Speaker 1 (0s): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the true life podcast. We are here with a special guest, a tenured professor at duke university and best-selling author Marianna DiMarco . Did I say that right? I hope

Speaker 2 (18s): I, except two of those Nick or , but I say to a government

Speaker 1 (22s): Rugged Nick, she's written an amazing book crossing back. And can you just introduce the book a little bit and maybe tell us a little bit about it?

Speaker 2 (30s): Sure. Well, let's start with the idea that it's a cul when it seems now, when I was very, very young, I wrote a memoir about growing up Italian-American in New York, which at the time was not privileged position. Italian Americans were suspect mafioso and were not educationally advantaged in New York as I was growing up. So I wrote this memoir about having turned out to be a college professor at Chris Williams college, which is a very waspy, very elite four year college in new England and then duke university, which is a somewhat less waspy, but also elite institution, North Carolina.

And that was a book of essays and a half of it was memoir. And half of it was critical essays and the memoir part addressed my father's death. He died as I was writing it. So that became an important part of it. In that memoir. My father had been the leading character because he was the parent I associated with my educational path and my movement from extreme working class, Brooklyn to elite university America.

So life goes on. I wrote other books. I continue teaching at duke. I I've directed for a long time. A program called duke in New York, arts in media and life was just moving along. And then my mother got sick rather abruptly. It wasn't a heart attack. It wasn't that kind of abrupt, but she had a stroke during surgery for her first ever hospitalization, which was for colon cancer, a removal of a tumor. And I found myself just thrown.

I had been writing a book about reading the classics at a time of war, and that turned into a grief memoir about my mother and I wasn't sure what I was doing anymore. And then there were chapters about food, all kinds of stuff was going on. I wasn't sure what was happening. So basically had a manuscript that was a mess. This happened. And so I said, oh, this manuscript is a mess. And I think I'll put it away when I, in part did not realize, but came to realize later is that I was emotionally a mess because I had been very reluctant to accept, accept grief because of various traits in my personality and background, both personal and intellectual.

And then I also discovered that I had, I had to put this kind of an unresolved issue of morning about a child who died in infancy and that was all mixed up in this. I kept coming back to it. I know it sounds, this sounds nuts. I mean, as a, as an author, I've worked on books and I tend to write one every four or five years, which is a pretty brisk clip for a professor. And I couldn't finish this one. So after 12 years after 12 years, I decided that what I was really doing was writing a sequel to the first book, which was called crossing ocean Parkway, which is a symbolic street in, in Brooklyn of the movement from working class to middle class, upper middle class.

And so I called this one crossing back and I had chapters that just weren't working. They just wouldn't work. And so I just took them out and said, this is going to be a poetic book. It's, it's gonna, it's not going to be very long. It's going to be very poetic and it's going to speak to the problem of, of grief and how to accept grief and the specific ways that I move beyond grief, which are not the specific ways that other people would, but the specific ways that I did.

Speaker 1 (4m 5s): Wow. You're such a hero in some ways to go from working class to the elite. And then, and then I didn't catch the metaphor about that street being symbolic from moving. So moving places in life like that.

Speaker 2 (4m 16s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's some, there's something I say in that first book, which I think is true. And I, I think I quoted in this book as well. I have crossed ocean Parkway. I will never cross ocean Parkway. You know? I mean, it's a kind of, I kind of, kind of a psychological thing where I, I still think of myself sometimes as a working class kid and I manifest like, not either kid or working class.

Speaker 1 (4m 42s): Yeah. Do you think that maybe the way you dealt with green, do you think that maybe one class of people deals with grief on one side of ocean Parkway and the other people deal with it differently? Or do you think that everybody deals with it maybe differently?

Speaker 2 (4m 55s): I think everybody deals with it differently. I mean, for me, I was raised Roman Catholic. I'm not a practicing Roman Catholic, but like many Roman Catholics, there's a kind of a resonance in my mind. One of the things that I think was different for me was that for both my father and then my mother, and then my brother who died shortly after my mother had pancreatic cancer. So it was a double kind of thing. I did all the Catholic rituals, but they were not effective for me. One of the things that differs, but my husband is Jewish from the other side of ocean Parkway.

And one of the things that's different about Jewish rituals and much more like Protestant rituals that I've come to know since people talk about the dead at the funeral. Whereas Roman Catholicism was very wedded to, there's a funeral mass. And, you know, we believe in the afterlife and we look toward the afterlife. And if that's, I suppose that works for many people and I'm sure it works for many people, why not many people do, but if you're not in the religious tradition, it becomes a kind of sterile ritual.

And, and there's no opportunity to talk about the person who's lost. And at Jewish funerals, there's usually a moment and Protestant funerals, I've seen two people talk about the dead and there's this kind of laughter and bantering and all that happens that can happen at Catholic funerals, but at the, but after the funeral awake. And I think that that has a kind of consolatory power that the rituals that I was experiencing just didn't. So I think there is a difference, but I, I think everybody handles it differently. I think a lot depends on who dies when they die, the circumstances, whether there's any feeling of guilt or, or not.

I mean, I really do think it's a kind of individual process, which is one reason why memoir often oftentimes deals with death because it's a very big thing in, in, in, in life. And it's a very big thing when it happens to you. I mean, it happens to all of us sooner or later, so you're having, you're going to have to deal with it.

