 I'm so excited to be here today. First of all, thank you all for braving the elements. I mean, it's main after all, it's like we all made it, so that's fantastic. I have just been in this sort of Catherine Marie Coma for the past few days. I've already had so many conversations with her. I think this is sort of redundant to me. If she hadn't shown up today, that's not gonna happen. I could have just conceded this whole and everything by myself. I guess probably we should start. I will just very quickly introduce myself and then I'm gonna ask Catherine to introduce herself and just give a brief synopsis of this beautiful, beautiful book. My name is Elizabeth Pepe and I am a main, importantly, writer. Those of you who have been around a while may best know me by my columnist, from Casper Bigley, in the Bollarder, my favorite columns. So one more recently, my mother in the show, my mother's clothes are not my mother. There's been a whole bunch of stuff in between, but that's sort of the hook end of my career. I have just finished after the book version of the show and I'm very interested to compare some of my sort of Catherine when we get into the conversation, but first of all, I'd just like to turn it over to Catherine for a moment. I just let her introduce herself and the book. Thank you. I hope we're coming. Please make sure you're writing. Right. My name's Catherine Murray. Thank you all for coming. I'm very honored to be here with Liz and be here at the library with you all. So synopsis of the book. Sure. Yes. So it's a story of when I first, a long time ago, went to Thailand to teach English in a refugee camp and I lived there about a year and I fell in love with a local man and we got married and had three kids. And then we're living quite the idyllic life on the banks of the Mekong, running bicycle tours and eating mangoes and sticky rice and pad thai and green curry and with a huge extended family and whole neighborhood of people eager to help us parents. So it was really a wonderful life. And then quite suddenly out of the blue, my middle child at right after his fifth birthday was diagnosed with a very rare form of leukemia. So the story, the book is really a story of going from that life to living with his illness and ultimately being with him until his demise. Well then, all right. We're taking none out of the Easter. Here we go. Did that work? Yeah. Okay. Much better. Great. How about this? Testing testing, one, two, three. I mean, really, I can just do this. I teach public speaking, so I can do that. I'm not going to. Let's do that. I guess maybe a great place to start is talking about how somebody takes such, I mean, I can't even begin to fathom the depth of this tragedy and how I want to take something like this and frames it into a story that you can put on the page. I mean, I guess the starting point is where did you begin? Well, I think, you know, that's something I had to ask myself in recent years when I was trying to make it into a story, but really I started at the very beginning. For me, I think what helped me survive going through such a difficult experience. And I want to say that I don't think tragedy really applies for me. To me, the word tragedy has more to do with like genocide and incest and just really sort of horrific unnatural things. And the death of a child is incredibly painful, but it's not completely outside the realm of human normalcy. So I think it's a really, you know, a very difficult thing. But in order to live through that, I feel like I sort of made it into story every day for myself in the sense that I needed to write every day. I needed to journal. That was really how I handled the emotions or survived the emotions. So I kind of had a head start in that way and then I kept a really detailed journal. So much of the book is just the journal. And then it was in, after he died, I knew I wanted to become a book. I wanted to share his story and I wanted to reach out to other grieving parents and articulate what I think can be so hard for us to articulate, which is the grief and the pain. But going from journal to memoir was another story that was hard. So that for that, I tried to do it by myself for about 10 years. I kept every now and then I would take out these hundreds and hundreds of pages of journal and think, all right, how do I make this into a book? And it was always just so overwhelming. I just couldn't, I would just become reimbursed in all the pain of the time and give up. So finally, I went to, I went for professional help and I went to the Stone Coast MFA program, which is a wonderful program here in Portland. It's a low residency program, two years with amazing faculty and peers. And for that, I only had to turn in 18 pages at a time so I could go through the journals and pull out 18 pages that I could handle. I guess, you know, talking about this because I have taught memoir before, it was actually called memoir. They didn't know what to do with it back 20 something years ago. And when I had my students come, I actually just this past Saturday did a workshop called How to Frame a Life. And to me, this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks, hurdles, downfalls of people who've tried to deal with their own personal stories. They don't know how to get in and they don't know how to get out and they don't know how to narrow their focus. And the thing that struck me so much about this beautiful book is how narrow and lean it is. And I guess, following in the structure thing is how you were able to decide, for example, there's almost no backstory. And we have no idea who you are. You've just graduated from college