially forward that have a basis of loss coming from them. And I think that is part of the equation of like, it can feel selfish to profit off of it in any way. I don't mean profit financially, but just even profit, like in your life, like enriching, like, “oh, I have this cool podcast”, or the book you're writing or the play I have. Because you know, sometimes it can feel bad to use any part of something terrible and do something good, like as if you're suddenly buying into the “everything happens for a reason,” which feels terrible. Not like you're buying into it, but like you're like promoting it or endorsing it is the word I want, which doesn't feel good. Like, emotionally, logically, I think it's clear to see you're not, you know – as long as you're being sensitive to the person. You know. It's logically, it's like, oh, that's not a problem, right? Like, that's the thing that happened and you're just picking up scraps. But I can get that feeling, like to feel bad. Like, I've talked a little bit about like, is there permission to use it in art or use the experience in any way?

HANNAH: I actually I have another quote to pull for that too if that’s okay.

IAN: Go ahead!

HANNAH: Because that’s another thing that hit me hard. I was like, oof, one of the characters said, “there's a part of me that's like, am I even allowed to use tragedy? Does it belong to me? Like, can I write songs about Evan, is that wrong? I don't know. It's always been hard to finish songs anyway, because I want them to be perfect. And especially if it's some monument to him then it really has to be perfect.”

And I was just like, oh my god, like I literally go through this struggle every single day. I'm like, is this my story? Like, can I even talk about it?

IAN: Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, with that character, Emerin, that character is an interesting one because he has sort of the least relatable perspective. And so I intentionally gave him some of the most relatable struggles to like, smooth it out a bit. But if any, he's not like a villain. There's no villains in it, but if anything, he's like, the least relatable, you're going to sympathize with him. Likely, at the end of the play. Maybe not, but I would say most people. I think, it’s this human thing of the struggle of perfectionism and not knowing that question.

Yeah, and I think ultimately, what’s weird about it is, to use it, you're like waiting for permission. And that permission might be like from yourself, maybe. And you know, and I talked about this before. I try to be really clear that my play is not about my friend at all. But like it is inspired by my relationship with young loss, which him passing is like, that's what my experience is. And I did struggle with like, “Is this okay to put out there?” And for a while, I was like, “oh, I should send it to his family to see what they think.” And my friend very kindly and very firmly dissuaded me of that idea, because the play is not about him. And in sending it, I would be like, “this is about him,” and it would raise some uncomfortable, inappropriate things for them that are in the play, even putting ideas in the head like, “is this a thing that went through?” You know, it just would not be healing for them. And I really would be putting burden on them and I realized I had to independently be like, “Am I okay with this?” And that same friend knew the person passed and, he's like, “I think it stands on its own and I don't think it feels like it's bad. It plays on its own.” I got another friend to read it who also knew the person that passed and he was also like, “yeah, independently, I think it works. It's not like about him there's not like too many things that are pointing…” One of our friends is like “yeah, I can see sort of the DNA here and some of the skeleton I feel like is bringing my friend to mind but it's not about him,” so there was that. I also was listening to the first episode of your podcast. The guest mentioned this idea of like, they had a dream of the loved one like, basically saying it was okay to move on. And I forgot this, we talked earlier, but I did have a dream where at one point the friend was just like, “yeah, you can do this play.”

HANNAH: Oh my gosh.

IAN: And you know, that also helped make me feel like it was okay to do it, even though sometimes I get like, you know, spiritual, woozy doozy about things. For some reason this is something that I don’t at all. To me, it feels like that was my own subconscious doing that to tell myself it was okay. And so I think that goes to giving myself that permission.

Where are you these days? You're writing a book, a memoir, that is centered around this; where are you in terms of feeling like you need or you have permission to go forward on it?