Speaker 1 (6m 56s): Yeah. And the subtitle of his book is called books, meditation and memory. The, these are the ways or methodologies you've found to help kind of cope with the strategy. You can we start with the first one, maybe. What do you mean when you say book

Speaker 2 (7m 10s): With books? I teach books. I'm an English professor. One of the things that I thought was very original, very original indeed. When my mother died was that I found myself rereading classic books. I I'm forgetting right now what the order was, but I think I started with the Odyssey

Speaker 1 (7m 27s): By Homer.

Speaker 2 (7m 29s): And then I think I read the need by Homer. And then I read a book which had been deeply meaningful to me at different points in my life, in part, because of the Italian American ness of my life. Dante's divine comedy. I thought I was being very original.

Speaker 1 (7m 48s): Oh, I think I lost you there. Oh, I kind of froze up for a minute. Right, right. After Dante Inferno.

Speaker 2 (7m 52s): Okay. Then right after Dante. Well, that's a great place to lose me. Who knows what might happen as I began to do the research portion of this, which for somebody like me means reading other memoirs, I discovered how many intellectual people read classic books after loss. And so I then began to think about, well, why is that? Why is that? So that became part of the, the theory part of the book. Why do we read classics? And I think the reason is it's complicated.

I'm not sure how quickly I can articulate it verbally here. But I think the reason is some people go to the classics because they've been told all their lives, that the classics are bright and shining books that offer wisdom and comfort. But when you read the classics, they're bright and shining, but they're also about the death of mothers, the death of fathers, the loss of home, the need to regain home patricide, matricide murders, revenge, very messy books.

And so I think that the idea of the classics is idyllic books. It's wrong. And I think we read them because they're about the messy things in life that we don't necessarily want to happen to us. And so we read them as a way of kind of almost a kind of prophylactic to prevent them from happening and as a way of coping when they do happen. So that became my theory of, of, of, of, of, of reading classic books as somebody who has been educated in novels and has taught novels. I also read war and peace, which favorite book of mine, a book, which does talk quite a bit about death and coping with death, because it's a book about war.

It's much more recent. Ian McKeown's atonement. I don't know if you know that one. I'm

Speaker 1 (9m 38s): Not familiar with that one.

Speaker 2 (9m 40s): It's a, it's a beautiful book about an author figure who clearly is based on Virginia Wolf, who does something unforgivable in her youth to damage the relationship of her sister and her sister's boyfriend, who's lower class. And then world war II breaks out and you read the novel and you think that the sister and the, and the, and the boyfriend have married and it's a happy ending, but the less time you see the boyfriend before the happy ending, he's wounded at Dunkirk, the, of the evacuation of the British from France.

And then at the very end of the book, it turns out that the author has just made up a happy ending for this couple. She can't do anything. You know what she didn't real life is irreparable. Their lives have been ruined, but she's tries to make up for it and fiction. So it's quite a beautiful and very touching book. For me,

Speaker 1 (10m 30s): It seems to me like I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan. And it seems to me that when we would go back to be at the Iliad or the Odyssey, or even some of the king Arthur myths for me, there's so much in there that speaks to our own hero's journey. And when you're forced with death, when you're forced with loss that you have no control over whatsoever, it's almost like you have to find the hero in yourself to overcome this. And it's, it seems to me that the people that left you would want you to be a hero. When, when you spoke about those different books, do you think that may be part of the healing process?

Was that you got to see the situation from a third person point of view, or was it that you got to relive some of the messy stuff? What do you think was so therapeutic about reading the books?

Speaker 2 (11m 12s): Hmm that's that's that's an interesting question. I'm pretty sure it wasn't seeing it from another point of view. I mean, I'm somebody who I'm very analytic it's. I am. So when I see a movie, when I see a television show, when I see a novel, I empathize and identify with the situation almost immediately. So I don't think that was it. I know, I think it was it's. I th I think it was the process of using your mind and having your mind kind of work interpretively, which creates a kind of, I suppose, it's a distancing mechanism, which intellectuals use and, and, and which I used, I thought pretty effectively in this case, but I don't think it would have worked on own.

So the second thing was family. Nice. Part of what I had to realize in the process of this is that families change. They go along, they go on and I, I have two adult daughters. So I certainly noticed that during their teenage years, I guess they changed what darling children who adored him so much, and they became somewhat difficult and then they stopped being difficult. So yes, families change memories are very strong, you know, linking force.

And so my own family, which consists of a husband to whom I have been married for over 50 years and two adult daughters. And I don't mention them in the book because I'm a somewhat superstitious superstition, but my two young granddaughters were very sustaining forces during this process. I, and I think most people who go through an unresolved grieving process, and I would have to say mine was unresolved from much more than I could have believed. There's a moment when you, you kind of pissy to be around and difficult to be around and actually strike out at the people closest to you in this case, my husband and you actually can kind of endanger our relationship by having unresolved grief, but family became a very sustaining force.

So that, that middle section of the book is about family, family memories. The third part of the book is actually called memory without pain, which is as a hard concept, it comes from a literary critic named Roland Barth who doesn't use those words exactly. But he talks about the death of his mother and how he needed to arrive at a state where he could think about her without pain. And that clearly was what I was looking for to thinking about my mother, thinking about my brother with whom I'd had a vexed relationship as an adult, not a terrible relationship, but a vexed relationship as an adult.

