Fractals of Change

Are You Gonna Listen?

• Mary Schaub • Season 2 • Episode 34

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0:00 | 47:47

What does it mean to truly listen — to a child, to grief, to the signs the universe leaves when we're paying attention? 

 Writer and former biology teacher Katie Rizzo joins Mary for a conversation of rare honesty about loss, addiction, guilt, and the unexpected ways art saves us. Katie's son Nicholas died from opioid addiction, and rather than turn away from the pain, she turned toward it — writing her way through the experience in two forthcoming books: The Trimesters of Grief, a memoir, and None of Them Are You, a collection of poems. Together, Mary and Katie explore the uncanny parallels between pregnancy brain and grief brain, the systemic failures of addiction medicine, the shame culture that surrounds both loss and addiction, and what it means to be "half here and half with Nicholas." This episode is about the courage to be broken — and what becomes possible when you stop pretending otherwise.

 ✅Key Topics

  • Identity, loss, and what happens to a self built entirely around motherhood 
  • The three "trimesters" of grief and the physical experience of bereavement
  • Writing as a lifeline
  • Nick Cave's practice of externalizing grief 
  • The opioid crisis up close
  • Shame in addiction: the systems, the families, and the internal monologue that tells addicts they are a moral failure
  • The radical act of authentic grief: saying "I'm terrible" to a neighbor who expected "we'll get through it" — and what her running away taught Katie about who can witness pain
  • Birds, bald eagles, and the question of what's real: on staying open to signs, connection beyond death, and resisting arrogance about what we don't understand
  • Healing as service — not wholeness, not gold leaf over the cracks, but opening your eyes wide enough to climb a fence in Central Park for a stranger with a dropped phone
  • How free do you wanna be? — the Al-Anon principle that became Katie's anchor in grief

  

💡Takeaways

  • Grief and new life share the same body: disorientation, longing, inability to eat, altered time. The cruelty of that mirroring is also its strange intimacy.
  • The 70–90% relapse rate for opioid addiction isn't a failure of willpower — it's a system in crisis. The drug is that powerful, and the structural incentives for alternatives are that weak.
  • Addiction carries a cultural load of shame that kills. The shift from moral framing to disease framing isn't soft — it's survival.
  • Art isn't content. It never was. Music, poetry, and story are how humans get back into their bodies, regulate, and transmit what language alone can't hold.
  • Healing isn't restoration. It's learning to live as someone with a hole in them, and choosing to open your eyes anyway.
  • Connection is not a feeling you generate — it's what happens when you say yes when someone calls, climb a fence when a stranger is crying, and tell the truth when someone asks how you are.

 

🎤Memorable Quotes

 

  • "This death has shattered me, and I'm not a vase we can drizzle gold leaf over the jagged pieces and push back together. I'm just broken, which isn't as bad as it sounds." — Katie Rizzo, The Trimesters of Grief
  • "I felt like I was this liminal creature. I was half here and half with Nicholas. I still feel that way." — Katie Rizzo
  • "Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins... I have found that the goodness of the work can go some way towards mitigating them." — Nick Cave (read by Mary)
  • "How free do you wanna be?" — Al-Anon, as quoted by Katie Rizzo

 

 🔗Resources / External Links (only if applicable)

 The Trimesters of Grief will be released on October 6 by Koehler Books, with Blackstone Publishing. None of Them Are You - A book of Poems will be published on October 31st by Extra Extra Publishing.

Katie's Books

 Connect with Katie

 

Referenced in this episode

  • Nick Cave — The Red Hand Files (blog): theredhandfiles.com
  • David Kessler — grief researcher and author: grief.com
  • Colin Campbell — Finding the Words (book on grief and connection)
  • Dr. Steve Ramirez — memory researcher, Boston University (memory creation/removal in neuroscience)
  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — referenced in conversation about memory and loss
  • Love in the Trenches — East Coast grief support group for parents who have lost children to addiction
  • Al-Anon — support for families of people with addiction: al-anon.org
  • Matthew Perry — Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (memoir on addiction, referenced by Mary)

 

