We Need to Talk About COVID

- Five years ago this month, the first deaths from COVID were reported in the US, and life as we knew it changed. In many ways, forever. Almost 7 million people died worldwide. More than 1 million in the US. Work, school, relationships were permanently altered, and the ramifications are all around us. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and here's my question, can any of our national mood, maybe even our current political climate, be traced back to that collective trauma? And if so, what do we do about it? Today on to the best of our knowledge we may not want to, but we need to talk about COVID. Keep listening.

- From WPR.

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- It's To The Best Of Our knowledge, I'm Anne Strainchamps, and this hour we're gonna make the case for why you and I and all of us need to talk about COVID. I know it was five years ago, five years ago this month actually, that the pandemic began. And it's hard to calculate the scale of the loss. Almost 7 million people died worldwide. More than a million in the US alone. But then multiply that by the number of people who knew and loved them, and that is an astounding measure of grief. And then beyond that, all the other intangible losses, the work lives changed, offices shuttered, school years missed, relationships broken. For me personally, it was my life before COVID and my life after COVID, and they're very different. I'm guessing many of you might say the same, but, and here's my point, we don't talk about it. It's like we all went through this enormous trauma together, and now we act like it didn't happen. And to be clear, it's not like I'm bringing it up at dinner either, but from what I know about loss and grief, that's a recipe for problems. So I reached out to one of the world's foremost grief experts, David Kessler, and he agrees. We Americans are dealing with a lot of unacknowledged, post pandemic grief.

- I think we have a tendency to want to put things behind us. We want to believe that the bad is over. And somehow people think remembering is dwelling. You know, I run 26 different grief groups, and in these grief groups, there's a number of people who have had a death from COVID. And they live in a world where, yeah, no, we're done with that. No, you're not done with your father who died, your spouse who died. And it actually really is important to where we are today because as I've been doing so many interviews around the tragedies in the world right now, the fires, the airplane crashes, I remind people we're kind of not coming to this moment full and whole, many people are coming to this moment still empty. So many people now with the fires or whatever you hear in Los Angeles are saying, "Oh my gosh, I think I got PTSD," you know, post-traumatic stress syndrome. It's not post. It's not post, we're in it now. And I think for a lot of people, we're in complicated grief right now, reacting to this new world and everything that's happening from some of the pains of our old world.

- What happens when people don't complete the stages of grief? And even as I say that, it seems like an odd thing to say, because I don't think grief ever ends. I think it transmutes.

- Yeah. People always ask me, they say, "How long is my wife gonna grieve? "How long is my brother or sister gonna grieve?"

- Yeah, like forever.

- Well, I always say, "How long is a person gonna be dead?" Because if they're gonna be dead for a long time, you're gonna grieve for a long time. Now, it doesn't mean we'll always grieve with pain, hopefully in time we can grieve with more love than pain. But grief should be always changing, ever moving. But there are times we get stuck when our grief doesn't get witnessed. And that's when things can go wrong. You know, I always say what we run from pursues us and what we face transforms us.

- So what would you have us do. I mean, let's say somebody listening thinks, well, I'll make this first person. I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, wow, I think it's possible that I never did really come to terms with the fact that I don't go into an office anymore. A whole collective life that I had with my coworkers is gone and it's not coming back. And maybe that's part of the depth and rawness of my response to a lot of the events I see in the news. Maybe that's part of my weird inability to get out and see more people. Maybe that's why I'm hiding indoors half the time. I had never thought about that. Well, so now I don't know what to do with that.

- Right, let's start there. Our work isn't to do anything big or artificial, our work is to be present with what is. This isn't self-help, this is self-acceptance. And what that means is some point you're gonna go, I should get out more. And you go, alright, let me not make it a judgment. Oh God, I should go out more. Let me instead of judging it, get curious about it. Where does it come from? Oh, I think it comes from the pandemic. I'm not going into an office anymore with people. Then you suddenly feel a little wave of sadness. And then instead of going, okay, okay, don't feel sad. Let me think about the good things. Let me think about how good it is I get to work from home. Let me tell you and you sort of brightside yourself and use toxic positivity, and you didn't let that moment of sadness have its due. So what if instead you went, oh my gosh, I didn't realize how sad I am that I'm not going back into work. And just let yourself be sad.