HANNAH: It changes every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I'm in the phase right now where I'm like, “burn it. No one should ever read it.” You know, like, what the EFF am I even doing? Like, I'm just writing. And that's another thing. It's because I literally could be you know, this fictitious person who is the best writer in the world and I could not do her justice. So then I'm like, is it even worth it? Then, like, do I want to have this book that's just like a vague idea of her? And then I'm like, yeah, maybe I don't, but also the thing that makes me flip flop is just that I know that stories can help people. You know, but I think maybe it's just, you got to find the right way to tell it or, you know, I don't know. Maybe what I'm doing isn't the right way. But luckily I'm in no rush. So I'll make sure I have the right answer before I do anything big. But, even if it never sees the light of day, at least I'm getting my thoughts on paper, you know, sorting my feelings out and everything.

[Beginning of Part 2]

HANNAH: If you are grieving a family member, how would you feel writing a fictitious play about grieving a family member?

IAN: How would I feel about it? This is in the aftermath of grieving a family member, what would it be like to write a play about them?

HANNAH: Yeah, like instead of the DNA being a friend's death, if the DNA was a family member's death, would you feel like you needed permission or would you feel like “oh, this is totally fine. It's my grief. I own it. I can do art about it.”

IAN: Yeah, I think again what was on the first podcast – which by the way, is the only one out as of this time. So dear listener, if there are more out I might be referencing more. Don't think I only listened to the first and then scooted out.

HANNAH: [laughs]

IAN: But yeah, some of the first part, I feel like yeah, if you're closer to it, it feels easier to talk about because it's like, oh yeah, my parent. You know, my sibling. It feels like that permission would be more a given. So I think like hypothetically yeah, but for some reason when you said that to me, I'm like, I wouldn't want to write a play. That wouldn't feel like the right, I'm imagining, but that wouldn't feel like the right avenue for it. More potentially text writing might feel good. But I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what it would be like in that situation.

HANNAH: Yeah, it's impossible to truly know.

IAN: I do have another play idea that is centering from the perspective of the family that has lost someone. But that one, I feel like I almost don't want to — I have a few play ideas. I'm like, it'll be like so tough and tragic that I don't know if I want to invest myself into doing it just because it'll be hard. But yeah, when you said my own family, I don't know why I felt like “oh, not a play.” But certainly I would feel like I had more of the permission to do it. You know, the struggle of like, the farther you are from someone it feels hard to use it. But like when someone's a stranger then it feels like totally fine. Almost.

Like if it's like a news article or something. So like how the play started becoming a play was I had read in the article about this person who died in a sort of convention in the city I was in and I was like, “oh, man, that's rough” and it was an accidental death. It really hooked into me and I read all the different articles trying to, fuse together this stranger. And then so I ended up writing about that. I ended up writing a monologue where a character uses that as a way to be like, I need to say things now while I still can. And it ends up being a confession of love. And also its reference that they know, in that monologue that I wrote, that they knew somebody else had died that they were closer to but they're talking about the stranger.

So I had that monologue written and I'm like, “Oh, this could be a play, but I have no idea what else is happening.” And then a couple years later, again, there was a stranger’s death. And then in the news that hit me, this one and it's ridiculous. So in the Superbowl 2020 They killed Mr. Peanut off.

HANNAH: Oh, yeah, that was in the play.

IAN: Yeah, that's in the play. Yeah, right. But I was also similarly like, “oh my god, that's messed up!” And literally I hated how it was like playing at grief in a commercial it just felt so like bastardized, and I like was like, literally watching a bunch of different Mr. Peanut commercials being like, kind of actually affected by it in a weird way. And so then I a scene with two characters where one of the characters is similarly affected by the Mr. Peanut passing and I ended up using it as a confession of how bad they've been. While they reference in that, actually knowing someone who died. I had two scenes that are both people dealing with strangers dying when they actually had someone they knew that died.

And then I zoomed out to be like “what is happening here?” And discover the different characters and themes. So I feel like there's a thing of like, if it’s just a random person, like my friend had an email mailing list and she wrote about stumbling upon someone who was dead in public. They had just been passed.

HANNAH: Oh my God! That’s horrible!

IAN: It is terrible. But like, I feel like she didn't need any permission to write about that. Just because it’s like, you know, so far away. And then when it's someone who's so close, you also similarly feel like you don't need any permission to talk about it, but when you get in that middle layer, and maybe it's because you know that you are connected to people who are more connected to the person who passed. And you worry about their perspective. Like that's what I was worried about is like potentially the family and stuff. Is that part of like, wondering how your friend’s potentially like, family, might think of your book?

