Should You Stay or Leave When You Hate Where You Live?

Okay, so just for, we want to do a little something called Catherine Explains a Joke. And the joke, joke I have for you is pretty simple. Let's see how you do it. Why do Canadians hate orgies? Why do Canadians hate orgies? It's a question. Because they like to say thank you or something. The answer is because of all the thank you notes they have to write. All the thank you notes. Yeah, that's so dumb. Okay. I find the whole idea of jokes a really poor comedic expression. You'd like no jokes to exist. I just don't get them usually. Remove the jokes. Yeah, remove the jokes. Dad, do you have a joke with the cow in the field? Once there was a guy named Izzy and there was a guy named Mendel. There was best friends. And then Izzy got rest his soul. He goes away. He leaves. He goes to the other side. And Mendel's working away in the tailor shop. He's putting a pair of buttons on and a pair of blue pants. All of a sudden he hears his voice. He's a Mendel, Mendel. He goes, Izzy, Izzy, is that you? He says, yeah, what's it like? What's it like? He says, unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. Tell me, what's it like? Let me tell you something. You wake up and you fuck your brains out on the breakfast. And you say, shut up. Then comes the breakfast, the size of it you wouldn't believe. After breakfast they give you a lunch, makes the breakfast look like a snack. After lunch you go to sleep, you wake, take a little nap. You go to eat, you have dinner, makes the breakfast, lunch look like nothing. And you wake up the next day and it starts all over again. My God. And you fuck your brains out some more? Oh my God. And you fuck your brains out some more. Then you go to sleep and you wake up the next day and it starts all over again. And Izzy says, my God. So this is what heaven is like. Heaven, what the hell are you talking about? I'm a bull in Montana. Now that might be funny. Also because I love the way I haven't heard Dad tell that in years. I love the way he tells that. And that I think is very funny. Wow. So it's a story. It's a narrative. It's a story. Okay. And why is it funny? Because of the difference between what you think the expectation is of heaven and the reality of being this animal in a pasture and the way Dad tells it. I think that's funny. That's great, Mom. Yeah, thank you. Welcome to Don't Listen to Us. I'm getting Groty Patinkin, son. Who are you guys? Do you have names? Okay, somebody's coming to us today. Catherine. Catherine Groty, Mandy Patinkin. I really prefer that name. I'm one of the... I'm Catherine Groty. Who are you, Dad? Hurley. This is our biggest challenge in the show. Just saying our names. I know. We're going to go on to our first listener question. It's a voice note from Debbie about moving. So Mom and Dad, if you can put your headphones on here, we will hear from Debbie. How long should you give it when you move to a brand new place? I moved about 2,700 miles from East Coast to West Coast. I've been here just a few weeks, so I know it's too soon to feel like it's home yet, but I'm just wondering how long do you think you should give it and what things can help to feel at home? Okay. Go ahead, Kath. Well Debbie, I think any move later in life is a brave thing to do. I once read about how people that move to a new place in mid or later life actually live longer because you're not comparing everything that used to be on the corner and that's gone. So I would certainly, I mean you've only been there a few weeks and it must feel very strange, but I would start off with meeting your neighbors. Who are the closest people to you? What stores or coffee shops can you visit on a regular basis, get to know the people that work there? What comes to mind? The fact that she asked the question is the answer. She should move back home immediately. We had friends who moved to a new house in Ireland. Their family was from Ireland. They were homesick or whatever. They missed their country, countrymen, etc., countrywomen, and they were going to lift up from the east coast and go there. They had businesses, lives here, etc. They went there. They were traveling around a little bit beforehand. They had everything ready. They had the dogs ready to be shipped, etc., the whole life. They were going to sell this house here. They were our dear friends. We get a call. We're not going. We're staying. We feel we've made a cosmic error. We're staying. It reminds me, when we were looking in 2005 or 2006 for an apartment to change because our rent stabilized apartment was going to cost billions of dollars. We were just looking to downsize because the kids were gone. We asked a realtor, we'd been looking in Brooklyn a lot. We'd lived