Jayson Greene and David Kessler on loss of a child

Hi, everyone. Just coming on tonight. I'll give people time to find us.

Finding this is always the trick on these.

It's a very strange thing that if you come on too early, it doesn't work. Good. I see us live. I have Jason Green here with me. Hey, Jason. Good to see you.

Hi, Dave. It's good to see you.

We're going to just give people time to find their way on.

When you come on, say hello. So we'll know.

We'Re not just talking to ourselves, which wouldn't be a bad thing. But I'll give everyone a moment, a few moments, actually, to come on.

We're going to have an important discussion tonight.

Jason, you're in New York, and you're gone. Well, hopefully Jason will be back.

Jason was here.

I look forward to him joining us in a moment.

Welcome, welcome. And there you are again.

You have an echo, Jason. So maybe log out and re. Log back in.

That's the thing about technology, and we're all just figuring it out these days. It's pretty crazy, but it's giving everyone a chance to find their way in.

All right. Hi, everyone. Jason will be back on with us in a moment.

And here he comes. Let's check this out.

Hang on. You're coming on. And there you are.

Hi. I don't know what happened. I'm so sorry. I just.

We were joking about technology. These days. We're all figuring it out.

Figuring it out. Yeah.

It actually makes it interesting, Jason.

Well, I guess it. Yes.

There's these awkward moments of, like, giving people a chance to sign on, and you filled that moment beautifully.

Oh, good, good. I'm glad I could.

It's a little like romper room here. I don't know if you're even old enough to know about romper room, but it was a teacher years ago who used to say hello to everyone through the tv, so. So that's kind of what I do. Mimsy's here from California. Daniel's from Illinois. Hey. Shirley from Pennsylvania. Gina's here. Laura. Hey. Janice is here from Vegas.

Deborah from Massachusetts. Robin from New York.

All right.

Sherry says. Good evening, Jason and David. Betty have listened to your audiobook. She says she loved it. Jody's here. Beth is here. Beth is going to be on with us in a few days. Ronald's here.

Ronald says, hey, David. You and Jason both had the book of our month. Book of the month for our. The compassionate friends grief group club. All right.

That's wonderful.

It's the club no one wants to be in. And yet we managed to get in it. Jason.

Yeah, yeah.

Debbie is from Cincinnati. Patricia from North Carolina. Sherry from Iowa. All right. Jamie's from Connecticut. Julie's from Ohio. Carla's from Georgia. Sharon, Florida. Kenny, Puerto Rico. Oh, and I lost him again. Hopefully he'll be coming back. Colleen from New York. Oh, it was Ms. Janine, and she was looking in a magic mirror.

All right.

And now Jason's just playing with us. Now you're just. You're just having fun, Jason.

Yeah, I wish I was having fun.

You know, if you disappear, you just come back.

I'll come right back. Yes. My computer kicked me off for reasons I don't understand. It just disappeared. But if it happens again.

I'll come right back.

All right. Jane's from New Hampshire. Linda's from Culver City. Mary from New York. Paul says hello to both of us. Sharon from Midland, Texas. Sherry, Tennessee. Betsy, Tallahassee. Sheila's from Canada. Well, welcome, everyone. I'm so glad you're all here.

Tonight's going to be a powerful evening. One of the things that I always like to do. By the way, if this is your first time watching one of these, I do one of these every night with someone different. And Jason is incredible that he's volunteering his time to be on here. Every evening, someone comes on to sort of share their story, their take or a talent they might bring to us. And like, for instance, we had Andrea Kagan on, who is an editor and a writer and edited some of my books. And she talked about journaling and dealing with grief. So every night we do this with someone, usually around 5 or 6pm Pacific time. And then.

At 1pm Every day, Pacific time, 4pm Eastern, I come on with a new topic. This has all started because we want to make sure with COVID 19, there's no grief groups. You have to physically distance. And it broke my heart and I think so many people's hearts who are here and to help that people were just alone during all this. So that's why we're all here. I wanted to just start off with, we're also here because our loved one has died. So I like to just take a moment just of silence to send them love because that's why we're here. And I don't believe when they die, we quit loving them. So if you'd all join me in just a moment of sending those who have died our love.

Thank you. I appreciate you doing that with me. So.

Jason and I. Oh, and Diane Gray's on. Our buddy Diane Gray is Going to be on. She's going to be on, I think Saturday night. I think that's right. So.

I'm going to let you sort of tell your story and how our lives became interwove and what brought you here.

Sure, sure.

So.

My daughter, Greta, you can see her behind me. This oil painting was made by a friend.

She died when she was two years old. A brick fell from an eight story windowsill in Manhattan and struck her in the head and killed her. My wife Stacy and I donated her organs.

And then had to figure out what that accident and our child's death meant for us. So that was how I met you, David. We came to a grief group that you hosted.

In 2015, and we had such a profound, transformative experience six months after Greta passed that it sort of set us on our path towards.

A journey. I wouldn't say that, you know, towards healing, because I don't think you arrive at a finished point. But we began to heal after that. And so you and I have been intertwined more or less ever since, in one way or another.

