The CBC interview is below, and here’s the TIME article, a version of which will be on newsstands worldwide this weekend. Then keep reading, because this week's piece is connected.

And Now, The Thing I've Been Avoiding for Twenty Years

Memorial Day always does something to me. Not in the way it’s officially supposed to, though I always stop to think about the people this day was actually made for. I’m thinking less about flags and more about the word itself. Memorial. The act of memorializing. Who gets remembered, how, and by whom.

It’s been especially loud this week. Last week I wrote about saying goodbye to The Late Show and, through it, to my mom, who died while I was working at The Colbert Report in 2006. The response cracked something open in a way I genuinely didn’t see coming—the aforementioned interviews, thousands of DMs, requests to read the articles from Rosie O’Donnell; the co-creator of The Daily Show; Tom Freston, the founder of MTV?? It’s something I’ve never experienced from any piece of writing. Overwhelming, frankly.

But what got me wasn’t the scale of it. It was that so many of you wrote back not about Stephen, but about your own people (just read the comments section). Because that’s what happens when you ask someone to witness what you’re remembering. They crack open a little too, and give it right back.

‘Who tells your story’ kept surfacing. For my mom, for a long time, the answer was: almost no one. Not because her story wasn’t worth telling. Because I kept waiting for the right moment that never seemed to arrive.

She died before online life really got going (lucky her). The only real artifacts of her existence on the Internet are a couple of obituaries and some ridiculous forwarded jokes from the early 2000s. You know the ones: Re: Re: Re: Re: FWD: FWD: This Will Make You Smile!!!. Most everything else—the photos, the letters, the notes she’d dash off in her enviable script—lives in a wooden container that also functions as a side table in my living room. I open it sometimes. I close it more often. Something always felt more urgent, or honestly, more comfortable.

But I have kids now it is increasingly not okay that they’ll never meet her, now that they’re developing lives of their own. And her friends, who still message me that they miss her, deserve somewhere to go.

So I finally did the thing.

I built her a memorial page with Keeper, a female-founded business from the Toronto area, and I used their concierge service, which meant that a very kind and patient person walked me through the whole process (see the part about them being Canadian). That part mattered more than I expected. I didn’t really have anyone to do this with, and having a guide made the difference between closing the container again and actually going through it.

The page itself is genuinely beautiful, in part because you can choose whatever colors, imagery, or themes would work for it (no hazy sunsets in here, unless you want one?) There’s space for her favorite recipe (apricot chicken), a family tree, her interests and milestones, quotes she loved, things she was known for saying (among them, “take care of my girl” and, amusingly, “discombobulated”). There’s also:

• a world map showing her many adventures (something I particularly loved working on and am still soliciting anecdotes from some of her travel companions)

• places to donate in her memory (the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly NARAL)

• favorite songs (I added videos for “Duke of Earl” and a selection of Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and Tina Turner)

• a section for friends to add their own anecdotes (for me, selfishly, priceless)

I even turned my favorite photos into a video slideshow, because once I started digging I couldn’t stop. My cousin Barb in San Francisco sent me photos of my mom’s days hanging around the Haight in the late ‘60s. I finally opened the video from my other cousin’s 1994 wedding in Philly and there she was, laughing and clapping to “September” in her fancy ivory beaded dress from Harry’s.

Going through this ritual was a lot of things. “Nice” doesn’t fully cover it, but it’ll do.

For now I’ve set the page to private. Maybe one day I’ll make it public (you can see one of those here). But right now it’s just a quiet place that exists, a small corner of the digiverse where some of her goodness takes up space. That’s enough.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: memorializing someone doesn’t require any particular timeline. You don’t have to do it while the loss is fresh, while everyone is watching, while you feel ready. I am, apparently, proof that twenty years later still counts. And now that I’m looking at all of it, so many things about her that I felt like I kind of forgot along the way have come roaring back to life.

Keeper offers a lot—memorial pages, virtual funeral services, memorial trees, even QR plaques you can place at a physical site that link directly to the memorial page online—but if you’ve been putting off something like this the way I have, I’d specifically recommend starting with the concierge option. It made the whole thing feel less like a project and more like a ritual.

Modern Loss readers will get 15% off by using ML26 at checkout.

Try it out

I’d love to know: How have you memorialized your person, animal, dream?

Leave a comment

This post is sponsored by Keeper Memorials. All thoughts, and all memories of my mother dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire, are my own.

I have photos and stories from across the years that I've mostly kept to myself, not wanting to come across as boastworthy. But this is an elegy for something that created real meaning in my life and the lives of so many others. So here we are, leaving it all on the table.

It was 2005, and I’d been working up the nerve to tell my parents I wanted to apply my brand-new Columbia Journalism degree to producing “truthiness” on Comedy Central (a term, it turned out, I’d witness being coined during the morning writers’ meeting). Before I could, she called. “Beck, I heard Stephen Colbert on Fresh Air today. He’s getting his own show. You should work for him.” She said it so plainly and without hesitation that I laughed out loud, as though it weren’t the longest shot in media jobs. As if this were simply how things worked. But we both recognized something special in him from The Daily Show that we couldn’t quite name yet.

Somehow, after months of interviews and twisted story idea submissions, I got the job. The following year, on the last night of our summer hiatus after we’d just come back from the Emmys, she was gone, killed in a car accident miles from the studio. The highest high to the lowest low.

What followed taught me things I’ve never quite put into words publicly. Working at The Colbert Report taught me how to treat people. (And, just as importantly, how not to.) It taught me that culture flows from the top, and that in a relentless industry not exactly known for its empathy, daily television included, Stephen set a tone I’ve tried to carry ever since. He checked in, and he both directly and indirectly made clear that taking care of myself wasn’t optional. He sent me a one-line, hand-written card that cut to the heart of everything weird and painful about fresh traumatic loss. I’ve never written about that before, and frankly, given the scope of his enormous life, I'd wonder if he’d even remember.

