In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

The post My parents are dead—can I afford avocado toast now? appeared first on Salon.com.

Years ago she fell and broke her wrist in many places. She called me at an airport. I was coming home from somewhere; where? She chirped about her terrible luck, making it into a funny story: rushing out of a hot tub to get away from a lecherous friend, slipping. It is not a funny story when I type it here. Typing makes it sound terrible. I am expert at telling terrible stories. She never wants anyone to feel sorry for her.

The thing about the scarves is I can wrap myself in them, round and round my neck. I can lower my face into them and smell. They smell like her.

“This smells like Cai’s house,” my son says.

“What does that smell like?” I want to hear someone else describe it. He knows she is dying in three weeks. He knows she has planned it. The only other person who has died is my dad after long, sad years of assisted living that scared my son. Also the cat. My son cried when the cat died, but only after half a day passed and he noticed the cat was gone. He has known Cai all his life. She doesn’t play backyard sports with him — even when she could — so she is not his favorite of my friends but he loves her. He likes to joke about all the books she’s published. He likes to say “Aren’t you jealous?” He likes to say, “She’s so much better than you.”

“Good,” he says of the smell.

I steal books off her shelves. She has mountains of them. I call it borrowing. “Can I borrow this?” But I am a slow and picky reader. I dip in and out. I will not be done in three weeks. Things that will outlive her: the spinach in my freezer. The half bag of fertilizer in my shed. My unfinished book draft. The bulk bag of prescription food for the (not dead) cat’s allergies. My other unfinished book draft.

Her scarves are fancy, fancier than mine. My clothing is utilitarian. Hers are about pleasure. She always had exquisite taste in clothing and jewelry and housewares. But she wasn’t a snob. She isn’t a snob. She’ll be dead in three weeks but till then, verbs are present tense. She’s a stickler for grammar.

I am selfish in my grief: Who will deliver cupcakes to my door when I’m depressed? Who will correct my every lay to lie? Who will take me to birthday pedicures?

“You better haunt me,” I say.

She wants to be cremated and sent in an urn to the fancy Boston cemetery where her parents are buried.

“What about us?” I say. By us, I mean her husband, son and me, 3,000 miles from Boston. By us I mean me. “Who’s in Boston anyway?” I say.

“Bostonians,” her husband says.

We three laugh, though Cai’s is a seal straining to bark. Her voice was the first thing to go before hands and throat and dragging feet.

I know everything there is to know: Two doctors have approved the drug she’ll spend $750 to ship from the single pharmacy that dispenses it. The drug will go into her feeding tube. She has to depress the plunger that will send the drug into her feeding tube to stay within the law. The drug will first put her to sleep and then kill her. But anticipating death is like anticipating Minotaur or anticipating ribosomes or anticipating nebula. I lack the neural pathways.

We need to cry together, she types into her phone beside me. Deep breath, she texted on the same phone from the neurologist’s office nearly two years ago — the specialist neurologist, the neurologist of last resort — minutes after the diagnosis and the moment before she told me. Even then, she wanted to tamp down the drama. All I want is drama. My friend is dying, I tell anyone who listens. My dear friend is dying. My best friend is dying. I want to wring it out. I want to rain it down. If I could self-immolate in it, I would for the spectacle. We cried together once in a room full of other people crying too.

Spectacle doesn’t work between the two of us alone. She says, “I don’t want to think about it too much because then I won’t do it and I want to do it.” She wakes up in mucus, unable to breathe. Her bones hurt. Her fingers that she uses for writing, for speaking, for everything, are barely working. My job is to say yes to everything that makes no sense, that I can’t see my way to. My job is to be not me, not anything about me.

I name the stupid people who didn’t appreciate her enough – who don’t appreciate her enough – and enumerate the ways I will tell them to fuck off to in her obituary. In her eulogy. I say this like it’s funny. Which maybe it is. Maybe all this is funny, like her stories are funny, no one feeling sorry for anybody.  

I have three scarves, a stack of books, and November’s orange toenails, already chipped, slivers of bare nail pushing up from the cuticles. Soon I will sit at this same desk in this same body in this same life, type She laid on the couch, crushed, and wait.

Cai Emmons died peacefully in her home surrounded by friends and family on January 2, 2023, using Oregon’s Death with Dignity law and with the help of EOLCOR (End of Life Choices Oregon). Here’s her farewell message to friends and readers. Miriam has since stolen a gel pen, a half pad of Post-it Notes, and an insulated grocery bag from Cai’s home.

The post When your friend is dying, it’s OK to steal her scarves appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s not easy being Baby in a world that’s Scary in every sense of the word. It’s hard hanging on to your most joyful self when you have been through the most difficult, devastating moments of your life. And after Philpott’s teenage son experienced an abrupt medical crisis, the author of “I Miss You When I Blink” found herself reckoning with the hard truth that she had lost some semblance of control. “All I want to do is take care of everyone I love, but I can’t do it,” she laments. That feeling may be familiar to those of us who have experienced medical crises, either in ourselves or among our families, that are random or completely outside of our ability to control. 

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Such abrupt and random crises test not only faith, but one’s resolve. How does one stay hopeful after hardship? How can we let such experiences deepen our empathy, instead of raising up our walls? 

Philpott speaks from personal experience, and she has some ideas. In “Bomb Shelter,” she contemplates the imperfect art of letting go, and discovers what turtles can teach us about life. Salon talked to Philpott recently via Zoom about optimism, meditation and nurturing our truest Spice Girls. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Like you, I am a Baby Spice. And then life comes along and throws you these things that make you realize, “Oh my God, I’m really very out of control.”

Yeah. I have no control over anything. All the control I thought I had was one big fat illusion.

I want to ask you about that metaphor of the bomb shelter, which in your family’s case is literal. Why was that the thing that you wanted to pin this book on?

“Bomb Shelter” was not the original title for this book. The original title was “Hello From Upside Down,” which is now the title of the second chapter, when I’m lying on the floor and looking at everything upside down. But when I got to the chapter about my dad and about that actual underground secret fallout shelter, I got to the end of writing and I said, “What am I going to call this chapter? I think I’ve got to call it Bomb Shelter.”

As I typed the words on that document, I thought, “This is the title for the book. This is the whole thing.” It has that tension of opposites that runs throughout the whole book. Bomb and shelter. It has that illusion of control. Bomb shelter? Is there really such thing as a bomb shelter? I mean, yes. But in the case of the one my dad was working in that was meant for nuclear war, it’s, I hate to say this, kind of fruitless. You can go into that bomb shelter and you seem safe while you’re down in there. But if the whole world has actually just been atomic bombed and you come out, you’re not going to be okay when you get out.

RELATED: I love being a Girl Dad

It’s a temporary illusion of safety. I loved that it was just two words. I loved the soft consonants and the hard consonants. I loved that it meant I could put a turtle on the cover. Frank, the turtle, has just a couple of cameos in the book. I loved the image of the turtle, how he is this little, soft animal in a hard shell. The turtle has something that we don’t have, which is that built-in protective mechanism. We’re just these little water balloons made of skin. We have to create our own protective mechanism.

