EP6 Concetta Abbate

Concetta Abbate is a composer, violinist, and death doula out of New York. She lost one of her closest friends, Rebecca, in her late twenties. While there are often unanswered questions surrounding death, the uncertainty surrounding Rebecca’s death has been a pervasive part of Concetta’s grief. In this episode, we get to ask if the circumstances of one's death affect how we grieve and how we understand violence in the face of severe mental illness. We also get the unique opportunity to contrast a composition Concetta created for Rebecca shortly after her death with Concetta’s voicemail, recorded nearly a decade later.

Content Warning: The episode contains conversation about death, mental illness, and suicide.

www.concettaabbate.com/

Living your Dying by Stanley Keleman

Transcript

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(Phone Ringing)

Hello friend, you've reached voicemails for the dead. Please leave your message after the tone.

(Beep)

Concetta: Hey Becca, first of all, I love you. I love you a lot. I love you so much. I always loved your calm energy, the way you were a good listener. You always had a quiet wisdom. You reminded me of a rabbit in the earth, the way you created an art studio in the basement of that old house in Massachusetts. And I remember you sitting there painting in the stark contrast of the light shining through the window into an otherwise dark and obscured space. I remember how you would read my aura as the color yellow. You even gave me a string of beads to represent the colors you saw in my energy. And you always told me that you thought I was a good person. You had a really intuitive sense for things, but I didn't know early on when we were in college, I didn't know what that really meant. And sometimes you would talk about ghosts in the afterlife and being in touch with the dead. And we would have these fun little seances. But as time went on, this turned into a paranoid obsession with fighting evil and demons. And it was hard for me to understand.I considered that you may have been having a schizophrenic break. The way that you were talking, it sounded really scared and paranoid, but I didn't intervene, and I wish that I did. And I had heard that you had moved back in with your parents, and I thought that they had everything under control and were helping you. But looking back, I'm worried that they ignored you and they ignored your cries for help. And those threats that you felt from other worlds and dimensions were seemingly hallucinations to others, but I know they were very real for you. You really experienced them. And I really cringe when I think about the terror that you must have felt. You would scream about how the ghosts were coming to take you away. I remember when I visited you at your apartment next to the cemetery one time. And while everyone was being dismissive and treating you like you were crazy, rather than somebody who might be ill, they did. The ghosts did, they took you away. I have this plant that you and I found outside the art museum. I don't have a green thumb at all, but I've somehow kept it alive for this past 15 years. And sometimes I talk to it because it feels like it has some of your spirit. It keeps growing, and it has become super massive and huge. I couldn't go to your funeral, and I don't really know exactly what happened to you. I don't even know where you're buried. I just received a one-sentence email from your mom one day while I was on my way to work. And then I read the obituary online, but I hope you're okay and that you've moved on and that you can return to your calm and peaceful self. I'm not entirely sure, but I think if I could read your color, your aura was lavender.