in Manhattan. A realtor said, you have Manhattan-centric lives. But I felt if we moved to Brooklyn, I'd just be nostalgic. I'd start our families all the time. But that comment, you have Manhattan-centric lives, was a profound, interesting comment. That's five boroughs of Manhattan. He was saying, you're already, this is where your life is. This is your country, Manhattan. Not Queens, not Brooklyn, not Bronx. There's a great joke about your generation of Jewish artists in New York never go below 96th Street. Yeah. Dad never went below 72nd Street. I had to tell him. I got bagels above 96th Street. I had to tell him how to get to the village. I'm excited to Debbie. Let me just say, Debbie, 2700 miles away, I have a feeling you might have, I don't know the reason. Did you go to be closer to relatives? Did you move to get away from relatives? Is a weather question. I would think of it as an adventure and not a sorrow. I would do everything you could for at least one year. That's what I would advise. I love just the two differences. Let me sum it up. Catherine says, give it at least a year. Meet everyone you can. Get to know the landscape. Walk around. Live as though you're going to stay there forever. Don't compare your old place to your new place. Mandy says, if it doesn't feel right, go back home immediately. But it's also, she's had like a 60-some year old. She's had like a grown up. And you're not going to be around forever, Debbie. You don't know that. You're not going to have time to just to a house in another land. Just go home. All right. There you go, Debbie. Okay. My advice is, ask somebody else. I've done a lot of research into this. Ask somebody else. Yeah, that's really, ask your neighbor. Hey, everyone. It's Leah Greenberg. And Ezra Levin. We're two of the lead organizers of the No Kings protests. And we're also the co-founders of Indivisible, the grassroots movement organizing against Trump's regime. We host What's the Plan, your weekly guide to the state of our democracy and how we fight back. Tune in every Friday for new episodes. Democracy is a participatory sport. The fascist win when we sit on the sidelines. What's the plan is all about how we get into the game. So subscribe, recruit, discuss, organize, and win. What's the plan is available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back from the break. We get a lot of questions about grief and loss. And mom and dad, you're constantly telling us you don't always feel qualified to handle the weight of some of these questions. So this week, we thought we'd bring in some support, a friend, an actual expert who can help us all grapple with some of the toughest questions. Special guest, can you please come in? Come on in, special guest. It's Karla Fernandez. That's so amazing. I knew it had to be one of two people. I am going to know two people. Hello, Karla. Pretend I'm up, stand up, and give her a hug. Pretend. Nice to meet you, Hart. Pretend to give her a hug or give her a real hug. Just pretend real hug. All right. I want to introduce our special guest today to our listeners. Today's guest is Karla Fernandez, writer, grief advocate, and family friend. Karla is a co-founder of the Dinner Party, a community where people who've lost someone come together over shared meals and honest conversation. She started that with the one and only Lenin Flowers. Her new book is called Renegade Grief, a Guide to the Wild Ride of Life After Loss. We wanted to bring Karla here to help us today with this question that we got and filed under weird, wild, and wonderful emails. So perfect for Karla. Is Karla on camera? Yeah. Is she able to see things? Yeah, I'm nice. And Karla has a friend with her. Please meet me. I do. Who's the friend? Who's the friend? Who's the friend? A little Karla inside cooking. Oh, we got Karla. The pregnant person, Mandy, did already offer for me to give birth in his swimming pool. Yes. We're going to make it a live podcast. Karla, could you please read Wendy's question for us to get us started? Wendy, Wendy, Wendy! All right. Is this Wendy from Peter Pan? No. Wouldn't that be amazing? Maybe. Coming out of the fictional world, Never Never Land. Okay, so we're getting serious. Yes. Oh, fuck no. I'll do the Peter Pan music in the background. Captain Hook, Dear Mandy, Katherine, and Gideon. I would love to talk with you about the collision of inconsolable grief, monarch butterflies, which I just saw outside as I was coming in, and Dolly Parton. My brother, Matthias, died on October 4th, 2021. He was 33 years old, I would say young. He was the light of my life. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about the expectations people have for grief versus the actual experience of grief. We're really, Wendy's emphasis on really, bad at it. I think we could be better. Monarch butterflies and Dolly Parton have helped me understand my grief, and I'm curious about the collisions of disconnected things that other grievers have cobbled together. I have so many questions. What do people do when grief events stack up one after the other without adequate time to heal in between? Do our atoms transform, linger, or disappear when we die? If matter can either be created or destroyed, wouldn't the matter that makes up a human still be here somehow? What would happen if we started expressing our grief outside of the rather formal framework we currently have in our national culture? Is grief ever funny in a gallows humor way in an absurdist way? You're all such a lovely balance of witty and wise. I thought you'd be good people to talk to about this. Wishing you all wonderful success in your podcast endeavor, Wendy, grieving sister, butterfly guardian, and Dolly Parton acolyte. Thank you, Wendy. My first question, where do monarch butterflies in Dolly Parton enter into her grief experience? Other than watching butterflies die. Because probably my guess is, first of all, thank you for sharing that, Wendy. I think our culture sucks at allowing people to be however they feel. And Carla's book, by the way, which I truly love, because I think it shares such creative ways of dealing with loss. So that it's not something that happens to you and then it's over. I'm going to let Carla speak to this, but I would assume, man, monarch butterflies are beauty and they don't live forever. And they come and they go. And Dolly's songs probably have spoken to her. Because Dolly got some songs about grief, particularly. Something tells me she's written some songs about heartbreak. Yeah, heartbreak. And also, I would just say, I deeply believe we transform. And I'm continually looking for the matter that has transformed from who I've lost. And I'm so far in my mind, but I do believe that we do transform. And I'm going to pass it on to Carla, who has more expertise at this. Well, what I love about Wendy's question, to me, is it kind of shows the moment and culture that we're in that's shifting. A hundred years ago, Freud wrote a very big, important paper called Morning in Melancholia, where he basically explained that if someone was continuing bonds with somebody that was dead, if somebody was seeing butterflies and feeling connected to their brother or hearing a Dolly Parton song on the radio and feeling moved to tears, that there was something wrong with them. Right. He turned it into a pathology to continue grieving, which was very distinct from human culture up until that point. And we're now at a point where science is disproving. Actually, the magic is not about breaking bonds and cutting the person off and pretending like you didn't know them, but it's about finding these magical small ways to continue their presence in your life. And yet the muscle memory of the culture we live in is still in the kind of Freudian breaking bonds model. That it's something wrong with you. So the fact that Wendy here is like, is it okay that I have this kind of bizarre combination of things that reminds me of my brother? The answer is like, hell yes. That's the whole point of the game is how do we find ways to continue our connection? And what I love about this is it's not like the standard aesthetic that you might think about when you think about a grief connection or something that can, you know, an object related to your grief. This isn't like a crocus poking through the snow. There's obviously a story here about her and Matthias and country music and monarch butterflies that I would love to hear more about. Yeah, I would too. And it's like whatever those connections are, like if it's a pita butter sandwich and like clean windows, that's like, you know, it's like, what does it for you? What makes sense in your idiosyncratic brain and experience? One of the things I love most in her email is this question, is grief ever funny in a gallows humor way in an absurdist way? It was something I really enjoyed in reading your book. This kind of notion that we have of grief of somebody like on the beach with their head in their hands and then there's this expansive universe of ways people deal with that. Can you speak at all to the conversation of it being funny or absurdist or gallows? I think we can relate to that. I have nearly pissed my pants laughing so many times talking to people about dead people, the experience of grief. And the dinner party, the organization that Lenin and I co-founded, were bringing people together to not just recount the diagnosis or the accident or the death, but all of the ways we're stumbling and fumbling our way through