Yeah. It was very interesting that.

You and your wife Stacy had come to a retreat and it was powerful. The way you two showed up was powerful.

And it was so powerful that when I was writing Finding Meaning, I'm like, I got to put their story in, you know, and Did I call you first or. You called me first? I think I called you. Or did you call me first? I forgot.

Well, it depends on which part of the story you're you're thinking of. So when I was writing a book and I reached out to you out of the blue just@your grief.com email, and I didn't really expect. Not because I didn't think you would, but because I assumed you got so many emails that you wouldn't even see mine. So I wrote you this note basically saying, do you remember me? You know, we were at your November workshop. Even though you did them, you know, you did so many. And I'm writing this book, I think, about. About our daughter and our loss, and we want to include you. And you wrote right back.

You wrote right back in the. In that conversation. I said I was going to ask you the same thing. I want to include you in mine.

Yeah. And so ever since then. Yeah. So it's. It's this poignant and sad, beautiful thing that we each, you know, you're in my book about my child's loss and Stacy and I and Greta are in yours.

And I remember and I'm just going from the words.

First of all, you're a writer to begin with.

I have been a writer for. Yeah, a number of years.

So you. Your.

Your telling of your story.

Of what happened is probably as powerful as any story I've read. That's beautiful there with you.

It's beautiful to say thank you.

And you're also gifted in a way. I'm not that you're gifted. And in writing, your humor comes through. I mean, I can try to do it, and usually I have to, like, have help, like funny, but it's not sounding right. And, you know, when you're. You're noticing of the absurd, the funny, the crazy.

In the midst of death and grief was really remarkable.

It's funny because I don't think we thought of things as funny while they were happening, necessarily, but it was in the work of looking back at them. When I was sort of reflecting because I decided to write and when I started writing and I was thinking about these things, then it sort of came to me that, oh, gosh, some of this is weirdly funny and not anything that. That sounds gruesome. Nothing that happens.

No, there's nothing disrespectful ever that you've.

Just. In the sense that we were so uncomfortable. And anytime you're in a new circumstance, you're trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. You're trying to figure out what feels right, what doesn't feel right. You feel awkward. There's always the opportunity for something sort of funny to happen because you might expect there to be one outcome and there's another. And that's, you know, that's so. We had so many moments like that. And when I was writing, I remembered them. How awkward Stacy and I felt in the back of your grief group. So scared that somebody. It was like the kids that didn't want to get called on. We were so scared that we. We were going to say or do something wrong, as if there was a wrong thing to do. Yeah. You know, being forced to. To do a bonding exercise with a total stranger and having to put their hands over mine and feeling like, what am I going to do with this person?

That's. That's Paul Denison's grief yoga, which is like. He's. He's like, I've got to rework that now in the age of.

Corona, that, you know, we're not touching each other like we used to.

Not at the moment. Yeah. But yes. So I think that some of that stuff became that way only in revisiting. And I think that it Helped me to process my story and to process the meaning of our daughter's death a little.

And also.

There is a randomness to your circumstances that's just horrific. You know, it wasn't that someone kicked a brick off a ledge. A brick, randomly, correct me if I'm wrong, got dislodged, just fell.

Yeah, it was improperly maintained building, but yeah, they were just underneath it. It was Greta and my mother in law, so Stacy's mother, who was watching her at the time. And they were just walking around the corner on a beautiful day. They'd had a sleepover and they were sitting in a bench because they often sat on this bench to watch the world go by. And the brick just fell and hit my daughter in the head. And it is an incredibly random.

Awful, egregious sort of thing. And.

Out of all the circumstances to be trying to make sense of, those were challenging ones because there didn't seem to be any meaning to it at all.

But I've also, you know, I've come to sort of, from speaking to other people who've lost children in particular, or anyone who's lost a loved one to an unexpected or violent death, there is no death that doesn't feel random or sudden in those circumstances.

And our circumstances might be on the outside horrific and tragic in a specific way, but everyone's loss of their child or their spouse or parents is horrific and tragic, particularly when there is this abrupt, like, end, this fissure, this just rip, you know, in your life.

And so I think everyone struggles with that. I mean, I think that that's part of what the grief process is, is that you're groping for meaning in this absence where there was somebody, there's suddenly nobody and only your memories. And that there's no good way to be left with grief. There's no good way to be left with grief. Nobody's lucky with their grief. Nobody's lucky and lost. Nobody has it better than anybody else. And I've come to really understand that as I spoke to the grieving people who have either been in grief groups with Stacy and I, or people we've come to know since I wrote the book.

Everyone's loss is horrific, you know, in a way.

So one of the things that I think about when I think about your journey with Stacy after Greta's death is.

You too struck me as active.

Were actively seeking. I don't know if the word is healing, but you were actively seeking, you were active. Whatever you could do, you were going to look under that rock to find Whatever was there to be found. I don't even know if you thought that way or were aware of it, but you weren't. You weren't, like.

Waiting to see if something's going to happen in your grief. You were definitely. You had momentum. Did you. Were you aware of that?