- I miss, I miss people.

- I miss people. And so get curious that there is a part of you that's longing for interaction. Now, how can you soothe that part of yourself? Well, later today, tomorrow you're gonna get an invite. Or someone's gonna say, "Do you wanna do it remote? "Or do you wanna come in?" And you might have the opportunity to say, "No, I'll actually come in for this. "No, I'll actually, I'm not gonna have that delivered. "I'm gonna run to the store and get that." And we begin to listen to the voice in us that says, from the pandemic, I'm sad I'm not getting out more let me go pick up the pizza. Even it's driving in the car, walking into the pizza place, saying, hello, let me go do that. So to hear there's something inside of you that's saying, I need to be sad and I need more, and listen to that.

- So I also think though that we have post COVID, a lot more fear of each other and a lot more anger. There's been so, so much political anger. The tone of our political conversations so often are kind of filled with rage and contempt. And I'm wondering if we can trace that back in any way to unresolved ambiguous grief around all that we lost because of COVID.

- COVID was this one big moment that we collectively went into that we all really became divided upon. That was certainly a moment that for those who were deeply affected, your grief didn't get witnessed. I mean, I remember the one story of someone who was literally coming back from the funeral and ran into someone and they said, "How are you?" And they said, "God, I was just, "I'm just coming back from my mother's funeral, you know?" "Oh, how'd she die?" "COVID." And they went, "I don't believe in that." Can you imagine you just go to your mom's funeral and someone says, I don't believe in what just happened to your mom. So we come to it collectively with this divide. We come out of it into our new world with all of this for some unseen, maybe unhealed pain. And we're trying to find our way in this new world. And I think you mentioned one segment. I also see another segment of the population, the people who are saying, my inner peace is so important. Nothing can disturb my inner peace. I'm not gonna watch the news. I'm not gonna look at what's going on in the world 'cause I don't want my inner peace upset. Well, I don't know how well that's gonna work as a long-term strategy. It goes back to what we resist, persist. I mean, if you deny things or don't look at them, the knock on your door just gets louder.

- I should back up and ask, does collective grief differ from individual grief? Do you think it has the same stages or is there something unique in collective grief?

- Well, I think in collective grief, many people become hypervigilant and others become hypovigilant. You know, I'll tell you a moment that I think sort of show this very clearly. In Los Angeles, there was the Northridge earthquake back in the '90s and it was this horrible earthquake, and it had huge aftershocks that went on for weeks. And I remember a week or two later being in a movie theater of all places, and all of a sudden there was an aftershock, and there was half the theater that got up and went, "Oh my goodness "you know, an earthquake caused an aftershock, "find the exits." And the other half was like, "Shut up, calm down, "sit down, watch the movie." And I think that's a little bit who we are that a lot of us have been thrown in this new world into hypervigilance collectively. Oh no, not another thing. How are we gonna deal with all this? And there's all those folks that are like, just stay calm, look down, look away, it's going to be fine. Both people are responding to the pain just in different ways. And so what you said earlier is, what does that mean for where we all meet in the middle? Well, that could be people are cut, people are in denial. People are a little angry. People are a lot angry. People are showing every emotion they have on every social media platform they have.

- I guess I'm wondering if there are some unique aspects to the American psyche that makes collective grief harder for us. When I was talking with somebody about the Spanish flu the other day of 1918, and they said, you know, 'After 1918, people didn't talk about Spanish flu." It was the same thing. People kind of wanted to move on. So I'm wondering if there's something about American culture that makes collective grief harder for us.

- Well, there's something about what happened there a little harder and a little scarier for us, and I think it's the vagueness of a pandemic. It is the ambiguous grief of a pandemic. And I think that also goes back to, I mean, when you look at collective grief, we talk about JFK's death. We talk about San Francisco fire or North Ridge Earthquake.

- 9/11.

- 9/11. We do talk about tangible collective grief. 9/11, there were planes, there's videos, What's our videos? I don't know. There's people in masks.

