In this Talks at Home episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss mourning culture and the phenomenon of expected performative grief when a loved one dies. They analyze the reasons people mourn, including regret over the deceased's unfulfilled experiences, selfish sadness over losing them, and guilt about things left unsaid. Malcolm and Simone propose a cultural shift towards focusing on the deceased's legacy and life's work rather than indulging in non-constructive sadness. They also touch on relating constructively to children's lives versus elderly deaths and texting while driving risks learned from Malcolm's medical examiner work.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] They are using the amount of pain that person's death caused their children as like a judge of the quality of that relationship.

Malcolm: And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship was a meaningful one. worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you, and when you have this emotional reaction, you are affecting I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my kids, most of all it's saying not just they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this grief.

Malcolm: They want my grief. And

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: hello, Simone! This is going to be an interesting, if sad, episode, because we lost one of this show's first and most avid watchers, she watched every episode, a few days [00:01:00] ago, which was my mom she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly a few days ago.

Malcolm: Since she passed away, I have experienced a very interesting phenomenon. Do you want to talk about it, Simone?

Simone: Yes, you have experienced the phenomenon of what we might call mourning culture, M O U R N I N G, where, interestingly there's a very bifurcated reaction that we get from people when we tell them.

Simone: One is, wow, that's really heavy, hope you're doing alright, let me know how I can help. Other people are like, Whoa, hold on. Like, how are you even on the phone with me right now? Like, how could you be telling you, you need to be like, no, get off the phone right now this is an emergency.

Simone: I understand. Like, Don't, you know, don't handle process your pain. Um, And they kind of, there's very much this expectation and feeling that you get from these conversations. That you should be pulling out your hair, crying, rending your clothing gnashing your teeth, right? Like rolling around on the floor in [00:02:00] pain.

Simone: Yeah, I need to be doing

Malcolm: whatever North Koreans were supposed to do when Kim Jong il died, where you get, the moral police come after you if you are not mourning correctly and loudly enough. Yes. This brings me to a confluence of really interesting phenomenons, right?

Malcolm: Which is one, what's going on here? Like why specifically do they want me to be demonstrating emotional pain? What are the reasons why Hmm. and. If we are intentionally building our own culture, a culture by our value system, what would a person actually do when a person dies, when a parent dies? Yeah,

Simone: Yeah. And,

Malcolm: And how do we relate to that? And then in addition to those things, I want to cover the concept of what lessons I learned from my mom, because I think that's a really, a valuable thing to convey to the audience.

Simone: And I don't know, [00:03:00] man, that might be its whole, like a whole other episode. That might be a whole other episode. Now this woman was a force of nature. She is not someone who can be wrapped up in even one episode. So no let's save that for later. Let us talk about the culture of especially mourning in the context of losing.

Simone: A loved one or family member. Yeah.

Malcolm: Let's first focus on why. Like, why do people feel sad? When somebody died, and I think that there are only a few reasons and they can really be isolated to better understand if they're bringing you any utility or they are in any meaningful way honoring the person who died.

Malcolm: So the first is you are sad for anything that they did not get to experience, right?

Simone: So there's a feeling of regret over what they didn't complete because you know what they wanted and they didn't get that.

Malcolm: Yes, and so that can be things like seeing their grandchildren grow up or something like that, right?[00:04:00]

Malcolm: It's similar to that, and I think that this by far is the biggest reason that people mourn, is regret over things that they won't get to do with the person in the future. The reactions they won't get to have from the person, essentially missing the person.

Simone: People are mourning their own lifestyle changing to a great extent, right?

Simone: Yes.

Malcolm: Yeah. And the things that they're like, I think that this form of mourning is entirely selfish. And really not beneficial at all. The first form of mourning and we'll get to other forms. I don't know. I can understand why you would take some time to reflect on the regret of the things a person isn't going to get to experience, but it really has no utility by that.

Malcolm: What I mean is the person's already dead,

Simone: Going to be able to fix it by fretting over it.