 Keywords

grief memoir, opioid addiction loss, mother grief book, Trimesters of Grief, Katie Rizzo, loss of a child, addiction and shame, opioid crisis systemic failure, grief and creativity, writing through loss, Nick Cave grief, liminal grief, grief brain, poetry after loss, None of Them Are You, Koehler Books, Blackstone Publishing, Extra Extra Publishing, how to live with grief, Fractals of Change podcast

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

SPEAKER_01

Today, you'll hear my conversation with writer Katie Rizzo. This was an emotional episode for me. More than 25 years ago, after the birth of her first son, Nicholas, Katie stepped away from a career in medicine to focus on her family. She went on to teach anatomy and biology and to flourish as a writer. Her work has appeared in literary journals and earned recognition at writing competitions and conferences. She came to speak with me today about two upcoming books, her latest memoir, The Trimesters of Grief, and None of Them Are You, a book of poems. Her book is the most unflinching account of loss I have ever encountered. It chronicles one mother's transformation through the most profound change imaginable. The death of a child. Here's where we begin. And you write so, so beautifully about the different versions of yourself. There was the Instagram version, the ball of clay, you. Who were you before Nicholas died?

SPEAKER_00

What an honor that you read it and that it touched you. That's huge. So I was a very proud public high school teacher. All three of my boys went to the public high school. Nicholas took two of my classes. I had stopped everything 25 years before to be Nicholas's mom and the other two boys' mom as well. I felt like I had found my calling. When Nicholas died, I felt not only did I lose him, but I also lost me. And I think that's pretty common feeling in grief.

SPEAKER_01

I met you a couple of years ago. We were in a class together. And I think you were the best writer, one of the best writers in the whole class. I was very intimidated. It was the kind of class where you had to read your stuff and then everyone had to comment. And I had the feeling that maybe you didn't like me or my work. Just as a personal note, I'm experiencing you as different. This is the first time we've spoken in a while. And I can feel a different energy from you. Sometimes I feel when we change, there's something that's revealed more than taken away. Do you feel like there's something that's been revealed?

SPEAKER_00

That's so beautiful. I hope so. I hope that I have found a place where all of us are more equal. But I do have to say in that class, I thought you were the best one and that you hated me. No way. So no, you were curious.

SPEAKER_01

This is just as a testament because I want to talk about trimesters of grief, but I've knowing being familiar with your other work, I remember some of the stuff that you started. And I was already invested in the characters. It's almost like starting a movie you didn't get to finish, and then wondering when you're going to get to finish it. That's the impact your writing had on me.

SPEAKER_00

And I remember yours too. I feel very similar. Isn't it funny? Yeah. But back to something being revealed as a teacher, I tried to see all of my students as equal, that everybody on this planet deserves love and understanding and a feeling to be accepted just by being here. I don't think I gave that to myself. And I don't know if all my students would say that. Maybe some would be like, oh, she was a pain.

SPEAKER_01

But it might have been they weren't ready to receive it too, though.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah. But definitely since he was gone, I'm at a place where if I find that feeling uh where when you're like, oh, that's that's not me, everyone's me. The homeless man on the street, they're by the grace of God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

It's not lost on me that your role and who you were was such a giver to your family and to your students. And I'm hearing you say that maybe you weren't finding some of that for yourself. And I'd like to come back to that. Your new book, Trimesters of Grief. I've been thinking about how to convey how powerful this was. So, again, being familiar with your work, I knew it was going to be good. I wasn't prepared for how intensely raw and personal it would be and how it would affect me. I love autobiographies. I read a lot of them, and I can say unequivocally, this book is the most honest piece of writing I have ever read. I felt like I was in your mind, maybe even in your body at some points. It was so powerful. It was uncomfortable at times, but I felt, I still felt honored to have the experience, and I felt a responsibility to bear witness to what you were so courageously sharing.

SPEAKER_00

That's a big compliment. I'm gonna sit in that for the next 10 years. I just wanted everyone to know Nicholas and to know what a loss this is. And I'm sure every mom feels that way. But I really wanted this book to be a testament of what a loss that he isn't here anymore. And as women, it's so sweet that it touched you because the only thing maybe that's gonna get us out of the muddle that we're in right now is if we maybe learn to love everybody's kid, right?