- Right. It's the amorphousness of it. You know, when did it end?

- Has it ended? Some people would tell you it hasn't ended. Others will say, of course it did.

- So in getting ready to talk with you, our producer, Charles Monroe-Kane is putting this show together, sent me a photo. He's been looking back at some of the photos from COVID that have haunted him. And this is one that he said he cried the first time he saw it, and he cried now looking at it again. It's the photo of a woman hugging her mother in a nursing home. Her mother was in the nursing home, and they're hugging through a plastic sheet. Remember back people used to call them cuddle curtains?

- Yes.

- Charles said he cried again, even though he doesn't know either of these people. I don't know. Maybe that's what we all need to do. Go find the photographs that remind us of, oh yeah, and try to feel it again.

- Well, I think that's the challenge of it. That photograph is so heartbreaking and meaningful depending on how you were affected. I mean, I promise you, if I showed that photograph to some of my grief groups, there would be people that would burst into tears because they remember doing that. Others would say, "I didn't get to do it. "I didn't get to get a hug. "I didn't get to do any of that." And there's also people who if we went outside the grief group would go, "Ugh, yeah, that was silly. "We didn't need to do all that." And they might go into the politics of it. Here's the thing, it's a hard grief to have witnessed. If grief must be witnessed we are not all witnessing the same thing around the pandemic.

- What do we do then? I mean, this is what you do, right? You meet with 26 different grief groups and help people figure out how to witness their own grief and how to move through and transmute it, so what should we do?

- Well, I teach people, one of the things we have to do in these situations is find the people who can witness it. In other words, we have to go to the people who get it. And we have to not go to the people who don't get it. Now, why do I have 26 different grief groups? Is because people in grief have been gathering for as long as we know, whether it was in the town square or wherever they went and it's because of this. Grief is a time when your family and friends can feel like strangers and other people who are in grief, who are strangers, can feel like family and friends if they get it. And part of what I have to teach is your sister who was your best friend, who got everything. Oh my gosh, she's got a different view of COVID. She's got a different view of grief. She's a practical griever. She's a move on person. Let her be your sister in all the amazing ways, but don't go to her for your grief, find someone else. And the problem is, so many times we all keep going back to the people who don't get it, hoping to get them to get it. And it's like walking up and down the aisles of a hardware store, you're never gonna find milk.

- Last question. An anniversary of a death is a hard time. And this is the fifth anniversary of the beginning of COVID. Do you think this is gonna hit us collectively?

- If it hit you personally before it's going to hit you collectively? If it didn't hit you, it's gonna be just another day. That's not only our COVID response, but the response that people feel around grief every day. You know, when it's the anniversary of my son's death, my younger son's death, my mother's death, my father's death, for me it rocks my world, for the world around me it's Thursday. You know even the word bereavement comes from an old Latin word that means to be robbed. And COVID robbed us of so many things from our safety in the world to people we love, and everything in between, and anniversary dates are return to the scene of the crime. And so to let folks know if you were affected, you are gonna have a lot of feelings that came up.

- Wow. Thank you. That's sobering. It's scary, and it's good to know.

- Yeah.

- David Kessler, is one of the world's best known death and grieving experts. As he mentioned, he runs many grief groups, and he also has a website full of free resources and places to go for help. You'll find it all at grief.com. Coming up on this fifth anniversary of COVID historian, Drew Gilpin Faust, looks back to the Civil War for lessons in national mourning. and later this hour, what one woman learned after decades as a funeral singer. ♪ What can I do to help you now ♪ ♪ What can I do to help you now ♪ ♪ What can I do ♪

- It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. ♪ To help you ♪

- What does it mean to mourn collectively as a nation? And what does that even look like? A ceremony at Arlington, a monument on the National Mall, a national holiday. Steve Paulson reached out to historian, Drew Gilpin Faust, the former president of Harvard, and author of the landmark book on grief after the American Civil War called, "This Republic of Suffering."

