00:00When I was 30 years old, I was on a camping trip with my parents, and they dropped me off
00:05on their
00:06way back home to Philadelphia, which is where I'm from, and I got a phone call about 45 minutes later
00:12after we just had said a very quick, very inconsequential, loving goodbye to each other
00:16that there had been a really bad accident on the road, and my mom was not okay. When I did
00:21finally
00:21get there, she had not survived. I knew it in my gut the moment I got that phone call. By
00:27the age
00:28of 34, my dad died, and I was really acquainted very quickly with the fact that loss is an
00:36extremely isolating experience, and thus began my journey living with this thing called loss,
00:51which is this ever-changing, amorphous presence in your life that is with you 24-7
00:58for the rest of your days in various iterations, in various forms, in various triggers. I was an adult
01:05living in New York City working in political subject. I worked for the Colbert Report at the time.
01:10I was a producer for them, and I was going to work every day because that's what you do when
01:16you're 30. You don't say, well, I'll just take my summer vacation to work through my grief, or I'll go
01:21to my guidance counselor at school to work through my grief. It's more, no, you got to like keep going
01:27because that's what the world expects of you when you're growing your career and you're supposed to
01:31be self-sufficient. You don't really have structures that are in place at that age to support you through
01:39something like this, but it was so isolating because no one knew what to do with me. They didn't know
01:44what to
01:44do other than for the most part to ask, you know, how are you with the emphasis on the R
01:49and the hand
01:50on my shoulder and the earnest look into my eyes that, you know, I would have done to anybody else
01:55because I wouldn't have known what to do with someone like me. And it was just this weird position
02:01of feeling like I was in a state of my life where I was focused on building everything around me.
02:07I
02:07wanted to build my career. I wanted to build my personal life. At the same time, I was losing everything.
02:14And so it was just this really uncomfortable position to be in. It was just this very foreign
02:18territory. And at 30, I really had trouble connecting with people about it because I found
02:23that not everybody was willing to kind of let it all hang out.
02:33The reason that we launched Modern Loss, which was first website, which we launched about four and a
02:37half or just over four years ago, just think of it as a quality online publication where the niche
02:43topic is loss. But when you think about it, it's not so niche. It's actually everything under the
02:48sun, which is also reflected in the book. So we have stories that are about sex, that are about
02:52mystery, that are about just intimacy, that are about triggers and secrets. And oh my gosh,
03:00body issues, right? Health, dreams, everything. I mean, everything is affected because you had a loss in
03:07your life. You just might not realize it somehow. There's hope out there after the fact that you've
03:13gone through a profound loss that you're not going to be broken. Life is actually going to go on. And
03:19beyond that, it can actually be really amazing. And not just in spite of, but sometimes because of
03:26what you've been through.