life after and more often than not, there is hysterical mishaps and confusing moments and awkward conversations that the only appropriate response is to laugh. And I think when you're opening up to the tenderness, the intensity, the sadness, the low notes on the piano keys related to grief, it also opens up the other end of the emotional spectrum too. And I feel like sadness and praise are two sides of the same coin, that the more we can lean into grief and our connection to someone, the more we can feel into what is the wild hysterical reality of being a human. I mean, my experience in terms of funny, I had a first love. He was somebody that I was... Not him. You never met him. Not him. Not him. He was my actual real permanent love. This was somebody I had delusions about being that. But those are fun eras. They are very fun. I was very young and I loved that my parents hated him. So I felt very grown up because it was like I brought this guy, you know, this sort of Brooklyn guy to Sherman Oaks. Long story short, he became ill. He had Huntington's disease. I was his guardian after he made me insane. And he was cremated and... He became part of our family. He became part of our family. And he's in all our family. Yeah. And, uh... Mandy was great with him because at one point he was at this cardinal... I can't... A cardinal cook home for Huntington's people. And very diminished. But Mandy said, who's your favorite author? And I thought, oh, God, don't ask him that. It's so painful. And Jeffrey went, Shopenhauer! Shopenhauer! Because that's what they all did. Huntington's is a condition where you lose control of your speech and your movements. Yeah, it's an inherited horrible genetic illness. But I took the box of Jeffrey to the Hudson River. And my brother Michael was with me. And, um, he wasn't yet a monk. But we both took Jeffrey. And it was a still day. It was not a breeze. It was blue. We opened this box and I said, Jeffrey, become part of the city that you loved. And at the moment I went like this with his ashes, a friggin' gale-sized wind out of nowhere came and covered me from head to toe with Jeffrey. And Mike said, that's him not ever letting you go. One last embrace. One last embrace or making me crazy. It's crazy. I thought that story was grandma at Point Lobos. Maybe that's how all the characters die. Yeah, do you always get covered in your people's ashes? No, honey. That was a very different situation. What I love about that story is finding a moment to honor his life. To take, you know, to think about what is a uniquely Jeffrey way to release him back into the world. That it was an ode to New York City. That's the way I think tending to grief is actually a creative process. It requires you to kind of tap into what someone's spirit and legacy is. Different from anybody else. Just very specific to them, even though a lot of people can identify with that. 100%. Yeah. What is it that comes to mind for you, Dad? Well, I love all those ideas. I live them. I do them. Every time I see a house fly, sometimes I kill it. And sometimes I put it on my finger because every time we see a house fly, I decided that's my dad. The ones I kill are not my dad. How do you tell the difference? I can tell because I know my dad's voice. I know how he looks. I listen for the cough, the sound of the cough. You know his B.D. eyes. I know his eyes. And I, Catherine, I'll tell you why I did it because mom, every time we saw a blue jay, we have a lot of blue jays here. She goes, that's my father because her father Irving. Blue jays ate out of his hands. Wow. I mean, wow, blue jays. This is no life. Yeah, he would do this and they would come. They wouldn't do it for anybody else. So Dad wanted that experience with his dad. My dad had a blue jays out of her father's hand. My father's going to be in this game too. And I picked the house fly. And here's something about the house fly. I do concerts and in a concert, there's a spotlight on me. Sometimes the stage lights are a little lower and the spotlight's on me. And when you're watching someone on stage and a fly gets in the light, everybody in the audience can see it. It totally takes focus. And this has happened to me two or three times. And always when I'm singing a song like I'll be seeing you, you know, or something. And the house fly hits the light and in a spotlight, it's major. And I just put my finger out and every time it lands right on my finger. And the audience becomes absolutely still as can be. I finish the entire song to the house fly, my dad. And then I go like this with my hand and let him go. And then the place, you know, says thanks. And it's happened more than once. It's happened more than once? Yes, it's happened at least three times. Wait, can