HANNAH: Yeah. So first of all, if I was able to contact her parents, I would absolutely ask their permission, but the mother passed away, and I cannot get in touch with the father, I tried. And then it's thinking, well who has permission after the parents? Because she didn't have any siblings. And then it's like, aunts and uncles? Like it then it just gets so gray area, you know, and it's like, here I am trying to like, I don't know, make myself look better or feel better, but I have been trying to do what I think is right. Like I reached out to other people who are really close to her and I was like, “I'm writing a book like, don't worry, it's nowhere near being anywhere close to being published, but like, how do you feel about that? And do you want to read my current draft?” And they had pretty positive responses, which made me feel better. But like, other than those few people, I don't know whose permission to ask.

IAN: Yeah, I mean, I think you're doing the things Hannah that you need to that you can do, right?

HANNAH: I guess, there's no rule book!

IAN: I think at the end of the day, that permission is probably from yourself, you know. And you said something earlier. You mentioned like, you were thinking about throwing the whole thing out because you can't possibly honor your friend 100% and I don't know if this is comforting or anti-comforting, but I don't think anyone could. Like I think that's the whole thing. People are more than words and ideas and you would have to write a book that covered every second of their life, like the full complexity—like you can't do it. So hopefully you're not letting that bar limit you from going forward because that is truly an impossible bar.

HANNAH: Yeah. No, it's true. And maybe it'll be a really meta book, where I'm like, reflecting on all this in the book, because I feel like I have to presence it somehow. For example, okay, I was reading this book. There's very few books that I can find where people talk about a friend who died but I have found a handful and I've read them and I'm looking for more, but in one, she even kind of steps back and breaks the fourth wall for a second and she's like, “gosh, I'm so frustrated. I'm making her sound perfect.” And she was like, she didn't say like “dear reader,” but it was basically like, “dear reader, trust me. She was not perfect.” And then she listed less appealing attributes. And I just loved that because it did make her seem more like a real person because everyone is annoying sometimes or like, says the wrong thing or whatever, and she broke the fourth wall and I was like, Maybe I just gotta break the fourth wall. You know?

IAN: I'm a big fan of that. I'm a big fan of that. Because I really love authenticity. And the authentically true thing is you are a person who's writing this book. And so it's authentically true to put in your reflection on writing the book. That's funny that she talked about the insult stuff, I ended up settling on some of that in that eulogy later, the person says some less than flattering, not like super negative, but just like, you know, even annoyances they had with this person.

HANNAH: Like that he smelled bad. He was like, “the room would smell worse when he was here.”

IAN: Yeah yeah, he ruined his surprise birthday party. You know, which is like light and it's comical and it's a funny reflection but it’s like, “come on, man. Like what are you doing there, Evan?” That's the name of the passed character. Yeah, I like that. I like putting yourself there. I just thought about the only book that I know of that has a friend that's died in it is Perks of Being a Wallflower.

HANNAH: Oh, gosh, I have to read that book. I loved the movie.

IAN: Oh, I love the movie. I watched the movie on a plane when I was going to study abroad, and then I immediately tried to find the book when I got there because I was like, I need to read the book now. Yeah, the book is really good to.

HANNAH: Okay, I’ll definitely put that on my list.

IAN: Yeah. The friend is not a huge subject of it. It's sort of like the backdrop in an interesting way. But yeah, that's definitely a book that has a friend in the context of it. I think they talked about it in the movie too, a little bit. But yeah, that's a very good book. I just remembered another one I can't believe I forgot this. In the pockets of tiny gods. It's a book of poetry. I'm getting the title wrong. It's a book of poetry by Anis Mojgani. And it is killer. It is so devastating. It's centers around two events. His friend who died by suicide, like maybe a couple decades prior to the second event, which is about his divorce.