SPEAKER_01

I'm so happy that you said that because I'm not a mom and this touched me. So I'm sure your readers are going to be possibly people who've walked this difficult path themselves or parents who haven't, but can understand the bond of a parent child. I'm coming at this as not a parent and still profoundly moved. And it made me think why did this move me so much? I live in my head. We're all living in our heads and our screens, and we're overstimulated and underconnected, and we're using screens for connection, and artificial entities like AI are surpassing us in our thinking, our reasoning, and it makes you think what's so differentiated about us. And that's where it hit me. Is never going to experience these things and never going to be moved by the energy of another human being, and that's why it's so important and why I felt it was a gift, as uncomfortable and painful as it was to read. We can't value the human condition if we don't step into that pain and share that with our fellow humans, and that's how we love and we comfort each other, and then it comes back to us. That's the complicated experience of being alive. And your book did that for me.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, you're so sweet. I definitely love that kid to hell and back, and I would do anything to get him back. Colin Campbell has a book called Finding the Words. It's beautiful. He recommends in grief, and I think in life, you need to find people and you need to make connections and you need to say yes to people. I think before Nicholas died, I was super introverted. I spent a lot of time at home. I still lean that way, but when somebody invites me to do something, a lot of the times, if not 100% of the time, is yes. The whole reason I'm here now, if it's not to be with my two sons and my husband, it's to be with somebody else. Connection means something.

SPEAKER_01

You had described grief as something that implants almost as it takes root in your body, and you wrote about having grief brain and how sometimes it made language hard to access. What was your sense of reality as you were going through that process and experiencing all these internal changes with your perceptions?

SPEAKER_00

It was cruelly ironic to have experiencing having experienced pregnancy brain, and then to have this grief brain and to just see how much they mirrored one another. I slept all the time. It was exactly my first trimester with Nicholas, and there I was in grief. It felt just super cruel.

SPEAKER_01

You were writing the night that he stopped answering his phone, and you had written in the book about having a deadline for that class. You wrote that word deadline, it was pounding in your head. There's something almost unbearable about this collision of art and life in your story. How has your relationship to writing changed?

SPEAKER_00

Was I'd never written a poem, except maybe in elementary school, maybe I did a haiku, but I started wanting everyone to know about Nicholas and about my grief. And everybody was moving on. And so I started writing poems in the morning. I don't know how else to say it, except that I felt like he was almost there with me, or else I could just touch the feeling of him. I could smell what he smelled like at a time. I would write it down, and I did the craziest thing. I started putting on Instagram and on Facebook, and I thought everybody was gonna come and get me and put me in a mental institution. And I felt sad for my other two boys because who needs a mom who's lost her marbles? But they both encouraged me to keep writing. And I started writing poetry more and more. I I kept a journal. I let everyone in our life know that we were what we were going through. It felt like I was this liminal creature. I was half here and half with Nicholas. I still feel that way. I don't know that is ever going to go away. Our everybody in Nick, and my nick, my husband's name is Nick too. Everyone in our lives knows about Nicholas, even our our exercise instructors. If somebody says, how's your day? I want to be like, for somebody who's lost a kid, we're doing okay. But how can you say, I'm fine? It's never gonna be fine. So my experience with words is very different. I've used them like a crutch. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't write right now. I think the thing that's saving me is trying to see how nature mirrors my life right now.

SPEAKER_01

It's interesting that these moments where we are in touch with our humanness is where we demand authenticity from others. You had described in the book, there was a couple different examples. A neighbor who came up to you and said something, and you had answered really unfiltered, I'm terrible, or I've I've lost my son, or something like that, and she just turned around and walked away. There's something about being an artist where you are partly here in reality, and not to get too metaphysical or woo-woo, but there is this polite society way where we all go through the motions, and when someone says, How are you? you answer fine, and we all just fall into line. And maybe being in that other place, you're not tethered to that anymore. And people, if they're still attached to this reality, they're not going to be able to handle it. But it also feels to me that we need more people that are shaking us out of that numbness. There's a line in your book where you say you don't think that your poems are good, but that there's a nugget of Nicholas and you in there. And it feels like that's the truest statement a writer can say. Did you see yourself as an artist before this book?