But here’s what I’ll remember: The sight of an unmarked oversized white rental van pulling up to a cemetery in Philadelphia, doors swinging open, colleagues spilling out. The way that even when people didn’t know what to say (which is most people, always, in the face of loss) they still tried. Tanya, who is now The Late Show’s co-executive producer, took me to a John Edwards taping—the psychic, not the senator—a couple of months after my mom died. She didn’t know what else to do, but she wanted to do something. That’s its own kind of love. We got tickets. We sat in those chairs. We were completely serious.

That’s the thing about that place. Even when people were at a total loss, even when they were overextended beyond belief and surviving on craft services on 54th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, they showed up. In unmarked vans. In psychic waiting rooms. However they could.

My mom never got to see Stephen move to The Late Show in 2015. But he was there anyway: in the moments when my dad turned on The Colbert Report to watch him, say, solemnly posing with a portrait of himself posing with a portrait of himself and imagine her giggling on the couch next to him. In the years since, he's been a nearly daily presence on my phone, on my TV, tethering me to the version of myself she believed in.

There was always the knowledge, too, that I could get tickets to a taping at any point and walk back into that room, reconnect with that world, feel the thread pull taut again. Losing him as a touchstone feels like another thread cut from what connects me to her. And now, even that option is gone.

I realize it’s a somewhat embarrassing thing to admit that losing a television show feels like losing a mom again. But you can’t be embarrassed by a feeling. Unless it’s being irrationally moved to tears by a particularly well-executed parallel parking job. That one I’ll own.

Last week I sat in the Ed Sullivan Theater for one of the final tapings. Before the show even started, the theater became something else. Old colleague after old colleague materialized to greet me and my friend Nicole Savini, a beloved former producer there—writers, producers, crew, folks I’ve since creatively collaborated with at Modern Loss—and what followed was a cascade of hugs so sustained and immediate it felt less like a reunion and more like a reflex. As many as twenty years dissolved in thirty seconds. The family feeling, it turns out, doesn’t require maintenance. It just waits.

After the show, Stephen grabbed my phone and took a selfie of us on that stage. I am aware that I look unhinged with joy. I was.

Watching Stephen work that stage one more time and watch the audience simply gravitate toward his energy, I found myself thinking about what he’d actually built. Not a show about grief. A show where grief could appear without apology. Where a guest could say something true and unfinished and not be nudged back toward the punchline. Where love and loss were allowed to sit together, because he seemed to understand, better than almost anyone on television, that they were never really separate.

That understanding changed me. I carried it out of that building and into the years that followed, and it’s part of what led me to build Modern Loss: the belief that people need spaces where the hardest things can be said out loud without being packaged into something easier to swallow.

He proved it was possible. Over and over again. After the next section are five moments I keep coming back to.

In TIME, today

My latest piece for TIME makes the broader cultural argument about why Colbert's contribution to late night has been so overlooked, what it means that nothing has replaced it, and why grief remains fundamentally at odds with how mainstream media is built. The $64,000 question: What’s gonna happen now?

I’m genuinely proud of this article and learned a version will appear in the printed magazine next week. Ping me if you see it in the wild!

Read It Here

Five moments (of too many) that didn’t resolve

1. Andrew Garfield on grief as unexpressed love (2021)

Garfield told Colbert he didn’t want to get over losing his mother — that his grief was “all the unexpressed love I didn’t get to tell her.” Colbert went quiet. The audience went quiet. Nothing was resolved.

2. Keanu Reeves on what happens when we die (2019)

As an answer to one of the standard questions in the first-ever Colbert Questionert, Reeves simply responded, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” Colbert shook his hand and ended the interview. Boom. Nothing else needed to be said.

Buy The Modern Loss Handbook

3. Katherine LaNasa on cancer as something ongoing (2026)

The Pitt actor didn’t offer a survival story. She just offered the truth: “Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get the short end of the stick.” It was the rare interview that didn’t ask illness to redeem itself and I watched it over and over.

4. Anderson Cooper and Stephen go deep (2019)

Ok, this one was Anderson’s interview, but whoa. Who doesn’t love these two together? Colbert’s answer that gratitude and grief aren’t opposites and that suffering is part of the gift of existence has stayed with me longer than almost anything I’ve read on the subject.

5. Stephen on the gun violence crisis (2022)

After a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Stephen stopped his show cold and told his audience that prayers wouldn’t end mass shootings. Voting might. “Who running for office has publicly stated that they are willing to do anything and everything in their power to protect your children from the criminally insane number of guns in America?” he asked. He was doing what mainstream television almost never does: using one of the most-watched stages in America to say the uncomfortable, specific, politically costly thing out loud, not as commentary, but as a demand. Hero move.

And so…

I keep thinking about my mom on that phone call, so certain. She’d love knowing the show ran for another decade after she died. She’d love knowing I was in that room last week, cackling with and being pulled into hugs by the extended family she helped nudge me toward.

She’d probably also take full credit. She’d be right.

To Stephen: Thank you. For the tone you set. For checking in when you didn’t have to. For building something that taught a roomful of people, including one very green researcher from Philadelphia, that loss doesn’t have to be hidden to be survivable.

I have a lot of feelings about the forces that took this beautiful show off that stage. But today, just this.

Leave a comment

So in the spirit of feeling all of it anyway, I spoke with Gus Constantellis, a comedian and content creator who built a quarter-million-person Instagram following by impersonating his Greek mom, Julia, a force by all accounts. After she died, Gus figured out ways to keep the relationship going through memory, and comedy, and now, especially, food.

Enter My Greek Mom’s Recipes, She Died. I Wrote This Cookbook, one of the most moving and enjoyable grief books I've read in a while, and also the only one with a recipe for walnut cake.

The full interview is below. And for paid subscribers, Gus's essay "I'm So Fucking Angry All the Time" and Julia’s recipe for Fanouropita, aka, “the cake for lost things.”