from Boomi Land in Thailand. And that's basically, every once in a while you lived up the bail. It's like, you know, my mother worked. I was in an affluent subject. Fred Flintstone was my best friend. Actually, Merv Griffin was my best friend. So we have to share some, you know, common after-school activity here. You know, and your mother shows up and brings a little Christmas tree. But there's almost no mention of your history or your family. And when one is telling a story this deep, I mean, how did you make that choice to eliminate everything that happened until you landed on Thai soil? Well, it's funny because the land you on Thai soil really was the backstory for me. Because for me, when I wanted to write the book, the most alive part of the story for me was those last few months before his death when we lived up on the top of the mountain with no running water and electricity. And it was just very bare bones. And for me, that was the story. And I enjoyed with just having that be the story. You know, just those few months. But I had some good advice from my mentor, Rick Bass, who's an amazing writer. And he said, we need to know more. We need to know the story. So I had to go back and create all that and figure out how much to put it. But that felt like, to me, that felt like too much, you know, to go all the way back. And I think also one thing that was hard to figure out as a writer was what order to go in. Originally, I had thought, oh, we should start with something really grabby, you know, like the funeral, let that show you the opening scene. And Rick was adamant that if the story is good enough to stand on its own regular, you know, just chronological order is enough. You don't need to do any flashy jumping around in time stuff, just once upon a time, the end and straight through. Well, that was another thing that struck me because, again, when I have students come to me and guilty is charged, they try to overcomplicate the story, you know, and very often the first thing I'll do to a manuscript when I'm working with someone is disrupt that linear chronology. You know, it's like, you know, the autobiography is linear, you know, life is linear, but memoir is more novelistic and more digressive. And, you know, yes, started in a flashing moment or started in a moment of crisis and then pulled the camera back. But the thing that really, again, struck me about this book is how clean and uncomplicated the story was. I mean, almost episodic, you know, again, the very first thing I say is don't get into this happened and that happened and this happened and that happened and then this happened and then that happened, which is exactly what you did with this book. And yet it was the perfect vehicle for the story because that just that simple structure had this much level of remove that made it bearable. That made it bearable maybe for you to tell the story, but also for a reader. And the thing that I have to say, you all have to get this book, but you cannot live without reading this book, is I reserved Sunday afternoon. I knew, and it's Chan. Chan was dying. I knew, I mean, no spoiler alert here. And I said, you know, Sunday afternoon, I'm turning my bone off and I am gonna cry all afternoon. I'm so excited to have this good cry. And I didn't cry. I didn't cry because I believe that you delivered me, like you delivered your son to that moment where it was inevitable. And as you say, natural. I felt transported to that moment safely, which was again the art of the way that you constructed this memoir. So good mentoring. But it's also very artfully created. I mean, we start with that sort of death by water, death by water and end by death by water. And it's so beautifully constructed. And the thing, I guess maybe what I would love you to talk about a little bit more is the title and how that, because I felt there was so much of this and so much of this in the book. And those two contrasts, again, talking about structure. Now you see the sky. So the title of the poem is... When Chon was born, he was born at home. Our house in Thailand, which is in kind of a big village, but very cheap by jiao with all the other houses. And so I was in labor at home and making lots of noise. And the neighbors, the next day, one of the neighbor women came over and said, oh, I thought somebody was drunk over here. I felt a shouting. But yeah, so he was born at home that night. And then the next morning, and his, my ex-husband's mother, my ex-mother-in-law had been there through the whole thing as well as our close friends and family. And so the next morning when we were talking to the new baby and just being so happy to have him there and how you do with the baby. And my ex-husband's mother said, ma leo hin fa da leo di chai ma. So she said, like, here you are. You've arrived with us. You're out here. And now you can see the sky. And I just, that just struck me in that moment. It's such a beautiful thing to say to a newborn. Human being, so. Right. And yet in the contrast, there is so much. I mean, to me, that's the open expanse of coming into the world. And yet there's. Is that better? There's so much womb imagery. Like, I feel like everything that happens in the interiors, especially you're hot up in the mountains. And in that bed, the family all sleeps together even when Chan is sick and dying. And it is cocooning and wombing. And yet when you go out into the, I mean, again, I don't, this is no spoiler alert, but after Chan dies, the first, not the first thing, but when you finally rouse yourself. And I just thought that this was such a beautiful, natural moment, is that Catherine goes out into the hillside and there's a big gibbous moon kind of hanging over the hillside. And she nails all the scooches down in peas and how the earth drinks up her pee. And she's looking at that moon and she says, every time I see a moon like that from now on, that's going to be my life. And to me, it was another birth. I mean, you know, the death and that transition and going out and there's birth scenes as someone who's never had a child, you know, ordinarily I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It just, again, because in her hand, her craft in her hand, it just, everything felt so natural. And now I have to jump back and say, I'm sorry I didn't mean to say tragedy. That was a whole lesson of the book. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so Western. I'm so Western, I'm sorry. Because you made everything feel so natural and that contrast between the light and the dark and the womb and the sky and the river taking, taking John away, all of those artful things that made this a journey. And you referred to his leaving us as a journey. I think we were there with you. And that doesn't happen by accident. That happens by craft and beautifully done. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, there's definitely craft. There's definitely purposeful use of things. I also want to say to the writers that trust is subconscious. I almost always wrote very, very early in the morning when I first woke up, woke up. So a lot of those things like you said, it opens with death by water and ends with death by water. I didn't realize that until you just said that just now. So I just want to say that as a writer, I guess I put a lot of faith into what my mind gives me without a lot of, if you can manage to find a place where you're open to your subconscious and to what the urges are that make you write, be on the honoring of that and really be true to that. Because it works out well when you're able to really listen. Well, sometimes we don't know what we're saying until somebody else tells us what we just said. So that works out nicely. I guess one of the other things that I was so struck by was the contrast of cultures. And that you definitely, even in initially Chan's treatment, we're half Western and half Thai. I mean, you wanted to honor the land that you were living in and your husband's family's customs and what they wanted to do. And yet the minute they said the C word, you rushed back to Seattle. I would just like to offer a contrast, because one of the things that I was noting as I was reading the book is every step that you made, everything that you did was with the temple of time and earth and naturalness. Whereas in the Western world, everything that we do about death, we have to stop it. Losing somebody is, as you said in the book, it's a battle. I just think about my mother's decline in death. We just kept one ER visit after the other, one mini-stroke, one AR, I mean, it's just like one thing after they aren't pumping her back to life and pumping her back to life, going, going, you have to sustain, you have to just sustain. And at one point I asked in the book, did we save her to death? Because we could not let her go. And yet the whole, again, this launching that you do of your son, that at some point you say enough, let's go home. And what the family does is they make beautiful food that they grow in the papayas and the greens and the juices and the rainwater that they drink. And everything is so gentle. And in Western society, we don't usher people out well. We stick them to death before they go. And you really gave this, it was a launching and so beautiful. And I guess you do this beautifully on the page, but perhaps you could talk a little bit about that internal culture. I wouldn't say war, but conflict. So had there been any hope that we could have kept him alive with whatever difficult, challenging, non-natural way, we certainly would have. But the doctors in Seattle, when they said, all right, he's relapsed, he's not going to survive another more than two or three months, then we said, OK, we're going to go back to Thailand and try to save him with trying to fight the cancer with more natural traditional Thai ways, which is nutrition and exercise and meditation, thinking and a lot of juicing, mechandises of vitamins. So it was almost a blessing, I think. I mean, if he was going to die, it was good that we were told by the American doctors, there's nothing at all we can do. So then we were free to go ahead back and take care of him, as best we could, using much more gentle ways. But yes, it was a struggle. It was very hard for me to not give up, to not. I think there was so much authority in what the doctors told us in Seattle after he relapsed when they said he's not going to survive. He's going to die within a couple months. Just really went in. I thought, that's it, what they say is the truth. And it took me some time to recognize that nobody can predict the future, no matter how many medical degrees you have. And no matter what you've seen, anything is possible. And the human body is always recreating itself, cell by cell. So I had to really teach myself to become not just a positive thinker, but just to really wake up each morning and say, it's a new day. We can fight. We can keep at this battle and not give up. Because there was part of me that wanted to say, well, the doctor said, this is it. I'm just going to be very kind of calm and intellectual and explain to my child to prepare for death. But there was something in me as a mother that knew that that was not OK, that I really had to fight for him. Even though that struggle between