Concetta: I met Becca when I was an undergraduate in college. I had a really hard time in college because of personal financial issues. Basically, I didn't know really what I wanted to study and I was bouncing around a lot. So I had transferred colleges twice. So by the time I got to this third school, I had a really hard time making friends and fitting in. Becca noticed me as the new person and she came with our friend Elizabeth to our dormitory room and just started talking to me and telling me about stuff that they were doing this weekend and do you wanna come along? I just appreciated someone who reached out to me when I found it really socially awkward to be in a situation where people had already been getting to know each other for two years. Becca was an artist and kind of a goth girl and really into crystals and just stuff that wasn't super mainstream at that time. I was a weirdo too. So we really connected. We were at the school that was very preppy. Everyone was really buttoned up. We were the artsy kids and we had a really cool way of hanging out where she would paint and I would play my violin and compose music and write songs. We would also hang out in the town and we made friends with a lot of people in town. So we didn't hang out on the campus that much and there was a homeless shelter there. We would volunteer there and we got to know some of the homeless people who were living there and Rebecca was such a great listener, a really quiet person and these people would open up with their life stories of how they became homeless, why they're at the shelter and Becca continued to stay in touch with some of those people for years even after they became housed. I have a bunch of her artwork hanging on my wall. She transferred out of the school pretty much for the reasons I described. She didn't really fit in but she continued to live in the area so we continued to hang out a lot. When we graduated, that was really hard for me because Becca and I spent almost every day together and then I moved to New York City and she stayed in the college town. We would talk on the phone like a few times a week. Becca was my go-to person that I would call and she came to visit me a few times in New York City. She had really vivid dreams. She had really abstract ways of thinking about things. Like if you told her something, she would tell you this very unique interpretation of what she heard that no one else would give you that kind of feedback. I remember one time when we were in college, she would say that she could see people's auras and she said to me, "I think that you're yellow because you're so warm and joyful and friendly and I just see yellow all around you." And then she gave me this string of beads that just had all these different shades of yellow on it and she would make these aura beads for people. So she always had this kind of fantastical and whimsical way of interpreting the world. As time went on, she started to say things to me on the phone that sounded more and more like, "Maybe there's hallucinations happening. Maybe this is not reality." It was hard for me to gauge because I wasn't seeing her as often. I was just talking to her on the phone. We always kind of jokingly talked about ghosts and ghost stories and things like that, but she started talking to me in ways where this was very real for her. This was maybe something she was seeing and experiencing on a daily basis. The few times that I went to visit her after college, she was living alone and her living space was just covered wall to wall in paintings and crystals. And it became this really immersive artistic world that she was living in. Money was really hard for her and she was struggling. It was hard because I wasn't really living close by, but I was getting these bits and pieces through the phone calls. And the last conversation that I had with her was so bizarre and so abstract that when I got off the phone, I was like, "Should I notify a psychiatrist? Should I call her parents?" And I never did. The reason why I never did is because I heard from a mutual friend that she had moved back in with her parents. And so I thought, "Whatever's going on, her parents are taking care of it." I feel really conflicted about that. Maybe I should have inserted myself and made myself more involved.

And I continue to think about that. When and where is it your place to speak up and who do you speak to? And if she was living with her parents, maybe they weren't even really qualified to deal with what she was going through. But that last phone call, she told me that she was in an epic battle between good and evil, that there were these spirits from other dimensions coming from outer space that were going to attack the earth. And it was very scary and destructive. And then she said something like, "But don't worry, you're gonna be okay because you're a good person and I'm doing everything I can to protect you." And she was speaking in these terms where it was a different reality. And I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't diagnose what that was. Although I know the symptom of hallucination is associated with things like schizophrenia. She was also kind of around that age where maybe that could have been what was happening. Again, this is just me trying to find an answer because this is a situation where there's a lot of unknowns. I think there's always unknowns around death when someone dies. This was really a big unknown. Like what is going on? I think that when you confront a difficult situation that feels overwhelming, you want things to work. But even at that time, I knew that she had a lot of conflict with her family from childhood because she had shared that with me. And I knew that her parents were the kind of people, okay, I don't know. I just know what Rebecca told me, that her parents did not get her. They didn't get it. And I got the impression that they may be the kind of people to overlook bizarre behavior and try to feign normalcy. Maybe they didn't want to see how much her condition was evolving. I think a lot of us did the same. We were like, oh, it's just Becca being witchy and weird. It's just hard to step in in a situation like that, especially because a person who is seeing and hearing things is so convinced. That is their reality. You can't argue with them. She was really seeing ghosts. They were attacking her. So you can't say to her, that doesn't sound real because she would get really defensive. I think in our society, obviously we don't talk about mental illness enough. We don't have strategies for dealing with it. I take a little bit of the blame off of myself, understanding the context that we don't have a great infrastructure for identifying and reporting these kinds of things. Now I'm older and more experienced and I've lived through more things. And I definitely would have handled the situation differently. I think in my twenties, I was also just overwhelmed with my own issues going on in my life. It was a question of, okay, is this also my issue? Am I taking this issue on? I just never expected that she was dead.I never expected things to go that far. 

Hailey: Can you tell us how you found out about her death?