SPEAKER_00

I think I did, but I feel like so much of me wanting to impress people has is gone. I don't mean this to say, oh, it was a big part of my grief. A big part of my grief is Nicholas. I want that guy back. But a little part of it was that now everybody's gonna see me differently. They're gonna drive by and be like, oh my God, her kid died. What's worse than that? But I'm no longer tethered to anything about what they're gonna see about me anymore. So it gives me a little bit of freedom to be a hot mess and say things that other people don't want to hear. When that neighbor ran away, I remember feeling so lonely because she could run away, but I was stuck with my kid not being here.

SPEAKER_01

I had to reread it because I was like, wait a minute, did I miss this? So this person turned around and ran away.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, she wanted me to say, we're gonna get through this. People really want you to say that. Even my dad, who I love, will say, When are you gonna move on? David Kessler, who's a grief expert, has said that your grief's gonna end when your loved one isn't dead anymore. And maybe my writing will change. But as long as he's gone, my family's got a pretty big hole. And we are trying to figure out how to live with this hole and how to relate to other people. There's a lot of ugliness in the world, and we're not willing to talk about it that much, I think.

SPEAKER_01

This the size of that hole, the enormity, feels equal to the love and the specialness. The way you have uh walked through this feels it feels very courageous that you could have taken other options to not sit with these feelings. Maybe that's why your book has touched me so much. But the way you're handling this is beautiful. You talk about Nick Cave a lot in the book. Fulter of transparency, I wasn't aware of Nick Cave. So for those who don't know, Nick Cave lost his sons too. And he talks about taking his grief from the inside and letting it sit beside him. And you quote him, and sometimes it's like you're almost writing to him or commiserating with him. So throughout this process, you took in a lot of information. You were really like, what do I need to read, or what groups do I need to go to, or I'm gonna listen to this podcast? You were really finding ways of intentionally processing this. It feels like Nick Cave really resonated with you. And I'm wondering what it meant to find someone who would walk through darkness and also used his art to process the experience and cope with the grief.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Nick Cave, if there's ever any time when he's on TV or on the internet or writing a book, he has a blog. I'm his biggest fan. But yeah, he lost two sons, and somehow he has managed to have a life and find some meaning and find some awe and find some joy and not get muddled down in the shame and horror because I think it would be really easy. I know it would be. That I said, okay, Nick Cave, I'm gonna quote, deliver this grief. And I did. I pictured myself having it sit beside me. My grief right now, I think looks a little bit like a baby orangutan. And sometimes it demands so much attention. They talk about those grief waves, and sometimes it will pound on me. And other times I can sit there and quiet him. Just recently, my husband and I went to a talk. It was by a neurologist, Steve Ramirez. He's at Boston University and he studies memory. And he's found a way to create memory in lab rats, like a real memory. And he's also found a way to remove memory. And of course, this really interested me because as somebody who's in grief, there's a part of me that would just like to shine a spotlight and keep creating memories with Nicholas, right? What a beautiful thing that would be. Because part of my grief is that he doesn't get to continue on. I just keep reaching out to find a way to either secure my memories with Nicholas, keep them more solid because as you get older, they float away. It would be a beautiful thing to be able to sit down with him and see if I could look at my memories of Nicholas in my brain. He talks a lot about the hippocampus and how it spreads memories different ways to different places in the brain. But it'd be neat to create a new one with him.

SPEAKER_01

You know what's so beautiful? I thought of the movie Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey, because that's the premise. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought you were going to say that there's an option of removing the memory. And when you said no, you wanted to add more memories. I thought, wow, that sounds really important, a really important distinction and an example of how strong you are that you said not to remove it.

SPEAKER_00

I'm just so curious. And you could take this out if you want, but with trauma, do you think you'd want to remove your trauma?