Malcolm: yeah, and so what you're doing is you're allowing that person to, for something totally non efficacious, to negatively affect your mood, and worse, and this is something I [00:05:00] always say about sadness, Sadness hurts the people.

Malcolm: When I show sadness, when I publicly show grief, especially if it's an unaddressable grief, right? That disproportionately hurts the people who care about me most. Because they will begin to feel that grief. It will begin to affect their mood as well. It's

Simone: a communicable disease. So it's like knowing that you have a bad cold and then running up in French, kissing someone.

Malcolm: And there was that great study that you were looking at how families how emotions travel throughout the families or how stress travels throughout the families.

Simone: Saliva cortisol levels. Yeah. So I recently found a study that I found really interesting that measured throughout the course of a conflict.

Simone: So they, the researchers orchestrated a guess, like a conflict inducing. Activity for a family and then they throughout this activity, the duration of it at several points, they measured everyone's saliva level cortisol level. So I guess they made them spit like in the middle of this. And they found [00:06:00] that families do have.

Simone: high correlations and cortisol levels. In fact step parents had lower levels of correlation and cortisol levels with the rest of the family, like with the kids than biological parents. And they found also that mother's cortisol levels predicted father's cortisol levels predicted children's cortisol levels predicted mother's cortisol levels, which also suggested like mothers are The onus is on mothers to stop the cycle.

Simone: When people are getting stressed out because they are the. The driver of the feedback loop, essentially which is really interesting. And I think that, that happens on a broader sense with many emotions. I'm sure happiness works in similar ways. Sadness probably works in similar ways. Anger probably works in similar ways.

Simone: Yeah. So what they're really

Malcolm: saying, because I think that people, they talk about grieving and they talk about you should do it for this reason and this reason without really thinking about the cost of it. If I. I am doing this big public grief display and it seems really genuine because when somebody's grieving over the death of a loved one, there's not really that much you can say to them, because you [00:07:00] can't make it go away, right?

Malcolm: It's not like a fixable problem. Yeah, I think this

Simone: is why people send flowers. It's I don't know, I want you to know that I'm here for you and send you something beautiful in a moment of darkness, but I, I can't make it go away. Sorry.

Malcolm: But, and often the person who died wouldn't want you to be sad, like they wouldn't want to inflict that on you, but worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you, and when you have this emotional reaction, you are affecting I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my kids, most of all it's saying not just they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this grief.

Malcolm: They want my grief. And

Simone: This is where it gets really scary, right? Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event as we've discussed in other episodes by making it contextualized as traumatic. So we were actually really lucky to not be at home. When we heard the news about your mother, and I'm really glad for that because our kids didn't see us go through the initial shock.

Simone: They didn't see me cry. They didn't see us, like really. [00:08:00] Act weird. And by the time we got

Malcolm: home, it's not that we don't show any emotions around stuff like this, but we work really hard to, we see having those emotions, experiencing those emotions as a negative thing that we are working to overcome and to recontextualize.

Malcolm: Yeah,

Simone: it's a failure of self control on our part.

Malcolm: And then I want to talk about the final reason why people get really sad. This is outside of cultural reason. I'm just talking about like the natural reasons you feel sad when you lose someone. Yeah. Is things unsaid as I would call this

Simone: reason.

Simone: Unfinished business.

Malcolm: Yeah, so this is often a self narrative reason. As we've talked about in other episodes, people have an internal self narrative. And within most of those self narratives is, I am a good person, or I am a good son, or at least I'm not heartless, or something like that. Or, it could be like, I have a good relationship with my mother, or my siblings, or something like that.

Malcolm: If one of your last interactions, or if on reflection you were not those things to that person, You have now permanently lost the ability to [00:09:00] correct that, right? When I see people who I've noticed have had the hardest time overcoming specific losses, because they treated that person really poorly in some way, or in some way that they.

Malcolm: There's this one guy we know who just, all the time talking about his ex wife and then we talked to other people about their relationship and it turns out, he's just constantly cheating on her. He otherwise treated her pretty

Simone: badly. His late ex wife. Let's be clear.