Concetta: I play the violin. So I was on a train going upstate from New York city to play violin for a wedding. I was on my way to the event, which was really hard. I opened my email and it just says, hi, Conchetta, this is Rebecca's mom. I'm emailing you to let you know that we found her dead in her bedroom last night or this morning. She said, I just remembered that you were somebody that was really important to her and I felt that you should know. The email was clearly sent through a generic email forum on my website. I never got a definitive answer about what actually happened to her. And then I always felt awkward about asking, like, do I reach out to her brother? Do I reach out to her dad? And then as time passes, it feels even more awkward to ask. I guess I just had ruminated over the facts of it for a long time. I know that she was having these hallucinations, that she was difficult to get in touch with, that other friends had stopped talking to her. My other friends from college also didn't know exactly what happened. So nobody really felt comfortable to reach out. The obituary made it look like it was suicide just because it said things like, she was in a deep depression and stuff like that. But, you know, my mind goes to other places. Was she murdered? Was somebody coming after her? I know that she was involved in, you know, a lot of different scenes and communities in the area that could have been considered dangerous. There's a big party scene around the college and everything. I just had that thought too. The truth is that I just, I don't know. Since that time, I became a death doula. So I work with people who have terminal illness or who have lost someone. And that is a consistent theme that has helped me to realize nobody knows all the answers. Like, what was my loved one thinking? Were they suffering? What were they feeling? Did they know that they were dying? Did they know that I loved them? Those questions are always there. And in the long-term sense, I have found that comforting. The other thing is I have this plant that she and I found on the side of the street when we were like 21 years old. You know, it's like 15, 16 years later. And it's four times the size of when I first got it. So I always tell everybody, oh, that's Rebecca's plant.

Like it kind of feels like her presence is here in that way and it just keeps growing. And it's so big and takes up so much space in my tiny New York City apartment. And it's my way of inviting Rebecca to take up space in my life. Even though it's hard to have those unknowns. In my twenties, you're afraid to ask. You feel so awkward reaching out to her parents and being like, tell me more, like what happens?

Hailey: I think that's an incredibly important point because I do think that there isn't a lot of precedent around death, particularly precedent around death of younger people to tell us that it's okay to ask. It's okay to be curious about death. What I'm wondering is it sounds like it's been seven, eight years or so since she passed. In that seven or eight years, becoming a death doula, right? A lot has changed in your own life. I'm curious why you haven't gone back now to ask. Do you still feel like those pathways of communication are open?

Concetta: Actually, the only contact information I have is that original email. So in order for me to get in touch, I would have to go back into that original email, which is an old email account that I don't even look at anymore. And then I feel really emotional about actually looking at the email again, but I don't have their names. I don't have their contact information. I can't remember her brother's name. It would take a lot of effort to track them down. I have this mutual friend who was really close with Becca and they feel the same way I do. We could try, but it seems I am more intrigued by this than she is because our mutual friend was Becca's roommate and saw the decline of her mental health a lot more closely and was really traumatized by it. And she really doesn't wanna open it up. She doesn't wanna look at it. And I was a little farther away where I was just getting glimpses of the process. So I think I have more curiosity about it, but maybe talking about it in this podcast is gonna prompt me to do a little digging and get some answers. I don't know if having the answers would change anything at this point, but you're right. Being a death doula, I think I'm much more equipped to approach that conversation. And I feel a lot less fearful of her parents' reactions. And they may even be excited to hear from me because I may have a lot of stories and memories of Rebecca that they don't have. I certainly have a bunch of her artwork. (Laughs)

Hailey: There's a lot of potential reactions and responses that family members can have. I think it's an important thing to note in speaking about death, especially when death has just happened, that oftentimes you hear about someone say, "Oh, I had this person in my life die." And the next question that comes out of most people's mouths, for better or for worse, is, "Oh my God, what happened?" Particularly if it's someone who's younger. And sometimes people will go, "Oh no, I'm not supposed to say that." I actually don't mind that question. I think we need to talk about what happened more. I do think there is a line of like, well, you don't need to know a ton of very specific details if you don't know that person. But I think getting people more comfortable around the culture of death and being comfortable asking these questions of how did this happen? Why did this happen? Will ultimately put us in more of the right direction societally. If you still have access to her obituary, her parents and her siblings full name should be in it. If you decide to do that, I would be very curious to hear how you feel like that process helps you feel better, worse, more clarified, anything like that. But I'm gonna run on the hypothetical for just a second. If you knew without a doubt that, let's say she chose to overdose and they found her in her bed that next morning, she appeared fairly peaceful. And that was a choice that she made and it was pretty obvious. How would that make you feel? How would it make you feel if that was the situation that happened and maybe she even had like left a note, there's just an extra piece of information of her story that maybe you didn't know or didn't have access to and then you would be able to find that piece of information out. As opposed to maybe she had overdosed and it was a complete accident and that was not her intention. Would that ultimately have made you feel different about the death or the situation? And then I'll include one more, which is the idea of violence. If she had died by an act of someone else's violence, how would those different scenarios make you feel to know one of them might be true? What would that do to your sort of grief process eight or so years later? 