- So I think many of us are still trying to come to terms with the impact of the COVID epidemic, and in some ways it's obvious. For instance, the workplace has been totally transformed. But my sense is that we haven't really grappled collectively with the enormity of all the deaths that came about because of the pandemic. More than a million Americans have died from COVID. Would you agree with that?

- I completely agree with that. I think that we have not really taken a step of thinking it through and reflecting on it. I'd say this happened on a variety of levels. One is just seeing the impact on things like kids growing up. We have students at Harvard now who were kept at home for two years essentially when they were in high school during a critical part of their developmental process. What is the impact of that on who they are as young adults and who they will become? I mean, there's just so many dimensions of this. That's just one dimension. Obviously, you're thinking about the impact of death and what it means for society to lose that many people and to understand itself as diminished or not understand and acknowledge itself as diminished.

- So why do you think we really haven't talked that much about how many people died from COVID? It was the overwhelming event that affected our lives for several years, and yet it's sort of like, okay, that ended. I mean, it hasn't totally ended, of course, and it's time to move on. And it seems like we haven't really come to terms with this.

- I've been thinking about this a lot in relationship to a book I'm writing about speeches, and one of the chapters that I've just been working on has been about condolence speeches, about the Gettysburg address, about Reagan's remarks when the Challenger exploded, about W's remarks at 9/11, about Obama's remarks in Charleston after the shooting by Dylan Roof of nine parishioners at Mother Emanuel. And thinking about how the President sees those times to say something important about who we are as a nation in the aftermath of loss. Another aspect of these speeches, these sort of reclamations of our soul and face of what has happened to us, they're about unity. They're about coming together around a shared loss. And so much of the response to COVID was politicized from the start, and I do conclude this chapter by saying, Trump would not know how to make such a speech because his oratory is one of divisiveness that is his modus operandi. So I don't think we could expect him to seize such a moment and use it. But more broadly than just simply speeches, we have used COVID. We have endured COVID, not simply as a pandemic but as a time for divisions, recriminations, blame.

- Yeah. It's become so politicized and it ties into what we think about vaccines, what we think about the medical establishment. And it's hard just to kind of talk about just the death and the grief that we've had over COVID.

- For sure.

- So what are we missing? Because we haven't had this period of grief, this collective grief.

- Well, how does a event of monumental proportions and of existential import relate to a body politic, relate beyond the loss of any single individual? That seems to me a lot of what's at stake here. It's not just that it's an individual loss to a husband or a wife, or a brother, or that somebody was very ill for a long time. It's about a community of loss. First, you have to believe in the importance of that community and the sinew that hold that community together, and the values that underlie that community. And so we have to come back to reaffirm those, even though you million people have departed, those of us who remain remember you, honor you. And that requires a real belief in the importance of such unity and the importance of public rituals and public acknowledgement that create that kind of community. So I don't think those parts of our society and polity have been operating very well in recent years. So the pandemic came at a very difficult time for what was already a rather fraught situation.

- So what would national grief look like, or what has it looked like in previous eras?

- Well, as you know, I'm a historian of the Civil War, and I've thought a good bit about and written about death in the Civil War. But part of that is thinking about the aftermath and how the country decides to acknowledge and honor the dead and their sacrifices through public rituals for one thing.

- What kinds of public rituals?

- Well, things like orations, like observances, like mass grieving events, when people come together in honor of the Civil War dead or erect memorials. I mean, I think that's a really important thing to do. If we just think back to the impact that the Vietnam War Memorial had in how we thought about that war and the naming of the names and the combination that the Maylin sculpture was able to affect between individual losses and a national sense of grievance.

- And that's such an interesting example because of course the Vietnam War was hugely controversial and still is. It's not as if there was this unified national narrative about how to think about the Vietnam War. I mean, plenty of people think, oh, you know, we should have won that war. And yet that memorial, the Maylin Memorial is so powerful, it seems to work for everyone.