Rebecca Soffer: Gus, you’ve managed to portray grief as something that is somehow both deeply unhinged and deeply beautiful. It’s funny, it’s chaotic, it’s unexpectedly tender. It’s a reminder that grief doesn’t have one tone. It’s just a full personality disorder. Why did you start the shtick online, and why are we here today?

GC: I started doing content with her just as I was getting into the content game, right before the pandemic. One Easter, one of those videos went viral. People fell in love with her. I would subtitle and slightly soften her for the Americans, but it was still quite brutal sometimes. We started talking about doing a cookbook, but she'd always say, "Wait until the grandkids go to kindergarten." So obviously, that never happened. But I needed to feel connected to her in my own way, since children aren’t really in my plan. And as the queer son, I’m saying, this is your legacy, and now it truly lives on forever.

RS: You weren’t physically with her when she died. How was that for you?

GC: We were in Crete together—me and my ex and my parents—then split up on the trip. We planned to meet back in Athens and fly home together. But in between, she had a stroke waiting for the ferry and was in a coma for five days. I got to see her in the hospital. The doctor said she’d probably pass away naturally in a month so we should take our flights home and come back for the funeral. So I got on the flight. Six hours in, I got the text from my brother: mom is dead. And I had to pay for the WiFi. I paid $12.99 for that WiFi.

RS: You paid $12.99 to hear that your mom died.

GC: And because of the pandemic, they eliminated most bereavement flight policies, so it would have been $4,000 to fly back for the funeral. My dad said, “Just stay. You were here for four days.” So I didn’t go back.

RS: That must have felt wildly surreal.

GC: It did. Because I also went back home with my ex, and we broke up that week. We'd gotten into a huge argument before my moms’ stroke, and I felt completely disembodied; like I had to disregard my own emotions because this other man was trying to take over the situation. Then he had the audacity to say, "If you miss your mom's funeral, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life." I was like, you don't have the privilege of experiencing me grieving my mother.

RS: So many layers of loss, wow. And yet you’re finding your way through them. In the kitchen, of all places. Your mom famously said, “When I die, you’re all going to starve.” But you didn’t. You started cooking. What was the first thing of hers that you made after she died?

GC: I made her bolognese. I was craving the food. Like, “I want to taste this again, and I can make it. If it turns out shitty, it turns out shitty.” But it didn’t. It was like, “Oh, I feel nice and warm. This is perfect.”

RS: You realized you could maintain that connection and eat well at the same time. And then?

GC: Immediately my instinct was to share it with other people, which was my mom’s instinct too, especially because she didn’t speak the language and connected with people through food. I’d bake cookies and give them to my neighbor or drop them at my friend’s place. That was what clicked for me.

RS: When did this stop feeling like just content and start feeling like something you felt responsible for preserving?

GC: It always comes down to storytelling. It would be easy to just do TikTok dances and trends, but I’m challenging people with longer-form videos. They really lock in. If you sit down and pay attention, you’re going to get a cool, powerful story.

RS: There’s a chapter I love called “I’m So Fucking Angry All the Time.” What surprised you most about grief anger?

GC: How relentless it is. My therapist always says, “Anger really is just a mask for pain.

Every day I’m angry about something else. I’ll go to a wedding and see the mother-son dance and get angry again. I’ll see a mom with her kid outside and get angry again. I’ll see my dad doing something stupid and get angry all over again. You really have to sit there and be like, “Why am I angry? What is the pain, and how can I just sit with it?”

RS: You’re so funny online and you have this gorgeous colorful book. It’s important for people to hear that even those who seem to be navigating grief publicly and beautifully still struggle with the hard stuff, even years in.

GC: Once someone who follows me on Instagram bumped into me in Berlin and later said, "I met you a few years ago, but you were kind of mean to me." Well, I was going through something and didn't have the patience. When I posted about my mom dying, I was having coffee in a square in Greece and this family of six came up to me, sobbing: "We heard about your mom." Navigating that while it was all happening was traumatic in its own way. I'm angry about that, too.

RS: Did your anger build anything useful, or was it mostly destruction with good branding?

GC: This book, honestly. If I wasn’t so angry and in so much pain, I wouldn’t have done anything about it. Anger moves, and I had to move a little

Leave a comment

RS: Your mom didn’t just write recipes down. She felt them. What’s the emotional equivalent of that? The grief version of “add a little more until it feels right”?

GC: My therapist said, “follow the instinct you have right now. You’re going to feel impulsive, and some of those impulses are fine to give into.” I never used to go out partying. Now I go out til five, six a.m. I let the trauma out through dance and music. In terms of existentialism, my uncle died six months after my mom and that’s when it clicked: I’m just going to do what I’ve got to do and have some fun, because this is hard and I see how it ends.

RS: Life is relentless.

GC: Relentless.

RS: So you might as well make the meatballs and go out dancing. If your mom were around for your book launch—and obviously there would be no “She Died” in the subtitle—what would she be wearing, and what would people notice about her?

GC: Well, first, that she’d be outside smoking a cigarette. But her hair would be done up, she’d be in a beautiful blue dress, and she’d be so happy.

RS: If someone is reading this right now, missing their person—angry, feeling reckless, laughing at something they feel weird about laughing at—what would you say to them?

GC: Follow that instinct. If that’s what you’re feeling, you’ve got to laugh at the stupid thing and you’ve got to feel it, because if you don’t, it really does get bottled up. Sit with it and let it pass through you. And instill rituals in your life that feel peaceful to you and honor you as much as they honor your person.

RS: What would she say about this conversation that the publisher would absolutely not put in the marketing copy?

GC: “Don’t embarrass me.” And: “Make sure my food looks good, okay? Because you’re messy.”

RS: That sounds like a lot of our moms. And maybe that’s the whole point

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Leave a comment

Bake Julia’s Fanouropita, “the cake for lost things”

Read more

I promise this newsletter has not been taken over by a 29-year-old from Vermont.

But then The Great Divide dropped last week and here we are. I actually had an entirely different issue planned for today but some things are just too big to not address.