I don't think that's that uncommon either. We were friendly, but not intimate anymore, but I needed a way to be able to think about them. So for me, that came through, and this is another important strand in the book and looking at your website, I think it might be interesting through yoga and meditation. Yeah. I've been a practicing a practitioner of yoga for many years. The year after my mother died, I had this crazy thought of learning of doing it seriously enough to become a yoga instructor. Now, I'm you can't, I mean, your audience can't see this, my arms are short.

My legs are short. I'm not the most practicing yoga teacher material. My husband actually has taught yoga, but he's got a, a very slender, you know, a more flexible kind of body than I have, but I've, you know, I've done yoga for a very long time, but the year after my mother died, I started meditating every day for 20 minutes, which is a pretty serious amount meditation and meditation. And this, I think, relates to the hero thing that you were talking about.

Meditation creates what goca traditions and meditations called the witness mind. So you're observing the situation, but you're not, you're not letting it emotionally mess you up. You're not getting old riled up by it. And it just cultivates a kind of, not passivity, but a kind of equanimity, you know, the accepting kind of state. And so, you know, doing this for years and years and years, as I have was also very helpful to me. So those things, and it is it's memory without pain, because the very last chapter in the book, which is the longest chapter in the book is any vocation of three memories of my father flying kites.

When I was a kid and the kite got caught in the tree and we couldn't get it out, they came to me right away. When I, when I was thinking of the memory of my father, he, as we were walking back, he wanted to give me his Cape, but no kid would want that. So we were walking back and my father said to me, well, we sure had fun. And at the time I probably didn't agree. I, I lost my kite. That couldn't have been such fun, but now I've totally agreed. We had fun. And it was a very pleasant memory. The memory of my mother was more unpleasant.

I remembered inviting her to a school event and she was a working mom. So she usually didn't get to come, but she was laid off. She was a garment worker. And so she got to come and she was the only mom who came and it was, I was mortified for her. And it was a funny memory, except that, I mean, there was love behind it. She had dressed up to come. I had wanted her to come. And then the third memory was of my, my, my, oh, I'm going to get it. I'm going to get emotional, which I'm sure is fine.

My, my, my infant son who I remembered, oh, and one of the memories I did have of my mother that was very fond, was she of her making a financial sacrifice to buy me a Kelly Green dress that we couldn't afford, but she bought it for me. So the memory of my infant son was when he was at the pediatrician's office wearing a Kelly Green outfit, because that's the way memory works. Right. And he saw himself in the mirror was three months old. So for the first time, and he, he fell in love. And for me, it was a perfect example of why people usually marry people who sort of resembled themselves either around for the eyes.

And it was the mystery to, that was totally solved and be baby see themselves. And they said, oh, you know, you could look in person in the mirror there. I love you. So I, when I ended the book with those three memories and then a little bit about meditation, which in the yoga tradition and especially the one that I've been educated in the body is rental the body. The body is yours. You enjoy it. You go through life with it, many pleasures. I mean, we, there is no way of, of, of, of living without the body and enjoying life without the body, but it's rental.

And then I, I Def, you know, you leave the body and whether you believe in an afterlife, or whether you believe in energy forces in the universe, it's not your home anymore, you know, and, and in your home is, is, is, is somewhere else anyway. So that was the idea of memory without paying a friend of mine, thought it was a Eucharistic phrase that didn't make any sense. But to me, it does make sense. There are times when memory is very painful and there are times when memory can be pleasurable. And, and there are times when you don't want to go into memory and there times you do, and, and this was a book about exploring those different polarities.

Speaker 1 (18m 37s): I think it's beautiful. I don't, I think that it's far from humoristic and I think it's something that people can use to make their life better. You know, it, it, it's a sort of therapy to know that you can remember people you love. And even if it's painful, the fact that you can remember that you think about that word, remember you're recreating the memory, like why not recreate the memory? That's beautiful that you can have instead of holding onto something that you don't want, you know, it's, I think it's beautiful.

I could tell your friend, I would say it's not hubris stick. Mr. Tell him. I said that.

Speaker 2 (19m 11s): Yeah, of course. I mean, I, one of the things I realized in writing this book is that w you know, there, there have been certainly sadnesses, but I mean, you know, knock on wood because I am an American. So I'm knocking on wood as we speak. I mean, I, I mean, I had a happy childhood. I had caring parents, you know, money was scarce, but lots of people have that. And it's not like having, you know, it's, it's not like the kinds of things that score you as, as a child and make it harder, you know?

And I have been married for a long time. And that's, that's a sustaining thing too. I mean, I think the process I'm talking about here and what I mean by it being individual. I mean, I think there are people for whom religion would have been the way to go. There are people for whom chanting rather than meditating or praying rather than meditating would have been the way to go. But I think they achieve that much of the same thing, a kind of neutral state of mind, and a, a state of mind, which is able to step away from some of the most painful things. Some of the things that won't let you resolve the state of, of grief followed by morning, both of them are processes that need to be gone through.

Speaker 1 (20m 20s): I think you're onto something with that combination of relief from grief. If I made sure. Can I share a quick story with you?