Malcolm: Oh yeah, his late ex wife. Yeah, ex because she was dead. And. And I think that really, to an extent, drove that. And I think had I not treated like we really worked to give my mom access to her grandkids, to treat her well, even when she could sometimes be a difficult person, as all parents can to some extent.

Malcolm: And I think that lowers a lot of potential grief I could feel over not being in alignment with my own self narrative. But I think that this requires sort of constant checks into the type of person you actually want to be. [00:10:00] And are you that person in your interactions with other people?

This explains the daughter from California syndrome. , which is a phrase in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a hero disengaged relative. Challenges the care a dying elderly patient is being given. Or insist that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient's life.

I hear what you see is the people who are least able to deal with the death of a loved one are not the ones who were closest to that person in like a meaningful sense. They are the people who knew they should have been closer to that person, but weren't, and now need that person to stay alive so that they can make up for their own failure. You will feel a lot less pain when somebody dies. If you knew you were there for them in the way that you should have been when they were alive.

Malcolm: . So I actually do think that this form of emotional pain is [00:11:00] useful because it has a positive effect on a person. They weren't living up to the self narrative of the type of person they want to be in their interpersonal relationships with other and through the emotional pain that they experienced there that can act as.

Malcolm: A lesson to make sure that they are not treating other people in a way where they would have this form of regret if those people died.

Simone: Okay. So it's basically, Oh, but my trip, my character arc wasn't complete. And therefore it's this like huge prompt of Hey, you need to start rewriting the script right now because you're not like, this isn't working.

Simone: Either be, a better actor or, bring in new people or something like that. But it's helpful. So we see emotions as helpful when there's signals that you need to change course. And once you take the action.

Malcolm: Actionable feelings. So if I'm like, I... Did not close things up with my mom that I might have this action of, Oh, I need to go and be nicer to my dad.

Malcolm: I need to go and be nicer to my wife. I need to go and be nicer to my kids because if I lost any of them, then I wouldn't be the type of person that I [00:12:00] aspire to be. So that emotion is useful. The emotion of, I won't get to have these experiences with this person in the future. That's pretty much an entirely selfish emotion.

Malcolm: There's no real utility to it. The emotion of they won't get to experience these things in the future. There are ways, and we can talk about how you might be able to twist that emotion to an advantage, but there's also no real utility to it. And then there's the final emotional. Which is where we talk about it societally, which is some societies and cultures use the amount of mourning that you're showing as a way to judge how emotionally attached to that person you were.

Malcolm: And because, people will get more emotional normally, if they come from a culture that indulges in emotion. When somebody who they were closer to dies than when somebody who they were further away from dies, right? And so that can be used as a proxy for how much the other people in a person's life actually cared about them,

Simone: right?

Simone: Yeah, like you didn't really love them because you're not [00:13:00] really crying right now, right?

Malcolm: And through not showing an emotion in a way you are sending a social signal that people didn't actually have people who were that close

Simone: to them. Now, I think this is super interesting. So we saw, for example, some time ago, there was the famous, billionaires die in a submarine accident issue.

Simone: And one of the stepsons of one of the people who died on this Titanic seeking submarine had a stepson who at first, you know, was, I think publicly saying Oh, please send your. prayers to my father. I hope he, makes it through because it wasn't known for some time if everyone had died.

Simone: And then, a few days later he spotted at a concert and he catched, caught, he caught a lot of flack for that including from celebrities. So high profile flack. And I think the belief was how dare this person have fun. Their stepfather just died and I think that's really interesting because if I died, I would be thrilled if my kids were smiling in two days.

Simone: I'd be thrilled if they were getting on with their lives. And when I think about what would really [00:14:00] honor people. At least like what I would want people to do if I died is look at my objective function, look at the missions that I cared about and see how they could contribute to those in some way.

Simone: If you really cared about me, you would be doing what I would want to be done in the world.