those two places was almost excruciating, in the sense of, I mean, keeping hope alive was somehow more difficult for me than just wanting to cave in and be a victim. Which sounds really weird, because of course I didn't want to lose my child. But the hope was painful, because it's like, I had to be so hopeful. And yet, always in the back of my mind, knowing this might not happen, he could die. Does that make any sense? Oh, of course it does. Sorry, I didn't get it. No, I know. And I guess I'm coming into the candor of the book, because you think about a woman mother who has a child with cancer, and she's a hero. I mean, you're with your son almost 24 hours a day. Begging the hour that you can go sit at your laptop or go sit out on your platform and look at that, I mean, it's exhausting. And it's innervating, and all of those things. And you dare to say that in the book, which again, I think you even say you don't want to be the hero of cancer mom or the victim mom, is that this is your job. But it's not any fun. And you make that very, and again, that's what's so nice about this book, is that there's so much candor in it that she's not saying, oh, I got up in the morning, it's such a pleasure to be able to obey my saying. It's like, would you stop crying for five minutes so I can not scream? And I guess, again, making those choices about what to share with the reader, we all want to be the likable narrator. We all want people to admire us and think well of us. The whole basis of my book and show is that I sucked. My mother wasn't the greatest mother in the world. I wasn't the greatest character in the world, but I tried and I did my best. And you were awesome. And there's nothing showing up, it's like, look at what a fantastic caregiver is, because she's complaining a lot of the time about everything that she's doing, but figuring out what you're gonna share with the reader so that it doesn't feel like, look at me, cancer mom, but also it's like, this is so hard. Yeah, it was, and yeah, I have to think about how to respond. I mean, I think that one thing that helps that voice and that portrayal of oneself is I try to err on the side of more scene than reflection in the book. I try to just be true to this is what happened and being very specific about sensory details and trying to have less mind chatter. I mean, it's definitely in there, my reflections. I think the fact that it was journal, those reflections really happen. Say probably most of the reflective stuff in the book is moment to moment, you know, stuff that I recorded as I was thinking, like I was thinking out loud. So it's like I didn't have space between now and here to kind of, you know, embellish that. Does that make any sense? So it's very authentic. Right, right, and I mean, sometimes when somebody's putting together a piece like this and you have that raw emotion on the page because you were journaling, I'm sure you probably were able to expunge a lot of the emotion when you were actually going back and looking at it and saying, okay, and one of the things that I was saying to my writing students is, you know, get whatever you have to get down on the page. The work starts when you start editing and you look at those lines and you say, is this for me or is this for the reader? And understanding, I had to write these lines maybe to get to this next line, but the reader doesn't need to see them. And I guess, again, what I'm feeling with this book is that there's, you have so much faith in your reader that you don't have to explain a lot by showing us through your actions. One of the most moving passages in the book is one of the most mundane, is when your mother-in-law makes the sun-dried bananas. And it's not the act. It's your devotion to depicting the act of what she does. It's a page and a half. You know, you get birth and it gets a sentence, but you give a page and a half to, you know, sun-drying bananas. Can you talk about the way that you use time to accelerate and slow down and bring the reader to a stasis? I think, you know, it's about those moments that happened that were so essential. Like that moment happened just before it's death, I think just a day or two before it was kind of his last favorite meal. So her making those was incredibly important to me. So for some reason, you know, just as a creative act, I just, I had to really watch every moment of her making that. And I think it was such, it was so much the way she expressed love for him. You know, she didn't talk much, but this woman who did this had so much love for my son. And I think that means so much to me and meant so much to me that I needed to follow her, to be with her as she was making that last meal for him, which I was too exhausted and overwhelmed with two other small children to even think about. You know, in the book I say, he'd been asking you for days, mom, I really want sun-dried bananas. I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. It's got the time. But, you know, our friend listened and she did it. Right, there's another passage that I just adored was when you were in Seattle, I believe, and you take a moment out on the balcony. It's right when you're deciding the chance to go home and there's a construction site across the way. Could you just describe that a little bit what that moment was like and what you were seeing? Because again, just to set it up is, you know, we're understanding the framework of cancer and the cancer cells. It's almost to me like you're looking into these cells across the way that are alive and drumming with you. So this was a scene when we first went back to Thailand after we had been told