Was I aware that? Were we aware that we had momentum? I think we had. We had an awareness of that. We felt this driving need to go make sense of it. It felt more just like this urgent drive that we didn't probably stop to notice at the time.

I think I'm trying to explain this. In other times, I think I sort of thought about it, like when a car falls on your leg, you lift it really quickly. You don't really stop to observe that you. That you are. That you're acting. I think we just felt a similar sort of instinctive, we have to do something. That doesn't mean that we, like, sprung into action right away. I mean, we were aimless and listless for plenty of time. But I do think that we had a very strong need to go do something. And, yes, I guess in that sense we were. I don't think we had words for it, really. I don't think we had the vocabulary or the language that time and processing gives me to use now. But, yeah, we said we gotta do something. We absolutely did. And some people are inherently that way when it comes to grief. They feel the need to seize and do and reach out. And some people are not that way in grief. They are more reflective or internal or withdrawn. I mean, it is so unique. And whenever I talk publicly in any capacity about grief, I try to say something like that, because I don't want anyone to think that the person that they're hearing from has the answer to their grief or has a formula that they haven't followed yet to find their way through. You know, I mean, I can only say, this is how my wife and I found our way through. And maybe something that you hear from somebody else resonates. I know that talking to other people at your workshop and hearing their stories resonated with us, and it did help us find our way through for sure.

Right?

It's okay to do this, David, but I'm going to ask you. I see people are asking questions on this site. Is there a time in our presentation or where.

Okay, because everyone will handle all that for you.

I will do the scrolling, unless you're, like, wanting to dive in. But, no, I just saw a question.

In particular about Stacy's mother. And so I would like to circle back to that if some. I didn't want it to go by.

Or doesn't have to be.

So, you know, it's interesting. I just thought about that only because.

In trauma we've seen in post traumatic situations that sometimes doing something active does become very helpful.

Yeah.

And you know, timing is our own on this.

Yeah.

I think no matter what we're talking about it, our timing is our own. You know, I, I've just noticed even in the smallest world of being trapped in a house, you know, some people are like ready to go, they're going to be productive. And others are like, I am just trapped and I can't move for at least a week till I, you know, we will approach life differently. So of course we're going to approach grief differently.

Well, it's so weird to be looking at life through a glass darkly on a computer screens now because everything looks unattainable to you when you are streaming it on your computer in the dark. And I think that's so true of, it's true of all social media. And I worry about the danger of that happening if people are grieving alone in their homes and the only way that they can really reach out to people like you and to others is through the computer. Things can seem like they're not real or remote.

And you can feel like, well, I could never possibly feel the way this person feels. And so that's an important thing. I think what you said, that grief has to be witnessed is something that I've never forgotten. And I always carry that around with me. And I forget that too, own grief. You know, I, even when I'm talking about it, sometimes I feel like I forget in the moment that what I'm talking about is my own grief. And so I just really feel like the only thing that I hope people take away from a grief group is something that they know resonates with them because something somebody might say, something that makes no sense to you at all. And I think that's important to honor. Right. Like, I would never go to a grief group six months after. I would never do this. And that's important knowledge. That's you figuring out what you need to do to make your own way through. You know, And I just see people get so confused about what they should be doing. Should I be doing this? And it's so bad now because we're all on our own. We don't have a metric. Should I be. Should I be trying to walk five miles a day with my face mask on? So I stay active. You know, am I bad for staying indoors? Am I not doing this right? And those questions just torture people. I think they're awful. And they're very. They're very normal ones in grief.

Yeah. We are a very grief illiterate society. And we just want to do it right.

You want to do it right.

And it's hard to realize there is no right. There's only your right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you can get messages from the world telling you you're kind of doing it wrong or too much or not enough too.

So it's interesting to see Diane Gray on who's going to be speaking here on Saturday night. You know, Diane called me after my son died and introduced the concept. I'll talk about it more with her. I don't want to go into it with you. But introduced the concept about I might have a decision to make.

About whether I was going to live again. And she talked to me about that in my darkness.

Did you have to make a decision to live again? Was that a decision for you? Was it a conversation? Was it in your mind?

Oh, yeah. Oh, God, yeah.

I mean.

When I was at Greta's bedside, I was sitting on the floor in the hospital, and my mother was there. She had flown in, and she's behind me. And all I kept saying was, why can't I just die? Why can't I just die? I kept saying it over and over again. And I think that I absolutely felt like there was a very real choice I had to make about my life, whether or not I wanted it to continue. And I want to be very careful with my words here because this can be triggering for people. But I do think that there is a yearning so intense when you lose a loved one that it can make you feel like the place that they are, which is oblivion, is where you need to go. And I felt that when Greta died, I didn't have a daughter here anymore. Where was she? And I felt like where she was is where I needed to go. And I think it took some time for me to realize that that was the root of my feeling about, you know, because I. But, you know, every few weeks I would feel it again. My life has no meaning anymore. I don't know what to do. I mean, those are very normal feeling in grief. And I think that.