Concetta: My worst fear has been a scenario where she was violently murdered. And I think about some of the kinds of people that she might have been mingling with or surrounding herself by just making poor choices from not reading other people's social cues clearly, maybe, I mean, she did a little bit of that when we were younger where we would go to a club and she'd start talking to some guy and I'd be like, why are you talking to this guy? Because she was so friendly. There was something so trusting and beautiful and wonderful, but I always thought like this could go very wrong. So that's my worst case scenario. And if I found out that something like that happened, I hate to say it, I wouldn't be surprised. And I think it would make me even more devastated. And I think I would be grieving the whole thing over again in a new way. If I found out that she overdosed intentionally and it was pills and I don't want that to happen, but like in some ways that may feel like a relief because that feels like a more peaceful death of putting her suffering down. Either way, I know that Rebecca experienced violence because she told me that she was experiencing violence. Every time I talk to her, the last several conversations and I don't just mean violence from other people, I mean violence from the hallucinations. She was living in an apartment that was right next to a cemetery. It's a beautiful cemetery. There's a lot of cool historic people buried there, but she was on the ground floor and it was right outside her window. And I remember the last time I visited her in that apartment, she said, "Oh, you shouldn't stay in here alone. Like the ghosts, they just come in here and they terrorize me and they like to taunt me and they float over my head and attack me and threaten me. And I have to fight them off. And if I'm not here, I can't fight them off for you." And then when we spoke on the phone, she talked about these entities from outer space, from other dimensions of her being exhausted because she can't stop fighting them. She can't go to work. She can't leave the house. She has to stay here and fight this evil force. And she said several times in the conversation that they were planning to kill her. That was when I did reach out to a psychiatrist I just found online. Like I was in my twenties and I was like, "Hey, I have this friend. I don't know what to do." And they were like, "Well, you should contact her family." And I was like, "Well, I really didn't have any contact information for her parents at that time. And I also didn't really know their names, but I had heard through the grapevine that she had moved back in with them. So I don't know if I even would have had to like go through the white pages or something, but I remember her saying like, "They're violent. These entities are violent. They're going to kill me." And so part of me feels like whether she was murdered by a person or some demonic ghost in her paranoid fantasies, like it probably felt equally violent to her. Just how she's experiencing reality. I also have a history of schizophrenia in my own family. I had a cousin who was schizophrenic and it was a very similar story where they thought ghosts were following them. What I know is that when you have those hallucinations, that's your reality. And what sucks is that there is medication for this stuff. Like there is treatment for it. You know, I think either way, if we call it suicide, I don't think it's possible for her to actively had made the choice of suicide because she was functioning in a reality where even if it was her hand doing the act of killing herself, it was induced by a hallucinatory element. And I guess that's the conclusion. That's why we say that someone died by suicide rather than they chose suicide because there is this element of warped reality that happens through mental illness. Obviously every case is different. There's many different reasons why people take their own life. But in this case, I think it was not an active choice that she could make. So I don't know, you know, I've definitely thought through all three scenarios that you mentioned. None of them feel good to me. At least if you die with an opioid overdose, it seems like it's more peaceful than someone violently attacking you. But none of them are great scenarios, especially considering that she was 28 and she was a very smart person and had a lot to give to the world.

Hailey: Do you have any thoughts on what she would be doing now or what she would have done with some of that time if she had survived? 