Speaker 2 (20m 28s): Sure.

Speaker 1 (20m 29s): My, my wife is Laotian and she recently had a cousin that passed away and, you know, being from, being from, from LAUSD, they have a whole different system, but it's similar to what you just said in it. Your story reminded me of that. What they did was when the young lady passed away, the whole family got together for multiple days and they would chant. And if you think one thing about chanting, I think of breathwork like everyone's breathing together and out and like, they're connecting their heartbeats and they're connecting their breath work and they're thinking good thoughts. And so, you know, it's, while it's different, it's similar in that they're getting to remember the together and they're breathing, they're meditating, you know, and heard you speak of these three methods that you use.

I thought it was very similar. I wanted to touch on one thing you, you had mentioned your brother and your mother dying at, at a similar time and how your relationship with your brother had changed while your mother was sick. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 (21m 21s): Well, I share it in print you've done my brother and I were extremely close as children. We were two years apart and we were playmates for a very long time. In fact, we didn't really stop being playmates until we were in middle school, high school. And then there was a kind of divergence of the paths that, that just sort of happened. My brother was the first person in our family to go to college, which I don't think was an accident.

I think my parents must have, I don't know if they worked hard for it, but they were certainly open to it. And when it came up, they didn't prevent it. And he became a chemical engineer until he, his first divorce after which he sold ports to chemical engineers. So there was a kind of continuity. He also became politically at the opposite end of the, the opposite spectrum, opposite end of the spectrum for me, I, I don't know whether to specify the spectrum or not, but he, he, his, his political beliefs were extremely different from mine.

I went to NYU in New York and then to Columbia, I became an English professor. I, my political beliefs became extremely different from his, it kind of sat there. We always, we were, we were not distant from one another, but he, we, we didn't, we didn't talk regularly. We got together when, with my parents and then after my father died with my mother and for my mother, and both, when both parents got ill, when we immediately came together, we made decisions.

There were no differences until my, until my father died. About three years after my father died, my mother was spotted by. And I guess that's the correct way to put it. The downstairs neighbor who was also an elderly, Italian American, and he fell totally in love with her. And she, I, you know, they were both in their eighties, so it's hard to know how to characterize the relationship, but they were companionable very companionable. And my brother was furious.

My brother thought he was a gigolo. My brother thought my mother would be hurt. He took no pleasure in the companionship that she was getting at all. So during the period of my mother's illness, he was very hostile to this man whose name was Joe. And my mother was very responsive to Joe. This, you know, especially after the stroke, my brother didn't care about whether Joe got to see her or not. Joe, Joe would travel two hours a day by bus, in Brooklyn to go see her. And my brother would drive from New Jersey to go see her.

Maybe within a year. My brother called me on the phone, which my brother never did. And I was at a restaurant with my family. And so there was noise around me. And I thought he said he had prostate cancer. And I was right. I obviously I take notes sometimes when, when I need to concentrate. And then I looked at the notes after the phone call and I said, wait a minute, did you say prostate? Or did you say pancreatic? And he said, pancreatic. And I said, you know, I said, oh my God, because I knew what that meant.

We had had a cut in who had died of it right after my mother. And before my brother, I called him from home later that night. And we talked a little bit about it. And his wife insisted that they call me, but you know, the PA he, and he made a decision. I mean, it was his decision to continue chemotherapy until the very end. I have a F a dear friend who's ill with pancreatic cancer right now is making a similar decision.

But I think for different reasons, then my brother and I, you know, and like I said, I hope it'll be all right for him, but it eventually reached the point where he couldn't even get to a hospice. He's he, he continued the chemotherapy for so long. And so it was a, it was, it was a bad, a bad process. I wish I could say that there was a reconciliation with my brother, but I, there was never, there was never an overt rupture. And when I, I, his wife called me to say that I should come to New York quickly. I was in North Carolina where I teach, I did and was there with him while he was dying.

But it was too late. He couldn't, I couldn't understand what he was saying. He might've been saying, get outta here. He might've been saying, I'd love to Marianne. I could have been, I, you know, it could have been anything. And they would say it was too late for reconciliation. So it would be, it would be nice to say there was a reconciliation, but he didn't want to talk about it. His wife didn't want to talk about it. And it wasn't my business to talk about it if they didn't want to talk about it. So, I mean, it was my business, but not with them. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26m 8s): It's such a perfect, thank you very much for sharing that. Like, it's such a personal story. The ladies and gentlemen, the book is called, crossing back in is filled with so much helpful knowledge. That may be painful at times, but I think everybody should pick this book up. It's there's so much knowledge in there. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Speaker 2 (26m 23s): Thank you so much, George.

Speaker 1 (26m 25s): Yeah. You know, I, there's some other interesting questions that I was thinking about. You talk about how intersectionality played a huge part in mending someone's important relationships that had long been tenuous. My misreading that like a knucklehead. I,

Speaker 2 (26m 40s): Well, it's not a term that I would typically use, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean. What do you mean by intersectionality?

Speaker 1 (26m 46s): Maybe like you spoke about being an Italian American living on one side of the street over there and maybe the way then becoming a teacher and having different values than your family. Right. Do you think that all those things kind of came together to help you create this system of grief resolution? I don't know if resolution is a word, but the system you use as far as like meditation and book where you're like, you think it was all these factors that somehow this pathway showed you that allowed you to create this.