I had to make the decision multiple times, not once. I had to make the decision so many different times and at so many different points. It was like re upping a little contract to keep living and to decide to live again for Something to have a meaning. My own life.

It was not a neat decision. Might be in a book or a movie where you see someone cry and there's music playing in the movie, and then one day they look up, right? And then they wanted to look up and they're not crying anymore and the music gets happy and they walk out again. Like that's how people are taught grief looks and feels. You know, you take some time off from work and you go back out into the world, but you might have to decide over and over and over and over again. I'm still deciding at some points. There are dark moments when I still have to re up my contract with my decision to live and keep living and find a reason to live. And I don't mean that in the way that I'm not choosing. I don't. Those are not the same as having, say, a suicidal ideation, but it is. It is a way to talk about meaning in your life. And I think that anyone in grief should not be afraid of those feelings to the point where they think they're wrong or that there's something wrong with them to have them.

You're not broken, I don't think if that's the way you feel or you are, but in a way that's universal and healthy. This is the way that grief breaks you. It breaks you open, you know. And so, yeah, I absolutely had to decide that I was going to find a new reason to live.

And you're one of the things that comes up so much in this group is guilt.

Guilt.

And especially for your mother in law who was with her.

Yes.

Can you walk us through sort of her journey?

Yes, and I'm glad you mentioned Susan. Susan is such an integral part of our lives and she lives here in Brooklyn. When Greta died, she lived in the Upper west side.

And.

She had already struggled a little bit with some slight agoraphobic tendencies. And then this traumatic thing happened that could never have been accounted for, that you could never in a million years prepare yourself for.

She was caring for, you know, her daughter's child, her granddaughter, you know, and.

Then she had. Then she. I mean, I still Actually, David, I still have a hard time saying this because it's so. It's still so unspeakable to me, Greta's father. It's still so unspeakable to me to think what Susan had to live through. So unspeakable that she was the one who was there. She has that image in her mind and she'll. And she has to live with that image in her mind for the rest of the. Of her life, I don't have that. And if I can be grateful for anything, I am grateful for that. I'm aware that I don't have that. Her journey has been one that I will never. Because.

I think you and I were talking about this earlier, where when someone you love dies in the family, you share something so visceral in common. You have lost the same person. She lost her granddaughter. We lost our daughter. Both of those people were Greta.

We all missed the same person, and yet our own journeys were so different.

And grief journeys are so private and so different. And.

I watched Susan kind of crawl back slowly from this place of thinking that. I mean, in the same moment that I was saying on the hospital floor.

Why can't I just die? Susan was saying, why couldn't it have been me?

So we talk about guilt.

Even though she did nothing wrong, could never have prevented it.

Right.

Just this unfairness that descended from the sky to change our lives forever. Still felt such profound guilt.

And, I mean, I watched her work through it in stages. And to be honest with you, I don't really know what she thinks or feels about some of that, because she has, you know, But I know that she has taken herself through so many different modalities of therapy in order to process the trauma, like the actual raw trauma of the moment.

I know that she used EMDR therapy to help. She hated it, but I think it provided her with some useful. Because it was so traumatizing. But it did help.

And, you know, I mean, I think the best thing I can say to speak to what that journey looked like is to point to where we have come.

Despite the fact that we had this trauma in our family centered around our. Our child.

Before you go there, I just want to. Can I just go to one other thing real quick?

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Yeah. I just want to. There's one thing I want to. I hate to use this language. I want to unpack with you, Jason, real quick.

I would love that. Yeah.

The thing that you say about we all do grief differently. Can you speak a little bit, too? But if we share the same child, if we both love Greta, if all three of us, Grandma, mom, and dad, love Greta.

We'Re going to, of course, grieve the same way. And people are. Did you have that knowledge that you would do it differently, or was that a surprise? Because that's really.

So devastating for people to look at their husband, wife, parent, and go, why aren't you doing that? The Way, doing it.

Right.

It's a test of a relationship for certain. I mean, you asked me was I aware of that. I think I became aware of that pretty clearly. And I think it. I just sort of intuited that it would be different because we're different people, we have different tendencies. I talk a little bit about, like, people. You know, people talk a lot about love. Languages. Right. And that's it. That's. That's a phrase you hear a lot when people are talking about their relationships. You know, this person has a different love language, which means that they. They don't. Maybe they might not use the same words or the same gestures.

To show me that they love me that I would use. And I think grief is just love, you know, when the person that you love is no longer there, but it's just love. And so, of course, you grieve in different ways. And I think that I took away that understanding without knowing what it would look like. I didn't really know what my wife's grief would look like, but I think I had an inkling that it probably wouldn't be like mine because, I mean, I talk more about my feelings more openly because that's sort of how I just am. Whereas Stacy keeps them closer to her vest. And so I assumed that that would be the case. But, yeah, that doesn't mean it wasn't hard.

Right. And, you know, we all show up in this, in character. And the one thing I think about, and it's a bit of a generational thing, too, I know with my parents generation, their identity around relationships was if you had a good relationship, you were so much alike. Right. I think as the relationships have evolved, we realize, oh, well, maybe we don't have to be carbon copies of one another.