Malcolm: Yeah. So they're using the. The pain that this person caused other people that's just so twisted when you think about it. It's super twisted. They are using the amount of pain that person's death caused their children as like a judge of the quality of that relationship.

Malcolm: And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship was like a meaningful one. And this pain, let's talk about it. Even though we don't think like negative emotional pain has like a huge negative value. It does tremendously affect your ability to be efficacious in the world.

Malcolm: When you are mourning, you are not [00:15:00] efficacious. When you are really indulging in these emotional states. You are not moving towards the things that matter. And this is where I think we get to our cultural reaction, which is something that Simone was saying there, right? Thanks. Which is, when we think about how we relate to death, like whether or not I would mourn, my own death, like whether or not my death would be a bad or a good thing, the question is, did I, out of the things that I feel, like I have an objective function, like what I think is good in the world, what I'm trying to complete, I have a number of tasks that I have set to complete with my life, and the sadness of my death is measured by the number of unfinished tasks that I had left against the number of tasks that I completed.

Malcolm: And to that extent like that's how it would measure, like how quote unquote sad I would be like the amount of regret I being dead, not feeling regret would feel, right? Oh, it's bad that I'm dying now versus it's good that I'm dying now. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, one thing I [00:16:00] was saying with Simone, if I think that culturally, like we're building our own culture for our family, I think the first step, because different cultures have different grieving processes is.

Malcolm: to judge whether the person who died had a good or a bad life. And again, this is a very Calvinist sort of culturally informed thing, which is the idea you have the elect and you have the not elect. I think many cultures, they judge everyone's life is good or having matter. And I just don't think that's true.

Malcolm: I think sometimes people have lives that didn't turn out to matter. That didn't turn out to have a positive effect on the world. And it's important. I think that Through judging their deaths in this way, first, that allows you to process. You can think through their life and you can put them in one of two categories, right?

Malcolm: If you put them in the good category, like they wanted to positively impact the world and they did positively impact the world and especially if they did most of the impact that they were planning to have, and they didn't, leave that many untied threads as my mom, Then you can better [00:17:00] emotionally categorize okay, I don't really need to feel that bad over the things they didn't get to experience, she didn't get to experience her grandkids growing up, but she could largely know what that was going to look like to some extent, right?

Malcolm: She accomplished the things she wanted to accomplish in her life. Yeah. However, the reason why it's good to also have this negative Oh, their life did not reach its potential. Is that then you can relate to their death in a different way, which is you relate to their death as something to learn from Oh, this person actually ended up getting addicted to math and then did a bunch of really terrible things and hurt the people around them.

Malcolm: Then you can start to say, okay. Let's still give their life meaning through taking it as a learning experience. Like where were the choices they made that pushed them into a timeline in which their life became non efficacious to the people around them? And how can I not make those choices?

Malcolm: And how can, my kids or other people in my family not make those choices? So you're still [00:18:00] drawing something from the death. And then the other thing is to think about is did you treat that person the way you would have wanted to treat them? And if you get negative emotions from that, you should learn from those negative emotions in your current interactions with people.

Malcolm: But Simone, I'd love to hear what you think of this system and what you think of other cultural ways of reacting to death.

Simone: Yeah, one thing I was thinking about when you were talking about this and the idea that people really need to be dramatically mourning is that both in ancient Egypt, but even still today in some cultures, you can hire professional mourners, which is so crazy that like in ancient Egyptian funerals or funerary rites and traditions, you would have Like literally professional mourners who would like this was true in

Malcolm: like Victorian England too.

Malcolm: And I don't know,

Simone: maybe an ancient Rome. I know for sure. Egypt. I also remember like one of my top favorite TV shows, the [00:19:00] moaning of life with Carl Pilkington. He travels for the episode they do on death to Taipei and Taiwan where he hires professional mourner and then Yeah. She she shows him like how to do it and he's really bad at doing it and she's like getting frustrated, but I think it's really interesting that In some cultures, you would hire someone to do that instead of

Malcolm: do it yourself.

