Modern Loss With Rebecca Soffer And Gabrielle Birkner

Modern Loss founders Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner are members of the "Women With Dead Parents Club." Rebecca's mom died after a car accident and her dad had a heart attack while traveling. Gabi's father and stepmother were murdered in a robbery when a recently released addict was sent to their home to make a run-of-the-mill home repair. We're talking about how ANY moment can be a trigger, the surreal feeling of being an adult orphan, and why the time for pretending to be perfect is over.

Transcript

Rebecca and Gabby,

I am so excited to be sitting across the mic from you because I have leaned on your resources in my own coming back from the death of my mom in 2013 as well as suggested your book Modern Loss as well as your website Modern Loss to tons and tons of my listeners in the community.

It's been very widespread so I'm so just excited to share space with you and we'll start where we start all of our interviews here on coming back.

If you could both please share your lost story.

Okay so this is Gabby and when I was 24 I was working in newspapers.

I was actually an obituary writer.

I just started my career in newspapers.

I was about two years out of college when I got the news that my father and stepmother had been murdered in a robbery and all of a sudden here I was a recent college graduate thrown into a life experience I certainly never expected to have and could not have prepared for.

All of my friends were also around 24-25.

Most of them had parents who were living and didn't know anyone who had been murdered so they truly wanted to be there for me and many showed up in really powerful and important ways but they couldn't always intuit exactly what I needed in the aftermath of this loss like being a 24-25 year old and never having experienced anything remotely like this.

My lost story is that when my dad and my stepmother were murdered in their home in Sedona,

Arizona where they had been living for about a year and a half after moving from Los Angeles,

Semi-retiring there and they had a pipe that froze and broke.

They called a local plumbing company.

They sent a man who was a methamphetamine addict in prison for ten years out only for two weeks when he was sent into their home and you know it was it's this random horrible story that never that I never wanted to be part of my life and was.

That's the story that brought this topic close to my heart.

And this is Rebecca so this is definitely working with grief and loss is not something I ever imagined myself doing.

In fact I would have definitely chosen to not do something like this but life has other things in store for us than what we think we have in store for it and what it had in store for me was straight out of grad school.

I had just graduated Columbia Journalism School in New York City and I was working at the Colbert Report which is you know was my dream come true job and I was producing there and I just thought I was gonna have this amazing career in political satire you know like making fun of politicians for small salaries and just really happy about it.

But I turned 30 my second year of the show and I went on a camping trip with my parents to upstate New York a place in the Adirondack Mountains and it's where we went every summer this was like our family vacation it was very very sacred to me because it was the place where we always came back to every year even though life you know and everything around us was changing this it was an island it was like rock and trees and dirt and water none of that changed so this was a really amazing place for us to connect with each other and we had this amazing trip it was late August in 2006 and at the end of the trip we headed back to New York City in a very overstuffed Subaru Outback my mom and dad and me and my dad has an older son from another marriage and my parents dropped me off in New York at my apartment late that night it was Labor Day I was heading back to work the next day I you know said this really quick goodbye to my mom and dad they came up they used the bathroom we had a good laugh you know I was supposed to see them in a few days my cousin Julie was getting married back in Philly and 45 minutes later I was still in my camping clothes I was on my laptop just getting mentally ready for the next day and I got a phone call from my you know my dad's son that there had been an awful accident and that I really needed to get to a hospital in the middle of New Jersey and you know I was told that my mom was alive but she was really really badly hurt and my dad was screaming in the background and it was just this awful you know anytime I talk about it these days I don't want to talk about it I don't like thinking about that moment I miraculously found a ride to the hospital to find out what I knew as soon as I got that phone call which is that my mom hadn't survived this car accident and didn't really bad it was on the New Jersey Turnpike my dad survived he was mildly injured and the way that I found out was going into the hospital room and seeing him bandaged up and having him say I'm so sorry so that was my entry into the world of loss and grief and the ridiculous nonlinear ride that it is it was very isolating it was as Gabby said you know I was surrounded by people who are also like in their 20s you know like their 20s and 30s we were joking all day long we were actually that was our job to joke all day long and so it was really hard for me to navigate that because I also wanted to joke all day long for a living but I also was dealing with very real things like the states and choosing outfits for funerals and thinking about how my mom would never see me get married if I ever got married and so you know it was a really hard faith to navigate because there was no roadmap for it and I got really tired of it very quickly because I found that the onus seemed to always be on me to make everybody else feel really comfortable and so I was really happy when I finally met Gabby several months afterwards due to a mutual friend who got a bunch of friends together who had all lost a parent and we just you know we'd never met each other before and we became friendly very quickly and it just was very comfortable to talk to somebody else who got it.

Yeah I think it had been like six months for you Rebecca at that time and you're like I'm still feeling this way it's already been six months and everyone else who had lost someone you know years prior was like it's only been six months like that is such a short time in the in the like great expanse of grief.

Right it definitely felt like a nanosecond at that point and I thought that that was kind of my hand I was like okay I've been dealt mine but no so just shy of four years after my mom died my dad had a heart attack while he was traveling abroad and did not survive so by age 34 I was you know I'm not parentless but I was not being parented by anybody who was living.

I want to jump in to the midst of both of these stories because you both made a point to comment on what it's like grieving or having a parent die in your 20s and 30s and that's a life I have faced as well.

Listeners of this podcast know that my mom died in my senior year in college and I actually finished school after her death and then graduated and it's such a weird time to be experiencing loss which is probably one of the first reasons I latched on to modern loss as a resource and we talk a lot on this show about what 20-somethings are bad at while grieving but I think there's a few things that 20-somethings are really good at and one of them jumped out at me in the front of your book it's the thing that you called the women with dead parents which is like this unabashed nickname that stands in for the support group of 20-somethings who have lost parents and are pissed about it and I think this lack of this lack of stuffiness or fluffiness surrounding grief is I don't I don't know if that I would call it a trend maybe it's something that's coming up that's a way that we grieve in the modern age but something that 20 and 30 something's these days seem to be good at is like taking the veil off of grief and calling things for exactly what they are.

Yeah I mean I I don't know how people grieved in 1947 because as old as I feel now I wasn't alive but I gather and I even can see how they grieved I guess out loud for the most part 20 years ago I mean I remember when you know somebody in my high school died and there wasn't a lot of talk about it it was just something that I