I ask you a question? Did that happen once and it was so wild that it felt like three times? No, it's happened absolutely. And you're not rubbing your fingers with fly pheromone? Nope, nope. I don't even know what it is. Carl, let me ask you a question. You lost your father a while ago. What winged animal is he? Listen, I don't want to steal Wendy's thunder, but there's a monarch story. Oh, wow. My dad, he lived in this town called Pacific Grove, California, which is one of the overwintering spots for the monarchs migrating to Mexico. And you can walk from his home to this little park where when you look up at certain times of the year, there's thousands and thousands of monarchs clustered in the branches and he's buried like 100 yards from there. So it's sort of this like one-two punch of visiting his grave and then going through the monarch sanctuary and he was obsessed with them in the way that you talk about quantum physics. And for him, the thing that transfixed him was the migration patterns that the monarchs that leave this tiny little town in California go on this long journey and the monarchs that return to that exact same grove are something like three or four generations later. And yet there's this like magnetic pull, the sort of path that they know how to follow despite it being like their great-great-great grandparents. It's the ancestors. Is that the epigenetic? Epigenetic. That's a different thing. Do you think it's like, you know, there's some ideas, there's some sort of, they're following some magnetic currents, et cetera, et cetera? I actually know the reason why that happens. Please tell us. I've been sworn to secrecy. I mean, isn't that what, you know, their ancestors to friends of mine of Costa tribe in South Africa, their ancestors are as real as us sitting around the table. They think that we think that people that are physically dead are not here is really a depraved idea. And that's why the Freudian moment, the Freudian slip, if you will, was kind of the severing from what is like deep innate human intelligence. And read that Freudian, say that Freudian slip again. The appropriate thing to do when someone dies is to break bonds with them. That's what Freud suggested? That's what he suggested. And what ended up happening tragically is that his daughter died a few years later, his favorite daughter. Could you imagine saying that one of your kids is your favorite? You always wrote about her as his favorite. One of his many mistakes. He needs a therapist. She died of the Spanish flu. And he wrote in a letter to a friend, and I'm paraphrasing and modernizing. Basically, he was like, oh, oopsie daisies, actually, I miss her. If you think, if she's ever going to fill this void, there's an appropriateness to want to maintain a connection with her. And yet through the kind of academic pedagogy that he'd already released, like the domino had already fallen and the problem had already started and psychological best practice had already been established as break the bond. So it makes me think that what we're doing here and telling these stories, and they might seem sort of silly or trite, the monarch or the bluebird or the housefly, within each of those moments of connection is like deep history, ancestry, love. And that's the work we need to do in grieving is figure out how do we continue that bond. And it doesn't matter what other people think about it. It's about how it makes us feel. I know I've said it to Catherine, get in, so forgive the repeat. But I have my, I guess I would call it my grief vitamin that I take every day, sometimes more than once a day. And I do a couple of things. First of all, I have to preface it by saying, I, my belief in the higher power is my belief in science and Einstein's theory of relativity, that energy never dies. Therefore, in my belief system, all matter is energy and all of that matter never dies. So whether it's us or anything, a tree or flower, it transforms. It's not familiar, but that matter, that energy, those protons and neurons move out into the universe. And you can breathe them in if you choose to or see them if you choose to or imagine them near you if you choose to. Meaning my father and Moses or Buddha or Allah or anyone that you want to visit Jesus. You'd probably choose your dad out of those. I don't know. I've been with my dad. I'd actually like to meet Jesus and Buddha and Allah first because I've been with dad and get some insight from them. But, but then, then it couples with my favorite line from literature written by Oscar Hammerstein for a libretto of a musical of all things called Carousel. And the line is, as long as there's one person on earth who remembers you, it isn't over. And that led me to creating a litany of in