By now I know better than to casually listen to a Noah Kahan song for the first time while I have an audience. So I waited until I had time to myself last Saturday, inserted my earbuds, and walked around a lake. It’s a good thing I’m used to wearing my feelings on my sleeve, because by the end of the hour, I looked like someone who had just watched a Pixar movie alone in public.

I’ve been thinking about what it means that I had to prepare myself at all based on the mere two songs I’d heard in previous months in advance of the release. That’s not nothing. That’s an artist who has figured out how to reach into the chest cavity of a stranger and rearrange something.

It feels especially significant that the album landed right at the start of Mental Health Awareness Month. Every May, we dust off the same opener—it’s okay not to be okay—and then mostly leave people standing there with it. We’ve gotten good at naming the feeling. We’re considerably less good at what comes next.

Noah Kahan goes next. Song after song after song. And not just one kind of loss. The Great Divide holds so many of them at once: the grief that comes with a funeral and the grief that doesn't, the loss of a person and the loss of a version of yourself, the relationship that ended loudly and the friendship that just quietly stopped. The illness and the caregiving. The losses that qualify for sympathy cards and the ones that don't. He's not writing for one kind of hurt. He's writing for all of it.

“The Great Divide”

The title track is the thesis of the whole album, and maybe the bravest thing on it. It’s about watching a friend struggle with his mental health and religious trauma and not knowing how to reach him, or not trying hard enough. The guilt of a deep misunderstanding of someone else’s inner life. It’s the song that names what most of us have done to someone we love and never said out loud.

“Porch Light”

Written from his mother’s perspective, which is already a remarkable act of humility for an artist whose career has been built on mining his own pain, this one is about the specific, exhausting love and grief of waiting for someone to come back to themselves. She leaves the light on every night. She’s the one who turns it off every morning. He even lets her say the quiet part: it’s not irrelevant that you stopped taking your medication. No flinching.

“American Cars”

Man, I felt this one hard. That desperate wish for someone—a partner, a parent, a friend with their shit together—to just come and make it better. We're drowning here. But it also captures something subtler: how quickly the dynamic of a relationship can shift when someone leaves or comes back or dies or gets sick or injured and changes forever. How you have to learn an entirely new language with the people you thought you already knew by heart (if you ever see me IRL, just ask). How sometimes their absence makes everything easier, and how that can be its own kind of grief. And how sometimes they come back and everything gets so much harder, and that's its own kind of grief too. And then that bridge arrives and absolutely takes you out.

Leave a comment

“23”

Ambiguous grief in its purest form. The grief of a person you’re not sure how to mourn. The loss you can’t touch or see but can sure as hell feel (tattooed initials, the face you’ve decided you’re done with but keeps haunting you anyway). If you never see someone again, they can stay exactly who you needed them to be. Kahan knows how seductive that is. He also knows it’s a trap.

“Dan”

The closing track, and the one that undid me most completely. It’s about a childhood best friend, a bonfire, a pack of terrible beer, getting lost in the woods at 19, conversations about everything and nothing. It’s about more, too, but that’s where I went. It sent me straight back to childhood summers camping on the Lake George islands. Campfires and lightning bugs. The Big Dipper overhead. Bananas stuffed with chocolate and wrapped in tin foil, pulled from the coals. Mosquito bites. My family laughing and loud and fully present, and me feeling held by all of it: by them, by the night, by the specific untouchable magic of being young and not yet knowing that anything could be lost.

Kahan has a line in the song about not minding spending eternity right there, in that moment. I know exactly where my “right there” is. I suspect you do too.

If you want to go even deeper into the man behind all of it, Kahan’s Netflix documentary Out of Body, also out now, follows him through his own unraveling and reckoning with mental health in real time. It's as honest as the music. Watch it with snacks and tissues and no plans afterward.

What moves me most isn’t any single song. It’s the cumulative effect of a person deciding, again and again, to say the thing he is most afraid to say, and then releasing it into the world and trusting that someone will catch it. Also, it just feels good to root for the guy. He’s clearly a mensch.

That’s the nature of bravery that doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up, tells the truth, and creates a ripple it will never fully see.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be spending the next couple of months manifesting his Fenway concert tickets from the universe.

Leave a comment

While I have you

If this resonated, both of my books—The Modern Loss Handbook and Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome. (coauthored with Gabrielle Birkner)—are for anyone navigating the endless facets of loss.

And if you’re looking for a speaker for your organization during Mental Health Awareness Month and beyond, I’d love to talk.

One more thing, and it's a bittersweet one.

The Dinner Party is closing after 16 remarkable years, and I couldn’t let this issue go out without acknowledging it. I’m biased. Lennon Flowers, Carla Fernandez, and I started our weird, creative, community-building grief projects around the same time and I care deeply for them. Knowing they were out there doing the work every damn day made me feel like I had colleagues who truly got it. Many balmy Washington Heights gatherings later, I can say without hesitation that what they’ve built will continue on.

They're raising $100,000 to close with the same care and intention that defined their beginning: connecting waitlisters to community, preserving their resources, and supporting their staff. Every dollar is matched up to $20,000, so your gift goes twice as far. If you’ve ever been a Dinner Partier or find value in their mission, please help them close this chapter with grace.

Donate here

and I go way back…like, back to when our kids were babies tumbling around each other in living rooms, before his byline became synonymous with the most consequential beat in journalism. These days he’s a climate reporter for the New York Times, the author of The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Dirtbag Billionaire, and someone who has reported from Iceland to Patagonia to Cancer Alley in Louisiana.

He also, somewhat improbably, does not suffer from climate grief.

Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to him for this Earth Day issue. Our community knows better than most that grief doesn’t need a death certificate to be real, and climate grief is something a lot of people are quietly carrying. I wanted to understand how someone steeped in this material every single day actually processes it.

The answer surprised me.

Rebecca Soffer: You’ve reported from some extraordinary places. What’s one you still carry with you in a sensory way. Like, you can still feel it?