That's interesting.

And I noticed in your relationship with Stacy, literally, in the little time I had with you, you were very. You were so aware of, like. And it comes through in the book about Stacy has this different style than me. There's a sense of we're going to be carbon copies of one another here.

Right. I mean, and I think that that took time to figure out, too, though. But, I mean, I do think that it's. It's so hard, though, when someone doesn't process things the way you do. It's hard. I mean, it's hard. You're trying to decide what to eat for dinner, let alone if you're mourning a tragic loss. I mean, it's hard when you are living with someone who doesn't process reality the way that you process reality. It's confusing. And this is why we fight, you know, because why don't you understand? And when you apply that to something as profound as loss, I mean, in a way, I think that Stacy and I were gentler with each other because we knew we were in such pain, and it helped us make room for each other's differences where we might have fought before about whatever the question was, but we knew that we were both in such deep loss that I think that we just sort of did this. You know, I understand that what you're feeling is not what I'm feeling, and I'm going to give you space, you know, but some people really don't, you know, And I also think we were lucky in that our needs weren't so far apart.

That we were against each other, because I do think some people have needs and grief that are. That can be oppositional in some ways, and that requires, you know, a counselor or someone to help work through it.

Well, and a few things I've learned about that, that, you know, people always ask, does a child dying, you know, necessarily result in divorce? And I always say, I don't know about that, but I think judgment of grief can result in divorce. That if we judge the way there's grieve. And, you know, whenever I. And I don't know if I did this with you and Stacy, I try to say, you've got to create a separate community because you're two empty people, just flat out empty.

Sometimes looking to the other to fill the other one's void and pain and loss. And the person who lost, who, the child died, also, your partner is literally the one person who's so in pain that there's no way they can feel you.

Yeah.

Yet there's something about. Well, we've been looking to each other in a relationship. You have a bad day, I have a good day. It all works out, doesn't it? And then this comes along. It's like, no, this is. This is pretty devastating here.

Yeah. Yeah.

So.

Continue on with your story, and I want to hear more how life has evolved for you and Stacy. Well.

I mean, we saw you six months after, as I said, and that was sort of our first decision to do something jointly. I had a. I was seeing a therapist, and Stacy was seeing, like, a sort of a healer, a body worker to help process her trauma. And for me, I was working with a. A therapist who already was sort of versed in grief and trauma, but we weren't doing anything together.

And.

Then I think we Made the decision at a certain point that we were ready to do something as a couple.

But I think we waited. I think there was a period where we were sort of. We weren't ready. It was too raw. So that's when we came to see you and sort of started to process. And that's where we started to find some of the things, some of the beliefs that we did share. And we started to create a sort of shared language of what Greta's loss meant for us. And I think if I had to pinpoint what going to CU helped us begin to do, I think it was that.

And we started thinking through what Greta's loss meant to both of us as a couple. And that's when we started settling on these ideas that resonated. And one of those ideas was that.

We had been sort of treated with such compassion and care and empathy by so many because our story was public and because Greta's death was reported on in the New York Times. And it was so random that sometimes it was as if no one else had ever grieved around us the way people talked about us or treated us, as if we were sort of something had happened to us that would never happen to anyone ever. But we both found something so resonant in realizing that all grief is the same and in meeting other people who had, you know, were grieving brothers and sisters and from all sorts of circumstances. I mean, I'm seeing people share their stories with us here even, and it made us feel less alone. And so I think we both gravitated towards this idea that there is a community of people who have suffered, and that suffering is not new, suffering is not unique. And our suffering wasn't new or unique. It was ours. And so it was important to us, but it wasn't a new sensation in the world. And it's so funny. I think we both decided that we. That we both felt that grief was this powerful, universal feeling that flows through all of us. And it can feel so powerful and beautiful when you are connected.

And I think I should be careful when I say all grief is the same. I don't mean all grief is also very unique. I mean, there's a universality to the feeling of grief. There's something common to everyone's grief, even if their circumstances are different or what they're mourning is different. And tapping into that energy for us reminded us that it's such a sad irony. When you are in grief, you are experiencing one of the oldest, most primal, universal human emotions, and you never feel more alone. Than when you are in deep grief. You never feel more alone, and you never are more convinced in your life that no one could possibly understand what you feel.

And so I think that that started to unlock that for us. This idea that everyone suffers and everyone has pain and grief.

You know, that's so important because the truth is, while we all grieve, our pain is so unique because our relationships were so unique. Yeah. And. And the thing is, you know, people talk about, well, only these people will know, and only those people know, and only parents know this and only siblings know that. And there's. There's certainly similarities.

Yeah.

In losses that, you know, I don't know what it's like.

To have a twin die. I don't. No.

Right.

I don't have a twin, so I'm never going to know that. But even within our similar situation, I mean, we're both writers, we're both fathers, we've both had a child die. I am never going to know what it's like for Greta to die.

Right.

You're never going to know what it's like for David to die. My son. So it's all universal and different all at the same time.

Yes, exactly. Thank you for clarifying that. That's well put.

So.