that, you know, he had relapsed and he wasn't going to make it. We went back to Thailand and then there is a slight chance after a bone marrow transplant of something called graft versus host disease, which is after you've had a transplant if there's sort of a battle inside and if the new marrow can win out over the original marrow, then there's a chance that the patient will survive. So the doctors actually have to let this illness kind of rage and it's dangerous because it can be fatal and then they swoop in at the last minute with steroids to stop the struggle. So he was in the midst of this. It was 21 days in the hospital in Bangkok with he couldn't eat anything because he had all this digestive stuff. So he just had, I don't know, whatever feeding tube and he was pretty miserable because he couldn't eat. He would groan in his sleep, sticky rice, sticky rice. So it was a rough 21 days in the hospital. But we did, we were at the 7th floor in Bangkok and we had this balcony. So a lot of times I would go out and at one point I was standing out there at night and in Bangkok it's a huge bustling city and it's hot, so things are exposed. There's a construction site across the way and I'm just sort of describing watching the construction workers moving and someone's downstairs in their kitchen and I can see the spoons stirring in the wok and what I got to by writing that passage which so many things, the reason I write is because I learned things as I write. But as I was writing about that as I just felt moved to write about that I realized by the end of writing it that there are just thousands and thousands of other lives around me that write and view all these apartments and all of those lives, people have suffering, people have tragedy, people have illness and death and it really gave me a sense of perspective. Like this is just one more little story in this big huge world. So again it's like it's not that unnatural to be going through something really difficult. It's what, it's the human condition and it wasn't especially difficult event but that's what happened in life. Well yes and I think that you make a good point there. I use and probably anybody that works in creative nonfiction uses a book called Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick and if anybody is interested in my more writing you definitely have to pick up this book because it's such an instructive way to enter your story and as I was thinking in terms of this book, in terms of situation and story basically the situation is a woman's, a family's child has cancer and is going to die and that's the situation. The story is what you do with that and the story is the journey that you take the reader on to tell us that story and that's where it's, you know what again when you're dealing with topics that are like this they automatically evoke an emotion. I mean you don't even have to, you don't have to say anything else. The boy, the six year old's child died of cancer. You already have this evocative reaction from a prospective reader but it's not enough that because that is just the situation then lots of children die of cancer and a lot of people die of other things and there are tragedies and there is suffering everywhere so it's taking it, it's taking it above the situation what the event, the launching event is and where the author takes that reader and it is really through the life and the death the birth, the life and the death which you cite at the end of the book which is so interesting because you are framing it up for everyone because it's inevitable, it's all out there for all of us that this is just the natural bookend. You know my child was born, he lived and now he's going to die and you make that such a matter of fact story that even someone as removed as a Westerner who doesn't share in the medical decisions that other people might have made it's like everything seemed inevitable in your story by the way that you were so natural about relaying it and that is to me the threat that you pulled out of this event in your life that makes it not about the event it makes it about humanity and did you feel that as you were trying to lift this story up or was it really I just have to talk about what happened with me and my son? I think it's a bit of a combination I think lifting it up and making it about humanity is what is art, right? So I think trying to take what I'd written and be sure that it was art, be sure that it wasn't just us like drag everybody down with a really sad story is something that's where craft comes in and that's where it's universal because you're talking about specific specific sensory scenes that everybody can relate to in some way so I guess yeah my answer is sort of like that it's a mix of those two things that art makes it accessible to everyone. Does that make any sense? Yes, sure and then I guess to piggyback on that because we're talking about the subject matter and the subject matter in the promotional materials that I read about the book would have been otherwise off-putting to the publishing point, to editors and maybe you can tell a little bit about the journey of getting this book published because that seemed very interesting too. So the book originally I went to Stone Co's wanting to have my thesis be the book and I said I want to finish this book and when it was time to have the thesis read I had my first reader and I had to choose a second reader and because I had kind of gotten behind the eyeball there weren't any second readers left at school so I had to go outside and I contacted an author that I had taken workshop from years before Ann Hood and you all might