David Gelles: Iceland. It was in some ways the most alien landscape—obviously of Earth, but very different from everywhere else. There’s this sense of dynamism because it’s volcanic, and volcanoes were erupting while I was there. You get the sense that it’s very old, but also that there’s new land being created under your feet. It’s hot and cold at the same time, black and green at the same time, saltwater and freshwater at the same time. It’s a land of contradictions, and I loved it.

RS: You’re so deeply immersed in this material—the books, the Times reporting, the newsletters that I read and sometimes immediately set down because they have some stuff that feels scary to me about the state of the planet. What does climate grief feel like for you in the in-between moments, not on assignment but just living your life?

DG: I want to be clear: I don’t experience a lot of climate grief personally, and I don’t want to minimize it for people who do. All sorts of people, especially young people, may experience real feelings of grief when reflecting on what humanity is doing to this planet. There’s a lot to grieve. One hundred and fifty or so years of relentless fossil fuel emissions have warmed the planet, and the effects are really starting to kick in. There has been enormous biodiversity loss—on the level of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, we have done that to plant and animal life in just the last couple of decades. The human toll is real, too. Climate change is costing lives and will take many more, and that suffering is not going to be evenly distributed. All of that is worthy of grief. It’s just not how I personally experience it.

RS: And how do you?

DG: I’ve been practicing Buddhism for 30 years, and those teachings don’t tell us to deny any of the terrible things I just described—but they also don’t lead me toward a place of powerlessness. I’m a reporter, not a climate activist—I want to be very clear about that. That’s not my role. What motivates me is joy: both in the creative process and in believing this work matters.

RS: That’s actually reassuring, and clarifying. Because when you’re delivering information that can flatten people, you can bash them over the head with it until they never come back, or you can do what you do. Level-headed, clear-eyed. So when you wrote recently that scientists say things are happening faster than even they predicted—that’s not grief for you?

DG: No. And I don’t think this is the end of the world. I want to be clear about that too. Massive suffering is on the way, and there are potential black swan events that could completely disrupt the entire planetary ecosystem. But humans are incredibly clever and resilient. I do believe New York will still be here as a city in a hundred years. Holding both of those things at the same time is difficult. But I think it’s important.

RS: How do you talk to your own kids about this?

DG: Funny you asked, because I just addressed about 60 kids in my daughter’s sixth grade class. I very quickly note that things are changing because of human activity and that’s creating some problems. And then I pivot, and spend almost all the time on: so, what are the solutions? What can we do about it? Kids will talk to you about that all day long.

RS: The people who seem least emotionally flattened by this are often kids. The conversations I have with mine are more anchored in curiosity than dread.

DG: The opposite of grief in this context is action.

RS: Or not even the opposite—just a way to harness and channel it.

DG: Exactly. If the question shifts from “what is it doing to me, oh my God” to “what can I do about it”—that’s just a different posture.

Massive suffering is on the way, and there are potential black swan events that could completely disrupt the entire planetary ecosystem. But humans are incredibly clever and resilient….Holding both of those things at the same time is difficult. But I think it’s important.

RS: So for someone who is deep in climate dread right now, what’s one piece of take-it-or-leave-it advice?

DG: Get out of your head and get into nature. Turn off social media, stop reading the news, and go to a forest or a park or a lake or an ocean or a river. Go somewhere you can hear natural sounds—the wind, the water—and not the voice in your head telling you all hope is lost. Because if you get into nature and let your body remember what that feels like, you almost invariably will experience some amount of peace, and maybe even hopefulness.

RS: Earth Day can feel like a hashtag. Brands slapping a leaf on things, a collective moment packaged a little too neatly. What do you actually want people to take from it this year?

DG: Gone are the days to just sit back and reflect on what a beautiful and well-balanced blue dot we live on. The Earth is experiencing really rapid transitions that are going to disrupt life as we know it. Earth Day is an opportunity to talk about action—what are we going to do about it? That’s a big, hard, complicated, political and industrial conversation, and it can feel overwhelming. But every day is Earth Day. Get outside, get out of your head. If we’re going to have a collective moment, I hope it engenders a real conversation about what we’re actually doing.

Leave a comment

RS: What companies are genuinely doing notable work here, and who should maybe sit down?

DG: Patagonia is small, but the way they’ve structured their corporate governance, their giving, their supply chain—it speaks to a real commitment to do less bad in the world. And then there’s Microsoft, which I’m currently writing about. It’s a company that made really lofty climate goals and helped seed an entire industry of carbon removal technologies, but is now stepping back in some ways. It’s messy. This is going to often feel like two steps forward and one step back. We’re not on a straight line toward solving this problem quickly.

RS: Who is the most unexpectedly hopeful person you’ve interviewed on this beat? Not optimistic—hopeful. They’re different things.

DG: Eileen Fisher.

RS: Wasn’t my first through fifth guess. Why?

DG: She has used her company to real effect, trying to clean up its supply chain, doing things in unusual ways that try to benefit the planet and people. And if you spend time with Eileen, she has this infectious joy. She’s like a wonderful rock-and-roll kind of person.

RS: I love that, and this all makes sense because last year she opened a sustainable clothing lab near me in the Berkshires. After this conversation, I’ll take the infectious joy wherever I can find it—in an Eileen Fisher store, in a forest, in a sixth grader who just wants to know that the grown-ups care and also what the heck we’re going to do about it. Happy Earth Day, David.

DG: Happy Earth Day.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A Tree That Outlives Us All

Something David said stayed with me after our conversation: that the antidote to climate dread might be as simple as going somewhere you can feel anchored to the Earth. Keeper Memorials has been quietly offering a beautiful way to do exactly that, and it works whether your grief has a name or not.

Their memorial tree program plants a real tree in honor of someone you’ve lost—or, frankly, in honor of anyone or anything you want to mark—in protected public lands across the U.S., Canada, and Brazil in partnership with American Forests.