SPEAKER_01

Or do you think no, it has given me so many gifts? I guess this is my spiritual leanings, which is this is the path, and this is the version of me and the things that made me I'm here to carry, and there's a reason for it for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_00

You were talking about religion or spirituality. A long time before Nicholas died, we were in Al-Anon, and Al-Anon is a group for people who love addicts or people who love people who are addicted. And they have a reading in there on pigeons. I don't know if you know it, but there's a reading where it says, Let pigeons be pigeons. Pigeons are gonna poop all over and eat seed. People who are drinking are gonna poop all over you and drink their drink or do their pills or whatever. One time Nicholas asked me to pick him up because he had been in a car accident and his car was at the shop. And I was driving to get him, and a pigeon came out of nowhere and hit my windshield, and it was like a perfect pigeon outline. And it was almost like the universe was trying to remind me he's a pigeon. And maybe he and I have some kind of connection that we've agreed upon for this lifely form. I think he taught me a lot about pain. Since he's been gone, I've been clinging to little signs. I went to a grief group in Sweden for parents who have lost a kid to addiction. There were 15 of us. It's through Love in the Trenches, the group on the East Coast. There was something about those people. There was this connection, and people are like, oh, of course there was a connection. You guys all lost a kid. I don't know. I there were exercises like look into somebody you don't know's eyes. And don't talk for one minute. And looking into another mom's eyes who has lost her son, like I have, and she's got the same grief face that I have. It was something. And I found so much love and integrity and forgiveness. And there was no shame. And there was so much strength. And almost like I could feel the day that she found out about her son. And we didn't even need to talk about it. We had been through those fires together. I don't know if like our kids, wherever heaven is, or whatever dimension they were on, if they all brought us together, or if I'm making it up because I want that to be maybe I am. But man, there's something bigger than this world. Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

I have no doubt that the reason that this isn't more obvious is because we are so detached and so distracted and so attached to our ego and our little fake realities, and being in that state, whether it's grief or you're an artist that just sees the world differently. There are other people like you that are living in that other realm where you can absolutely see those things. I remember after my dad had passed away, or I was at a yoga studio in Manhattan, and there was a little tiny window in the corner. And it was a day where it just was hitting me where I was feeling very sad and missing him. And I turned to the window, and this little bird just came and sat in the window and just stared at me. And you know, Manhattan, it's not like I'm in a park. It was for a while. And a couple of weeks ago, I had a similar experience in my backyard. Cardinals are revered in a lot of indigenous cultures as being people who've passed on in your life. And I was having an emotional day, and I was just sitting staring at the sunset, and this cardinal came and sat in an evergreen for probably 20 minutes, which is not normal for a cardinal. And I talked to him like he was my dad. A friend of mine gave me a psychic reading for my birthday. This was before these incidences. And he said, There's a man, it's your dad. And he said, Look for me in the trees and in the birds. And I believe it. I think you'll find other people who believe it. And then there's going to be people like the woman who didn't want to see. And I think you're doing the right thing, which is staying by your people. And if you're feeling it in your nervous system, like that connection with that other mom, that's the truth. What you feel is the truth.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah. 100%. We had a bald eagle come and stay in our backyard for over two hours. I have pictures of it. I talk to it like it was Nicholas. And we don't get bald eagles in Arizona. And my husband was like, should I go to work? And I was like, dude, a bald eagle is sitting in your backyard. I think the world stops, right? You just, whatever the lesson is, and maybe it's just to sit and have coffee and talk to Nicholas and tell him you love him and his brothers love him and what they're doing, the pigeon and the eagle. I think you are going to continue to see things. I hope so. I now know why so many older people like birds.

SPEAKER_01

I I can't explain it, but I think we would be so arrogant to think that we understand all of this stuff. There's yeah, there's so much that we don't know. Why wouldn't this be true? Why wouldn't it be true? Yeah. Yeah. I want to quote Nick Cave. It's a long one, but I'm gonna read it. It says, Art does have the ability to save us in so many different ways. It can act as a point of salvation because it has the potential to put beauty back into the world. Art has the power to redress the balance of things, of our wrongs, of our sins. And by sins, I mean those acts that are an offense to God, or if you would prefer, the good in us that live within us. And that if we pay them no heed, harden and become part of our character, they are forms of suffering that can weigh us down terribly and separate us from the world. I have found that the goodness of the work can go some way towards mitigating them. So for me personally, your poetry and this book, Trimesters of Grief, feel to me to be your rebalancing of things, of putting beauty back into the world. Can you see it that way? When you say it like that and quote Nick Caves, sure.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and honesty, and honesty. A lot of my poems try to look at the ugliness of the world. Right now we have back to birds, we have all these ducks that are giving birth to ducklings. Tons of ducklings. And one day they'll be there, the next day they're all gone. And they're all dying. And there's a reason why ducks have broods of eight to twelve. It's so depressing. So I think my poetry is me trying to come to terms with just the beauty and the horror. That's what I think it is. And God, Nick Cave is right. And I think that I was one of those people, I was a science teacher, a biologist by training. I wouldn't have taken arts funding away, but I was like, ah, music, it's okay. Since Nicholas has died, it's been my lifeline. My Nick, my husband, learned how to play the guitar. He's taking guitar lessons. His guitarist instructor is his guru. His name is Ode. Nick is in love with him. He'll sit and play guitar for hours. I'll write poems or write YA fiction. And it's like the only way that we can get back into our bodies and kind of self-regulate.