be familiar with her. She's a prolific writer and she had a daughter die at age six I believe suddenly and she wrote a grief memoir, a very short one called Comfort which is just a wonderful book. Anyway she was my second reader and when she read the thesis she said this has to be a book, I want this to be a book and for years she had planned to start an imprint specifically aimed at grief and loss because the publishing industry is notorious for saying no to grief stories. They say oh people don't want to be depressed and you know it's too sad and there are lots of theories about why that is but she said this is enough is enough I want to see this published so she went to Akashic Books and said I want to start an imprint that is all focused on grief and loss and I want Catherine's book to launch the imprint so that's how that started and now you know and I think it is so important you know a lot of us who have experienced loss have been you know well-meaning friends give us books about grief and healing but so often they're sort of like psychology how to step by step things and for most of us that I've talked to they just don't resonate you know what you need is you need real stories real emotions, real experiences of people where you can cry you know people often ask me well can you recommend books what did you read after Chanda and I can only say poetry you know there just was except for Anaheim's book Comfort that was really helpful but I don't know there's some you need literature I think in really hard times not how to but at least most of the some people. Before I respond to that I just want to look up to the audience to all aspiring writers don't get your hopes up don't think that you're gonna write a book and an author is gonna say I'm gonna start an imprint because I want to see that published that's pretty miraculous that is I mean and it's a testament to the beauty and the power of this book but what I wanted to say was I think that we're scared to talk about grief and mourning and again you know in our sanitized Western culture people want you to get over it people you know we want to look at everything with a timeline it's like okay this event happened here you go through that you go through that you go through that and then it's over on with life and as someone who lost her beloved dad of a heart attack boom gone when I was 26 he was 64 I was the first of my adult friends to lose a parent I sort of felt like I was the pathfinder you know when our our parents and family started going my friends looked to me because I was I had already started to forge that trail and I've always been looking for literature I the books that I the genre is called mourning memoir and there's a lot of it out there but it's also sometimes imbued with agenda you know somebody wants to settle the score or wants to show themselves in the martyred caregiver light and caregiving as anybody who's ever taken care of anyone knows is it is a very mixed emotional bag without one or the other emotion going that I remember hearing an interview with an author when I was taking care of my mother and he was talking about his elderly father and he said some days I hate him some days I love him I want him to live forever I want him to die tomorrow you know that somebody could say that out loud all of a sudden I was like you can say that you can say that and you say that it more or less in turn you know and for us those of us you know dealing with someone who's elderly and going to go the time is right to actually be able to say that out loud about a child and that was again something that just like sprang up out of your book was that a revelation for you that you could feel that way well no because you know it's so hard as you all know caregiving is so hard so I was so exhausted and also so hard to see that the patient is much pain you know to see my son suffering so much so my mind was always jumping back and forth but you know like I need to keep my heart you know no it's better if he dies he's so happy you know it's always trying to figure that out so I don't know I think I'm in writing book I just again you know starting out as a journal I didn't I didn't ever write any of it thinking anyone would ever read a word of it so it was easy to be really honest because I didn't plan on it ever being read but then you know later when it was time to publish I went ahead and shared that because that's that's I felt like it just showed how hard it was and I don't think anybody would you know think that I love my child less but then I felt like it might be right for him to die but it took you know it it's 14 took 12 years between his death until the book was written so there's no way that I probably could have felt comfortable saying that within the first 10 years you know it was 12 years of crying and and grieving really I mean it worked really hard grieving in those 12 years not just with the writing which which was hard and a way of grieving but also just just crying with with loved ones and patient friends and it was that grieving and that healing I think that allowed me to be comfortable saying I wanted my child to die because it was so hard because I didn't like to see him suffer right but you actually even confess I want this be over for me too which again you know that that's that's it's one thing to say I want somebody to go because I want to end their suffering it's another thing to confess I want I want this to be over for me too I can't do this anymore and I remember sitting in parking lots of nursing homes and hospitals and you know with my head on the steering wheels I can't do this anymore I