Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Amanda Peet. She's an actress, a producer, and a writer. She's been in films like The Whole Nine Yards and Something's Gotta Give. She's currently starring in Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV+.
Amanda grew up here in New York City with her sister, Alyssa, who's a doctor, her mom, Penny, who's a psychotherapist, social worker, and her dad, Charles, who was a lawyer. Amanda has three kids now with her husband, David Benioff, who's probably best known for co-creating the TV series Game of Thrones. In late August of 2025, Amanda was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The following day, her father died and her mom died some four months later. I read a moving essay that Amanda wrote in The New Yorker about what happened called My Season of Ativan. We reached out to her and she kindly agreed to talk with me about it. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you so much for having me.
Can you talk a little bit about the diagnosis that you got?
I was just blindsided. I mean, it was just one of those things. It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and I guess they were watching a spot. I didn't really realize that somehow. And I said, if you were a bedding woman, what would you, what do you think? And she said, I think you have cancer. My doctor was able to call on the Saturday morning to say that, indeed,
The quick biopsy had come back and that I had breast cancer, and it was lobular breast cancer. And then that evening, my sister called to tell me that our stepmother had said that my dad was failing. And so I got on the plane, and it was too late. The next morning, he passed away at 6 in the morning.
How long had your dad been sick for?
He had a hard time in the last two years, but he didn't get really sick until he had a fall about six months before this. And then it was pretty quick. The end was really awful. He was very agitated and stuff. But I saw him two weeks before he died, and he was able to talk to me. We went to a restaurant. He was in a wheelchair, but he was able to talk a little bit and eat a little bit.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Amanda Peet face with her parents' health and her own diagnosis?
Yeah. Yeah. And she was very emotional.
Your sister was, who's a doctor.
Chapter 3: How did Amanda cope with her father's death shortly after her cancer diagnosis?
Yeah, but then once we left the apartment, she was more able to be like, his body is just his body. And I was much more like panicked about where his body was going and how it was so impersonal. This was just so impersonal, how they were just taking his body. It's so weird.
These people showed up.
Yes, it's so insane.
You described them as like the Blues Brothers dressed in dark suits and with a body bag.
Yeah. There was something just so rushed about it and so impersonal about it that really was torturous for me, even though I knew he was dead and it was just his body. It was, I think, much easier to... for my sister to be more clinical about it once his body left the building. And I felt this weird sense of like wanting to go save him. Like, who are these people?
Like, it was a weird sense of being possessive of him.
Had you felt that before?
No, and definitely not about him. I was much, much closer with my mom. In fact, I feel like now looking back, now that it's been a few months, like I feel like my dad definitely got the short end of the stick in terms of my attentiveness. He was less sensitive and he was more unfazed. So if I couldn't make it to something, I always thought he was kind of like, yeah, whatever.
Whereas my mom was more like, well, that'll hurt my feelings if you don't come to that.
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Chapter 4: What reflections does Amanda have on the emotional impact of caregiving?
And she's like, it's not so bad. It's kind of like being a book on a shelf that nobody's reading. And that has stuck with me for years. And that's what I couldn't stop thinking about when I saw the hearse and we kept walking.
Do you think that's what it's like?
No, because I think it's even worse, because it's not even consciousness. This is when I feel really dark about death. It's that it's in perpetuity lack of consciousness. I would rather be a book on a shelf that's like, hey, hey! You know? It's just nothingness. It's nothingness. That's what I can't. And for infinity.
Somebody recently said, well, why aren't you upset that you weren't alive before? You never cared. And I'm like, that doesn't help me.
We're going to take a quick break. Coming up, I talk with Amanda about the panic she felt as a mom facing her cancer diagnosis.
I'm Josh Radnor, co-host of How We Made Your Mother, a rewatch podcast for How I Met Your Mother. We receive thousands of emails and voice messages from fans, many about how the show has impacted their lives. One message from a woman named Jessica was so moving that we invited her onto the show.
So I got married when I was in my mid-30s. We were together for eight years. My husband was born with a congenital heart defect. And my husband died on March 9th, the day before your podcast aired. And I just found it so appropriate and so crazy, the timing of it all. So I sent that note only a few weeks after my husband passed away.
I really felt like I needed to share a little bit of my story because the podcast helped me so much. Like the fact that it was airing like on March 10th, like I literally went, oh my God, I have something to like look forward to.
Follow and listen to How We Made Your Mother wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 5: How did Amanda's relationship with her mother influence her understanding of grief?
But now the idea of – I was 10 when my dad died. The idea of dying around with my kids being that age is – it's unthinkable to me. Yeah. It's interesting because I now – it's one of the ways I understand my dad more because now I know what he felt when he knew he was dying. I understand how horrible he must have felt.
about that one thing I thought about was this woman when we lived in London we did a carpool with these two daughters and the mother had cancer and I remember my mom made us go to their birthday party it's one of the sisters it was her birthday and I was eight maybe my sister was probably ten and They were kind of nerdy and weird, and we were really mad at my mom that she was making us go.
And she said, well, the mom is sick, which we didn't know. And at the birthday party, there were all these balloons in the front room. And the mom was just lying on the couch, like somewhat corpse-like, with stockings that were like way too big. And she was not the right color and had the wig was like slightly askew. And I remember being so disturbed by it.