These aren’t symbolic gestures: these areas are already affected by deforestation and climate change. The new trees live 200 to 400 years, the forests are protected from logging, and after planting you receive GPS coordinates of exactly where your tree is growing. In a grief landscape that so often feels abstract and unmoored, there’s something genuinely grounding about knowing that a living thing, in a specific place, in a real forest, exists because someone you loved did, too. It’s also one of the more accessible and lasting things you can do with that feeling of not knowing what to do.

Modern Loss readers can receive 15% off of one tree with code ML26.

Get a memorial tree

This issue of Modern Loss is sponsored by Keeper Memorials.

I did not expect to become someone who casually talks about orbital trajectories, but here we are. I’ve been glued to the Artemis II crew since liftoff. Then I watched Project Hail Mary, in which an astronaut befriends an alien named Rocky by banging out math across the void together, and that pretty much sealed it. (As a Philly girl, the Rocky/Adrian detail and learning that astronaut Christina Koch watches Eagles games from outer space feels both important and correct.)

Alongside others packed into a bar on Friday evening, I watched the splashdown footage as though it were the Lost series finale, holding my breath until I knew it was going to end well.

There’s something quietly radical about the way we name things in space. Not the rockets or the missions. We expect those to carry the weight of ambition and nationhood. It’s the smaller, more human choices tucked inside them. A crater on the moon named Carroll, after Reid Wiseman’s wife, who died years ago. Not a scientist. Not a president. A partner.

And here’s a part that stays with me. The idea didn’t come from him. It was from the other crew members. And Reid didn’t make the ask. It was mission specialist Jeremy Hansen who requested permission from Mission Control to name it so. “A number of years ago we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one,” he said. We. His voice cracked. Then they all hugged and cried.

For all the mythology around space travel, how solitary and heroic it is supposed to be, this was something else. It was communal. One person recognizing loss in another and choosing to honor it out loud.

It’s easy to think of Artemis II as a feat of engineering. Trajectories, heat shields, launch windows. And it is. But it’s also an exercise in memory, in what we carry with us when we go farther than we’ve ever gone before.

No one leaves Earth alone, even when they do. Every astronaut is a constellation of attachments, the people who shaped them, steadied them, loved them through the long stretches. When they strap in, they bring those people with them in quiet ways that matter. A name. A photograph. A ritual. And sometimes, they carry each other’s people, too.

Grief can isolate, but it’s also one of the fastest ways we recognize ourselves in someone else. You don’t need the same story. Just the same absence.

Naming a crater after someone you love doesn’t make the mission safer. But it insists that even at the edge of the known world, we’re still tethered to one another, that memory can be mapped. There’s something useful in that for the rest of us, and I deeply hope we get the memo.

We don’t get to choose the vastness we’re dropped into after a big loss. But we do get to choose how we mark it, what we name, and where we place the markers that say this mattered. Okay, so maybe your version isn’t a lunar crater. Maybe it’s a recipe, a song, a joke, a phrase you keep, or letting someone else help carry it for a moment.

What Artemis II reminds us is that even as we reach for what’s next, we’re allowed to bring our people with us, and sometimes, someone else will help us hold them there.

Leave a comment

ICYMI

😴 If you’re awake at 3:17 a.m., read this.

🌈 Anderson Cooper thought he’d die at 50. But he feels more alive than ever.

☯︎ Harnessing the Dual Process Model of Grief to survive messed up moments.

Hi friends,

This note is for the people who keep this going.

Truly. Your paid subscriptions don’t just support Modern Loss in some abstract way. They make it possible for me to keep showing up, having these conversations with people like Anderson Cooper, bringing in smart people such as sleep expert Lindsay Scola for pieces like If You’re Awake at 3:17 a.…

Read more

Sound f…

Read more

The vernal equinox has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, which means we’re supposed to feel something like renewal. A shift. A soft reset.

The daffodils are thriving. The group chats are optimistic. Someone somewhere is eating asparagus on purpose. Mostly, it just feels like more light on the same things.

I’m finishing a week in glorious Big Sky, Montana, where I’ve pushed my body to its limits. Skiing is a sport that is objectively fancy and not exactly accessible to all. It’s also one that continually saves me physically and mentally. There’s something about being outside for hours, with other people and also very much alone in my own head, moving through something bigger than me, that tends to rearrange things just enough.

Not fix them. Not solve anything. Just shift the pressure, which I will take.

And still, nothing I was carrying before I got here has disappeared. The inbox is still there. The low-grade dread about the state of things is still there. The grief didn’t stay behind on the mountain. The news did not magically improve while I was gone. I stopped checking it after one more round of insults, disillusionments, and fears I didn’t need to absorb, and came back to find it all exactly where I left it: still loud, still exhausting.

If anything, the extra light makes it harder to ignore.

There’s a version of spring that gets sold to us every year: Open the windows, clear out a drawer, take a deep breath, become a person who has their life in order. It’s clean, convincing, and almost never true. I have tried it. It does not take.

What does feel real is quieter. The light lingering a little longer at the end of the day, even if you’re too tired to use it. Noticing something blooming without having gone looking for it. That subtle sense, before you can name it, that something has eased up.

Not a reset. More like a slight loosening.

And that loosening matters. Most of what we carry doesn’t respond to big gestures. It shifts with a little more space, a little less pressure, a little more light. Or a few hours moving your body through cold air and remembering you can still do hard things.

Spring doesn’t fix anything. But it does change the conditions. A few more minutes at the end of the day that don’t feel quite as compressed. A reminder that change can happen without your permission. Something external to point to when everything internal feels stuck.

Leave a comment

I don’t feel renewed. But I do feel slightly less braced, which right now feels like something. And from there, you can begin again—not by starting over, but by re-entering.

Nature takes its time. So should you.

Share

30 Small Ways to Opt Out of the “Fresh Start” Narrative

Get 20% off for 1 year

Read more

On International Women’s Day, I keep thinking about all the women I know who are quietly holding entire ecosystems together.