Like,

Speaker 2 (27m 18s): And that's what I mean by everybody finding their own way through this. That was, that was the combination. That made sense for me, whether it makes sense for everyone. I don't know, but I did. Oh yeah. Okay. There is one place where I, this is true. I was having a lot of problems with the grieving process to put it mildly, I mean, 10 years, 10 years, I mean, who spends 10 years, you know, unable to resolve their staff. I actually think probably a lot of people, but they do it in different ways.

And it's hardly like I was, I mean, I was functioning at a high level. I was working, I was teaching, I was writing, I was living, I was travel. I was doing all kinds of things, but that, that was it. It was still an unresolved unresolved grief. And when I kind of realized that I was putting all these things together, I felt like I did feel like this was a discovery and that it was something I wanted to share. And, and so in that sense, yes, putting these things together with something I wanted to share,

Speaker 1 (28m 22s): There was a part that like this one sentence really got to me. And it says after the loss of your loved ones, you speak about entering a spiritual and psychological state of trans and dental homelessness. That is what is transcendental home first. It's beautiful, but what is transcendental homelessness?

Speaker 2 (28m 39s): It's a, it's a beautiful phrase. It's it must be a phrase in translation. It comes from a, a Hungarian critic named gay, or Glucophage L U K a C S. And he, he wrote during world war one and, and was talking about the state of trends and dental homelessness being the state of, of modern people. And actually it comes back to the classics because he talks about how, and I think this is an overly idealistic view of the classics, but he talks about how once in classic times, the gods appeared and answer questions were asked and answers were given.

And then he talks about how for modern people, many questions, we have many questions about meaning, especially during an event like world war II or the COVID pandemic, or many of the things that we're living through, but there are no answers that are given. And, and he describes that condition of, of uncertainty as trends and dental homelessness. Now I took that phrase in a book. My one of my favorite books, it's a book called gone primitive.

I wrote a book called gone primitive, a number of a number of years ago now. But I took that phrase to talk about people like Lucasz himself, who was a Hungarian living in Germany, or your wife living in Hawaii, or me and Italian American living in academia land.

But, but anyone who has that sense of being unmoored, and it seemed to me a very it's one of the things I found in my work on primitivism and gone primitive was that a lot of people who travel to exotic locales the south Pacific Africa, and I have exotic in quotation marks with my friends. I know that kids see that on audio, but, and a lot of people who do that, who, who could pack it all in and just sort of say, ah, I'm going to go to Africa.

I'm going to go to India or people who are, who are acting out various kinds of transcendental homelessness. And it's very common in anthropologists as well. And if not refers. So I felt, I felt that they being unmoored in a grieving process was like being transcendental, the homeless, like you just, you know, where are you? Why are you? There were times I'm sure people do this in times, I'd go to Google. And I type in, what do I want?

Where, why am I? And, you know, I get a Google would give you various kinds of answers to those questions, but they weren't necessarily what you were looking for. And, you know, I just, I it's actually, that would be kind of funny study how often those questions get typed into Google and what kinds of answers pop up. So that's what I meant. It is a beautiful, subtle phrase. Isn't it beautiful transcend dental homelessness, but the, the homelessness means that you, the feeling of being ill at ease, not at home and that, that applies to a number of conditions.

And then the trends and dental puts it to a kind of metaphysical level. It's, it's more than just temporary. It's, it's transcendental.

Speaker 1 (32m 8s): Yeah. It's so beautiful. In so many ways, I feel like we're all trying to find our way home and the most difficult and depressing and sad instances are like road signs on this pathway of like, he, this happened, you gotta make a left right here, or you can keep going down this road. This is the road of grief. Like you can't keep going here, you know? And

Speaker 2 (32m 31s): No, I mean, that's true. I mean, it's, it's, you, you either go forward and I mean, it's a common phrase is one step at a time. Oh yeah. One step at a time, one day at a time. And sometimes, you know, depending on the level of grief and the level of loss, I mean, that's all you can do one day at a time, one step at a time, but then, you know, they, when step adds to another one day it's to another, and then you get to weeks, months, and years, and then you can emerge. I mean, there are people who don't, there are people who stay fixed in, in, in a kind of grieving process and become recluse or, or, or, or, or let it become a permanent kind of damage.

I mean, that's a possibility, it's always a possibility, but I mean, obviously it doesn't seem like the healthiest or the best possibility.

Speaker 1 (33m 21s): No, it doesn't. I, I often think that, you know, and when I was reading and listening to you, I think maybe I get the idea that the purpose of tragedy is for it to happen, to really strong people and then have them reach back and pull someone up. And I feel like that's what you're doing with your books. It's called crossing back ladies and gentlemen, if you need, if you need a guidepost or you need a helping hand, Marianna here has, has written a little bit of a manual that can help pull you up. I mean, do you think that maybe that might be part of the purpose of tragedy is because the world or God, or the transcendental being at the end of the universe wants to find someone strong so they can help other people.

What, what do you think about tragedy?