SPEAKER_01

Through the beginning of time, every culture across the world has found expression, music, story, the power of myth. There's something deeper to it than producing content, right? This is not content. This is something much, much deeper and profound. And you wrote about things you felt guilty for, things you blamed yourself for, and even hid from others. What made you decide the book needed to hold the things that were the hardest to say?

SPEAKER_00

I think addiction holds a ton of shame. I know Nicholas felt shame for stealing, for the accidents, for driving drunk, driving high. He felt shame for everything. Sometimes I think I played into that thinking, oh, this will get him better. We don't want a son who's an addict. Look at your other two perfect brothers. I have a lot of regrets about that. I have a lot of guilt about that. I would love to go back and get a time machine. And I say this all the time to my husband and his, you never know, he might have turned out worse. And I think that's a very common thing, a theme in grief is guilt. I definitely think that mothers of sons who have killed themselves or who, or daughters too, who have killed themselves or are lost to addiction. I think there's a lot of guilt there. And I think our society plays in with that. I think we give it to ourselves. I'm a human being and I made some pretty terrible mistakes with my son, giving him money, especially, that I wish I wouldn't have done. But maybe he would have died anyway.

SPEAKER_01

From what I understand, there was a lot of trickery, and you know that addicts are very manipulative, and you can torment yourself. But someone addicted to a substance can manipulate someone that they have deep bond. I was watching documentaries about opioid addiction, and I had no idea how powerful these substances are, and how strategically predatory the system has been to get people to take this for financial gain. These are substances that had originally been created for end-of-life palliative care because they were that powerful and predictive, they had to expose well people to chemicals of that type and to push it out at scale. There's about a hundred thousand deaths a year, about six hundred thousand globally, which is also terrible, but it also shows you the US is at the epicenter, this addiction for profit model. There are some pretty big forces here driving this. I know your book talked a lot about anger, which is, in my experience, one of the most disavowed feelings societally, especially for women. We don't like to be angry. It's a threat in your book, not just the anger at the loss, but at the system. The rehabilitation centers that released him, or the psychiatrist that you described as being no better than a drug dealer, the HIPAA laws that blocked you at every turn. You describe addiction as a disease that our society still treats as a moral failure. What would you like people to understand about this aspect of the story?