- But it was not anticipated that it would, there was huge fighting and division over her design. And as you know, there's a statue that's more representational of soldiers that is near the entrance to the memorial because traditionalists said, we need to honor the soldiers, not have this black scar in the landscape be the only reality of the memorial. But one of the fascinating things to me is people use that memorial, they use it as a kind of external expression of their inward grief, so that it restored to people a kind of agency of grief. When you're able to do something about your grief, trace your brother's name, or leave a gift, or something from that dead person's life at the memorial, it engages you in a way that I think kind of drains some of the loss and puts the loss into the external world, rather than leaving it within your body, within your soul.

- Yeah. It sounds like you're saying we need a memorial for COVID.

- I think we do. And yet I'm not sure what memorial we could agree upon. I would hope we would have one. I would hope that at some point we'd kind of catch ourselves up and say, this is a very significant event in American history and we are scarred by it in a permanent way. But we need to, I guess, excavate some of those feelings and excavate some of that experience so that we can move through it. I mean, if you think about how people write about mourning, mourning is different from grief. Grief is the terrible sense of loss that one feels. But mourning is a process of moving through that grief and getting to the other side of it. You don't ever recover entirely, but you go on slowly habitually, and that's mourning. And we have no gradual evolution through this grief. We've just shut it down. That seems to me a tremendous challenge.

- And also I think there's this feeling that at least among a lot of people, we need to move on. That was this pretty terrible few years in our country, but let's get back to living the way we're supposed to be living, let's not dwell on this unpleasantness.

- Well, on the one hand, yes, we need to move on, but we're not gonna move on until we deal with the impact that this has had. It's like a psychiatric reality, right? You have to unearth things in order to be able to confront them and move beyond them. I would say that's true here on a societal level or a national level.

- So I wanna come back to COVID and our problem with grieving properly over all the deaths from COVID, especially grieving collectively as a nation. And I guess I'm wondering how we could do that. I mean, you've already suggested a number of things, memorials, speeches, and that kind of thing. And I don't know if there are anything more specific that you might wanna mention. And also, what happens if we don't do that? What is the cost of not grieving?

- I have thought about how when I did this death project, it changed my whole view of late 19th century America. I began to think of everybody in that era as grieving. Whether they knew it or not, they were still affected, even though they'd mourned and they'd taken measures to assuage their grief, to reaffirm the community in light of the losses, they still were people affected by this terrible experience of seeing so many people die around them, the vulnerability that that transmitted to everybody. And so, as I think about things that went on in the 1880s, I now remind myself these people experience something that will affect how they see the world always hence forth. And I believe that we should consider COVID that way. I think we're different people because of living through it. It's had obviously very differential effects on different people, depending on social class, depending on age. As I suggested before, I think it's much harder to be locked up in your room for two years when you're 14 than when you're whatever I was in my '70s. And so we need to be thinking about how is this shaping what we're doing and how is it lingering in ways that we might fail to identify? You don't get over something like that, right? Everything assumed about the world is suddenly upside down. I remember early on when the pandemic was hitting New York City so hard, and I saw these photographs of coffins piled up in New York City because they couldn't bury them. They had nowhere to put them. They brought in refrigerated trucks to put them in. And I was so shocked because I thought all my work on death in the Civil War was within the frame of, that's what used to happen. That was a terrible thing of the 19th century. We certainly would never do that again. That would never happen again, and there it was. And that kind of undermined how my feet stood on the ground and what was possible in the modern world. All of that certainty, all of that confidence was challenged, and I don't think it's very easy to get over that.

- So what do you think happens when we do repress these memories? When we don't deal with it? It's sort of buried in our unconscious, but it's there. What results, what are the kind of underlying maladies that arise when we don't actually deal with this?

- I'm reluctant to be a kind of psychiatrist for a nation that I wouldn't even wanna be a psychiatrist for an individual.

- I'm hoping you'll be a psychiatrist for a few minutes at least here.

- But I wonder, does having that kind of unresolved trauma, of having that kind of vulnerability make you defensive, make you less likely to trust other people, make you less likely to reach out to others to forgive, to forget to overcome conflicts? Does it keep us all on edge? We feel wounded and we were defenseless. And does that make us want to, I don't know, protect ourselves in some ways that I think undermine the project of democracy, for sure.

- It sounds like you're saying we need to show our vulnerability more, and if we don't, we put on this different guise and maybe we act without as much compassion as we might otherwise.