And the book is about those two events. But it's really incredible, and I call it a book of poetry or maybe like a poetry book, because it's revisiting the same things over and over again within the poems. And you get to learn more and more about the person who passed and about the marriage and the divorce through the poems. And like they'll bring up an image, like the house with all the windows boarded up and you're like, “oh, that's like a metaphor” and then later, it's like, oh no, That was a literal thing. That was a literal landmark that occurred during the life and there's all these sort of like, almost things that reveal themselves as you learn more and more. And it is really good. Even if you don't like poetry, I think it's worth it. That one is really good.

There’s a bunch of really good poems. One of them is talking about like, the thought of—which I think is a really human thought—you still thinking maybe he's gonna turn up one day. Because all that was, this is very maybe graphic or terrible, but basically his foot, and then I think the other shoe maybe surfaced, that's what was found. Like imagining him without his feet or something, but like showing up at the door. Yeah, it's a tough read, but really good.

HANNAH: It’s interesting because clearly people are making art about tragedy. So it's been done. People do it. And yet, there are still so many hang ups, potentially for good reason. I mean, if we didn't have any hang ups, we might do incredibly insensitive things. So maybe it's just like, keeping ourselves in check.

IAN: Yeah, that's true. I think with everything there’s a balance between having to really think about other people and having to like, not worry about other people. And there's like a balance right? Because I think they're both true. It's like you should consider other people and care for them. But you also need to know, at the end of the day, you just can be considerate, and if you break someone's heart but you were being considerate, that's potentially on them at that point. You're not responsible for everyone's feelings. You could do everything right and someone could hate you. You know?

HANNAH: That’s so true!

IAN: This could be the most perfect tribute to your friend. Sensitivity, perfect, everything’s great. And someone just because of their relationship with grief with this person, might hate you for doing this. But like, you did everything in this hypothetical. You can't be responsible for everyone's feelings. You can only be responsible for like being considerate. And yeah, who's to say, maybe this person would be just as unhappy otherwise, you know? It’s certainly a balance. You gotta keep both things in mind. Like, you know, if you go too far on one side where you’re like, “hey I trust people are gonna react how they react, so I’m gonna punch you in the face and then if you’re mad, that’s on you.” You know?

HANNAH: [laughs]

IAN: I don't know if you've done meditation at all. But meditation is a lot about really understanding like, we're all one, we're all the same. There's some huge assholes in meditation communities. Always. Because they might go too far on this side. They're like, “Yeah, whatever man. Like, it doesn't matter what I do.” And therefore they will do like, bad things.

HANNAH: Yeah, you're right. It totally is a balanced. And I think another thing that freaked me out is that, a couple books that I read and really loved and got some healing from, where someone wrote about their friend as a memoir, they received some hate online. And this one person wrote about a friend and then the friend's sister wrote a really angry essay about how the author had stolen her grief from her. And I was like that is literally my worst fear. Like, and I don't know I was just like, Oh, God, like, this is exactly what I don't want to happen.

IAN: That would be the worst thing, right? But like, how can you steal someone's grief? Like obviously that person is really uncomfortable, but like, I don't know, you've read the essay. So maybe there's a merit there, but it's also like, that person had a negative reaction. Maybe there was something insensitive in the book, or maybe there wasn't, maybe that's just how that person was going to react no matter what. Right?

HANNAH: It’s so hard to know.

IAN: Yeah, it's like, you could bump into someone and cause them to spill some coffee on themselves and then. If that happened to me I’d be like “come on, man,” I’d be a little annoyed. But like, whatever. I probably actually honestly wouldn't say anything. If I’m like being real, if someone bumps into me and I get coffee on me and then they’d probably say “sorry” and I’m like “it’s alright,” or if they don’t say anything I’d probably be like “where’s my apology?” But I’m not going to confront them!

Or if I bumped into someone and they spilled a coffee, they are going to have that reaction which is probably mild annoyance. And I’m going to forget that I spilled coffee on someone in like a week or something. But let’s say, we’ve all been in this situation where we’re at the end of our rope. Where nothing is going right and we get coffee spilled on us. And we just break down. And if someone broke down after I spilled coffee on them I wouldn’t forget that and I would feel really bad about it for a while. But like, it was an accident and all I did was spill coffee in either case. Which is just a way of saying that people are going to react how people react to things, that doesn’t excuse you from not being considerate. Don’t be spilling coffee on people, but if you are trying to walk and trying to be careful and not bump into people, and sometimes you will bump into people, I think that’s what you can do. Right?