can't do this anymore and we can and we do it doesn't mean that we want to we don't want that but saying those words out loud again just sprung up off the page to me as such an act of courage and candor because that's the reaching out it's not I'm sad because my son's dying that that takes no courage but saying I'm tired of doing this and I wanted to go for him but I wanted to go for me too and even if it was in a moment and then you say I mean because again later you say well I'm like glad he's gone no I mean you know would I rather have him still be here suffering just a little bit less yes but we don't get to make that choice so in stacking stacking the narrative that way I think it just again opened up so much humanity to anybody who would read that book and again probably why I didn't I didn't cry I just I maybe I felt your relief I mean and there's lots of tears in this book everybody and this is the beautiful thing is that in that culture from everything that I you know gleaned out of that book is emotions are everywhere when you have your your when you have Cody your first child how long do you get taken care of yeah like that good month or something right a whole month a whole month it's like oh she had a child you stop we'll do everything for a month that's happened to everybody out here just have children right that's how the world works over here but it's the same thing with with losing with the losing John everybody just came in and took over yeah that I mean I felt really lucky to be in a culture where those structures were so clearly in place you know what happens when someone dies the community stepped in and and totally took charge and I didn't have to do anything except be there to you know remember my son it's interesting though you know they're the structural things that are very helpful in grieving but then there is this other parts of it whether they were very much not helpful to me so I was told that it was the morning he died it was the first day of the funeral and I was sitting next to his body with his father and his brothers and and I keep crying you know tears keep falling and I had neighbor after relative after cousin tell me stop crying don't cry you know you're gonna upset him they're gonna upset the spirit you're gonna and and that was not helpful you know that for me as an American is the way I needed to grieve was not like that so it's you know it's a mixed it's not like everything was wonderful and fabulous about being in another culture but I did really appreciate those you know the parts of the structure can you talk a little bit about going up to the old pire I don't know you know what I feel like I want people to kind of I feel like people have to be sort of led into those especially like tender moments I mean I'm okay to talk about it but I feel like I would rob people of their getting there and I understand that well I have but then let's talk a little bit about your your solace through this I felt that there was you were so isolated and so alone in your I mean even within your marriage that it felt this felt like such a solo journey and yet there were these moments like you're calling your your Melissa or whoever it was and having you know these phone conversations and you use the expression of letting them take off your and hold your arm of courage can you talk a little bit about the moments of solace in this so one thing that I did when things were really hard because I you know we're up on this mountain top I didn't really have any close friends but I did have a cell phone and I could get reception if I hiked up to the top of this mountain near our cabin and so I would call a friend in Seattle and and she would I would cry and you know we take turns I would talk she's also a mom so I would talk and then she would talk but but yeah I described it in the book as a moment of being able to take off that armor of courage you know that when I was the mother I couldn't break down you know you know that's how it is when you're a caregiver when you're a parent you have to be the one who's staying strong and but in those moments I could really I could just stop and say the unspeakable you know like you know I'm afraid he's gonna die or these things that I couldn't say in my family and and it just was so helpful to have a mother another mother there who could listen to me and kind of be the one to to say I know you're strong and we can handle this but go ahead right now it's your time to be a mess so that was really helpful interesting in in mothering I was on my my non-sodding Sunday I actually listened to a public radio program called on being I don't know it's yes and it felt like all of these things that were happening in your world were now kind of swirling around me I just that the guests were a married couple Glennon Doyle and her wife Abby Womback who was an Olympian soccer player but they were talking about parenting and I just want I want to read this because it feels so much in in concert with everything that you talked about taking care she sits in this was Glennon we say all the time with our kids everything's a pattern it's first the pain then the waiting then the rising over and over and over again and then we skip the pain and when we skip the pain we just never get to this rising we got this parenting memo that everything would be okay if we just never let anything bad ever happen to our children ever as long as they gave us the babies we're like take her home and just never let a human being have it never let being human happen to this child don't let anyone ever frown at her don't let her lose anything don't let a drop of rain