- Yes. I mean, I am reluctant to have a overarching explanation of the world, but if you can't admit your vulnerability, are you more likely to blame other people for things? Loss of control I think was a very important part of the pandemic. We tried to come up with means of control, like washing our groceries. Remember when we were washing our groceries?

- Oh, sure. Right.

- We wanna control this environment. We wanna do everything we can. And then we realized, wow, what can we do? And ultimately, the vaccines came and there were ways that we could reinsert control, but for a long time we were kind of reeling through outer space without any sense that the world made sense. And that's I think, a lingering reality.

- You mentioned that you think there are implications for our democracy in terms of how we mourn, how we grieve, how we come to terms with a tragedy like this. And I guess I'm wondering if we don't, if that it partly opens up the door for those who are not democratic, who have more authoritarian tendencies. Can we make any links between the failure to grieve, the failure to truly remember, and the politics that result from that?

- I think if we are consumed with fear and insecurity, we are gonna search to first of all, try to protect ourselves rather than to work together with others. We're going to not be as open to the kind of debate and discussion that's essential to democracy. It can be very corrosive, I believe, of the fabric of a polity or a society.

- Drew Gilpin Faust is president emerita of Harvard, an author of, "This Republic of Suffering: "Death and the Civil War." And that was Steve Paulson talking with her. We've been talking about the ways grief can divide people or bring them together. Coming up a professional funeral singer shares her voice and her thoughts about collective mourning as to the best of her knowledge, from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Lauren DePino was just 10 years old when she first sang at a funeral, by her '20s it was a steady gig. She dreamed of playing on bigger stages, of becoming the next Whitney or Celine. She auditioned for American Idol, actually made the cut from tens of thousands to 200. And then they told her to go home. So that stung. But it also made her realize that funeral singing was her real calling. Today, she thinks of that work as a form of alchemy, a way to transmute grief into something bigger. Here's Lauren DePino at the piano singing and talking with Charles Monroe-Kane. ♪ You shall cross the barren dessert ♪ ♪ But you shall not die of thirst ♪ ♪ You shall wander far in safety ♪ ♪ Though you do not know the way ♪ ♪ You shall speak your words in foreign lungs ♪ ♪ And I will understand ♪ ♪ You shall see the face of God and live ♪ ♪ Be not afraid ♪ ♪ I go before you always ♪ ♪ Come follow me ♪ ♪ And I will give you rest ♪

- Oh, that was beautiful. Thank you. That song, okay.

- Yeah.

- When you sing a song like that, when you sing that song to people, what's it like? They're mourning their loved one, their mom, their cousin, their wife, their child just died. They're mourning right in front of you, feet from you, and you don't know them.

- Right.

- I don't know, it seems like a lot of pressure to make sure the song is amazing, right?

- Well, I guess. So grief to me is like a sediment. It's a heavy, it's gritty, it's something that if you don't let it move the way it moves, it accumulates in you and weighs you down. So what that song did for me, it made grief airy for a moment. And so for that to happen, for grief to become buoyant, for a buoyant sadness, I know it sounds like an oxymoron.

- No, no, not at all.

- I had to funnel all my intention into that song and believe what I was singing and actually hold... People talk about holding space for grievers. I think it's more than that. It's actually holding their grief.

- I guess I'm trying to picture the scene. Sometimes the cathedral is packed, right? And sometimes it's not, depending on the person. Have you ever sung at funerals where basically nobody was there?

- Yeah, there were a few. And I would focus, I remember actually one of them, there were two very elderly people in the pews, and they both didn't have hair. And I was just focusing on the two of them, sending them blessings and love through the music.

- It almost feels like it's more important that song to them than to the bigger group.

- Well, I don't know about that though. Because there have been funerals where, for children or an infant. And I've had somewhere, the whole church and the choir loft where I was singing was so packed that people were touching me. And I could feel the one person was actually leaning on me, and people were all around me sobbing. And that was a lot, that was a lot more pressure for me.

- I bet that sounds intense.