SPEAKER_00

It's so powerful. Nicholas had the genes to be an addict. He also was given quite a lot of painkillers throughout his career as an athlete. And he broke numerous places on his legs, arms, his shoulder. I can't tell you how many times he was given an opioid without even thinking about it. And I was always like, Yeah, he's in so much pain, please help. Towards the end, when I realized that the opioids were starting to be a problem, Nicholas was playing D2 soccer for CMU and his elbow was out of joint. Nicholas was just screaming, writhing in pain. And I was like, Can't they give him anything? And the doctor kept saying, he is maxed out on the numbers of opioids that I can give him. And I thought either this is the worst pain anybody in the world has ever felt, or he's built up a tolerance to this drug, which he had. Just recently, my dad was in the hospital. He's fine. He had some lung cancer removed, and he was at Antwitz Medical Center, which is one of the premier medical facilities in Colorado. And I was there, and his drip was just full of oxygotin. And I said, could we just wait and see if he's in pain? We just don't know. He's asleep. I lost a son to a really severe addiction to this. And his doctor said, Oh no, there's nothing else. My sister had just had her knee replaced, and her doctor gave her this new drug. I think it's called Juvinex or and it's a non-addictive, non-opioid painkiller that works at the nerve. And my dad's pulmonologist said, Yeah, I love that drug. It's a miracle. He went to prescribe it, and the pharmacy at the hospital said, No, we don't have a written relationship with that company for our pharmacy. And so we can't prescribe it. So I said, let's look into this. What if you've got all these people lined up here at Anschwitz all day long getting oxycotton? Maybe we could remove the ability for some of them to become addicted. So the doctor finally said, okay, I can write this prescription. You need to go out of the system and go get it and bring it in. Fine. Went and did that. Apparently it's $700, but on Good Rx, it's $30. So for $30, I got this juvenile brought it back. But then the hospitalist said their lawyers were not comfortable with this. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't want to be like, oh, Oxycontin is trying to kill people. But the end result is that it's a very addictive drug. And there's a struggle to get something else into people. So I don't know what the answer is, except to educate people. If your kid is going to the doctor and they're prescribing it for wisdom teeth and your kid doesn't need it, don't give it to them. Because as the DA who brought Nicholas's phone and computer back to me, he said that in his experience, if he had somebody who was on oxycottin for eight or more days, he couldn't bring them back, that there was nothing you could do. So I kept pushing. I think part of why I'm still here is to educate people. The relapse rate for people who have gone to a treatment for opioids is between 70 and 90% relapse. So to me, that's huge. I think it's deadly. And I think us as a community, we need to figure something out to make it work.

SPEAKER_01

I read Matthew Perry's autobiography, and weeks later he passed away. It really sounded like he'd come out the other side of it. And he was a multimillionaire. He had many millions of dollars on rehabs to put into context how powerful and difficult it is to shake this. It sheds light that this is not a moral failing on him or you.

SPEAKER_00

And yet that's how we're asking kids to deal with addiction. They have to white knuckle it. Nicholas was in a rehab where he got kicked out, even though he was attending, he was going every day. He got kicked out because he wasn't performing for them. They felt like he wasn't giving enough. That was shocking. I participating. I think that's very common. And I think they're right. I'm not saying they are wrong. I don't think he wanted to perform. I think he wanted to get better. He would say, it's all arts and crafts, mom. There's nothing there that's going to get me better. After Nicholas was gone, we got a letter from our insurance saying he could have 30 more visits with the doctor who is prescribing the benzos and everything every 18 days legally. It's just so broken. I don't know where to start.

SPEAKER_01

I really believe that it's bottom-up, not top-down. I think people like you and I who are like, how can we use our brains to fix this? I actually think it's in what you're doing. It's in the love, it's in the connection. I don't think it's in this brilliant program or this policy change. I think those things have to happen. But I think the way you're changing the world is by answering those phone calls and going and sitting with those other parents and telling your story and publishing these books because it's going to have an impact on everybody who reads it. And then those people are going to go out into the world and carry that. I think that's how we do it. I hope so. Near the end of the book, you write, This death has shattered me, and I'm not a vase. We can drizzle gold leaf over the jagged pieces and push back together. I'm just broken, which isn't as bad as it sounds. That's a radical reframe of healing. What does healing mean to you now?

SPEAKER_00

Being as real as I can be, uh letting go of those times like I can feel when I'm trying to be the Instagram or the perfect me, and healing is letting that go. I'm trying to figure out how to be of service. This book is one way. Uh the other day, my son is in New York. One of my friends was like, let's go walk around Central Park. And we did, and when we're walking, there's so many people, and it's so beautiful. It was in the fall, and there was this woman who was behind a fence and she was spawning. So we went over and everybody was walking by her. And I was like, What's going on? I wouldn't have asked her before. It's none of my business. She's somebody who's having a problem. She's got to figure it out. I figure out things on my own. No, I was like, what's going on? Her phone had fallen, and she's called the police. They came by and they were like, we can't get over there. She went and bought a gripper thing, and but it kept falling. I was like, we can climb, help each other. We climbed over, got her silly phone, brought it back. It was nothing, literally nothing. It cost me one minute of my time, right? Nothing. But that's what I want. Open my eyes so I can see those times. That's the only reason we're alive, right?