Concetta: Becca was so generous and loving and I think she would be making really brilliant artwork and I think she would be doing a lot of activism in being socially engaged. She was just good with people. She was really good with animals. She would always rescue cats and various animals. She had a pet iguana and she was always so gentle with the iguana just talking to it and I think that we tend to outcast people who are different but we need differences in the world. We need people who think of animals as someone that you could have an interspecies friendship with on that level. We need people who think that way. It feels like a personal loss but it feels like a loss for society. If we could treat the symptoms that are terrorizing people, that are making people really unhealthy and still embrace their personalities, it's a tricky line I know but we live in a society where there's so many nuances around mental health that get put into these generic boxes and Rebecca's situation was not black and white. It wasn't like, oh, she's so sick and vulnerable. That's part of the story but the other part of the story is she's an incredibly brilliant thinker and a mystic and a visionary and I feel so lucky to have known her. I didn't want her to be hallucinating because it was causing her suffering but there was something about the way she perceived the world that elevated my own experience of the world. It just helps me to see things more vividly. She had this way of identifying someone's essence that was different than their embodiment as a person. It helped me to understand the interconnectedness that we all have. So I just think about all the conversations we used to have and all the ways we used to connect and the art that we would make. So I'm just really grateful. I think that we talk about mental illness and then there's also a lot of current conversations around neurodivergence and those two things can really overlap and how do you maintain someone's beautiful neurodivergent expression and perspective in the world while also treating the symptoms of mental illness. Of course, Rebecca never had that kind of nuanced care. I actually made an album in 2020. So this was like four years after Rebecca died and there's a song on the album that's dedicated to Rebecca and it's called "Worlds" and it's about living in multiple worlds of reality simultaneously. It's written for solo viola and I'm singing a little bit in it. It doesn't have any words. It's kind of an abstract composition but I wanted to capture in the composition her anger, her frustration, her feelings that no one understood her, no one understood what she was going through or her perspective.

And then I imagine at the end of the composition her ascending into a new reality, a peaceful reality where she can be relieved of all of those angstful, irritated, angry feelings and relieved from the violence. But that song is dedicated to Rebecca and my attempts at communicating with her posthumously and my attempt at using music to sort of walk inside of the mirror and look out the other side and try to understand beyond my own reflection of myself onto her what she is experiencing?

So I guess, you know, I have obviously done a lot of processing and thinking I have this plant, I have her artwork, I have my memories and my own music that I've written for her. I've come to a place where I don't feel I need to know all the details.

Like I have a lot of answers through the searching that I've done with the information that I have and that information is a gift. Whatever little inkling information I have, that's already a lot to work with to piece this story together. And then part of me feels like it is worth the emotional upheaval to contact her parents because I feel very angry. I don't know if that anger is righteous because I don't know what happened, but I feel it. And I think that's okay to acknowledge that we have anger around death. We wanna direct it at someone and I don't wanna approach them from a place of anger. I would like to be at peace and approach them from a place of curiosity and hopefully build connection if I do approach them.

Hailey: I'm hearing two things in your discussion of the grief. It sounds like you've had some anger with the reality of what happened and the fact that she died. And it sounds like with the information that you have right now, it feels like maybe her parents are the primary people who could have prevented some of this. It also feels like there's a sort of anger that happens generally that maybe you should have or you could have done more. And that feels super universal and really common. What I am wondering is if that feels true to you that this anger is somewhat internal and external since it seems like her parents could be a vessel for that anger since they are the people who potentially could have done more. But with that in mind, we don't necessarily know. 

Concetta: We don't even know if she was living with them. I don't even know. Yeah, I don't even know. I don't know if they were home. I don't know if they were on the other side of the planet. Like I know nothing. So you are right. All of those things are true. Angry at myself, angry at her parents.

And this is where I'm gonna get really emotional because as I get older, I get more angry at society, the social structures that created this scenario. We don't really have an infrastructure for healthcare, for people with mental illness that is effective. I think the way that I have dealt with this is through my work, I became a death doula.

We have a really hard time talking about illness, mental illness especially, but all kinds of illness. We still have these weird cultural ideas that disability and illness are related to our brokenness as people, like it's somehow a reflection on our value as a person. So I have dealt with Rebecca's death by doing a lot of research about disability rights and opening up conversations about illness early on. This is what I do as a death doula. I get people to do their advanced directives when they're healthy or when they have just the beginning of a diagnosis. That's a big part of my work is opening up the conversations because anything could happen to any of us at any time, no exceptions.

And to open up the conversation is opening up the opportunity for us to, as a community, as a society, to monitor how each other are doing. Stay open, stay in touch. You don't have to fix everything on your own. That was something I heard a lot in Rebecca's voice when we talked was, I have to fight these demons myself. I have to manage all this. I have to protect you from this. Now that I look back on that, no one should have to feel that way, that you're being attacked and you have to handle this all on your own. The societal repercussions of individualism and hiding our disabilities, hiding our flaws, that leads to situations like this where it just goes too far. I think death is a teacher and we learn from it and it takes a lot of time to unravel the lessons and time gives us the chance of reflection. And the fact that this happened so early in my life has completely changed the choices and decisions that I've made from that point on. It has shaped me as a person.