It reminded me also of that saying that when you have a child, you walk around with your heart on the outside of your body. It’s terrifying in a way that is also kind of abstract until you have that real crisis. Until you have that, “I’ve seen my kid fall and I’ve taken her to the emergency room and I’m really scared now.”

I’m breaking out in a cold sweat as you’re saying that. It’s true, it’s all hypothetical until that moment where you’re like, “CPR. CPR. How does CPR work? I’ve got to remember how CPR works,” or, “911, where’s the phone?” When it happens, then you just feel how absolutely vulnerable we all are. And helpless.

I remember feeling like, the wheels are going to come off me once we get past the crisis and she’s going to be okay.

Now I’m not okay, ever again.

It changes you.

Forever.

When we went to college orientation, there was another mom in the front row asking, “So how close is the closest hospital? Where are the hospitals?” and sobbing. I went up to her afterwards and said, “I feel like you and I have some things we could talk about.” 

You find them. I have found them among people I already knew, because you don’t talk about this all the time. I have found those other parents who have been here. Women I’ve known for years and years and years, somehow we managed to give out this signal and pick up on it like, “By the way, did you know that my adult daughter has diabetes that means she can never sleep alone and everywhere she ever goes she has to know where the hospital is?” Somehow, it’s almost like you can see it in the eyes of other people.

You say, “Everybody has something.” While everybody does have something, there are people who’ve had a specific experience of going through trauma, and are also thinking, “But I l want to be happy. I want to be hopeful. I want to believe in good things. I want to be the fun one.” When bad stuff happens you’re like, “Who am I now? How do I go forward?”

I want to be myself again. That’s the exact emotional plot of “Bomb Shelter” with me as the main character. It’s that journey of, “Now how do I get up every day? How do I reconcile these two forces that have always been in my mind, the anxiety and the optimism?” But now it’s come to blows, and the anxiety is screaming, “Everybody’s in danger all the time.” My optimism is going, “If we believe that we’ll never get out of bed.” It just ratchets up the stakes of everything. It’s both discomforting and comforting, but where “Bomb Shelter” lands is admitting and accepting that I don’t have control and admitting and accepting that yes, this awful thing is true.

Everyone’s going to die. Everyone is in danger. I cannot protect the people I love forever. That is a fact. I hate it, but it’s a fact. But the more I sit with it and accept it, this struggle becomes less violent because I’m not fighting against reality any more. There’s a part of my mind that does this magical thinking where I’m like, “If I just want it bad enough, I can make it true. If I just want it to be true, love is enough to keep everybody safe.” No. There’s no amount of wanting that to be true that will make it a fact. Letting go of that helps me let go of everything else a little bit. It helps me let go of these children who are now turning into adults and going out into the world where I can’t physically protect them all the time.

It helps me let go of this struggle over my parents getting older and seeing that they don’t have as much time left on this earth as they used to. And the fact that I’m getting older. I mean, every day I look in the mirror and I’m like, “Who are you? I don’t know.” Accepting that impossibility, as much as I hate it, gives me calm and lets me move past it a little bit and go, “I’m not going to be able to change that. I might as well move into this day and see what I can feel good about.”

Being able to go, “I can be sad and feel out of control, but as long as I can keep trying to point my compass back back towards some degree of hope and happiness, I can do it.”

And the things that we can’t control feel so big. I find, on the mornings when I can’t get out of bed, it’s because I’m thinking, “I will never be able to stop climate change. I cannot stop this war. I cannot find a way to prevent death.” Huge, enormous things. Of course I can’t do any of this. What gets me out of bed is going, “Okay, but here’s some things I can do. And they’re small and probably from afar, they look meaningless, but they matter.”

It matters for me to get up and go out in my yard and make sure there’s a fresh dish of water for the animals. To come home and do my work that’s going to go out in the world and someone’s going to read it and they’re going to feel better. To make something for dinner for whoever happens to be in the house tonight that is healthy and will maybe give them another day on earth. Focusing on the little things that I can do and make a difference for other people. That helps a little bit too, I think.

One of the things you write about is that when you are in that spiral of anxiety, then your eye is not on the ball. You can lose sight of so many other things, which is unproductive. 

It’ll wear your engine out. Okay, I’ve got my eye on this person, but wait, I’ve got to get my eye over here too. Thinking that it is important that I am attending to every single person and every single issue, because that’s the only way things will be safe. That is just the recipe for exhaustion and burnout and misery.

You can’t be a biblically accurate angel.

This is a personal book, but it resonates for the people who weren’t already pessimistic. It resonates for the people who are not competitive about suffering. 

No, I don’t want to be in the adversity Olympics at all. I don’t even want to qualify.

How do we take ownership of our optimism and hope?

You can’t change other people, which is the lesson I continue to learn again and again and again in the world. But if I’m going to get through this life without melting into a puddle of anxious misery, I’ve got to find every little sparkling bit of joy I can along the way. Everyone’s little sparkling bits of joy are different. For me, it can come from really goofy things. It makes me happy to put on a really bright color. It makes me happy to talk to pets. When I’m walking down the street, I greet every dog I walk by and maybe that’s weird, it gives me joy.

By the time I get to my destination, I feel better because I’ve talked to 12 dogs. These little things that make my day better. It’s not anybody else’s business if they think that’s silly. I need to believe that the world is a place full of little sparkling tidbits of joy, because I’m letting my children who are now becoming adults go out there. I need to believe that they are walking around in a world that has little pieces of joy everywhere and nice people and friendly pets and whatever it is, that’s going to bring them happiness along the way. I need to believe that’s the world we’re walking around in. So I look for evidence that it is.

It’s hard because we know that this is a generation that is struggling with its mental health, more than any other. I wonder what our role as parents then is to model for them, that what they are experiencing is real and unique, but also that happiness and joy and those little sparkling bits are out there.

They’re out there. And they’ve also just been through the weirdest past two years of development. Whether they’re little bitty kids or they’re teenagers, or they’re the ones who went off to college during pandemic and had to experience that. What is that going to do to them long term? I don’t know.

I keep thinking it’s our job to be as hopeful as possible, that pessimism is not an option. So how do you balance that? I want to ask you because you still feel anxious. You still feel sad. You still have to let in the grief for the person you were. You still have to let in the legitimate concerns about COVID, about politics.

I have to be realistic. I can’t be in denial of reality. As much as I am naturally drawn to seeing that horror now because I see it everywhere, I do have to look for the good stuff at the same time.

I write in the book kind of jokingly about meditation and how I’ve tried to use meditation to help still my mind. But I’m not kidding. I keep coming back to meditation. I cannot do it without a guided thing in my ear doing it or me. I don’t have that much control over my brain, but I do keep coming back to it because it’s that practice of stillness and taking stock of what is actually happening right now around you, versus trying to somehow absorb everything that’s happening everywhere and letting that all in it once. That stillness practice is really helpful.

More parenting stories: 

• Why Emily Oster’s parenting wisdom is wildly popular with some and lambasted by others
• What my mother’s “selfish” writing retreat taught me about being an artist and a parent
• Please stop trying to buy my 21-year-old daughter a drink

The post “The control I thought I had was one big fat illusion”: When crisis makes you not yourself anymore appeared first on Salon.com.