- The actual physical, yeah, like the actual physical and spiritual weight was all on me, so yeah.

- This is pretty important part of the mourning process, you're doing that song.

- Yeah. When I was younger, I didn't feel pressure. I mean, you have to also understand, I went to Catholic school where gory images of Jesus on the cross were everywhere. And death was everywhere. And death was actually a way back to life. You know from my third grade art project draw the stations of the cross. Jesus fell the third time, draw him bloodied on the grounds. I mean, that was like, whatever. It didn't feel like pressure because as growing up Catholic you comfort each other and death is a part of life and death is every day. It's not something you're necessarily scared of. Does that make sense?

- No, it totally makes sense. Obviously, if you're Catholic, you're gonna want Catholic hymns. And you're evangelical, and you want certain kind of hymns. But I would also assume, if you're not a Christian, if you're an atheist and you still want songs, what do people choose when they're not Christian?

- I've had atheists choose, "Be Not Afraid" in case you're curious. But The Beatles, Blackbird, "Hallelujah," Leonard Cohen. Even though Hallelujah is a Christian term. "I will survive," I've done that. That was a strange choice, "My way."

- Oh really?

- Yeah.

- You mean Sinatra "My Way," right?

- Yeah. Oh, oh, "My Heart Will Go On," of course.

- Oh, of course. Right.

- I'm always surprised. Sometimes people pick things that are really random and strange because it was just meaningful to them. Or it might be the song they wanna hear that helps them, that gives them comfort. Maybe it meant something to their lost loved one.

- You know, you brought up Leonard Cohen's, "Hallelujah." Now there's a not secular secular song that's religious but not religious. Tell me how that song comes across, because I think I'd forgotten about that song. It's kind of overplayed a little bit, so I've kind of forgotten about it. But then I went and listened to Jeff Buckley and then the Leonard Cohen version before I heard yours, and I'm like, damn, that's a hell of a song. Tell me about how you sing that one.

- I feel like that song more than any other, can contain all of it. And have you face all of it in this beautiful, open few moments of the song, a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. We're acknowledging the brokenness of it and the beauty of the brokenness of it. That's what it does for me. It reconciles all of that.

- Well, you took this responsibility to another level. So yeah, you're singing Christian hymns, you're singing Leonard Cohen, but you also felt like you wanted to write original music for funerals as well.

- Yeah.

- Well, let's hear it. Let's hear your original comfort song. I'll quit calling 'em funeral songs. So your original comfort song, let's check it out. What can they do?

- All right. ♪ Cold feet in the graveyard underneath the snow ♪ ♪ Can see any grass how do I know it grows ♪ ♪ With tears falling down ♪ ♪ Water rain soaking ground ♪ ♪ All together now ♪ ♪ We stand ♪ ♪ Holding on to each other hands ♪ ♪ What can I do to help you now ♪ ♪ What can I do to help you now ♪ ♪ What can I do ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ To help you ♪

- That's beautiful. Thank you very much.

- Of course. Yeah.

- You know, you're at the end of a show here on the fifth anniversary of COVID and it's about grief, collective grief. And I'm thinking to myself, that's a lot of funerals. Do you think COVID has affected how we grieve?

- I do. I do think it showed that when we're isolated, it's really awful, especially in our grief, 'cause we couldn't be with these people. And I do feel like there was a change for the better in the sense that the door opened a sliver. People were talking more about open grieving, people were embracing it, and then it kind of, it shut again. So we need to get back to that

- Why did it shut again? We missed an opportunity as a nation collectively to figure out how to grieve, and then we just moved on.

- Yeah.

- Why do you think that is?

- I think that we need a major cultural shift. I think that people see it as a weakness. That if you show sadness. For example, if I post something about my aunt three years after she passed, oh, you're still thinking about that?

- No, of course. I'm still thinking about it. I'm thinking about it forever. I think that what I learned from talking to these bereaved people whose loved ones funerals I've sung at, is that we need to give ourself permission to keep our lost loved ones with us forever. Like I have an alter to the dead in my one room. And it's up all year. And I talk to them and I think I get answers. People might think that's crazy or sad. It's sad that I interact with my dead loved ones every day. I think it's the opposite. And I think that it's a beautiful opportunity to keep their connections alive. And also it helps our grief.