Malcolm: In Korea, you have this, but you also will hire people to come to your wedding and stuff like that. There are professional wedding attenders. And it's to make it look like one, your social network was larger and the emotional impact you had on people was bigger. Like you had an emotional impact on a wider array of people.

Malcolm: And that's the quality of your life. One of the most interesting things that I've had some of people who I've known. Who have been, they've really told me that they see like your score card at life being the number of people who show up at your funeral. Yeah. Yeah. And potentially how famous those people are as well.

Simone: Yeah. Oh, yeah. What quality

Malcolm: people? Sad he died. , and I'm like, wow, [00:20:00] I really, that is almost like a negative scorecard for me. How many people did I hurt through passing? I don't know if that is.

Simone: Oh, I don't think people who throw who show up at your funeral have necessarily been hurt by your passing.

Simone: I think there are people who want to get together with people who cared about you and celebrate your life. Let's be fair there.

Malcolm: Yeah, but here we're talking about this performative mourning that you see across

Simone: cultures. And I think you might be misinterpreting this mourning. I think actually that it's more along the lines of for many people, the kind of mourning that is societally expected and that is seen as expressing love and dedication to the person who has died just can't it's not natural for them to do it.

Simone: It doesn't feel right to them. And so hiring someone. Helps with processing the grief and making you feel like you've checked the box because you can't do that yourself. Like everyone processes grief differently too. I think both culturally and genetically we deal with grief in different ways and there's just some people who like naturally are going to lose [00:21:00] it and go crazy and look like their morning properly, in the way that in that very dramatic way and then other people just won't.

Simone: And maybe a way to still feel like you're societally checking the box is by hiring someone. To do it in a very stylized way. The professional mourner from that episode of the morning of life where Carl Pilkington learned more about death was totally not someone who. plausibly be a friend showing up at a funeral who was sad.

Simone: She was dressed in traditional wear. She had a very style, a very stylized way of mourning. So I think it's more about checking a cultural box. I

Malcolm: disagree. I think that's about cultural drift that you're seeing there. So I think what you're seeing is keep in mind cultures evolve over, thousands or hundreds of years, whatever.

Malcolm: I think initially what you had there as a culture where people began to, as they do in our culture, Sort of attribute how good a person's life was or how strong a relationship they had with someone was by how that person is [00:22:00] reacting. And then initially, like you can think in ancient Rome or something like that, where you would have a lot of people who they might not know, and this person is being judged publicly.

Malcolm: It's okay let's get as many people to plausibly mourn as possible. But then after that happened. It began to become known that this was something you did, that you're supposed to hire public mourners, and then it just became this derived cultural tradition, which no longer really served the initial purpose of the tradition.

Malcolm: I don't think that's a sign. I don't think that when they were first hiring people to do this, that they were doing it just to, in a way where it would have been obvious. that these people didn't know the person. Do you disagree or do you think that

Simone: I think I disagree. I just think that this kind of mourning doesn't come natural to a lot of people.

Simone: And that there's still this feeling like you have to do something. And I think one of the biggest things that happens when someone encounters death in it even if you are in a culture that has a lot of tradition, [00:23:00] is this feeling of, okay, what do I do? I need to do something. But there's not that much to do aside from make sure that all the things that person did, or, like basically wrap things up for that person and replace any work that they needed to do, so I think I think the mourning is a part of that. I think I'm supposed to mourn, like I need to do something, right? So what do

Malcolm: I do? Yeah, so I would agree with that. I think that cultures that give people a specific death tact. A specific death task they do help people process the deaths easier because they're like, okay once you have done X task tied to the death, then the, the way that you're supposed to relate to that is over and you have emotional permission to move on.

Malcolm: without being a bad person.

Simone: Like one of our friends texted us after we, we let them know that this had happened and he was like, Oh, you know what one culture does is everyone sits on the floor, like the family of the last one dines on the floor for a week. And then they get off the floor and they're supposed to get back with their lives, but I feel like there's that neat, there's the [00:24:00] Victorian, you wear morning and then you wear purple and there's all these, the colors you wear, but yes, eat on the floor for a week or wear black clothing or, burn something or whatever, but you need to do something and it has to feel and then it's done.