Scents are like souls, Marcel Proust wrote. They endure death and destruction, “remembering, waiting, hoping…”

Fragrances are alive for Aftel, too. She calls them “my friends,” and once charmingly addressed a shelf of essential oils directly, asking, “Is everybody here?”

Aftel is heir to a tradition that traces back six thousand years to Egypt, where incense was burned to purify sacred spaces. Later, in Mesopotamia, the desire for more complex aromatics inspired some of humanity’s earliest chemistry experiments. One cuneiform tablet dating to 1200 BC names the world’s first-recorded chemist, a female perfumer named Tapputi. From that era onward, precious fragrances proliferated via the Silk Road, reached mass adoption in the “Perfumed Court” of King Louis XV, and currently comprise a 30 billion dollar global industry that includes Aftel’s cozy atelier here in Berkeley, California.   

The seventy-four-year-old returned clutching a notebook. “This is it,” she announced. The pages document seasons of struggle as the artist attempted to recreate the precise natural scent of someone she had loved and lost – a perfume she would eventually name Memento Mori. “The process mirrored the relationship itself,” she confessed. “Torturous.”

It had been a solitary period, reminiscent of the perfumer’s childhood in 1950s Detroit. Growing up in a synthetic miasma of “asphalt, detergent, and chlorinated swimming pools,” the scents of her youth were unfriendly ones.

“I wasn’t particularly well thought of in my family,” she recalled. “I wasn’t very pretty. I was dyslexic, and did terrible in school. Failure wasn’t scary for me; I had already failed. I just kind of marched along, and tried to figure things out on my own.”

Aftel got married, briefly, to a local boy. She became a mother. She moved to Berkeley in 1970. She became a weaver. She wrote an oral history of the musician Brian Jones, just after his death. She lived for months with the singer Donovan and his wife in Joshua Tree. She became a successful psychotherapist.

Finally, two decades later, on a whim, she decided to write a novel about a perfumer. It was a subject she knew nothing about. Yet as she submerged herself deeper and deeper into the alchemy of the artform, Aftel’s identity began to meld with that of the protagonist. Soon, she had shuttered her therapy practice and committed fulltime to the vocation of crafting bespoke perfumes.

In her book “Fragrant,” Aftel describes it as a love affair. “I took in the oils in all their gorgeous diversity. It was as if a mirrored sensation were occurring inside of me; I felt as if I were becoming one with the oils, as if they were entering me. I couldn’t tell where they left off and I began.”

Inside Aftel’s atelier and museum, one is immediately engulfed by the artist’s “scent organ,” comprised of hundreds of bottles in rows filled with essences. The perfumer presents the bottles to her clients, one by one, and watches carefully. “When people smell their favorite scents,” she observed, “they always close their eyes like they’re about to be kissed. It’s primal.”

Accordingly, olfaction is our oldest evolutionary sense. Every living cell ever studied is capable of assessing the chemicals in its environment. As higher order animals, we are often led by the nose beyond our understanding. Research demonstrates that humans can smell ovulation, reproductive compatibility, and general health — often changing our behavior as a result. One study of males found that the scent of a women’s tears lowered testosterone, sexual arousal, and perceived attractiveness of female faces.

Aftel’s scents often elicit strikingly precise responses. “They’ll say, ‘Oh that’s my grandmother,’ or ‘That’s a motorcycle ride I took one time in Germany.’ Sometimes, it’s a bad memory, or you can just see them get lost.”

She learned early on to avoid assumptions. “Reactions to ingredients come from such a non-verbal, animal part. I’ve had people come in for a custom perfume, looking super corporate, super conventional, maybe cold — and they pick out the sexiest, dirtiest stuff I have. You never know who a person is inside.”

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One of those sexy, dirty elements is jasmine. Aftel plucked a bottle from the shelf, and pulled the stopper. I inhaled deeply.

“What do you get from that?” she inquired.

I struggled for a moment, realizing how little of our language is devoted to the olfactory. “It smells like nostalgia… bittersweet.”

“One of the things that’s really interesting about jasmine is that it has two parts,” Aftel replied. “It’s got a very beautiful part and a very putrid part.” The putrescence comes from the molecule indole, which is in certain flowers like orange blossom and magnolia, as well as in excrement. “Jasmine is a fecal-floral,” Aftel continued. It derives its power from the contrast of opposites, the ugly and the beautiful. “That’s what makes it such a perfect aphrodisiac.”

“It smells human,” I added.

“It does,” she confirmed, “and if you put it on a scent strip, it will evolve over time. It changes, it moves. I feel like that’s how it should be. My perfumes don’t last. The thing that makes perfume last on the body is synthetic, and I only use natural essences. Anyone who buys perfume from me — I teach them how to be my customer.”

“You teach them to embrace the ephemeral?”

“Yes,” she concluded. “When something disappears, you treasure it more.”

Another figure particularly beguiled by jasmine was Napoleon Bonaparte. The olfactophilic Emperor, who famously forbade his wife to bathe, reportedly went through sixty bottles of jasmine extract per month.

The word “jasmine” appears repeatedly in Aftel’s notebook, scribbled among hundreds of other ingredients, nearly all stricken through by Xs. The story of Memento Mori, in many ways, is a story of creation through deletion. “I never had so much trouble making a perfume in my life,” the artisan confessed, flipping through the pages. “I cried the whole time I was making it. It just goes on, and on, and on — crossing out possibilities. I gave up so many times, but I always went back.”

“I wanted to make a perfume that smells like a body,” she continued. “I wanted the sensual pleasure that you draw from being physically close to someone you love, and the smell of them, and the touch of them. I wanted to capture what it is to be close to somebody and lose them, and know that it’s never coming back.”

Even now, over a decade since the end of the relationship that inspired her perfume, Aftel avoids specifics. “It’s still just too raw,” she gasped, eyes glistening. “I can’t.” She spoke in words that contoured her loss — never describing it directly. There was no name, or even a pronoun attached. Aftel only ever referred to her former beloved as “this person,” constructing the perfect void for her perfume to fill.

Building her fragrance in layers, she began at the surface of the absent body. “I was looking for the texture of skin – that comfort you get from someone’s skin from the time you’re a baby till you die, being physically close to someone you love. Just a very special feeling.”

In fact, our first olfactory associations begin even earlier, in utero. Odors found in amniotic fluid are later emitted during lactation to guide the suckling infant to the breast. Beginning at birth, the newborn will prefer its mother’s scent above all others.

Aftel kept returning to a bottle containing the essence of butter. “If you smell butter,” she described, “it’s kind of animal and soft. It has a tinge of sweetness and a little funkiness.”

She eventually added ambergris, an exceedingly rare and expensive substance produced when sperm whale intestines are wounded by the beaks of giant squid. Ambergris can be carried by ocean waves for a hundred years or more before washing up on the shore and being bottled. “The ambergris gives the skin its shimmery note,” Aftel explained.

Next, came Turkish Rose. “It smells childlike,” I noted. “Yes,” Aftel replied. “When you add this to the other oils it begins to move around them, body-like, giving it three-dimensional form.”