So I'm not saying it's a positive or a negative. I'm not trying to put a value judgment. I'm just thinking about the organic repercussions of death. There's a universality to this experience. It's not this stagnant thing where it's like, okay, someone died and then you grieve them and now we're moving on. It's gonna affect me for the rest of my life and this experience is going to affect the way that I die because I'm gonna make different choices because of watching the other people in my life and how they died. I would be curious actually to listen to that piece of music that I wrote. I think after hearing the story, it would be interesting for me to hear kind of my musical interpretation of this experience. 

Hailey: Let's take a listen to Concetta's original voicemail so to speak. This is the piece world's off her album Mirror Touch, composed and recorded shortly after Rebecca's death.

(Music)

Concetta: I think it's really cool to listen to that because I wrote it like so soon after it had happened so it really captures all the different feelings and emotions. It captures so much of Rebecca's personality. That opening fiery angry side and then she also had this very seductive side. She was very beautiful and mysterious and I think at the end it was her ascent through her death or being liberated from her life experiences in a way but also I just felt there was this sense of bravery. Whatever she's doing, she's being really brave. That gives me comfort to think about the fact that she was a courageous person. So remembering all those nuanced things about her personality makes me feel like whatever she went through as horrible as it is. I shouldn't underestimate how strong of a person she was. I often skip that track on the record. I intentionally don't listen to it because it's too emotional for me. There are other songs on that album that are easier for me to listen to and every time that track comes on I skip it. That piece of music is a contemplative piece that requires your full attention and it's not something that you could zone out to in the background. I think we experience music because of apps like Spotify. Music is something that is often in the background. It's in the background of movies. It's in the background of the grocery store. We might have music on while we're cooking and very rarely do we treat it like a sculpture that has to sit right in front of my face.

That's what that piece is. It's like when you play it you need to fully consider it. I'm someone who has synesthesia so I have a lot of visual associations with music. When I listen to that piece I literally can visualize three dimensional shapes. What I'm trying to say is that this piece is very immersive for me. If it's on it's so distracting to whatever else I'm doing and it needs my undivided attention. Every other song on the album is kind of like that but not as much. You could have a lot of that album on in the background but not that piece. I wrote it that way because it should be something rare and precious and demanding of our full attention. A story like this one. Stories like this one. They shouldn't just run in the background. That's kind of the point of it I guess. It does a really beautiful job of putting this story of an individual and the story of specifically your grief related to her at the forefront. It's like this is me. I am going to appear in this way and I'm going to hold this much space and I'm going to hold your attention in this way. 

Hailey: What I find so interesting is the fact that we can still choose to skip the track. Even you can choose to skip the track because on any given day sometimes that track feels like too much. I think it's important to notice when we feel like we always have to skip the track then when it's something where it's like oh yeah yeah not today but another day. There's certain grief practices that I think can kind of help hold to that. Some people who have lost their parents Mother's Day or Father's Day or holidays kind of hold that space of a time to be really intentional about metaphorically speaking listening to the track. Choosing not to skip it. Because we're talking about a friend in this instance, I'm wondering if there is like a specific day or time of the year if there's a specific ritual I know you even referenced seances when you all would hang out together like is there something that you can do to honor her more intentionally just in a very regular way. Obviously you've honored her quite beautifully in creating that track but just in a very regular way like is there a way to keep her alive.

Concetta: I think that's a really good point that you make that our society has an infrastructure somewhat for remembering immediate family. We have Mother's Day is a holiday. Father's Day is a holiday. And so many of us find those holidays to be conflicting, but many of us have a chosen family that people that don't fit in those designated categories but still feel like family. And so first of all, I want to thank you for this podcast and actually making the space to make space. And I think in some ways, and I've experienced a lot of death in my life and a lot of loss.