Simone: And then I think that helps you understand that the thing has been done.

Malcolm: This is why for our culture, I really want to focus on ensuring the things that are done are specifically

Simone: efficacious. So rather than just like wearing funny clothes, like you want to actually end up better off than you

Malcolm: were before.

Malcolm: The problem with the wearing funny clothes solution is then you get some people who begin to associate that again with how much they cared about the person. So like in Victorian culture, you'd have some women who would just never change out of their morning clothes. Like Queen Victoria. Yeah.

Malcolm: Where they wanted to show like, I extra cared about this person and I am going to show that through an indulgence in this particular aspect of the mourning process, the whole process efficacious throughout.[00:25:00] Then there is no way. That a person can negatively indulge in it.

Simone: Yeah. And actually the Queen Victoria is a good example here because she did phone it in after Albert died.

Simone: And she used her mourning of Albert to justify that. So she really hurt her nation by choosing to check out after her husband died and by indulging in her mourning that much. Yeah. She hurt a lot of people. She hurt an entire nation plausibly. And of course, her children like her children a lot of them weren't it didn't get great outcomes.

Simone: I think she could have been a better mother to them like all these things, it wasn't great.

Malcolm: So if she had, by our cultural standards, the better way to demonstrate her care for him, instead of through this morning theater. Is to judge what he valued and ensure that you lived a life that achieved as many of those values as possible, right?

Malcolm: And then I think the other way that we relate to mourning, and this is a really interesting thing because it has to do with how we [00:26:00] relate to our kids and how we relate to elders in our society is us as a cultural group. I think one of the things that you relate to warning is using. Oh, all of the successes I'll have in the future that they won't get to react to.

Malcolm: And a lot of people, naturally, they grow up to some extent, trying to impress their parents are trying to get approval from their parents. And our culture, because we have this very unique cultural setup, which is descendant worship, which is to say that we value the respect we earn from our descendants much more than the respect we earn from our ancestors.

Malcolm: So my mom, for example, does exist. in every one of her grandchildren, to an extent, both culturally and genetically. So in a very real way, it is an iteration of her judging me, but [00:27:00] more important than that, viewing things this way, culturally has a lot of positive side effects. First, it causes me to focus really heavily on the value set that I teach my kids, because the value set that I teach my kids will be the value set that I am judged by in a meaningful sense.

Malcolm: That is so much more important than the value set that whatever serendipitously your parents came to. The values that you're getting and keep in mind, I can teach my kids a value set and they may adopt some other value set. What this also does is it teaches me to value wherever they saw problems was in my values.

Malcolm: They are younger than me. Presumably, I gave them every intellectual advantage I could, whether that's material they could learn, whether, the way that they emotionally developed. So if they believe, that aspects of how I see the world are wrong, unlike my parents, [00:28:00] which had almost intrinsically less information than I have.

Malcolm: My kids have more information than I have. And any difference in information is due to. How I did as a parent, right? So it teaches me to extra pay attention to where my kids disagree with me and potentially update my own mental models based on that. And my own goals in life based on that, which I a much healthier family dynamic.

Simone: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I like that framing of it. And I, yeah, I think my mother passed, years before yours did and in a very different process. But like the thing that has given me the most, closure or happiness or like a feeling of resolution with my mother is seeing so much of her in our kids and in myself when I became a mother, which happened after she passed.

Malcolm: So like how you conceptualize time and how that's changed how you view them. The morning

Simone: process. Yeah. Okay. The TLDR of it [00:29:00] is that I essentially don't think that I'm a continuous person at all. And I first discovered this upon receiving a letter from myself in the past, like five, five years ago.

Simone: And was like, Whoa I don't know who this lady is. And it made me realize that who we are dies all the time. I'm going to wake up tomorrow with slightly different person. And so the idea that. Someone dies is ridiculous because, okay, that particular consciousness ended, but also it was always ending.