As we sat in her atelier inhaling, one by one, the essences of her signature perfume, Aftel closed her eyes, as if preparing to be kissed. Of all the senses, she noted, smell has proven scientifically to have the strongest, most enduring connection to memory. The olfactory bulb bypasses the moderating influence of the thalamus, directly infiltrating the amygdala and hippocampus, where emotions and memories form. I was not just asking her to remember her past, she concluded, I was asking her to relive it. 

As the fragrances began to combine, the perfume began to take on a life of its own. “I was just lost in it,” Aftel recalled, “like I was in the relationship. The perfume would be one way, awesome, and then a couple days later, the scent would morph. It would be awful. The perfume would just pick up and move from where I last left it. I was out of control. I would take the perfume apart and do it again, and again, and again.”

Writing about the history of scent, Aftel described her utopia, a remote hunter-gatherer society called the Ongee. These people of the Andaman Islands equate scent with selfhood. Death is imagined as a dissipation of one’s personal aroma. “An inner spirit is said to reside within the bones of living beings,” historian Constance Classen writes of the Ongee. “While one is sleeping, this internal spirit gathers all the odours one has scattered during the day and returns them to the body, making continued life possible.”

Eventually, like a bone spirit herself, Aftel felt that she had finally been able to gather all the scents of her beloved and seal them away in a bottle. The perfume premiered to savage professional reviews. “Not everyone loves everything I do,” Aftel remarked, “but I never get terrible reviews. There was one that compared Memento Mori to rancid cheese.”

Still, like a blossom that has evolved to attract a single species of insect, Aftel saw the pull her perfume has over the grief-stricken. The brokenhearted, she claims, often “magically” gravitate towards the fragrance without knowing anything about it. 

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“Soon after Memento Mori came out, someone who had just gone through a breakup came in,” the perfumer observed, “and they bought a whole bottle. Later, they wrote to say that they could feel what went into the perfume, and that it was helping them grieve.”

The fragrance, she claimed, seemed to function as a kind of exposure therapy. A related approach was successfully used to treat 9/11 survivors for PTSD. Many experienced a strong scent trauma from the unique stench of Ground Zero, described as “rubbery, bitter, and sweet at the same time.” Researchers at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia were able to use a similar “synthetic odor bouquet” to desensitize witnesses to their traumatic memories.

For Aftel, the creative process itself was healing too. “For anyone who’s going through loss,” Aftel offered, “if you can make something out of that loss artistically, it lets you move a little further from it. In the beginning, your grief is your whole life, but eventually your life begins to grow around the grief.”

“The grief is equal to the love, so I know that I will grieve forever,” she added. “But, as Leonard Cohen would say, ‘We’re all broken.'”

Throughout our interview, the songwriter’s words were ever on Aftel’s lips. As an ardent fan, she had once composed a perfume specially for Cohen, called Oud Luban. She mailed it to him, and he wrote back in gratitude. It was the beginning of a deep friendship that lasted for over twenty years. In Aftel’s universe, Cohen represents an enduring grace that she feels “balances” the cruelty of her lost relationship. She quoted Cohen again: “None of us deserving the cruelty or the grace.”

Painfully shy, Aftel would only interact with Cohen via correspondence. For two decades, she dodged his many invitations to meet. Only when he lay dying of leukemia did she relent. “He was just so kind and generous about me and my work,” she remembered of their meeting. “I was so scared, I wanted to leave right away, but he said, ‘I have a new song. Would you like to hear it?’ I kept thinking, ‘Don’t start crying!’ So, he played it for me, and it was unbelievable, and he just went on until he had played the whole album. And, I just don’t have words for what a transcendent experience love is.”

Before he died, Cohen requested to be buried with the perfume that Aftel had made for him. The fragrance is built around the essence of Oud. At forty-four thousand dollars a pound, it is the most expensive ingredient in the world of perfume. Oud is extracted from the endangered agarwood. It only develops inside the diseased core of the tree. Fittingly, like the ambergris in Memento Mori, the scent of Oud is the scent of a wound.

After his death, Aftel worked with Cohen’s family to prepare his funeral. “It’s hard to believe any of this happened,” the perfumer confided, “but I think it did.” She brought incense burners and arranged them on the altar. As it has done since antiquity, the fragrant smoke undulated skyward, a thin thread seeking to unite us on earth with something above. For a long time after the service had ended, even after the burial itself, the fragrance remained. 

Read more on perfume and scent:

• When love and perfume lead to “a side hustle in murder for hire”
• These people will make a perfume that smells like your dead relative
• Pizza Hut perfume now exists

The post A perfumer’s obsessive quest to recreate the fragrance of lost love appeared first on Salon.com.

In her debut memoir “All That You Leave Behind,” Carr turns that incisive lens on herself and her relationship with her father, New York Times journalist and beloved media critic David Carr, who died suddenly in 2015 after collapsing at work. The elder Carr, 58, was a role model and mentor to many in the media — his own daughter included, though their relationship was much more complicated. And at 26, she, her sisters and stepmother had to go through the process of mourning David along with seemingly the entire New York media world and the industry as a whole, plus the legions of devotees of his work. There are many books about grief in the world, but few talk candidly about what it’s like to find out your father’s hospitalization had been tweeted out as breaking news before the entire family had even been notified.

Also present in the book is Erin Carr’s own crooked journey through addiction and sobriety — another thing she had in common with her father, who chronicled his own trajectory in the memoir “Night of the Gun” — as she also made her way through launching a journalism career of her own with its own ups and downs, some of which were related to the substance abuse narrative and some which were not. There are stretches of sobriety and scary relapses for both Carrs, and Erin’s filmmaker lens never fails to capture the terrified reactions of those closest to her in accounting for her own. Throughout the book she weaves in chat transcripts and emails between her and her father, bringing some of that David Carr voice we’ve been missing in the world back to life in one of its most intimate forms.

I spoke to Erin by phone earlier this week about how she made the switch from filmmaking to memoir writing, about how women’s addiction narratives are received differently, and the challenge of writing intimately about a man known by many with the perspective only a daughter can bring.

As a filmmaker, because that’s how I know your work, what made you decide to make this project a book instead of a documentary? And since so much of the book is also about your relationship to your father — not just as a daughter, but also in sort of an apprentice role as a journalist — did it feel like you were moving into his lane, so to speak, after carving out this other niche for your own work?

I think some of the genesis of the project was reading his email. He was a writer, and an unfailingly good one, so it made a lot of sense to try to look at this medium and put his writing into book format. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t deep trepidation on my part. My dad wrote a memoir; he wrote it when he was a celebrated columnist at the New York Times. You know, it is a pretty damn good book, and I was like, “Oh god, I’m trying to fill my dad’s shoes. They don’t fit; this is horrible. What have I gotten myself into?”

I was talking to my therapist and she likes to remind me that if I [think I] liked doing this stuff now, I like talking about him, I’m David Carr’s number one fan, she’s like, “Just so you know, you hated every second of the actual book-writing process.” And I was like, “Yeah, you’re right. I did.”

So I love that my therapist reminds me of times past.

Writing a book is torture; having written a book is fantastic.

Yeah, exactly! And she’s like, “Are you gonna write another book?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m gonna be making some more time for you.”