my morning ritual prayers, meditation. I say the name out loud of every person that was a part of my existence that I was close to or maybe not even that close to, but that I had connection with. And I go through this whole list. How long does that take? Well, I think it takes about five minutes to say all the names. Probably a little less, maybe close to four, but I'll just do just a little bit. Daddy Joe, Irv, Haddy, Ellen, Ronny, Doc, Uncle, Kale, Bob, Mark, Uncle, Errol, Dre, Jeffrey, Siegel, Marcia, UI, Uncle, Arch, Dana, Chris, Duff, Bella, Smitty, Leo, Joe, Siegel, Nando, Bill, Maudelle, Tensovitzky, Sheldon, Andy, Mary, Skylar, and Silver, Sam, Tess, Dino, and it goes on and on. Wow. And so. Do you sing it out loud? Out loud. I do it out loud. And it's very comforting to me. I do it always before I go on stage or in front of a camera or in front of a podcast. I do it morning in my morning prayers before I come here to do these things so that I'm not alone. So they're with me, but I do it for a tremendously selfish reason down the road. And that reason is so when my time comes to leave this life that I'm familiar with and I hope I'm conscious and aware of it, I believe they will be there. All those people. All those people. I believe they're in big groups. No, this is the only time. That's the only time I'm willing to go to a rock concert. That's right. It's the only rock concert I will attend. Five minutes of people. Yeah. And when I look out into an audience during a concert and I see the darkness because when the lights in your eyes, you sometimes see darkness, I see them all there. I see all the people from, you know, holocausts across, you know, the planet, you know, from, you know, you know, Jews don't like it. We use the word holocaust, but, you know, you know, holocausts of the Jews, the genocide of American Indians, Bosnians, all the people that have suffered. This goes on and on, unfortunately, and continues to grow. And I fear that the Palestinians are now part of that list. And I see them and I sing to them and I welcome them. And I always ask and I always sing the Misha Beirach prayer, which is a Jewish prayer for healing, because I've heard that in certain cultures of religion that the soul goes into limbo or what's the word purgatory until it's ready. And then it goes here, it goes there. And if they need any healing, any of them, I wish them the Misha Beirach prayer. I wish them to heal. You also sing that to your dog when you feed her. And I sing it to God, who I refer to as Hashem, because I can't imagine that my God, my Hashem, isn't also wounded and dying inside, watching his creation fail and hurt and kill each other. What do you get out of that? I love this ritual so much. It's so simple. It's so powerful. You're continuing the connection. You have your own private way of doing this. But you can also talk to folks about it. Why would you advocate that someone has this sort of grief ritual that they turn to, as opposed to trying to forget or block out the memory of those people? What do you get from that? Oh, because I get comfort. Great comfort. I also took six years till I had a dream where my dad was there. I refused to believe that what my mind has in a dream state is any different from the reality of the three, four of us sitting here, talking to each other. That's reality to my brain. So is my dream. Do you hear that? Sometimes it takes six years to get a visit. It took six years, and then I had the most extraordinary dream. And so I want people to look forward to those visits, like when you're walking down the road and looking at your baby for the first time, and you start to bawl and weep because you miss that loved one who's not holding them. Those tears are that loved one's tears coming out of your eyes. They are with you. You are remembering. They're there. And those children, babies, dogs, animals, feel them. I believe that. That's not just my fun. It's my way of getting through this game called life. And what do you say to the person who has yet to have the dream six years later, and maybe other people have had dreams of their person, but you're kind of like, Well, I'm kind of like, that's what mom's going to. Do you want to talk about that at all? No, I want to eat, too. What would I say? Yeah, what would you say? I'd say, you know, stay healthy, eat right, keep walking, do your exercise, because I believe it will come. And if it doesn't come in this life as you know it, I don't know what happens after this life. Maybe this is it. Maybe it's not. But don't be so sure that it doesn't come, because I'll tell you when I think it comes, if it really wants to keep you waiting, it comes just as you're leaving. And it comes to take you somewhere. And I've been