Speaker 2 (34m 6s): Again, I'm a pro I'm a literature professor. So when I think about tragedy, I immediately think of Aristotle and the classic tragedies, Oedipus Rex, and take any, I mean, one of the most beautiful and brilliant set of tragedies ever written the Oresteia about, about the matricide and its patricide matricide and its consequences. But Aristotle said that the purpose of tragedy is for you as an audience member to experience tragedy, vicariously, to have it be a kind of cathartic event, be something that deeply riles your emotions, but then you walk out of the theater and it's a little bit, I mean, we, we don't, we don't, our state Telian tragedy doesn't quite work in the same way anymore.

But one of the things that we used to do, we do it a little less the last two years, but the, all of the destruction movies, the urban destruction movies, the apocalyptic movies, it was the same thing. You'd go to the movie, you'd see that the world is coming apart. People are dying, all kinds of stuff is happening. And then you walk out and, oh, the buildings are still standing. The people are still going about their business. And it's a little bit of that same effect too. So no, I do. I do think that tragedy, destruction, narratives, all of that is a way of, of acting it out, acting out one's fears, letting it, letting it in, edit distance, and then coming back into a sense of the cell that can go forward.

I think that's really true. I don't know. Do you want to talk a little bit about where we are right now, pending as I speak the worst surges of COVID appear to be over vaccinations or available for people who want them boosters are available for people who want them, a lot of people don't, haven't wanted them when we're entering. What's clearly seems both in North Carolina where I am now and in New York, where I will be for part of the summer, there's another surge happening.

And it's a, it seems to be at the moment, the surge is producing less hospitalizations in my staff, but it's hard to know. And so one of the things that I have been thinking about at this period, and it's, it's the period when we've reached the 1 million more, not a mark that I expected us to reach. I was among those when I published, crossing back, who thought, man, if it got to 675,000, which was the figure for 1918, that would be unbelievable. I mean, I thought it was possible, but I thought it would be really, really unlikely.

And here we are at a million and obviously it's going to go past a million. So it seems to me that it's a moment of, it should be a moment of reflection. And, and yet I'm not noticing very much reflection. I mean, a lot of people have decided they don't want to work from offices anymore. Well, maybe we should think about that. What does that mean? A lot of people have decided they want to be able to spend more time with spouses and children and pets and, and gardening and taking walks. Well, what does that mean then?

And what, what can we do about it? There's a lot of, there's a lot of divisiveness about, you know, ah, are you wearing a mask or you should be wearing a mask you're not wearing, you know, so on and so forth. And, and I mean, all the, all that's happening, if you're wearing a mask and you're a young person is you're protecting somebody else. You're unlikely to get sick, but somebody else might not be unlikely to get sick. It's an odd moment. And I, I, I'm not seeing a lot of desire for reflection here and yet it seems to me a period when reflection seems to be precisely, what's called for, and people might come to different conclusions.

I mean, I don't think it's an unreasonable conclusion. I had, I attended a family wedding in Atlanta with, with a bunch of people we're were handling things a little differently from the way that my family had been, but I was, I just, you know, I was there. So I was going to do it their way. And one of my cousins said to me, what the vaccines do they work? And that's a good point, let the vaccines do their work. And then some people say, oh, I'm going to get it sooner or later. Let me get it sooner and get it out of the way, except that it looks, I can get it multiple times.

I mean, I think there are different conclusions that one can reach, or I'm not going to let it change my life. It's I, some people reach that conclusion and that's reasonable too, but you know, there are different conclusions when can reach, but I just would like to see maybe a little bit more reflection that something serious has taken place. I was stunned. I was stunned that the figure is one in 357 Americans died of COVID one injured and 57 Americans died of COVID. I mean, I thought that, I mean, I knew that was a stat from New York.

I was worse than that, but one in 357, that's astonishing. That's astonishing. And what I'm noticing now, because I move in these circles that I move in, but I'm noticing more people are, are, you know, are saying they have COVID a dear relative recently told me she had COVID. It was mild. Great. Just last night. And we were talking about death and the surprisingness of it just last night, we learned that my husband's 97 year old great aunt who had survived COVID died on Thursday.

And they, the funeral arrangements were up in the air because her younger daughter who had been with her has COVID. So I'm starting to hear about it kind of in the circles that I move. And I hadn't been, which tells me that the transmissibility of the current form is, is for real, but you know, it's happening in circles that I move so far. No one is getting sick again, that's an awkward, but again, it just strikes me as an opportunity for reflection, which doesn't seem to be happening.

Speaker 1 (40m 2s): Yeah. There's so many things happening that I think we're not taking the message away. Like we should like, what's wrong with working from home. Like there's some real changes that we could make as a community, as a world and as a people that would make everyone lives better. And if we look at these true, regardless of what people think of COVID or the war, these incredible events happening, I think maybe the takeaway should be to take a good look at ourselves and our society and how we treat each other. Like we can really treat each other better in life.

Could be better for all of us, if we'd be a little bit more willing to not focus so much on what divides us, but what unites us, you know, like coming together. Right?

Speaker 2 (40m 41s): Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, I, I, I have trouble gauging people's ages, but I'd say I'm older than you are. And I remember that there was the, for a long time, there was talk about the inevitability of the four day work week. And, and then that went away and it became the five day workweek and the five and a half day work week on the six table. And you know, my children and many young professionals did that as a matter of course. And then I began to notice even before COVID itself, people were stepping away from it and saying, you know, exactly what is that about?