You two made another big decision as time went on.

Well.

Yes, we did.

We decided that just because Greta was gone.

We didn't want to stop being parents. We wanted to raise a child. We were always going to be parents in the sense that we would always be Greta's parents, but it didn't take away our desire to raise a child. And so we thought a lot about it, particularly because we had lost our child in such a violent way. And I think we were both mindful of this sort of idea that whatever we did next, we would never want to decide to have a child because we felt we needed to fill. We couldn't fill the whole of our lives without that child, and that.

We would be then contingent on that child surviving and living for us to have meaning in our lives. We didn't want to place a burden on someone we, you know, had, someone we hadn't even met. This is just us talking through the idea on a hypothetical child. We don't want to place the burden of our hopes and dreams and, you know, on them and the burden of our trauma and grief. So we started talking about it, and I think we both sort of realized that.

We didn't want to replace Greta. We just. We, you know, and so we started trying. And not long after we. We Met you, actually, not. Not that long. Stacy was pregnant again.

And then we sort of were in this position where we knew we were going to have a child. And we felt like we had all this grief work to do so that we could feel like when our child was born.

We had cleared as much space on ourselves as we could to make room both to honor Greta and to keep space for Greta and our family, but to make room for this new person to be who this new person was going to be.

And that was kind of the journey of the next nine months of. Of our lives.

And, I mean, I can talk about that some more if you want, but that was, you know.

Well, one of the things.

That you shared. Your. Your Charles, a boy.

His name is Harrison.

Harrison. One of the things that you shared with me, I hope it's all right to say this, is that it was so poignant. You said you didn't want the brick to hit him. Right. You know, you didn't want him to just be in a shadow.

I didn't want him to live in a shadow. I definitely remember saying that a lot.

Wanted him to be able to have his own identity and know Greta, but not it being something that overtakes his identity, which I thought was just quite extraordinary.

I didn't want him to grow up haunted by a person he never knew. I didn't want him to live in a grief haunted reality that my daughter didn't grow up in. I wanted to be able to give him the same sort of open heart that I gave to Greta. Otherwise, I didn't think we were ready to welcome another child into the world. It wouldn't have been fair to that child.

Right?

Yeah.

And are you up for taking some questions from folks?

I love that.

By the way, one of the things we're seeing that's just amazing about this group is while you and I are talking, they're all talking to each other and supporting one another.

I've seen that.

It's beautiful. That's what's just lovely here.

So if anyone has any questions for Jason here, I'm sure he would be open to addressing them. And you, if you type them earlier, please maybe retype it again or let us know.

Leslie says, I feel connected to both of you. Shannon says, beautifully powerful. Patricia says, that is powerful. Make room.

Jamie says, love that Jason and Stacy.

See, yeah, people just are talking about, you know, they love what you've said and are really connecting to it.

Earlier about EMDR therapy, I wouldn't want someone said, what is MDR therapy? Looks like, somebody answered that for the emdr. And I've seen a lot of people say how helpful that's been to them. I saw someone ask earlier about how Susan's doing with her agoraphobia. And I didn't want that to go by because I'm very sensitive to the idea that, you know, like, we are. You know, Stacy and I have gotten so much love and attention. And, you know, Susan was the one who, again, was there, and she's had.

So much work she's had to do on herself and so. Well, the question was, how is she doing with her agoraphobia? And that she had to leave her Upper west side apartment. And that the person said that they wept when they read that Susan had to leave her beloved Upper west side apartment to move to Brooklyn to be closer to Harrison. And that is beautiful thing. First of all, thank you to the person who said that for thinking of Susan and for connecting so powerfully to her story and to us.

And I think it was bittersweet when Susan left her apartment, but I don't think that.

It was a heartbreaking decision at the time. There was so many factors in it, including the fact that she lived around the corner from the building where the accident occurred. And so I think that she needed to move away from that space as much as she needed to move closer to us. Those two things were tightly bound up in each other. It was not easy for her to relocate. And, I mean, the question of how her agoraphobia is doing at the moment is a sadly ironic one, because the answer right now is not good, because everyone is indoors. But before the pandemic and before all this happened, Susan was watching Harrison twice a day. And I'll tell a quick story, if you don't mind.

On the anniversary of Greta's death this past May. The accident was on May 17, 2015, and she was pronounced brain dead on the 18th.

On the 17th of May of this past year.

It was the day of the week when I normally brought Harrison over to Susan, and I waited for her to ask me if she didn't want him to bring him over because it was such a tough day. And she said, please do. So I brought him over, and they spent the whole day together. And Susan chose that day on purpose to walk farther outside with Harrison than she ever had before.

Wow. So pretty courageous. Pretty courageous.

A lot about her.

And early on, there were some fears, almost like of her attaching to another grandchild, if I remember.

Like, almost like the guilt.

Yeah. I think in the very Beginning. She was. I mean, there were so many ghosts, I think, in the beginning for her.

Where she. She kind of stayed at the edges for a while, and we waited for her to be ready. I think we just knew that this was a tough, complicated process. There's all these dark emotions tangled up with the beautiful ones, and it was going to take some time for them to separate out.