SPEAKER_01

Your son Joey said you can be the sad mom and be the mom who kicks ass at the same time. Yeah. That's what you're doing. And hoping it's relation, it's a connection. That's all yeah. We lost the thread. We were way off the path. And things aren't great. And I am hoping that sometimes when things aren't great, it's the thing that needs to happen to wake you up to reconnect. And how beautiful that you had that experience with a total stranger. And she's probably going around telling that story to every single person.

SPEAKER_00

And it was good for me too, right?

SPEAKER_01

For me too. Yeah. That's the thing is that we feel like we give it away, but we don't give it away. We get something immediately back. A hundred percent. The full title of your book comes from a voicemail Nicholas left from the state-run detox. And it goes, quote, Hi, are you gonna listen to what is going on in here? You found it buried in your deleted messages months after he died, and you described it as the first time in four months you heard his voice. That message is the title. What is he asking you to listen to? And what are you listening to now?

SPEAKER_00

Hard to hear his words. I feel like he was like metaphorically, maybe trying to say, like he was just in so much trouble. And are you gonna listen to what's going on in here? Is it he was in a state-run hospital trying to detox, but also are you gonna listen to what's going on in here? And I think it was just a lot of shame and guilt, and he really wanted to be the person that he knew he could be. I think by then he couldn't have. I just yeah. Where are you hearing him now? And you I'm trying to listen every day. I try not to tell people because usually their response is everybody sees a hummingbird. But I'm gonna show you something. So today there's this piece, it's a leaf, and I found it on the floor. And I don't know if you can see the shape it's in. Isn't that so weird? We keep his urn in our bedroom, but it was right on the floor there, and I don't know how did a leaf get in the on my floor. I feel like it was for him, but from him. And I love that kid.

SPEAKER_01

I have no doubt when you're paying attention, things are coming through, and you're in a beautiful state to receive them, and you're receiving them, which I it probably means you're gonna keep getting more because you're noticing and paying attention. I hope so. You wrote this book for parents who find themselves in the same trench you were in. Is there anything else you'd like people to know that we haven't touched on today?

SPEAKER_00

I would like people to know that a guiding principle that I got from Alan on is how free do you want to be? And when I find myself getting wrapped up in a story or wanting vengeance or wanting justice or feeling just dysregulated, the How free do you want to be helps because it's easy for me to let stuff go then. If you're deep in grief, you're going to have people saying just the craziest stuff to you, and the people that you want to show up aren't going to, or maybe they really will, and some people that you'd never imagine are going to show up. Things are going to happen that are just going to break your heart. And it's easy to attach so many sad meanings to them. I look back on Nicholas's short life, and it would be really easy for me to be sad that he didn't get to do the things that he wanted to do or give whatever gifts he had inside of him, that the drugs took that away. It's just easy to spiral and then just to remember, okay, well, how free do you want to be? I can't bring him back. I gotta live with what I have right now.

SPEAKER_01

Trimesters of Grief will be released on October 6th by Kohler Books and Blackstone Publishing. And on October 31st, which is Dia de los Muertos, Extra Publishing will release None of Them Are You, a book of poems. I'm gonna put links to these in your author pages in the show notes. And I'd like to quote Nick Cave again. It goes, anyone who says they don't have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that, but by doing so, they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness. Though, of course, the hardest thing of all is to forgive oneself. One sure path to self-forgiveness is to arrive at a place where you can see that your day-to-day actions are making the world a measurably better place. Katie, throughout this book, the sharpest, most excruciating pain I felt, even more than the tragic loss of Nicholas, was hearing the guilt you carried. With this book and the way you've lived with courage and conviction for yourself, your family, and for others who suffer, I hope you can see that you have made the world a measurably better place. As you can see, the book touched me very deeply. It was a gift and an honor to be brought in so closely to bear witness to your pain, to know Nicholas a little bit, to get to know your family. You share a deeply human experience, and I truly feel changed after having read it. This is what artists do.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Thank you for seeing me, and thank you for seeing Nicholas.

SPEAKER_01

I will keep an eye out for him. He might come by. And I would love to have you back and hear about your next book and to see what comes through you because you're a beautiful person that is sharing something very special with the world. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Right, Becca to with your podcast. Thank you.

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Mary Schaub

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