But I think that the desire to work from home is very much part of that. There's a guy I, I work with at, at, at duke university who doesn't work for the university, but works for a kind of ally thing. And recently the meetings I've had with him, I've been online and he's at home and he says, oh, I'm going to walk my dog after this. Great. I love it. And I think that that's the kind of, there's nothing wrong with that. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that working, like, even if all you're doing is saving the commuting time, that can be an hour, a day, half hour, a day, two hours a day, sometimes three hours a day.

What's a lot of time to save, to be able to devote to other things now as somebody who engineered her life. So that that's been my life all along. I'm saying, oh man, now everything, but it's okay. It's okay. I think it's, I think it's good. I think it allows you to have a broader spectrum life, which I think is an important thing and a good thing. That is one thing I, you know, I don't know if that's going to go away or not. My own university is letting its staff work from home. I read somewhere that only 10% of people are being allowed to work from home.

My experience is that it's more, but I don't really know that I just returned from a visit to my daughter in California, extended visit in California. And one of the things I noticed there is that a lot of people there are kind of in, by definition in the freelance mode, you're working, you're working, you're working, you're working, working, working. And, and because there's, you know, that's just part of the regular rhythm. I noticed a lot of people going out for lunch and just sort of chilling. And I thought, well, that's, that's kinda nice.

That's kind of nice, nothing wrong with that, especially if you're making enough to make a go of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43m 4s): Yeah. I agree. I, you know, when I look at my own family and I grew up in similar last key kid and two parents working and, you know, as I got older and I have kids of my own, it kind of breaks my heart to think about the way in which Western ideals and Western philosophy has treated the family. Like we put our parents in an institution, we send our kids to an institution and we go work for somebody else. You know, you speak so highly of family and where you came from and what your father had instilled in you and your mother flying kites.

And what are, who's going to take care of your family better than you. On a, on a side note, my wife, she comes from a really tight family where the grandparents were there. The, the, the mom and dad were there and they were there and there's so much wisdom. Grandparents have that new parents do not have, like, it's just a world of difference. And my daughter got to be around my wife's mother, who was just, you know, she was profound in the way she could deal with children. And I got to see the way my wife's relationship with her mom changed. My, my wife never saw her mom treat her kid and I got to be there and be like, she's like, George, I cannot believe my mom can do all this.

I had no idea how hard she worked or what she knew. And it was like this new evolution. I think there's something there.

Speaker 2 (44m 19s): Well, again, I think the last two years, the phenomenon of people moving in with parents, I mean, which has been going on for a while because of just the, the socioeconomic factors, but it happened more. And so you were having multi-generational households. I, I have not moved in with my daughter, but my, one of my daughters has a, an Airbnb that they use as their country house. And it's, it's a big house.

And my first road trip during COVID was to go visit them. And I hate driving. I hate my husband drives, but he can't, he doesn't even like it. But we did this 10 hour road trip to go to their Woodstock house from North Carolina. And I pulled up to the driveway and my young, my older granddaughter was doing a war dance of joy in his driveway. And the younger one kind of looked at me and she knew who I was, but you kind of am I allowed to hug her?

Because it was funny. It was pretty, it was mid, mid pandemic and her mother said it was fine. And she kind of ran over to me and we've spent, my whole family has spent time now in that house. And, you know, it's nice. It produces a different rhythm. The children, children are always a handful, even if they're good children, it was really hard on young parents having to take care of children and not being able to send them to school, not being able to get daycare. In many instances, it was really hard on them. So I think that being able to disperse those kinds of responsibilities across the family.

Yeah, it's really, it's really beautiful. I, I, I'm going to say this and I'm not sure it has anything to do with it, but I mentioned a cousin's wife who died of pancreatic cancer and she was Filipino at her funeral rather than being an occasion. That to some extent that you'd want to get through and just move on, which certainly the Italian American would want to do there ever was taking pictures. Everyone was taking photographs and I thought, Hmm, lots of cultural difference. And I suppose it's just as just part of it that you, this is part of the lifecycle.

This is part of the family cycle. And you want to have a memory of everybody being there and doing this. Yeah. So it was, it, it was another instance of different grief and mourning rituals that I had never seen. It was, it was, it was surprising to me.

Speaker 1 (46m 38s): Yeah. It's almost like a celebration of life instead of a warning of life. And I think there's room for both, but I, I think that there should be much more celebrating the lives of the people we love. I think that, that's what I, I mean, I think a lot of people would want that. I don't want people just to be moping around. I would like them to be sharing stories. And Hey, remember that one time George did this, you know, or

Speaker 2 (47m 1s): Cause it's part of, it's part of it's, it's part of an, you know, an ongoing life tradition. Yeah. So, oh, wow. I don't even know why I'm going to say this, you know, and I, I guess you're free to edit it out. You want it, but a couple of years ago, my husband and I saw a documentary called a will for the woods. And it was about natural burial rather than, you know, bombed kind of burial. And so we, we kind of looked at each other and we've, and we're different religious traditions.

So the question of where to be buried had never been discussed between us. But we looked at, we sat with that sounds really, that sounds like really good. We, we liked that idea. So we looked into it and, and, and actually made some arrangements. And one of the women we spoke to who supervises one of these cemeteries, there aren't that many around the country that have portions, but there are some, and she said, what's always, it's a different kind of funeral. Those, those tend to be more celebratory and less the group Prius. And I thought, oh, that's okay. You know, it's good. It's good. That it'd be more celebratory unless the group various.