Even if someone says “you stole my grief from me,” which is a terrible thing to say, it might not be on you. It could be, right? I didn’t read the original book, it’s possible it was insensitive in a way and in this metaphor you’re carrying more coffee than you could possibly—you’re trying to carry three cups, right? You’re doing something dangerous. But just because the person reacts in a really bad way doesn’t necessarily mean you’re at fault for all the negativity. And I think the fact that you are wrestling with this for so long is probably evidence to the fact that you're only carrying a single cup of coffee and trying to walk slowly.

HANNAH: I love that metaphor. That's a really cool way to think about it. All I can do at the end of the day is make sure I'm holding one cup of coffee and make sure I'm looking out for the other people as I walk.

IAN: But you know, also not everything needs to go out there, right? There’s something to be said for, hey I did this thing for me and maybe people don’t need to read it or something. What you said is true, there is potential value. You’ve talked about wanting more media to consume, and this podcast could potentially be a resource for someone if you end up publishing your book that could end up being a resource for someone. I also like the metaphor of the scraps.

HANNAH: Gather scraps, yeah. And is it selfish to gather scraps or is it survival?

IAN: Yeah. I certainly don't think it's selfish.

HANNAH: But I do think it's normal to worry if it's selfish. Not meaning like everyone worries about that. But I think the fact that it's like pretty common to like, be concerned about it.

IAN: Yeah. And also everyone has a different tolerance for like, how much it's okay to use from other people. You know, like, I'm kind of a thing of like, well, not everything but I feel like a lot of experience have happened to me and I have no problem talking about them. And using them like this. I was in it. Y’know? Someone bullied me, if someone broke my heart, if I broke someone else’s heart, I feel freedom to talk about it. But people have their own tolerances. My girlfriend, who I will link no information about because she’s on the other side of the spectrum, and this is okay to keep in, just to say she’s on the other side of the spectrum. She doesn’t want to be used in anything. She’d be upset if you wrote about spilling coffee on this stranger that broke down and that was her, she’d be like “aaah!” y’know? She’s specifically told me that if she dies she doesn’t want me to write a play about her dying. Which I find very funny.

HANNAH: But can you write something else, did she specify?

IAN: Intention, right? I don’t think she needed to say every part of media.

HANNAH: [laughs]

IAN: But yeah, I’m just saying, people have different allowances of what they think is okay to gather from life. And I think there’s some people who are like, just do fiction. But the thing is, in fiction there is true things that you’re basing off of it.

HANNAH: How could you not? Life is your source material.

IAN: Yeah, so I don’t think that actually gets away with it entirely. In this play, which is a fictional play. Most of the things the people said are things I have thought at some point, or in most the things that happen are things that have happened to me at some point, to some degree.

HANNAH: Whenever I try to write fiction, it's literally an essay about something that happened except they have like brown hair instead of blonde hair and their name is like, “Jessica”.

IAN: [laughs]

HANNAH: I’m just like, I can’t write fiction, I cannot not pull from my life like I don't know how people do that. Like, like people build entire wizarding worlds that have magic that has nothing to do with life. And I'm like, what? Like, how do you make something up from scratch in your brain?

IAN: I don’t know, yeah. I think something I sometimes do is, people have placeholder names. And sometimes I'll have like, placeholder specifics, like I need something here. I don't know exactly what it is. And I'll just use real life. And then I like literally have to later mad libs style change them, or not change them and just keep them the same. I think for this play, I wanted to change it because I wanted to make it an independent thing that stood on its on and wasn’t a reference to other people. But also the names of the characters, some of them not all of them, are people in my life. Because when I wrote the first scene, I'm like, I need a name. I'll just use this name. And then it just stuck.

HANNAH: You’re just like, well that’s what their name is!