Your films focus on these intense stories about intense people, who occupy morally ambiguous territory or have even committed criminal acts, and take an incredible amount of investigation into what makes these people tick. What was it like to turn that lens on your father, and at the same time, onto yourself?

Well, it basically was a moment of reckoning: “Am I going to be as honest with myself as I need for my subjects to be?” And I’ve gotten remarkably lucky in people confronting their own identity with me. I’m talking about Gil Valle and “Thought Crimes”; with Gypsy Rose and “Mommy Dead and Dearest.” I thought so much about Michelle Carter and her mental health issues, and her meditating on suicide and girlhood.

And so when it came to these themes of alcoholism and tragedy and death, I kind of am uniquely suited to dive in. I think that my whole work is sautéing my brain in the darkest stuff imaginable, and I can do that because I’m sober; I don’t drink anymore. I’ve seen some darkness; I’ve read “The Night of the Gun.” I think that, as a kid, I was growing up and my father instructed us that we’re not equal to our best or worst action. And so, I think that really plays in my films, that  I really don’t want to be judgmental. I don’t know what it’s like to be these people, to go through this, and I just want to create moving portraits.

And the same way when I was writing about my dad. I think it would’ve been deeply easy for me to be like, “Yesss, he was amazing! I was the best writer. He wrote me all these emails. He never did anything wrong. I don’t know what ‘Night of the Gun is.'” I think that I had to challenge myself and write about the things that he struggled with, because that is the David Carr way. It’s the full 360 version of who he is, not 180. It was still painful to write about a relapse of his, and write about when we fought, as is normal in a relationship. Whether it be a parent, or a boss, or anybody, conflict is how you grow.

And it’s complicated, of course, by the fact that, at least within media circles, your dad was a very well-known person and personality, and so, there’s already a layer of public knowledge about his personality and life. I would think that would be a bigger challenge than if your father was not a New York Times columnist who was read widely, who wrote his own memoir.

The book, as I read it, is three interlocking things: It’s a tribute to a public figure who’s legendary in our industry, and it’s a personal memoir of daughterhood and grief, and it’s also a chronicle of addiction and sobriety. I thought it was a really delicate balance that you struck, to not move too far into one or the other. What kinds of narrative or structural challenges did that present to keep those three threads in harmony?

I love that you got that. I love that it was something that you see as distinct threads. I mean, I really was battling with the fact that I’m not a famous person.  It’s like, what do you want read after a long day of committing journalism? I want you to want to pick this up. I want for it to be exciting. How did you figure out a career? What David Carr secret sauce can you glean from this?

I want to make this readable, to not be just about stark grief because, thank God, not everybody has to deal with that.

So basically I would outline every chapter. I note-carded it like I note-card my films, and I worked with a brutal editor and my agent. We cut down the book some because I want this to be like, my films are a bit on the shorter side, [they’re] sort of like whiplash: What did I just take in? What I can take away from this?

I wanted to use some of the skillset that I have as a filmmaker and as a communicator, and view this body of work that I am not an expert at in any way, and to use the tricks of my trade. And not be embarrassed. I think what was so cool was, I used to be so deeply embarrassed that I got fired from a job. You know? It was this deep secret from people that I never talked about. I love the email that my dad sent me after I was fired from Vox that basically said, “You’ve got this. They are wrong. You are right.” And I think that if I can speak to anybody that’s gone through it, it’s just like, sometimes you get fired!

I’m not gonna play: I understand why they fired me. And it f**king set me on my path to be who I’ve become, even in the infancy of my career. I’ve only been doing this for not for long. I could’ve been at Vox for years. I was put on this Earth to make films, and sometimes you have to have people push you down to get back up.

Absolutely. It struck me that having this treasure trove of electronic communication from your father is a wonderful by-product of the digital age (which can also be a terrible thing). You have these Gchat transcripts, these email chains, and they function a lot like archival footage for a documentary. Which is kind of an amazing way to take parts of that format and put it onto the page, as well. What were some of the nuts and bolts of using that material? And how do you balance the enterprise of wanting to look at these emails as research and archival material, and the fact that this is a hugely emotional endeavor for you to go back and re-read these emails that you probably never thought in the moment that you would have to read in this way?

Yeah, I mean, I love that example you were talking about, like the Gchats and talk about the journey of self. And my dad emails me David Foster Wallace giving the commencement at Kenyon, and he explains that, he killed himself, but his writing on the journey of self — something you and I both deal with — is awe-inspiring.

I can’t imagine being so smart and with it that I’m basically musing about my own selfish nature and that I gave it to my kid, in a Gchat, in relation to one of the greatest writers that we’ve seen. And so I put away my sadness as looked through this stuff, and said, “This is cool, this is interesting, and this is a way to put more David Carr in the world, and if I have to deal with crying while writing and eating bagels, then that’s what I’m gonna do.” That is a price that is worth paying.

And so, I basically got Scrivener and I tagged every single email like, “This is about alcoholism.” “This is about musicians.” “This is about writing.” “This is about mentoring.” And then, basically when I wanted to write about something, I was able to bring up, using these tags: “Picking the wrong boyfriend,” VICE, [my father’s] own writings.

First it was sad, and then it was this weird puzzle about this person I loved a lot, and it got less sad as time went on. And I would just send my best friends or my boyfriend and be like, “Look at this one. Isn’t this one great?” And they’re like, “Yeah, not everybody’s trapped in your crazy book world.”

There are reams and reams of narratives out there from men who are working through their feelings about struggling to feel like they’ve lived up to their father’s expectations for them and their models of masculinity. And memoirs by daughters about fathers, I think, often tend to be different. They’re gendered differently somehow.

Yeah, I literally talked about that today. My boyfriend — he’s a reporter — and he was like, “Do you think the fact that you were raised by a single dad . . . Do you think that affects your concept of masculinity or femininity?” And basically, we were at a book event, and he’s like, “Did it factor into writing this book?” And I think that yes, I am more direct and deeply ambitious, but in terms of feminism, that’s good. To be a woman, harnessing some of these traits that my father inherited to me, made me have a masculine edge, but it can be taken even in more power as a woman. I don’t have to be ashamed for wanting to make money, and wanting to write, and wanting to take up space. And I think there are so many people that would’ve been like, “You know, I’m 28, 29. I don’t have a memoir in me. That’s deeply self-indulgent.” And while it is self-indulgent, somebody did ask me to do it, and I’m going to take up space.

He accepted so much of me, but what was I able to really do? And it’s sort of a meditation on that. And even writing this, comparing myself to him; comparing it to his book and what the book did, and I know what his book did number-wise. I shouldn’t know any of that. I’m not David Carr, you know what I mean? He had many years on me when he wrote it, still, but I hold myself up to this impossible standard.

That was a very spicy response.

That is a final act of trying to live up to him. That’s a challenge you set up for yourself.

I signed up for it. I put myself out there by writing this book, and I can’t be nervous when somebody doesn’t like it. I mean, art is subjective.

Have there been negative reactions to it? I think this is tricky because there are so many people who knew, or felt like they knew, your dad, but of course they didn’t know him the way that you and your family know him.

There was an amazing woman who professionally admired my dad, and met him a couple times. And she said, “This is hard for fans of David Carr, this book.”