Speaker 1 (48m 4s): Yeah. That's a great, that's an interesting conversation. I wonder how many people have that conversation about, so what do you think we should do? Should we, you know,

Speaker 2 (48m 13s): We saw a documentary and a film festival. I mean, where people would go to film festivals or, well, now we do it virtually a lot, but we did film festivals a lot and we just thought it was just, it was just very striking, like, like, you know, why, why, why do people do, why do people do this?

Speaker 1 (48m 28s): Yeah. I feel like there's a little nugget in all the different cultures that if we just put it together, we would have the puzzle, you know, like everybody has one little piece

Speaker 2 (48m 36s): Campbell, right?

Speaker 1 (48m 42s): It's an amazing guy. There's so much in, there's just so much in mythology that is like oral tradition. Right. You could make the, you can make the argument that that is mythology is the oral tradition passed down and down. And, and, and you're right when you spoke about Homer's the Homeric versus there's just so much in there that sometimes you got to read a page and just stop and be like, wait, what are they talking about? And then you realize maybe it's, it almost feels like it's being told specifically to you. And it's weird. Can you, you are an order, you're a teacher. So in a way you are teaching the Homeric verse and you're teaching literature the way it was taught back in the ancient days where it was like a verbal handout.

Speaker 2 (49m 18s): Well, one of the things also that makes one of the things that makes a classic a classic is that it says different things to you at different times. And that's just true. When I read Homer's Odyssey as an adult, it was very different from when I read Homer's Odyssey as a grieving mother, certainly from when I read Homer's Odyssey as a freshman in college, where I just had to make my way through that. But I mean, I think that students are sometimes exposed to these books at a too young age. I mean, I think there's a point at which you're ready for it.

And you know, not sooner than that,

Speaker 1 (49m 52s): You know, that brings me to an interesting point. I've had this idea. I was talking to Simon Critchley a while back. And we were talking about elusive in the Eleusinian mysteries, like a Rite of passage. I imagine going to something like you lose a symbolic rites of passage. They allow you to not, it not only points towards the thing, but it allows you to participate in it. Does that kind of makes sense. So you get to see the, the, the symbolic gestures happening, but then you get to participate in it. And it almost gives you, it's like the Trinity kind of, you get to participate on three different levels.

And I think that that's what our society is missing as these is the absence of rites of passage. And that's kind of what a funeral is, but, you know, there should be something along the way to prepare us. And I think that this divisive nature of via COVID or war, or right, or left just all this division has stripped us of that, which unites us now, what unites us is these rites of passage, like, like the Eleusinian mysteries used to be your core. I think there's something there.

Speaker 2 (50m 50s): Yeah. Know that there's definitely something there. I mean, the importance of ritual

Speaker 1 (50m 54s): Ritual. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (50m 56s): And thank you. Because that was, that was also something I realized reading a book is a ritual. Yeah. Meditation is a ritual family tradition. Those are rituals. And, and, and, and in a way it was, it was being able to put together my rituals, which was extremely helpful for me. They can be very simple and, and sort of surprising that this is a memory from a July 4th, a while ago, I was in North Carolina and we were outdoors on a hot summer night.

And, you know, the fireworks were about to go off. And then the host did something that was surprising, world war, one, veteran standalone, world war two veterans, then fewer of those Korean veterans stand, there were very few of those. And then, and then he said, Vietnam veterans stand. And they were good. Many of those, and the applause was very warm and it was, you know, there was, it was still close enough to the point where that would have been not happening. Maybe even just a few years before it, it was a beautiful moment.

It was, and it was a kind of shared ritual. We were applauding the veterans. Like we were going to sing the Star-Spangled banner before the , before the fireworks went off. And it was a shared ritual. It's good. It was good.

Speaker 1 (52m 9s): Yeah. Those are that's beautiful. Like there should be more like that. That is the antidote to the divisive nature that we're constantly being bombarded with is people gathering together, shared ritual, shared sacrifice, ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening to this, do yourself a huge favor and get the book by Marianna. It's right here. It's crossing back time and it's a beautiful story and you're going to learn and you're going to laugh and you're probably going to cry. I think everybody can find it's like, it's like these great myths. I think you can find something in there.

So where can people find you at if they wanted to buy your book?

Speaker 2 (52m 43s): Well, my book is available on Amazon as a Kindle. It's available at Barnes and noble. It's available at the independent book store shop, which I think is called shop book or bookshop bookshop. It's available from Fordham university press, which published it. And, and, and, you know, I, I do think it's, it's, it's, it's a beautiful book. It's not a long read it's it's in chapters that can be read in, in, in bites. And it's, it's a book which wants to be read. So I hope that you read it, George, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

Speaker 1 (53m 15s): It's the pleasure is all mine. I really thank you for your time. And I'm going to put all the links in the show notes

Speaker 2 (53m 21s): For you, George pleasure meeting

Speaker 1 (53m 22s): You. Pleasure's all mine. Have a great day.

Speaker 3 (53m 24s): Thank you. Bye-bye you bye-bye