Simone: Like they were always, there's this constant renewal, this constant change of who we are. And I also, because we have this sort of very mechanistic, Calvinistic view of the world, we, we see everything. That has happened and will happen is and is happening all happening at the same time. It is all already happened.

Simone: It is all happening. And so when someone passes away, it doesn't undo the fact that they exist or did exist or will exist. They are very much still here. And so the entire way to say that is that

Malcolm: they still exist. When they existed was in the timeline and then our [00:30:00] position in the timeline today is not a privileged position in the timeline.

Malcolm: And this is very important in how we see the world, how we see moral good and everything like that. That's why I don't value sort of the state of people today, whether it's their happiness or agency more than people in the distant future. In terms of the actions and the way I try to judge whether or not I'm living a good life.

Malcolm: But, because I don't have this sort of privileged position of the now people who existed in the past, they still very much will. In a very real and material sense, still 100% exist last week, my mom is still alive last week and she is still experiencing everything she went through last week.

Malcolm: But this requires a different way of relating to time that I think most cultures do today. And I think one really perverse thing that's been elucidated to me through her death. And through how I've seen [00:31:00] people react to it is yesterday my brother and wife had another kid or was it the day before yesterday?

Simone: This is on Friday. So yeah, three days ago now. Yeah.

Malcolm: And this happened like the day or two days after my mom died. And being kid number three for them, a lot of people don't really care anymore. Once you get to kid number three, four, it stops becoming such a big thing. People are like, oh yeah, another one, right?

Malcolm: But when you think about it, that kid being brought into the world is such a more meaningful thing in the scales of life and death than an older woman dying. She had max 20% of her lifespan left, maybe 10% of her lifespan left. She had very little efficacious that she was going to do from this point forwards in terms of changing the world.

Malcolm: Me knowing the trajectory of her life and yet this new life brought into the world has an entire lifespan in front of them, a dire hundred percent of their life in front of them. And it could be a very long life. It could be a [00:32:00] very efficacious life. And that's so devalued in terms of the happiness that is bringing people when contrasted to the death of an elderly person.

Simone: So in other words yeah, the reaction of people to your mother's loss is so much it's so disproportionate to the reaction of people to the arrival of a new child in the world that it feels weird to you, especially considering the life impact, the life experience the change to the world is so much more meaningful with this new arrival.

Malcolm: Yeah. And, this is really highlighted for us as people who have a new kid every year, basically, people ask me when our kids age, I go at three, two, one. And we're about to do our next implementation this week, right?

Simone: Frozen embryo transfer. Yeah. Tomorrow.

Malcolm: Tomorrow. Ah. So again, another new potential life coming into the world. And it is just interesting. And I think morose as a society, how we have so devalued the lives of the next generation. And while we aren't a society that practice ancestor worship, I do think that we [00:33:00] disproportionately value the lives of the old and undervalue the lives of the young and the perspectives of the young.

Malcolm: That

Simone: and I think that there's just a very toxic culture around death that leads to a lot of negative impact. So I think one is we don't know how to deal with death because we don't have a culture around it. My mom told me when I was younger, she's Oh man, I love how, in Japan, when someone dies, like everyone knows what happens.

Simone: Everyone has a role, like your neighbor brings you this and your family does that. And everyone knows what happens. And here in the U. S., like no one really knows what to do. And another friend was telling us, how they work in, in, in the. They work with public schools and they have they encounter children's funerals because they oversee districts with a lot of students that do have premature and very young deaths.

Simone: And he sees families, just spending, thousands and thousands of dollars on these elaborate funerals for these children that they've lost because it's, they don't know how to deal with it, but they're doing, they're going into debt. They're doing this to the detriment of themselves and other siblings.

Simone: It's like they're hurting [00:34:00] their own families and life's potential. Because of this inability to know what to do in this feeling, like you have to do something. So I feel like there's a very toxic lack of tradition around death and mourning that is not through any like open maliciousness, but because of free market forces, obviously there are industries that have cropped up around this, that it encouraged people to spend their money away to deal with this.

