David Kessler, a grief expert, shares how his mother's death and witnessing a 1973 mass shooting shaped his work. He argues grief isn't something you get over but learn to live with, and that engaging with it rather than avoiding it is key to healing.
Fear doesn't stop death from happening. Death is going to happen. Fear stops us from living this moment.
This subject is a heavy subject. I don't know, it kind of feels like laser tag. You have to be careful with how you approach it because everyone's grief is different.
Some people go through life taking a lot of things for granted and acting as if they're never going to die.
In our culture, we think not only did we lose the person, we lost our soul. Your soulmate isn't the one that leaves. Your soulmate's the one that stays.
How do you know if you're over it? It's not. I don't feel like it's black and white.
I think there isn't over. I think there's a learning to live with it.
Can you experience grief with people that have not yet passed?
Grief is always a change you didn't want. You may have been victimized, but you don't have to be a victim your whole life. And the one thing I want people to know is, of course you want to run from grief and pain, but what we run from pursues us. What's going on? Just say what's coming up.
It's just hard to talk about.
This subject is a heavy subject. There's a lot of, I think a lot of.
I don't know, it kind of feels like laser tag. You have to be careful with how you approach it because everyone's grief is different. But when I saw you speak about it and I saw your books, you're so eloquent and elegant with it. So I wanted to have you on. My first question to just set the stage is how you even get interested in this topic to begin with.
Yeah, it's so true. Like, no one in the third grade is like, oh, police. Oh, teacher. I want to be death. Grief. That's what I want to do, right? It's like it's not. And there's so much grief in the world, you know, different ways. Relationships, death, narcissist, There's a million things. So when I was a kid, I had a mother who I thought she was just ill. She went to a hospital in the big city a few hours away. We went there, my father and I, to a hotel across the way. While we're there, I remember one day in the hospital, I was able to get in my parents, as my mother's dying, had a monogamy discussion in front of me. By the way, never have a 13 year old present for a monogamy discussion. Not a good parenting technique. Nor is it a good relationship thing to deal with. So I had that weirdness. My family was dysfunctional. My mother would probably be considered narcissistic now. My father was an addict. So much dysfunction. And then she's sick. We're there. And one day at the hotel across the street, someone yells, fire. Everyone runs out. Fire department comes up, extends the ladders, and the next thing you know, shooting starts. What? It turns out it went on for, like, hours. It was one of the first mass shootings in the U.S. holy shit. So I see people being killed. I see people being killed. Police, you know, you know so much. Hotel guests. My father's desperately trying to get us back over to the hospital. We do. Couple days later, my mother dies. It's so much trauma. My father had to call up because he couldn't afford the funeral. I mean, it was just like a lot of stuff.
From an outside perspective, I have. I have questions. When your mother died from the mass shooting or from something else?
She had an illness across the street from where there was a mass shooting.
So.
So the mass shooting took place in a hotel that you were in a hotel that you were staying in that.
We were staying at.
So. So it was. So it was across the street from the hospital that your mother was dying. That. Geez, that's like a.
It's like a hamburger cacophony of, like, crap happening.
What year. What year was this?
73.
And then the monogamy conversation, when you said how hard that was, do you mean that they were talking about being with other people? What do you mean?
My mother, who's fragile and ill, said to my father, have you been with anyone?
And I saw him look down and said, no.
And you knew he was lying?
I knew he was lying.
Do you think that she was just so sick that she couldn't even comprehend that you were in the room and the ramification of that, or do you think it's the narcissist?
Couldn't tell you. Probably all of the above. All of the above. And I also have, like, you know, they would always fight, and when they fought, every argument, a suitcase got opened. Like, so it was like I came into my teenage years, I just thought, I am so screwed up and so damaged. And I just thought, well, this is forever. This is like I was just going to be screwed up. And then I went to community college and there was two classes, and they're like, here's the easy classes. Human Sexuality and death and dying. And then, like, Human sexuality was full, and I'm like, I can take death and dying. And like all of a sudden there was a language for what I had gone through. There were words for it. There was Kubler Ross with the stages. And I'm like, oh, oh, maybe I can figure this out.
So you were able to sort of control what had happened to you in a way where you like, knowledge is power.
Yes. I'm like, not. And But I thought I was the only one. I mean, I remember trying to talk to someone once in a stairwell of the hospital about, you know, this is really hard. I remember them saying to me, stay strong and stay strong, especially to a guy. But I think to anyone sort of means stuff your feelings and take care of everyone else. So I didn't know what to do with my feelings. I didn't know how to process any of this.
When you're that.