I saw someone ask, I hope you don't mind, David, would you like to be the one who picks these, or can I?

You are welcome. This is. It's completely organic, Jason, whatever you want to do. There's one I want to ask, too, but go ahead. It might be the same one.

Someone just said something like, can you speak to how you dealt with feeling calm when Harrison was born? Anniversaries are always difficult, so wondering if your anxiety or emotions were amplified as Harrison's reached Greta's age, if he has. So, first of all, yes, Harrison is older than Greta ever was. Harrison's three and a half now. And Greta died when she was 2 years and 1 month old.

I think that I dealt with being caught. Well, it's an interesting question. I'm not sure if that refers to the fact that I mentioned being in shock for part of Harrison's birth, because I was. I think I was in shock. There was a moment when the hospital. It all mixed up both with Greta's birth and then also with her death, frankly, because there was a rush in a hospital there. And so I kind of checked out of the scene. In a word, I remember feeling like I was 40 miles away, even as I was helping get Stacy onto the bed.

And I think that I dealt with that by choosing. I mean, there was very little time. It's sort of an emergency situation. But I had a moment where I was like, I feel broken by the fact that I'm not present with my son's birth right now. And then I said, no, no, Jason, you're allowed to have a moment of shock considering what you've been through. You've been traumatized. You've all been traumatized. Nothing about this is going to be neat or pretty, and that is okay. And I gave myself permission, and I texted a friend, stacy's in labor. I'm in shock. That was what I told him. And I think that that was sort of how I just embraced the fact that this was not going to be straightforward. And I didn't blame myself, you know, for feeling far away. I don't know if that's what the person meant by calm.

And Diane and A couple other people wrote this. It kind of follows up to what you're saying.

Were you worried? Are you worried about something bad happening to Harrison? Are you A catastrophizer is what someone else writes because, well, for after a catastrophe, to become a catastrophizer.

God, that's a great term. I don't think I really have heard it, but I've never thought about how aptly it applies to. To this sort of situation. I think I worried very much that I was going to be a catastrophizer. I did not know the answer. And when Harrison was little, you know, he was a normal child. He did normal child things, you know, and we had. We had opportunities to discover just how we reacted when something happened, you know? And in the beginning, I think the first time Harrison had a fever, we were not okay. We were not normal. And that was also. We had to do a similar exercise that I described when Stacy was in labor. We are not the same parents. We were. That doesn't mean we're worse parents. That was a tough one for me personally. I had to sort of separate out the idea that I was different from this judgment that I would put on it, that I was worse somehow, because I was more worried. The first time my son got a fever. But I think through repeated exposure to events, the next time he had a fever, and he had a lot of fevers. It was almost as if he was given to us with, like, an extra set of injuries and maladies so we'd have more practice, you know.

I learned to feel the trigger of trauma, to acknowledge that it was a trauma trigger and to sort of step over it. It was like a tripwire that went off, and then I kept moving, and I allowed myself to feel all the feelings. There's that spike in your body when you are re traumatized. You feel shaky, you feel clammy. You might feel far away. And I felt like after the first couple times that happened, I was able to recognize that sensation calmly and step over it. And then I was allowed to not feel that way as much anymore. So he felt on the stairs, you know, when he was, like eight or nine months old. It was like the day our gate for the stairs shipped. It was, you know, one day too late, and that was horrible. And so I had these moments where I was like, am I a catastrophizer? And I learned that my body was learning slowly to not be.

And you don't know. It's the thing. I feel like raising a child and dealing with trauma. There's like, there's a reason people use this metaphor of going into war. You don't know how you're going to react until the battle starts. Until you're in the moment. You just don't know. You can spend so much time. And I had so much anxiety beforehand about how I might respond.

And I think that anxiety might have been useless because I'm not sure that it helped me prepare for anything. And when the moment happened, I found myself in the moment. There was no longer anything abstract to fear. I just had a child with a bloody lip or whatever it was that needed attention. And so I think that I discovered that despite my worst fears about myself as a parent, I had turned out not to be a catastrophizer.

Well, I'll tell you, I'm surprised you haven't heard about it, because I so often talk about I've been a catastrophizer just from working in this field.

Sure.

I mean, I always joke about I never have a headache. I only get a brain tumor.

Literally. I can remember when my kids were young, a child would come into the emergency room at one of the hospitals I worked at, and, oh, my gosh, I would come home and take their bikes away. I'm like, look, guys, I just can't explain it. We're gonna put our bikes away right now, just for a few days. I just. I. You know, I'm like, I had to control something after, so on. Something uncontrollable. And. But the other thing I say in that is that despite all that internal catastrophizing, I had to learn to work with over the years.

Right.

And calm down and recognize.

Right.

That people are late, people are irresponsible. All those things you learn, people fall down. That's okay. When my son actually did die. Right. It was not a moment I was catastrophizing. I mean, it. The whole catastrophizing didn't even work when I needed it to work.

Right, right. What were you preparing?