IAN: Yeah, exactly. My writing coach, a couple years ago said, use the real names in the first draft, like change them after because if you change their name as you're writing, they just have a different energy and if you want it to be true, like use their real name. Because in a memoir, I would still change almost everyone's name, and I would ask people's permission if I use their name, but I have such a fear that I'll have like a Dwigt situation like in The Office when he “control finds” and changes but has one “Dwight” spelled wrong. So it stayed as “Dwigt”. I’m like, what if something slips through?

IAN: Yeah I had that worry too of not wanting to have any remnants of previous names that I’d changed. I managed to get them all and have readers, people will see, because a new name will stand out. They’ll be like, “wait, who’s Zach? I’ve never heard of Zach before!”

HANNAH: [laughs] And you’re like, wait, crap, delete!

IAN: You’re like, uhhh, Zach’s no one, I meant Toby, the keyboard got messed up!

Building on this idea of seeing people as two dimensional, people become markers of things. Like, this was my first love, or the person who bullied me, the person I was first scared of. They’re just labeled as like, that. And they’re abstracted in that way in your memory. And I think that’s really tragic about knowing my friend that died, because that’s my marker for young loss. Which again is brutal. You hate that happening, because it means they’re an idea not a person, right? In the eulogy portion that you were reading before, there’s another part where the character talks about, how they hate that they use this as an experience. If someone says “I know someone who died young,” and then “I know what that’s like” Is my reaction. The character goes almost like self-anger. “No, I don’t know what it’s like, it’s always different. Everyone is different.”

I think the thing is with grief and probably with everything, you’re jumping between contradictory paradoxical perspectives on it all the time.

HANNAH: I know what you mean about like being frustrated that someone's become a marker, because I also don't want them to be distilled to that horrible thing. Like, I would much rather remember her as the amazingly multi-dimensional rich, complex human being that she was, rather than being kind of stuck on a horrible, horrible tragedy. It’s really hard.

IAN: I think about what your last image of someone is. I remember asking my father, so my grandfather passed, it’s probably the person who's closest to that passed. I've had two other grandparents I wasn’t as close to die prior to him. And I remember asking my father, like cause that’s his dad, like when you picture him, what do you picture?  Beecuase you've known this person for so long. And my dad said, and I don't know if this is still true. But at the time, he said, like, “unfortunately, I think about those last few moments.” You know, which is tough because that's not like, no one is at their best when they're on their deathbed. You know, it's a terrible thing to see your parents like that. I don't know. I mean, the thing that I think about with my last experience with my grandfather, my last image feels really positive.

Because it was for his birthday. And it wasn't the last time I saw him, it was maybe the second or third to last time we saw him. But he was just talking about how, you know, he was sick and my parents were pissed at him because he wasn't doing the stuff that his doctors wanted him to do. You know? But like, even through that argument, he was like, “whatever” he was like, he felt grateful for the life that he had. And that's sort of like, I think the lasting thing that I remember from him and the lasting image I remember from my friend is like a while, almost a whole year before he passed. It was this time that we hung out at his house and went around to the beach. That was like a really nice time. I don't know if we can pick the moments that stand out as a lasting image, though. Do you have like a clear idea of like the last, what's frozen in your mind, when you think about your friend what it is?

HANNAH: I have lots and lots of like, snapshots and moments that are frozen, and one of the most significant was, so we went to camp together. And this is how we met when I was 17. And she was 14 going on 15. That's actually the bulk of the time I spent with her which is a whole other thing that I’ve been grappling with that only really was with her for six weeks in person. But at the end of the six weeks, our goodbye was so intense, like she snuck into my cabin, which was not allowed, before she left in the middle of the night. It was like, thundering, like rain was pouring down. She like wakes me up. I'm sleeping on the floor. She whispers “I'm about to leave.” And then we just start bawling and we hug each other for like five minutes and I mean, it was like as intense as if we would never see each other again.

And that was not the last time I said goodbye to her but it was the most intense goodbye. So in some ways, it's almost like in my memory like that's our last goodbye.

IAN: I think there's something really special to have that as your sort of lasting image is a goodbye, because it's a thing that can never have closure, but I feel like having a goodbye prominent in your relationship with her, that feels like that could help with more closure of your lasting images of you two being grateful for each other and for knowing each other and maybe not knowing when you're gonna see each other next or knowing that it's gonna be a while.