Kathryn Schulz
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kathryn Schulz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I don't know that her life was improved by never confronting the vast sources of pain within it, at least never in any way visible to any of the rest of us, right? Life is full of suffering. It's unevenly distributed in tragic ways. I would never dispute that. But even the best and luckiest and most privileged life has an unfortunate share of suffering in it. And
there are choices to be made about how much do we focus on it? How much do we dwell on it? How much do we speak of it? How do we speak of it? And how much do we pay attention to our own suffering versus the suffering of others? And I think you're driving at something a little deeper than everyday complaining, which is a fundamental question about, do we regard ourselves as strong?
And this is such an overused word right now, but resilient and able to overcome? And do we dwell on what is going well or on what we hope to do, on our aspirations, on our motives, on our goals? Or do we get excessively mired in what has been done to us or ways that we've been wronged? And I don't pretend to know the answer, and I'm not suggesting we shouldn't speak about trauma and upset.
As I said, I think it was a great revolution in our culture that people have permission to do so. But I share the sense that something was slightly lost in these generations that Yeah, I mean, my father spent decades not really saying altogether that much about it, both a fascinating and also unquestionably disruptive and upsetting and traumatic childhood.
Deadly dull. I mean, when nothing is happening, which is a lot of the time when you have someone in an ICU with a kind of mysterious set of failing bodily systems. much of your time is spent doing absolutely nothing.
Much of your time is spent waiting for someone who has the faintest idea what's going on to come and talk to you, which inevitably happens in the 10 minutes you decide you're finally going to go get a cup of coffee. So, you know, they felt long. They felt repetitive. They, of course, had this...
kind of specter of fear always on the edges of them because it's not like I knew my father was dying the whole time. At some point that became clear, but for a lot of the time it wasn't clear at all. I will say, and this is so much of what this book is about, they felt a little bit like a gift.
It was this bit of time carved out from the daily grind of, I'm at work, I'm on deadlines, you know, I'm doing all these predictable things. It's like, well, no, I am here in this hospital and here we are as a family, like my family of origin together in a room. How wonderful. And so it had moments of sweetness.
There was a kind of bleak tedium to it, and yet it was always punctuated by the gift of family. And then, of course, gratitude for the medical professionals who were trying to help us and outside and around and infusing all of it, this fear, which proved accurate that these were my final days with my dad.
I think that's often true. And I think many people experience it that way. You know, this longing people have still today to die at home, right? And the resistance to entering various kinds of care settings. It's not, I don't think, just stubbornness or even fear about, you know, being warehoused in an institution or no one will come visit you or this kind of thing.
It is a real sense that much of what makes life meaningful is absent from these places. There is a kind of cruelty at the end of life of all times to not be confronting beauty. I mean, I will never forget. I don't know how much of it he could take in, but I'll never forget turning on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in my father's hospital room because we felt like he loved music.
He loved classical music and the urge to fill this incredibly sterile space with something awe-inspiring and overwhelming in its beauty was overwhelming within us in that moment. And, you know, we've recited in poetry for the same reason. On the one hand, look, I want to be incredibly clear. I'm profoundly grateful to the medical team who took care of my father at that moment and many others.
And so I don't mean to suggest there's not a reason these places are the way they are and that acts of incredible courage and grace and beauty don't happen there. They do every single day. But when you are there every single day for a long period of time, you also feel their kind of...
emotional thinness you know that the life is so abundant we'll talk about abundance i hope at some point here but life is is so rich and wonderful and varied and not abundance as we mean it on my podcast to be honest well sure but um so much of that is forcibly kept at bay in a hospital and you're right one once more for the sick and the dying i'd like to ask you to read a passage it's one of my favorite in your book it's on page six sure
For a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully at 74, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy.
What shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved, even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all.
The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile. Everything felt vulnerable.
The idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.
It's so funny. Is it a more honest perspective of the world? It is certainly accurate by many lights. Loss is omnipresent. We will die. The people we love will die. The things we build in the grand scheme of things, even in the medium scheme of things, are relatively transient and fleeting.
There are times in life when the omnipresence and the scale of this loss do become profoundly visible to us, at least to me. I think a lot about scale, right? And if you dwell on the scale of the world, let alone the scale of the cosmos... Our lives are stunningly short. They seem or can seem stunningly insignificant. And this sense that everything around us is terrifyingly fragile is accurate.
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