Families. Friendships. Communities. Group chats that would collapse without them.

They’re managing careers while also remembering whose kid needs a ride, whose parent is in the hospital, whose bir…

Read more

The Winter Games wrapped just a week ago and roughly seventeen thousand news cycles have blown through since.* One moment, though, has stayed lodged in my brain.

Last week, freestyle skier Eileen Gu stoo…

Read more

I don’t want you to die and leave your people one random, maddeningly vague line in a memo about a valuable and emotionally loaded item that simply says:

“Negotiate. And be nice to each other, or I will haunt you.”

Ask my why? When my family reviewed my dad’s will and personal property directives, to his credit, the vast majority of it was thoughtful and clear. He did so many things right.

And then we hit that line. It was very him. It was very funny. It was also, in that moment, not very helpful. Also not helpful: When my mom died a few years prior, most everything of hers automatically went to him, with few specific directions. Besides that ridiculous line, so much thought went into my dad’s estate planning. So little into my mom’s; he was older than she was and everyone assumed he’d go first. Silly us.

Here’s what I’ve learned both personally and from years spent reporting on loss: Even in loving, functional families, inaction and ambiguity in the wake of death is its own kind of emotional landmine. And in many cases, it is entirely preventable.

It’s obvious that experience has stayed with me, and it’s part of why I was so interested in my recent conversation with Andreea Olteanu, an estate planning attorney with Steward, which is a modern estate planning firm that thoughtfully blends smart technology with actual human guidance. I spent a lot of time on the platform and found it easy and intuitive, which are certainly two words that I don’t normally use when immersed in this stuff.

We talked about what estate planning really is (it’s not just for the ultra-organized or wealthy among us), why avoidance can unintentionally burden the very people we love most, and how putting a plan in place is less about morbidity and more about generosity.

This isn’t about predicting tragedy. It’s about removing administrative trauma from an already painful and weird moment. It’s about giving the people in your life clarity instead of confusion. And yeah, it’s about finally doing the thing you’ve probably meant to do for years.

By setting up an estate plan, you’re ensuring that your family is taken care of, in the way in which you want, in situations where you cannot help them. I’m writing that one more time because I feel so strongly about it: By setting up an estate plan, you’re ensuring that your family is taken care of, in the way in which you want, in situations where you cannot help them.

Share

Here are 10 takeaways from our conversation, with the full video above.

10 Things To Know About Estate Planning (Before It’s Actually Urgent)

1. An “estate” isn’t about wealth. It’s about your stuff.
If you own anything—a home, a bank account, a car, digital assets, a life insurance policy, a couch—you have an estate. This isn’t a Dynasty situation. It’s a human one.

2. The real gift you leave behind is direction.
Clear instructions prevent siblings, blended families, and other people from negotiating in the fog of grief. Ambiguity fractures families. Specificity is love.

3. Doing nothing is still a decision.
If you don’t create a plan, the state creates one for you. Default laws decide who inherits what—and that may not reflect your wishes.

4. Probate takes time, money—and becomes public.
A will has to be “tested” by the court. That can take months and cost thousands. It also becomes public record. A properly funded revocable trust can avoid much of that.

5. Most families don’t need complicated tax strategies.
For the vast majority of us, a revocable trust isn’t about tax loopholes. It’s about making things smoother and simpler for the people we leave behind.

6. Minor children complicate things quickly.
If you don’t have a plan, assets can legally pass directly to your children, triggering court oversight and unintended consequences. Even forgetting to name a beneficiary on a life insurance policy can create chaos.

7. Update your plan when life changes.
Death. Marriage. Divorce. Or every five years. Even if your assets haven’t changed, your people might have.

8. Capacity matters more than you think.
You must be mentally competent to sign estate documents. Waiting too long—especially if dementia becomes a factor—can mean losing the ability to put a plan in place at all.

9. Guardians and trustees are not the same role.
The person who would be a loving parent to your child may not be the most financially savvy trustee. Choose based on role, not just closeness.

10. Estate planning is emotional protection.
It doesn’t change the fact that we die. It changes what the people we love have to carry afterward.

This post is sponsored by Steward.

A small nudge if this has been sitting on your to-do list:

Steward is offering Modern Loss readers $750 off their estate planning package through Sunday, March 1.

If getting your documents in place, or finally updating them, has been quietly hanging over your head, this is a good moment to take the first step. Their entire package includes, among many other elements:

• Dedicated Concierge to guide you through the process

• Unlimited time with your attorney

• Access to Steward’s proprietary estate planning software

• Mobile notary to execute the documents

• Revocable living trust

• Schedule of assets

• Power of attorney

• HIPAA authorization

Learn more and start your plan here

Still have questions? Good.

Andreea has been doing this work for decades, and one thing that came up again and again in our planning conversations is how many questions people carry around that shy them away from estate planning.

So we’re opening up the comments for an AMA about estate planning with Andreea below. If something has been floating around your brain, big or small, drop it there. She’ll be hopping in to answer. No question too basic. Trust me: I’ve asked all of those!

Leave a comment

Lauren Ashley Smith is the kind of comedy writer who can land a joke and an emotional truth in the same breath. She is a culture shaper and a history maker, and I’m proud to honor her existence and accomplishments during Black History Month (and, frankly, all the other months too).

Her credits span some of the s…

Read more

It was 3 a.m., and my eight-year-old was standing beside my bed. “Mommy, I had a bad dream,” he whispered, his voice shaking. In it, I was searching for him and couldn’t find him anywhere. He was lost forever.

I’d already been awake. My body was on high alert, my mind ricocheting through an interminable month’s trap doors: names I can’t shake—Liam, Renee, Alex; shootings; rights that no longer feel so inalienable; children hurt, taken, contained; we’re going to “run” Venezuela?; friends scrambling to research moves abroad. Plus basketball schedules. A no-school snow day colliding with a work Zoom I can’t screw up. Almond milk running low. Remember to Venmo the sitter.