Really?

“It’s painful to experience him as a parent that’s driving drunk and putting his children in jeopardy.” I think that, when you ask and you quiz people, killing your kids in a drunk driving accident, which is what could’ve happened, could have been one of the worst things to imagine. And we tend to forget these things because it almost stopped him, but it didn’t.

I think that we expect a lot of memoirists. You’re supposed to have these stories that exist and can live up to fiction. And real life is so flawed and scary and it doesn’t wrap itself up in these neatly prescribed bows that cinema might. And so people are like, “Don’t read the comments.” I’m like, “But this is really interesting stuff. How often are you gonna get people reacting to you and your life in real time?”

So, the masochist in me reads every single word, and then there’s an Amazon review saying, “I abandoned it on page 99.” I was, “Oh my god. That’s the cruelest thing you could’ve said!” It’s not that somebody didn’t finish it, but I mean, obviously the majority I’ve seen have been deeply positive, and people have finished it. And so when you have somebody like, “Don’t talk about this, you numbnuts, but whatever.”

[Laughs.] Well, so I’m curious about another thing, then. The thread of the book that deals with your own drinking and struggles with sobriety reminded me a lot of Sarah Hepola’s “Blackout” —

I love that book, yeah.

Yeah, it’s a great book about addiction and being a young woman working in media, and the pressures and the lifestyle that can go with that. 

And I know that at one point, you articulate the “work hard, play hard” reputation of VICE, which is also endemic through the media and a lot of creative industries, too. It strikes me as that is sort of a coded masculine way of talking about partying or substance abuse, to whatever degree that’s in play. And I wonder if you’ve experienced or noticed any difference between how your story’s received, and how for instance your father’s was, as part of his mythology. Does our culture view women and men differently when it comes to these narratives of addiction, recovery, sobriety, and the honesty that has to go along with that?

Yeah, I mean, I really feel strongly that men are given the benefit of the doubt. There’s a before and after. There’s “he had a problem, but now he’s fixed.” I think that a lot of literature lends itself to that, and when women communicate about their alcoholic lives, they’re marked forever as “messy.”

Messy. Yes.

As incoherent, that they did and said things that cannot be taken back. This sort of weird misogyny that underlies it. So I basically sent the book, before I finished, to my editor and to a couple of trusted people, and I said, “Will this affect my ability to get jobs? I’m a documentary filmmaker. I love what I do. It is at the heart of my joy in this life. I can’t write this and not be able to get work, because people think I’m unreliable.”

And everybody was like, “No . . .  It’s so clear, the demarcation that is a before and then a reaction to grief, and you’re sober now. No, you will not have a hard time finding work.”

But I got scared, because basically, I saw that people have such genuine anger when it came to women talking their — again, with the self-indulgence. That this is repetitive. Why are you talking so much about blackouts? You don’t even remember it. Da-da-da. I mean, female alcoholic writers need to be given the same benefit of the doubt.

I did not want to let that fear guide me. So I tried to write about it as honestly as I could, and that means writing about drug use. Did I really want people to know that I like cocaine a lot, in the former addicted life? No.

But that is the truth, and I think it’s really interesting. I mean, Scott Simon, the NPR guy, was like — he put it in a very Scott Simon way, which was very polite, but it was basically like, you were a crack baby, why did you do cocaine?

What’s going on here? And he just was like, “Why?” And it’s just such a complicated . . . I don’t have a neatly . . . It made sense to my brain when I did it, and so I did more of it, because that’s addiction.

When you were mentioning earlier about the person, the acquaintance, who read the book and said that reading the part about your dad driving drunk with the kids in the car was really hard to read, and I thought, yeah, but he wrote in his own memoir about the moment of leaving you guys in the car when you were little.

When you write about it from being that kid. It’s one thing to hear him talk about it. But then you’re putting yourself in the perspective of a kid in his car. That’s who you are in the story. It’s kind of a different emotional experience.

It’s true. It also just, to me, speaks to this idea that it’s easier to forgive men when they write about these things. That was a thing that he did, but it’s almost like you absorb that into the person that he is. But women still have to answer for every part of that along the way.

So, how do we change that, is my question.

That’s what books like this, I think, start, but I think maybe also being honest about confronting the difference instead of… I don’t know. Women are often socially conditioned to apologize for ourselves, and even past the point where the genuine apology has been extended. Like, apologize for living, basically (laughs). Yeah, we need to stop doing that.

Yeah, it’s like, “poor men,” and I think that men are not the only ones that make mistakes.

And as we continue to write about our careers and our attempts at motherhood . . . That’s what I really appreciate with writing that I’m coming into contact with. There was this genuine sense that everyone that is nice and good is able to have [babies], and I think there’s been a real reckoning in the last couple of years that maybe that’s not true. And maybe that — this is a completely different tangent — but I love the honesty that has emerged while I’ve become cognizant of women writing about these issues, and about what they’re feeling and thinking. Women have always written about issues, but I think we’re having a unique moment of transparency that feels important to continue.

Absolutely. I wanted to ask you about the Sad Girl’s Guide, the Google Doc that you write about putting together that gives advice for women who have lost a parent. Has that been something that you’ve continued to develop and share, or was that more of an artifact of a period in time when it was a useful tool for you?

I sent it to my friend that lost their father, and I didn’t get a response. I think it was maybe a year ago, and I realized at some point, maybe this stuff needs refiguring. So, anybody who wants it, it is available to, I just redact the names. I don’t know, I think there’s some great advice in there.

I think that it’s hard to build those things because you don’t know what the person is going through at that moment, and of course, they have the choice not to read it.

But I wanna be so tender toward the person in this moment and not ascribe a way of being to them, when they’re just figuring out how they’re going to go through their grief. Not everybody crowd-sourced information like me. Maybe they want to figure their out own process before getting someone else’s? That’s what makes us all unique snowflakes, that we all feel differently about these things.

Have you thought about developing that into a book, as well?

I don’t know. This is my beautiful grief book.

Somebody had brought that up to me, and I think that there is something super — I don’t know — really important about the varying of opinions as it comes to this. Every person, how they got through loss, or how they’re getting through loss, is different. I don’t know. It’s a good idea.

I want close with one question, and this sort of feels obligatory, and you’ve probably been asked this a bunch already, so I’m sorry. But I think a lot of people who are either in the media or are media junkies have found themselves thinking, in the Donald Trump presidency, in the thick of the Donald Trump age, it sucks that we don’t have David Carr writing about how all this entire shit show has gone down. What do you think that he would think or write or say about this intensely bizarre media moment that we’re in?

So, I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and I think he’d be profoundly disappointed with how disjointed it came to bear that all Americans were. That somebody who participated in abject racism and sexism would be elected to the highest office in the land.

I mean, he would have to be careful about objectivity, in terms of his reportage from a New York Times standpoint, but I think my dad was an optimist. He believed in the good of people. He believed in second chances. He believed in women going places and being ambitious, and so, when that happened, I’m sure that if he exists somewhere in the ether, he f**king flipped out.