But when I thought about it, when I had cancer and was thinking about my children, I was like, how beautiful, how beautiful that the family had the strength to include her and come what may and not treat her and the pain and the grief as something to be sectioned off. like a cordoned off thing that's not to be seen, not to be talked about.
I thought it was so beautiful, even though as a child I felt almost repelled by it.
It sounds like you had, growing up, this incredible level of communication with your mom.
My whole life, she taught me how to talk about my feelings.
I guess as a teenager, you were in psychoanalysis at the same time as she was in psychoanalysis training.
Yes, we were insufferable.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Amanda share about the process of dying and grief?
I think that's very true.
Yeah.
I understand that feeling of regret. Did I spend the time with her I should? Now that I have little kids, and how much I love to be with them, the idea of me being old and them being in their 20s and me only seeing them occasionally is just terrifying to me.
Yeah. I couldn't get over this one incident. We came home from my daughter's bat mitzvah, and she was already with Jerome, our caregiver. And she couldn't walk or anything like that and wore diapers, but she had an accident in my new car. And I was such a bitch and was so shaming. And I couldn't believe how I had been. And Jerome was like, you should tell her. So I told her.
She was really blank, but I just said, I'm really sorry. I was sorry. But I rejected her so much when she was sick because I was so busy with my kids. It was like a terrible, in my mind, there was a very unfortunate kind of timing with everything.
Talking about your mom, you said, I was always waiting for glimpses of who she was in the past, whereas he, talking about Jerome, embraced the person she had become. Sometimes I caught sight of the old her. She would raise one eyebrow, a skosh, when I asked her if she wanted a glass of wine. The idea that she was still in there but couldn't communicate gnawed at me.
You also said that you never told her she was in hospice and that you never asked if she knew that she was dying or if she was scared. And you write, I was like Ilyich's wife, Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich. I was like Ilyich's wife, chirping about bullshit while he lay terror-stricken.
I would drop by her cottage and try to perk her up with some dessert or a few sips of wine, but my visits were never more than flybys. You sound very hard on yourself.
Well, I wasn't able to really completely be there for her. So that's a fact. And I think that if she had been compass mentis, she would have been like, go take care of your kids. Are you kidding me? Please don't worry. But I don't know exactly where she was mentally. And sometimes I felt guilty that I was presuming that she wasn't with it, especially if she like gave a suggestion of something.
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Chapter 7: How does Amanda describe the experience of being untethered after losing her parents?
And if they tell me this on Wednesday, we're going to tell Frankie and Molly. But then Molly has the soccer tournament, so we'll do it after. It was very strict in my head that I wanted to push her away. And then the more information I got that I wasn't going to die, I was able to go visit her again and stop doing that. I was able to hold the whole thing. All of us.
It was very painful not to be able to tell her. Or if you're going to take off, you want to be able to say, like, hey, listen, I need space right now. I'm going to come back, but I need to go do this thing. And that wasn't possible. I remember when I told Jerome, though, he was just very sweet and loving and forgiving. Very extraordinary relationship with that man.
Your therapist said that you didn't have to appear strong or unfazed to your kids or have definitive answers. How did you handle telling them about your diagnosis?
We waited to tell them until we were really fairly certain that it was a smallish tumor and that it was hormone receptor positive HER2 negative, which is like the best kind of breast cancer. And so I was much more confident about talking to them when I knew those things. So we waited a long time.
And by the time we told Henry, it was probably almost confusing for him because I was like, you know, I had cancer. It was almost being like, I almost got hit by a car, but I didn't. What's he supposed to do with that? I don't know how I would have been if I had to really devise a much more difficult plan.
I went to Miami to do this little film festival, and it was right before she was about to really start to take a nosedive. And Jerome called me and said, I think you should come back. I made him, please promise me you'll tell me, because I do want to be there when she dies.
And he called and said that she was having trouble breathing, and in the middle of the night he had said, Penn, do you want to die? And that she went, no! She was really very full of life, very connected person. So it's so weird that that, it's just so weird that she doesn't exist anymore. It's just, I know that sounds so childish, but it's just... No, it doesn't.
The finality of it is still just insane. She's gone. It's so insane. And how much she would hate it.
Hate being gone?
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Chapter 8: What lessons about grief does Amanda believe can help others?
The morphine was taking forever to kick in and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision. We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes. I thought of my teen improv class, which she had found for me when we moved back to New York from London.
In improv, even if the given circumstances defy logic, you and your scene partner have to stick to them. I wasn't sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting disembodied shapes. I said, howdy doodle. That's how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit.
Time was running out, and besides, I had already told her everything. It's beautiful.
Thank you.
How do you doodle?
Always. Yeah.
I was with my mom when she died, and... I found it incredible. I mean, I've seen a lot of bodies in a lot of different ways. I've been in hospital wards where like children die in front of me and stuff, but I was holding my mom's hand and it was just, I don't know, I just found it to be this incredible thing. And I'm so glad I was there.
I think the fact that we weren't religious and my parents weren't religious was really difficult in some ways. And I understand why the rituals exist. We do Shabbat and I didn't have any of that growing up. But the idea that you're saying words and doing a ritual that your forefathers did and their forefathers and so on and so on is like it gives me chills.
It's a way to maybe feel comforted that there's something bigger than you.
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