- It's interesting. I remember when my brother was killed, my older brother. It's like when the casserole stopped, I felt like that's when I was supposed to stop grieving.

- Yeah.

- But then it ends.

- It ends.

- Like, nobody's taking care of you anymore. Okay, we're done. We did that. We did that thing. And I think about COVID and I'm like, the pain of that is so extreme with that many people. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that.

- Yeah. Well, that's what art's for. I mean, I think art is the thing that will save us. You know, I think Annie Dillard wrote, "The Artist is the wick, "and the purpose of the artist is to burst into flame." My job and my small role is to keep making art. To write music that comforts people, to sing to them. What's more beautiful than music with the intention of comforting people. And I feel like that's the kind of art that can give you temporary relief from the void or that sense of homesickness that keeps coming back.

- You know what's funny, our engineer's name's Joe, when this interview's done, and listeners never hear this. When this interview is done, you and I are gonna record 40 seconds of silence so he can use the silence to edit. He was telling me how many people tell him afterwards how appreciative they are that the two of us sit in silence together for 40 seconds. I was struck by that in context of this interview of being like, maybe you just need to sit with it for a second. And it's pretty powerful just to sit with that, you know?

- Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I do that every day. I mean, there's so much suffering going on in the world right now. I do that and I just try to project, I try to transmute it, transmute the suffering into love. I know it sounds woo woo, but it feels... Look, I'm never gonna stop praying for people. It stuck to me. That's what stuck to me, so is prayer.

- That's amazing. I'm thinking about, one of the songs you do a lot is the song, "Song of Farewell." We're about to end this interview and I would love for you to take us out, and this is the last interview in the show as well. If you could take us out with the "Song of Farewell," but can you explain the song first before you sing it?

- Sure. Sure. So in a Catholic funeral mass, there's a rite called a Final Commendation. And it's the song before the recessional where the priests bless the body or the ashes with incense, and you're entrusting the soul to eternity. And the whole congregation sings the farewell. Of course, the funeral singer is leading it. It's a statement and affirmation of hope in the Paschal mystery. That Jesus died, resurrected, opened the gates of heaven and we're handing over this loved one to God. And if you think about the origin of the word goodbye, do you know the origin of the word goodbye?

- I don't know the origin of the word goodbye.

- It's God be with you. That goodbye used to be a blessing. So if you think of goodbye that way, you're entrusting your soul to whatever you think the highest force of good is. It's a little bit easier, right? And you're all doing it together.

- And the "Song of Farewell" is a goodbye?

- Yep.

- Well, can you sing that for us, for our goodbye?

- Sure.

- Thank you. ♪ May the choir of angels ♪ ♪ Come to greet you ♪ ♪ May they speed you to paradise ♪ ♪ May the Lord enfold you ♪ ♪ In His mercy ♪ ♪ May you find eternal life ♪ ♪ The Lord is my light and my help ♪ ♪ It is He who protects me from harm ♪ ♪ The Lord is the strength of my days ♪ ♪ Before whom should I tremble with fear ♪ ♪ May the choir of angels ♪ ♪ Come to greet you. ♪ ♪ May they speed you to paradise ♪ ♪ May the Lord enfold you ♪ ♪ In His mercy ♪ ♪ May you find eternal life ♪

- Funeral singer Lauren DePino, talking with Producer, Charles Monroe-Kane. May we all find something eternal in the people we love and in the memories of those we've lost to COVID over the last five years. So much divides us as a nation right now. Maybe the one thing that we all share, grief, will help bring us back together. Thanks to Charles Monroe-Kane, who produced this hour. He had help from Producer, Shannon Henry Kleiber and Angelo Bautista. Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hardtke. And we had additional music this week from Piore Humel, Paddington Bear, and Sage Quadrato. Special thanks to Oregon Catholic Press Music Publishing. The Executive Producer of, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is, Steve Paulson, and I'm Anne Strainchamps. Be well and join us again next time.

- PRX.