There is the sort of media part that I’m sure he’d have an incredible take about, why the media and CNN and MSNBC and FOX News — they were our electorate, and they, in fact, elected this person. I never want to speak for him because he’s not here, but as somebody who has studied him pretty carefully in life, and in this after-experience, there would be this disappointment, but then there would be intellectual vigor and investigating and why.

I wish I didn’t have to write this book; I wish he was here doing these things. I think he’d also be really proud of the New York Times. He’d be really proud of their reporting, and he was such a lion for the institution. And they have remarkably stepped up to the plate when it comes to combating false news, and their reporting on sexism and the #MeToo era. He [would be] like, “Whoa, you guys are killing it.”

The post “That is the David Carr way”: Erin Lee Carr on writing fearlessly on grief, addiction and her father appeared first on Salon.com.

Did the sacrifice of leaving your family, friends, and familiar places pay off? You get swaths of time during which you can be with yourself and figure things out, but there’s a risk, because you also experience loneliness. Is there an upside to that loneliness?

“The Lonely Hour” podcast explores all of that in our new four-part miniseries, and we begin with Kamey Butler.

Things often happen in threes, and the catalyst for her trip was unfortunately a series of three tragic experiences: a breakup, a missed promotion opportunity, and the death of her father, former Baltimore Rams defensive lineman Jake Butler.

“He grew up poor and Baltimore and shined shoes and bagged groceries and did anything he needed to do to just bring himself up,” she says. “I admired him because he just never gave up. He just was like, ‘All right, well, just pivot. What else you interested in?'”

Kamey went into producer mode after her father’s death, planning the funeral, taking care of business.

“I never allowed myself to break,” she says. “I didn’t know what that looked like.”

When she returned home to New York, though, she started to feel a loss of control. Then she started to daydream about South Africa, a place she had visited before and loved. With the exchange rate working in her favor, she could sustain herself for about four months.

So she bought a ticket to Cape Town.

“I just remember driving through the city and the magnitude of Table Mountain,” she says. “I had seen it before, but now I could settle into it. It wasn’t just like you were on a vacation, it was just, ‘Oh, wow, OK.’ Just settling into the surroundings, the sounds of the place, the different dialects — I think that’s what stood out the most when I was there.”

“And a regular day was getting up, I’d go for a run, there was my favorite coffee shop that I’d go to every morning, order the same thing: It was muesli and yogurt and this gingered honey, and I’d sit and have my coffee and my French press. I literally would sit and write for however many hours. I had told myself that I’m just going to blog about this experience and see what comes of it. And that was my way of mourning and just getting out what I was feeling through this whole thing.”

“It was just so nice to be anonymous. Not that I was a rock star in New York! But I just knew that I didn’t have to be anything to anybody in the time that I was here.”

Time passed, and her four months were coming to an end. Money was about to run out. But she had started dating someone in Cape Town. Somewhere along the way, she had already decided to leave her New York job once and for all. And then, she was offered an opportunity to start the first Cape Town art fair with the largest exhibition company on the continent. She took it. She stayed.

Listen to hear how Kamey spent the rest of her time in South Africa — and what she learned from her experience:

The post Looking for clarity halfway around the world appeared first on Salon.com.

Kelsey Crowe made this painful discovery after she lost her mother — who was her sole parent and family member — to mental illness when she was in her early 20’s.

“I experienced the loss of my entire, but very small family pretty much alone — with no recognition,” Crowe shared with me in our recent interview for “Inflection Point.”

“There were no cards, there were no invitations for the holidays, there was no record of people’s memories of my mom when she was well. And clearly the absence of all those things in that scenario was a very amplified version of what so many of us go through in difficult times.”

Years later, when her dear friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, she agonized over how to reach out–and chose to wait to be asked for help.

The problem is when people are in pain, Crowe observed, “the neediness that comes about with intense loss of any kind can cause a lot of shame. You don’t want to be that needy person — you want to be that likeable, funny, giving person.”

And that means that it’s hard for people having a tough time to ask for help, or to even be aware of what their needs are.

The popular solution, Crowe said, has been to create self-help books instructing broken people on how to fix themselves.

“At some point I realized that yes, it was very, very hard for me to ask for help. And I was like well, ‘why the fuck should I be the one learning to ask for help when I’m feeling so crappy?’ Why would I be expecting my friend [with breast cancer] to ask for help?” Crowe told me.

Why indeed?

Crowe realized that the problem isn’t that grieving people don’t know how to ask for help–it’s that the people in their lives don’t know how to offer help and reach out.

“Instead of self-help books that were proliferating beyond belief . . . I said we need a ‘help each other’ book. So that we’re not waiting to be asked by that empowered individual who feels ready to ask for help. And so that’s where I wanted to go with it is how to make it easier to show up.”

Crowe’s book “There Is No Good Card For This,” which she co-authored with Emily McDowell, is the culmination of interviews she conducted with 900 grieving people about what they needed others to say and do to help them feel less alone.

Listen to how Crowe decided to make the study of grief her life’s work and her advice on how to get past your own discomfort and offer genuine empathy to loved ones in pain.

The post How to be a true friend when the worst happens appeared first on Salon.com.

I’ve never told anyone that before now, but as the third anniversary of his death approaches with agonizing slowness, I feel strong enough to say that if not for being afraid of causing my children the same pain that I felt, I don’t know what I would have done.

When he died, I didn’t recognize myself anymore. So much of my identity was being my father’s daughter and nothing was the same. What was the meaning of life and was it worth it?

These were questions that I could no longer answer as I navigated the world exposed, vulnerable, hovering somewhere above my body between reality and a dream state. Other times, it felt as though I were in a bubble deep beneath the sea. I could see people at a distance, but they couldn’t see me. I could hear words coming from their mouths, but they made no sense.

More from DAME: “Sex Can Be Complicated. Consent Is Not”

My father was and remains my hero, my rock, my best friend and a life without him didn’t seem possible. It still doesn’t. How do you put one foot in front of the other when the ground beneath you is crumbling? How do you speak when unshed tears claw at your throat? My heart didn’t feel broken or shattered when my father died. It felt as if it had been ripped bloody and pulsating from my chest, leaving only a gaping hole to remind me of its existence.

I’ve written about him before. But it was when the grief was fresh and raw, and the protective numbness allowed me to focus not only on who he was to me, but to other people: his passion for social justice and political reconciliation; his refusal to bend to popular opinion and teaching me never to follow parties, rather to question and engage ideas. My father was a public servant who gave and gave and gave to his community until he had nothing left to give.

Then he gave some more.

Among other health issues, he had an enlarged heart, which made perfect sense to me. His heart was too big. He trusted too much, loved too hard, and worked tirelessly to make everyone around him happy and the world is darker without him in it.

As fall settles in during this third year since his death, my grief is much more subtle. It’s not this looming monster that threatens to destroy me. It’s a shadow that follows me, a lingering chill in the air even when it’s warm. Grief has become something that I no longer try to fix because, with time, I’ve grown to understand that it never goes away. You just learn to live with it.

But I miss his hands—wide, callused hands that would rub my back or grab my hand just to kiss the palm and tell me he loved me.

I miss laying across his bed watching a Motown special on television and discussing the “feud” between the Temptations and the Four Tops.