fall into her head and then everything will be fine it took me till my kids were 10 to figure out the parenting parenting memo was complete BS and that we don't let our kids fail we don't let our kids feel they don't learn to learn how to become human one of my greatest challenges in my personal life and in my parenting is to just look at my kids and say I'm not going to protect you from this I'm going to let you fail here I'm going to let you feel that yes life is that hard it's hard to be human and I'm not going to grab that from you and that's how I it was as though you were sitting there talking to me about getting John his death that you didn't take it away from him that you didn't protect him from it that you accompanied him with it but you let him have it and own it and and take it out in his all his pain and all his suffering you let him have that and to me that seems like the greatest leap of faith that a mother could possibly have I don't I don't I don't know how you were able morally to do that I mean I just kept saying she's so brave she's so brave did it feel brave at the time no I think though as a parent I always did agree with that I found really clear that you cannot we as all we want his parents is to protect our children that's the most important thing but we can't and it was always very clear to me that I couldn't protect them from bad things happening but I could be there for them to process when bad things happened or you know so I think that was just so ingrained in me by the time he was sick and dying was that I was only there you know to witness what he was going through and to allow him space to have feelings about it well I think again that's where the book uplifted for me then when we came to that moment where you let him go and with that you let us go that the reader go and it was it was hopeful as as heartbreaking as that moment was you gave us hope hope in saying this is part of nature this is part of what we're doing and we show the love by letting go I'd like to ask you about your experience sharing your story both with people directly and through the book I've spent a lot of time but always in the West photographing children who are about to die young children or have died or stillborn and what's striking is that these parents who are in utter grief become the consolers of them who of those who hear the news when I tell people my mother who's 92 was in the hospital last week and she's out now well that happens when I told them that my four-day old was in intensive care many years ago that can't be it's not possible I have no space to look to to accommodate that and when you said that you know all of us are going through tragedies the the severe illness or the death of a young child is a tragedy that at least in the in the West rises to be a different kind of an event an event that's that's never supposed to happen and we don't know how to make space for it I don't know what it was like for you thank you for that observation I just wanted to make a comment I've only read about quarter of the book so far but I'm not a person that feels like I'm very good with words but I can certainly resonate to people that write and in reading what I've read so far I do feel like I'm being carried along with that you know along with you the images the smells you know that what I'm hearing what I'm seeing my imagination I feel like I'm right in there and even though I know someone where the book is going I trust that I'll be able to take that journey because of what I've read so far it's going to be a difficult yet kind of journey thank you addresses it but how did his brothers go through this journey is it throughout the book that's a good question no the book really ends a hundred days after his death so I guess if you ask how they went through the journey of the book they were they were aware that he had an illness he could die from you know we tried not to candycoat that but we also wanted to you know we didn't want to put the idea into their heads that your brother's going to die so that was a really I think I do address that in the book that that was a really hard path for me to walk where where that line is and that's something that you know I talked to hospital oncologists and doctors and children's hospitals and and that's such a live issue you know people always want to know how do we how do we handle that I just want to ask if Buddhism has played a role in your life or in the story yeah that was that was a big gift when I first moved to Thailand right after college I started reading about ninety some percent of people in Thailand are Buddhists it's part of the school name in the government and so I started to study Buddhism and I and as soon as I started learning about this idea of mindfulness and trying to stay present and not getting lost in future thoughts and past I thought it sounded really intelligent so I started meditating I started a practice of meditation at that point so by the time Chan was ill I had really internalized to a very helpful degree the idea that we can't control the future that we have to the best way to live is to buy is to be as present in the moment as possible not that any good at that and at it but at least I knew I was supposed to do that and and I think that was a huge a huge help because because I so often when I was in the throws of fear and terror and worry I would just remind myself okay there's nothing I can there's no point in being lost here just just focus on the spoon in my hand and the soup in the bowl and my child over here needing me and just stay there so yeah that was a huge huge part of my journey thank you