That's one of the realities, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Preparing to watch TV and figure out what to eat when he died. I wasn't, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, that's powerful. And I mean, it is. You waste all this energy thinking it's preparing you, and then it doesn't. Actually.

It didn't. It didn't. A lot of love here for you, Jason.

Oh.

Let me see if there's anything.

People are just saying wonderful things. I feel so connected to you both right now. I mean, I think that, you know, Ronald says, being a bereaved dad, how are you dealing with the anxiety that the recent COVID 19 stress in the New York area is causing?

It's an interesting question. I'm glad you asked about that. You know.

I feel like people's responses to Covid is going to be a whole other ball of wax, because I don't even think that the way that I respond to Covid is the way I respond to grief necessarily. It's a whole other catastrophe. It's a whole other situation that brings out a whole other complex ball of emotions. I say that to say that for whatever reason, and I'm not sure I can tell you that there's a rational reason why for whatever reason, I'm not worried about it at all. And I don't want to sound glib or cavalier. I'm not saying we were taking every precaution. We're being. I mean, there's some scientific reasons to not be that worried just because children haven't been shown. And I think that, frankly, if there had been something demonstrating that Covid affected children, I would be deeply, deeply triggered and terrified. I'm sure I would be, because that would touch on this place. But it hasn't touched on this place for me where the world is specifically endangering my child's life.

So I think that for me, it hasn't touched that most vulnerable, terrified place in me. I think I'm dealing with this other catastrophe the way that many others are. There's a lot of confusion and grief and being in this city, I'm aware. I mean, it feels like the whole city is wailing in grief right now. I can feel that every time I go out.

And I'm sure that plays upon my sense of loss in some way that I haven't been able to figure out yet, because I'm still living in it.

You know, I think there's a mixture about whether you're the worried well or the affected. You know, we all worry about our kids being harmed.

Right?

And you had the worst scenario happen to one of your kids. We're all worried about COVID.

Most of us are going to get through it fine. There's going to be a future. We got through the AIDS epidemic. We got through the Vietnam War. We got through 9, 11. Life is going to continue. There's going to be day when we learn so much more about vaccines and viruses because of this. And there are those people, and hopefully we're not. But we're here in a room with a lot of people who their Loved ones is get. Their loved ones are getting hit by a brick.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, and I'm also speaking, as you said, as the worried. Well, I have a very particular perch on this. I do not have a mother or father on a ventilator right now, thank God. You know, I don't. I mean, but people have that everywhere. And so that I feel like that is affecting my response to this as well.

And, I mean, I'm so glad that you are doing this. I'm so glad that you are giving this space to people right now because.

And, yeah, I just saw someone say, same here with COVID I have no fear of it at all. Definitely think is connected to the loss of my daughter. And I suspect that's an insightful connection that some people that I have made as well. The worst has already happened.

Well, and that's, you know, Betty, our Betty, said that, too. The worst has already happened. I think about. I've mentioned it before. The World According to Garp. You know, he drives up to a house when I think lightning hits it and a plane crashes into it. And he goes, I'll take it. You know, because it's like, that's not going to happen. Like, too much more. You know, the worst has happened. So.

Right.

Again, a lot of ways people in grief sometimes do take on a fearlessness because we have lived through the worst already. So, Jason, I could talk to you for hours, as usual. And, like, you know, they're always supposed to be 30 to 45 minutes, and here we are almost at an hour. For those few people in the world who haven't read your book, tell us the name of your book.

That's nice of you, David. It's called Once More We Saw Stars. Yeah.

And. And I'm so honored that I'm in it. You're in mine. Even though you talk about me yelling at your wife, it gave me a sign in that moment. There was one point where he's like, don't yell at my wife. And I'm clearly like, oh, they are different. They are different.

Well, that was me being angry and not. Yeah, that was more about me than it was about you.

You were supposed to be angry in that moment. That's exactly what was called for.

Yeah.

So thank you so much for being here. You're just, you know, I'm so honored to have you in the world and to know you, and I'm so sorry that tragedy has brought literally all of us together here.

Well, grateful that you're providing this space, David. Thank you so much. And I'm sure everyone here feels the same way.

Yeah. Thank you so much for just showing up tonight and volunteering and sharing your story with us. All right. Thank you so much, Jason. For everyone else, I'm going to see you at 1pm tomorrow. So I'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be. What's tonight, Jason? This is like the COVID moment. I'm always like, what day of the week is it?

It's Thursday, April 16th.

Thursday. Thank you. So tomorrow night we're going to have.

Cheryl Joy is going to be on talking about death from an overdose and addiction. So she's going to be on tomorrow night. Diane Gray will be on Saturday. Amazing people. Beth, who's on here, is going to be talking about death of a fiance next week. Melissa Rivers is going to be talking about the death of her mother, Joan. And when a parent dies, a lot of people are showing up because you matter. You matter. Your loved ones matter. Your life matters, and their death and their life mattered. So thank you so much for all of you being here. If you know someone who's alone isolating, please let them know about this group. These videos we're doing are always here for anyone to watch later. And I will see you all tomorrow. Thank you again, Jason.