Sarah Jaffe: From The Ashes

Kelly connects with journalist Sarah Jaffe who wrote the best seller “Work Won’t Love You Back.” They talk about her new book “From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.” 

 

Was it hard for you to include your personal grief story in a book that covers the collective grief of so many other people?

“The uncomfortable thing about it, of course, that most people are asking me to start out by telling my grief story is that I do end up telling my story in the book, which is a sort of no-no of a lot of journalism. You’re supposed to be objective. You’re supposed to keep yourself out of it. But for me, I really found that I couldn’t go around asking people their grief story without sharing mine. You shared yours with me before we got on this call before we hit record, and as you said, your listeners know it well. And so yeah, it is something that I felt I had to put in this book, even though it makes me deeply uncomfortable to talk about it.” 

 

I certainly didn’t know the literature that shows us that grief lives in the body. 

“I was really lucky, I had a friend who was at the time when my father died, studying to be a death Doula and she literally had a worksheet that she sent to me, and one of the things it had on it was the physical things that might happen to you. And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, so I’m not dying. This is not my dad’s heart disease showing up in me. It’s just my body reacting to losing him. That’s what’s happening.’” 

 

Tell us about the term ‘disenfranchised grief.’ 

“People who lose someone to opioids. It is really hard to talk about that in public, because there’s a lot of shame and a lot of judgment that comes with drugs, right? That you were using a substance, and therefore you were weak. You were bad, and therefore they sort of brought their death upon themselves. And that lack of recognition for your grief, that lack of ability to sort of bring it into the public, makes it this sort of disenfranchised thing. We can’t talk about it. Grief is disenfranchised in this culture because we just don’t talk about it at all.”