in the room with my father and my aunt Ida when that room was electric. And it bonded us forever. And I believe to this day, my grandpa Max, my father's father, showed up in that room. And it made my aunt Ida and I one being for the rest of our lives when my dad died at 52. I felt it. I've asked other people about this kind of thing. It's spooky. People think you're crazy. I love it if people think I'm crazy. I don't give a shit. I believe it. Well, you know, it's funny. I'm always looking for signs, because, you know, my brother left us a year ago, February. But I was walking down the hall in the apartment. He made me this gorgeous collage for like my birthday in 1986. It's hung on the wall. It's right behind you. No, no, honey, not that one. Not that one. It's one in the city. And I love it. And it's up there. And just, it's been there for 20 years. Just hang on. And I walked by it the other day, and I noticed there was a little bit of writing, like that he'd cut out, you know. And I couldn't see it, and I couldn't see it, and I wanted you, and I took it down. And it was this incredible quote that I haven't memorized, but it spoke to this moment that I'm in, because I'm working on a piece about the age I am. And here's this quote that he put on this collage in 1986, and it says something like, I'm a youth ferocious, lusty, glorious, wonderful. Do you know that old age can also be lusty, ferocious, beautiful, that the darkness and the stars can also be as extraordinary as the sun? And it just, I never saw it before. I never saw it before. I never remember even reading it. It was like 1986. And you know, Isaac was, you know, four, and you weren't here yet. I was here. And here, yeah, you were. And it just felt to be like, okay, okay, that's a sign. You know, I just couldn't believe that as I'm struggling with this piece about how to be fully alive and ferociously alive in this age. And I did when I was younger, and there my brother put that in 1986. I love the part of these conversations that's about just like opening these big curious topics that are at the heart of the big mystery that is life. And like, we don't know. We know. Was the moment seeing the collage, your brother kind of beaming in and bringing your eye to this frame, or was it just like you were looking for a clue that had been there all along? And like, it doesn't actually matter. Or was it dad's dad as a housefly who landed on the corner of that frame at that moment, drawing mom's eyes there? Yeah. And Wendy, I thank you. I thank you for sharing your story with us and inspiring this kind of conversation. And I'll think of you when I see more butterflies. And Mandy, maybe you can add Matthias to your list of folks. There's room for one more. Okay. I'd like to, I'd like an honorable, alive person mention. No, that would not be good. That would make me very super special. Okay, never mind. I don't need to be there. We spent enough time together. Carla, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming by. You can check out Carla's incredible book, Renegade Grief. And lastly, folks can also check out the dinner party. Amazing organization for people who have lost someone trying to find community 40 and under. And amazing thing to plug into if you're looking for that in your life. Do it. Thanks so much for coming by. Thanks guys. Next time bring some cookies or something, okay? With Salt Flake on top. We should bring, we should have the cookies. Next time we'll have the cookies. You look so beautiful. You do. Come on. Bye guys. Bye. Thanks Carla. Thanks Ed. Bye. Alright, that was wonderful. It was wonderful. We love having our people stop on by here. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We want to hear from you more questions, stories, advice for us, advice you've had. Absolutely, we need advice. Strange tales from beyond. You can send an email to AskMandyandCatherineatgmail.com. Or check out our socials for an easy way to send us a voice note. And just remember. Don't listen to us. Don't, don't, don't. Don't Listen to Us is a Lemonada Media Original. Hosted by Mandy Patinkin, Catherine Groty and Gideon Groty Patinkin. Created by Katrina Anstad, Debbie Pacheco and Gideon Groty Patinkin. Executive producers are Catherine Groty, Gideon Groty Patinkin, Mandy Patinkin, Katrina Anstad, Debbie Pacheco, Jessica Cordova-Cramer and Stephanie Whittles-Wax. Our engineer is Ryan Derringer of Welterweight Sound. Video and audio production by Mark Whiteway of Bellows Media. You can watch on CNN.com slash watch or the CNN app. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Media Premium yet, now's the perfect time. You can hear Don't Listen to Us completely ad-free. 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