Simone: Yeah,

Malcolm: but our culture doesn't relate to death. And I think that this is a really important thing that you're saying here. People see it as they go their entire lives without seeing somebody die. Very frequently in our society. This is very rare, historically speaking. They just, like death is a universally bad thing.

Malcolm: It is something that is not supposed to happen. Like it's actually almost not supposed to

Simone: happen. Something has gone wrong when someone dies.

Malcolm: Something has gone terribly wrong. You go to a hospital because they are going to fix you if you are sick and you are ill and they have failed when you die it's just, there is no this is when it's [00:35:00] okay to die in our society.

Malcolm: Whereas most societies historically had context. Where you were like, ah, yes, that's an honorable death. That death was okay.

Simone: That was Yeah, just it happens.

Malcolm: Yeah, and I think, one thing that may change how I relate to death, and one reason why I, may be so much more comfortable with it, is, early in my career, you're getting Malcolm Lohr here.

Malcolm: I did work with an M. E. A medical examiner. So I would go and collect brains from my lab. Because, then we were looking at a different brain morphology, but I'd get to read the person's psychiatric files. So all of their interactions with their psychologist before they die, like leading up to their death years leading up to their death.

Malcolm: So I'd get like a full profile on all of their innermost thoughts and let go and I'd get to see their body and I get to pick up their brain. And I then be taking that back to my lab. And so I saw a lot of dead people like a lot of dead people. And it may. I almost wish more people could have that experience so that they understand that death Is something that happens and it's all [00:36:00] around us and our society covers us up.

Malcolm: That was one thing about the me. If you're in the me in a large city, something that becomes really clear to you is just people are constantly dying around you. And you just

Simone: me being medical examiner,

Malcolm: right? Yeah. And you just don't see it like the, if you're in a major city, there are people dying every single day.

Malcolm: There is a. There are rooms full of dead bodies every single day. And you just don't see it.

Simone: Yeah.

Malcolm: And it also other learning from the Emmy don't text and drive. Those were usually the most gruesome bodies. Do not text and drive. Oh and the other thing you learn is that fat is even like grosser on the inside than it is from the outside.

Malcolm: So

Simone: Don't text and drive and watch your figure.

Malcolm: It's useful. It's helped me motivation in two areas. Also don't, don't drink and drive. That's another thing we would see in the Emmy, but actually texting and driving seemed to, that was like [00:37:00] way more people than drinking and driving from my memory.

Malcolm: Oh

Simone: gosh. Yeah. I think you're more impaired even than when you're drunk, which is, it's insane that texting and driving is not more I guess persecuted, prosecuted, you would expect texting and driving to be more prosecuted based on the number of deaths that it causes every year.

Malcolm: Yeah.

Malcolm: This has been a fantastic Talks at Home. Yeah, we didn't get into the lessons I learned from my mom, so we'll talk about that in some other podcasts. And I really hope that if I was to die, that you wouldn't go into this big performative morning thing. I know that you care about me and that you'd focus on our kids.

Malcolm: Because that's what matters most

Simone: to me. Kids first and foremost. And then second, the way to honor you would be to carry forward your goals and mission to honor what you were doing, to honor your work. And I hope you would do the same for me. Yeah.

Malcolm: Remember if you're ever wondering, what your husband would think of what you were doing or any success that you've had, that what my kids think of you matters so much more than what I think of you.

Malcolm: Same,

Simone: Malcolm. I love you [00:38:00] very much. And yeah.

Malcolm: And please don't die. Please don't die. Yeah. It would be logistically very difficult.

Simone: I do not want to inconvenience you. But yeah, I also love your mom a lot. I know you do too. And nothing will change the impact that she's had on us and nothing will take that away.

Simone: And that's a really good thing. Yeah. She lives on.

Malcolm: And this is what she wanted to an extent, she was very clear in her will and everything like that, only celebrations of life, no morning, no anything like that. So it's also not against her wishes. Yeah, exactly.

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355: I balance values the same as anyone