I miss his laugh. Oh, his laugh could light up a room and reverberate for hours after he left. I miss reaching for the phone to call him in the middle of night, just because. I miss the light that came into his eyes whenever I walked into a room, knowing that it reflected the light in my eyes at seeing his face.

I miss seeing him getting dressed for work in the mornings. The familiar scent of his aftershave and cologne wafting through his bathroom as I trudged in blearily to get ready for school, always passing his watch and ring where they sat perched on his nightstand.

I miss cooking with him after my brothers were asleep. I miss going to his office, stopping at the coffee machine just outside his door to make him a cup before walking in—cream, two sugars.

I miss his famous card tricks that he would pull out whenever my friends came over.

I. Miss. Him. And the longer he’s gone, the more at home the hurt becomes.

There are days that I can deal with the pain.  When I remember that all he ever wanted for his children was for us to be happy, I realize that nothing would devastate him more than knowing that his death caused even a second of unhappiness.

But it hurts. My two older sons were born before he died, but my youngest son will never know firsthand the depth of his grandfather’s love for him. He will never feel the security of knowing that, other than his parents, there is a man who would move mountains for him. Of course, I can tell him stories, but a story can’t replace the feeling of laying on his chest and feeling his laugh reverberate until a responding smile tickles your lips—and knowing that in that moment, all is right with the world.

He’s always made everything right.

When I was 18 months old, my mother, Jacqueline Rose Smith West, died from a brain aneurysm. It was October 13, 1981, my big sister’s 11th birthday and two months before my mother’s 30th birthday. Monday was the 33rd anniversary of her death.

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From the time that he felt I was old enough to discuss it, my father always said that I saved his life. He told me the story of how he had packed me and my sister up and took us to his parents’ house with the intent of dropping us off and going somewhere to heal without reminders everywhere of our mother, his first and one true love.

My grandfather George, who would die from a heart attack three months later in January of 1982, said, “Son, of course your mother and I will keep the girls for you. But let me ask you this: If you run away, will that make Jackie come back?”

“No, sir.”

“If you leave, will you stop hurting?”

“No, sir.”

“Then stay here with your girls.”

And there he stayed. Thirty-one years old and raising two daughters, an 11-year-old and an 18-month-old, on his own. He would eventually remarry and give me two adorable baby brothers, but in those earlier days it was just the three of us. He said that when my sister was asleep, he would allow the tears he’d been holding in all day stream down his face as he talked about my mother and cried it out. He swears that I would look deep into his eyes as if I understood every word. And he laughed when he recalled that I would hit him over the head with my bottle with my juice order—“apple juice, light ice” —exactly how I drink it to this day.

According to my father, two things helped him begin moving through the grieving process.

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“I stopped going to the cemetery every day, baby girl. I realized that your mother was in my heart where she’s always been; I didn’t have to go stand at a stone. But before then, I raged at God. ‘How dare you take my Jackie from me?’ I’ve been a good person, how dare you take my wife, my girls’ mother, from me? Why me? Why me?!’

And I heard a voice, baby girl, and it said, ‘Why not you? You work in the funeral business and you see death and grief every day. You see mothers burying daughters, fathers burying sons, sisters burying brothers. Why not you? What makes you so special?’”

Three years after his death, as the murders of countless sons have ripped open the post-racial façade of a nation, as mother after mother, father after father, are forced to bury their babies after they’ve been gunned down by monsters with badges, I remember his words and I ask myself, “Why not you, Kirsten?”

Grief is the price one pays for love. And I am fortunate to have known my father’s love so completely and so intensely, to have him there to walk me down the aisle at my wedding and to see his face at the hospital when I gave birth to my two older sons. I am grateful that he was there to wipe my tears and hold my hand until I was 31 years old.

About a month before my father died, during one of our nightly calls, he told me to move home, back to Mississippi, and I laughed. I had called him from our tiny apartment in downtown Los Angeles and the tears just fell.

“Daddy, it’s so hard. I love to write, but there’s just no money in this. I’m stressed out. I never get to spend time with the boys …”

“Come home, baby girl.”

“Ha! You want me to leave L.A. and bring my entire family back to Mississippi and do what exactly? I can’t do that, Daddy. And you know it. I have to make this happen. I can’t afford to leave.”

About a month later, I would be seeing my father for the first time in nearly two years, laying on the table in a freezing cold mortuary. And it felt like coming home. I held him and didn’t want to let go. I rubbed his hair and traced his face.

“I’m here, Daddy. I’m here, Daddy. I’m here, Daddy. I’m here.”

The guilt was immense. All I could think about were the days when I was preparing to move. He cried as if his heart was breaking and said, “I’ll never see you again.”

I looked at him like he had grown three heads. “Of course you will, Daddy! What are you talking about?”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

It wasn’t until after he died and I spoke with one of his doctors that I discovered he was suffering with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). That is what he was covering up when he wouldn’t allow his doctors to give me information and I was furious.

“Why would he keep that from me?” I cried to one of my uncles. “Why?”

“And what would you have done?” my uncle responded.

“What do you mean, what would I have done?! I would have come home. I would have taken care of him. I would have made sure that he got everything he needed to still be here.”

“And now you know why he didn’t tell you,” my uncle said. “He never wanted to be the cause of you not following your dreams.”

“But it’s still not fair. He shouldn’t have made that choice for me.”

“He didn’t make it for you; he made it for him. He did it his way, as he always has.”

And when the soloist sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” at my father’s funeral, one of his favorite songs, it brought the house down because his energy moved through that place like lightning.

I shouldn’t be surprised that he died in fall, the season that I feel most alive. His last gift was allowing me to feel him in the breeze, to see him in the burnt oranges and burgundies and golds of autumn leaves and hear his voice in the stillness just when I need it the most.

The last three years were spent learning to live without him. The next three will be spent learning to live for both us. Just as he would have wanted.

*I love you, Daddy. I’ll always be your girl.*

The post When my dad died, I lost my will to live appeared first on Salon.com.

From Amazon’s perspective, the uninspiring performance was no big deal. $126 million is barely a rounding error for a company that generated nearly $20 billion in revenue in a single quarter, and Amazon officials continued to, as the New York Times’ David Streitfeld wrote,  “exude a serene if vague confidence.”

“We’re not trying to optimize for short-term profits,” Thomas J. Szkutak, the chief financial officer, said in a conference call. “We’re investing on behalf of customers and share owners,” he said. “We’re fortunate to have these opportunities.”

The problem for Amazon, a company that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is that at some point investors will wonder when the short-term finally becomes the long-term. For years, shareholders have been content to keep the faith. This week, after tech and telecom companies like Apple, Netflix and Comcast reported healthy profits, they seem to be getting itchy.

What does it mean? One sentence from the New York Times report says it all:

The quarterly results are likely to reinforce claims that Amazon is squeezing book publishers to make up for all those investments — not, as the company claims, simply to benefit customers.

The reference here is to the ongoing struggle between Amazon, Hachette and other publishers over e-book pricing. And it’s a foreboding message. Now that Amazon is feeling the heat, it’s starting to wield its near-monopoly power in anti-competitive fashion. Who could have predicted such a thing?

The post Amazon’s long-overdue clobbering: Why the online giant is in big trouble appeared first on Salon.com.