In some ways, I chose this story because I didn't have another place to talk about it. So, the fact that I chose a friend's death for this podcast definitely has to do with that factor that you were saying about there not being a space for it. And also, I'm like, I'm a death doula, I got to do better about my own ancestor altar, so to speak, really carving out the plant is is great and I'm, I'm so happy about it and I love that I get to talk to people about her when I tell them about the plant, even though people think I'm weird as hell, you know, I think there could there should there could and should be some kind of regular space. And I and I think there are, you know, many religious traditions that have this space built in like Dia de los Muertos, and, you know, there's in in Judaism there's like the Russia Shana holidays, you know, there's like these rituals built into these ancient traditional practices but if you're kind of secular, we have to find meaning in ways that are unique to our lived experience. I took my dog on a walk at a local park, there's tons of cemeteries near me. I live in Queens, in New York City, and there's this huge cemetery belt here, and all the plants were dying. Like we were in the park and like, you could see the like shriveled leaves curling in on each other and just like the leaves all over the ground and, you know, I was just thinking about how beautiful it was in a way and how impressive it was in a way. And even if you don't make intentional space for grief and remembrance it seeps in, you know, in those moments through nature, you know, just reminding us. And then, of course, we have to be open to experiencing those moments so I don't know what my ritual will be but I'm gonna think about that. You know, like I said, I am a death doula now so I'm just way less afraid to talk about death. And I think I'm also like, I've learned how to let go of other people's reactions to how I talk about death. I talk very openly about writing advanced care directives and making burial plans and I have had people have really angry responses to that. Because they may be upset that their loved one didn't have an opportunity to plan or they didn't do it for themselves. Like I had somebody say to me, well, not everyone's so organized like you can try to, you know, like, and I'm okay with that. It's okay. Like people feel angry. It's really not personal. So if I contact Rebecca's parents and they don't write me back or they're angry or they're offended. That is their issue. Because now that I've lived what I've lived, I realized there is nothing wrong with me knowing what happened. And that is totally my right to know. She was one of my closest people. We have these societal ideas like only mom and dad and siblings should know it disqualifies the level of closeness that we had the type of relationship that we had. The fact that we bonded as family in a context where we both felt really alone. I feel that reaching out to them could be a way for me to reclaim that relationship in a way. I'm curious how I would feel doing it like in the process of doing it. I even had a professor that died a couple years ago, and I just asked what happened and somebody said to me like, oh, that's, that's what I was doing. That's not appropriate. And I'm like, why? I understand that people might interpret it as just like voyeurism, like, oh, you just want to gossip and have something interesting to talk about. But that's really not where I'm coming from. When I asked that question, I think knowing a little bit can, like you said, change the grief process, having some bit of information. That bit of information can also affect how you live your life. I think part of me is like that, like just ask and part of me is like, learn how to sit with uncertainty, because on that end of things too, like there's always going to be uncertainty and then one question may lead to more questions. 

Hailey: I think it has a lot to do with the nature of why someone's asking, are you asking because you will feel fundamentally different about the person based off of the response that someone will tell you if the response someone that someone tells you is they were murdered versus they were in a car accident or died by suicide, if you will feel differently about it based off of a factual piece of information like that, then maybe that's not the right question.

But if you're asking about it out of genuine curiosity for better understanding the person the same way that you would ask, hey, what did you do last weekend, you just want to know them better. To want to know someone in death, which often involves knowing their death is a very reasonable thing. If you were genuinely curious about the person while they were alive, being genuinely curious about the person in their death is completely reasonable. If you really didn't give a shit about someone while they were alive, caring about their death doesn't make any sense because you're then you're only caring about them because they're dead. And I think to me that feels disingenuous.

Concetta: Have you read the book Living You're Dying? It talks about how your death is a continuation of your personality. It's a continuation of your life. It's not like a separate thing. And in some ways, it's a thing that happens to us. And it's also a thing that we do actively. A simple example is like if you're a smoker, you will likely die of the consequences of smoking. Not to say that it's bad to smoke or that addiction is bad. Addiction is just a condition. But it's a continuation of the way that you live. You're living, you're dying. And I think it also is a good exercise as a death doula because I am working on how to have conversations around death. And it may be interesting to come up with some approaches for asking that question that feel genuine and that will be more likely to get the answers that you're looking for than a flat out like, well, what happens? You know, because you could lead it with I really cared about this person and they've deeply affected my life. Knowing what happened may give me a deeper understanding of them. Like now might be a good time to reach out to Rebecca's parents. It's been almost a decade. I think it's interesting to consider the shape of grief over these long periods of time. 

Hailey: It's just a very different picture of grief when it's been two years or even four years as opposed to 11 or 27. It's just a very different story.

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Hailey: A special thanks this episode to Concetta Abbate. If you are interested in learning more about her work please check out her website at concettaabbate.com. Our music is provided by SubOctav out of North Carolina. And if you’d like to record a voicemail yourself please call our hotline 720-828-2023. In your host Hailey Taymore Brown and thank you for listening to another episode.