January threatened to obliterate our sanity. Frankly, I started to doubt it would ever end. We weren’t built to metabolize this level of absorption all at once. It’s taken me three days to coherently write this short newsletter.

I pulled my little boy close, slowed my breath, and did what parents do: I told him he was safe. “Do you promise?” I promised. And then I promised I’d never lose him. In short, I lied. As anyone who lives with grief knows, certainty is the first thing these times take from us.

I didn’t have certainty to offer myself, but I did have a framework. Lately I’ve been returning to a grief theory called the Dual Process Model. My beloved social worker shared it to help me make sense of the constant back-and-forth after my mom’s death between falling apart and functioning. This theory was presented in the 1990s by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut to challenge the idea that “healthy grieving” means doing one thing in one linear way.

The model describes two necessary ways we cope in the face of loss: loss-oriented, where we sit with the pain, fear, and heartbreak; and restorative, where we take breaks from all that and turn toward life—structure, adjusting, action, even distraction.

The key isn’t choosing one over the other. It’s oscillating between them. That back-and-forth isn’t a setback or a sign of instability. It’s a normal, adaptive rhythm of adjusting to loss. Both count.

I’m not a therapist, and for all I know Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut would bristle at how I’m applying their model to moments of collective grief and overwhelm. Still, the framework has been useful to me here, particularly in the last month.

Further down are some specific ways people are caring for themselves right now, oscillating between sitting with loss (which, in my personal, non-clinical interpretation, can include staying connected, channeling care into advocacy, or finding ways to feel useful) and restoration (which might look like temporarily dissociating with Heated Rivalry or throwing a solo dance party to the top hits of 1989—the year, not the album). Here are some of mine:

Loss-oriented
- Calling my representatives once a day, every day
- Supporting small and immigrant-run businesses
- Trying my damndest to explain things to my kids without scaring them
- Donating to the Committee to Protect Journalists
- Developing a quick, daily text check-in routine with friends with zero expectation of a comprehensive reply
- Letting myself actually read the hard stories instead of skimming past them*
- Naming out loud when I feel scared, angry, or deeply unsettled without immediately trying to fix it

Restoration-oriented
- Being outdoors, preferably with any sort of movement
- Researching bucket-list trips
- Comfort food (try Dan Pelosi’s pastina recipe)
- Group outing to Yacht Rock Revue (there’s very little a good Kenny Loggins cover can’t make at least slightly better)
- Puppy yoga class (featured puppy: Dachshunds)
- *Immediately stopping reading any stories when need be
- Introducing my kids to the Mel Brooks canon, to ravenous reception: Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and History of the World: Part I. Turning the Inquisition and Hitler on Ice scenes into a lesson on how making fun of something scary can defang it, at least a little? Best thing ever.

What are you doing out there? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

A moment of recognition

Last month I received a Women to Watch award from Jewish Women International, a leading nonprofit championing women and girls globally by fighting and preventing gender-based violence and sexual abuse, addressing the intersection of domestic violence and gun violence, and building pathways to long-term economic security. My fellow honorees were some of the most wildly impressive women I’ve met, including First Women’s Bank cofounder Melissa Widen and Punchbowl News cofounder Rachel Schindler.

The conference unfolded during a brutal 48 hours, between the Brown University and Bondi Beach shootings—events that directly touched many women in the room. I don’t live in an awards ecosystem; most days my work feels like chop wood, carry water, send words into the void and hope they land somewhere. So this recognition reminded me that making space for grief, loss, and mental health, and insisting those conversations matter, is not invisible work.

💸 To that end, if you work with a nonprofit supporting highly vulnerable women and girls, consider applying for the 2026 L’Oréal Fund for Women. It’s a well-resourced global fund backing education, safety, and long-term stability. Many of you do this work, and this is real support. If you apply, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Oh Catherine! Our Catherine!

Catherine O’Hara’s roles weren’t just a throughline in my life; they were a lifeline. Delia Deetz, Kate McAllister, Moira Rose, Cookie Fleck. Just last week I’d watched her stunning eulogy for I Like Me, the documentary about John Candy, and thought, well, thank god she’s still around. Suddenly, she’s not, and it feels awful, doesn’t it?

Here she is with Eugene Levy, as Mitch and Mickey from A Mighty Wind, performing “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow.”

My sweet, my dear, my darling, you're so far away from me
Though an ocean of tears divides us
Let the bridge of our love span the sea

Real Ways People Are Coping Right Now

From Modern Loss readers and a handful of trusted friends. I hope a few are useful when things feel especially hard.

Read more

When Bob Weir—an original member of the pioneering jamband the Grateful Dead—died over the weekend, I didn’t feel sad in the way you’re supposed to feel sad about …

Read more

This is my first newsletter of the year, and I’ll be honest: I had really freaking hoped to start with something lighter. Something forward-looking, inspirational. But it felt more important to follow what needs to be named than to offer a premature uplift.

One year ag…

Read more

Today is Festivus, a made-up secular holiday that I absolutely celebrate and strongly encourage you to do the same.

It’s a holiday devoted to specificity over platitudes and saying what’s actually what before the calendar insists we wrap everything in a bow. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Then Christmas. Then the long exhale into the end of the year, and the…

Read more

There are weeks when the news feels like a series of small explosions: The Sandy Hook anniversary. Brown. The Hanukkah massacre on Bondi Beach. Another headline that knocks the wind out of already-tired lungs. Grief isn’t linear, but on days like these it feels like it’s trying to swallow the map.

It’s the …

Read more

So here’…

Read more

We’re T minus two days away from Thanksgiving and if you’re anything like me, you’re feeling, at best, a mixture of “yay” and “ugh” as you’re injected into the end-of-year holiday season.

This time of year can hit hard when you’re carrying loss—regardless of what you celebrate (or don’t). That’s exactly why the Modern Loss Winter Gift Swap exists: to pa…

Read more