Last Words & First Words and How They Relate with Michael Erard

In this conversation, Michael Erard discusses his work on language, mainly focusing on the first words of babies and the last words of the dying. He shares personal experiences with death, including a profound encounter that shaped his understanding of grief and mourning. The discussion explores the importance of communication at the end of life, the cultural models surrounding death, and the collective experience of dying, emphasizing the significance of verbal and non-verbal communication. In this conversation, we delve into the profound themes surrounding language and communication at the end of life. We explore cultural perspectives on the last words, the significance of agency in the final moments, and the challenges faced in researching end-of-life language. The discussion also touches on the importance of rituals in grief and the potential for rewriting moments of loss. Through personal anecdotes and reflections, we emphasize the power of language and the shared human experience in navigating death and dying.
Michael is a writer, a linguist, a parent, and an immigrant. His work has been mostly about language and languages and the people who use and study them. For the last five years, he has been working on a book about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying as linguistic phenomena, personal curios, and objects of cultural interest. “Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words” comes out in February 2025.
Michael sent us a preview, which we thoroughly enjoyed. The results of his studies and his skilled way of sharing the stories made it a compelling read. And the conclusions are fascinating and will be of great value to anyone doing end-of-life care. Michael is also in training to be a Death Doula and is on the advisory board of the Death Languages project, which recently received a grant from the Order of the Good Death.

Links to his new book
Penguin Random House has both hardcover and e-book options
MIT Press has only the hardcover
Michael's Website

Dr Katherine Mannix whom Michael mentioned as an inspiration.

Transcript

Annalouiza (00:01.23)
Hello. Today we are excited to have a unique conversation with Michael Erard. Michael is a writer, a linguist, a parent, and an immigrant. His work has been mostly about language and languages and the people who use them and study them. For the past five years, he has been working on a book about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying as linguistic phenomena, personal curios and objects of cultural interest. Bye bye, I love you. The story of our first and last words comes out in February, 2025.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (00:45.409)
 Yeah, so good. Michael sent us a preview, which we thoroughly enjoyed. The results of his studies and his skilled way of sharing the stories made it a really compelling read. The conclusions are fascinating and I think they'll be of great value to anyone who's doing end of life care. Michael's also in training to be a death doula and he's on the advisory board of the Death Languages Project, which recently received a grant from the Order of the Good Death. Maybe you can tell us more about that later. As always, we will include links in the podcast notes so you can find out more about Michael and on Death Languages Project and anything else that comes up during the podcast. We most definitely want to hear more about the book and your work. 

We always like to begin by learning a little more about you. So could you tell us in your own life when you first became aware of death?
 
 Michael (01:37.727)
 Sure. So I grew up in pretty rural circumstances where we had farm animals. And I think the fact of death, you know, is something that you encounter pretty early and pretty suddenly.
 
 I think the first time that I really saw it was just one morning going into the chicken coop to feed the chickens. And there was a bird that had fallen off the roost and was collapsed, you know, cold and stiff and kind of terrifying really that first time. 

Wakil David Matthews (02:36.002)
 Mmm.

Michael (03:04.703)
 But my father was a medical professional. And so there were lots of stories that he would bring back from work about people who died in accidents and things like that. And he had also been a combat medic in Vietnam so that reality was always kind of around, think, although the actual fact of individuals that I knew who were dying was something that happened quite off stage, something that was taken care of by my parents or by doctors or was the privilege of clergy to deal with it was not something that I was introduced to or had very much to do with directly. But I think the thing that had the most impact on me recently, and this is where I start the book, was with an experience that I had 12 years ago now where I was foraging for wild blackberries in Portland, Maine, where I was living at the time and discovered human remains, which turned out to belong to a woman who'd been living on the streets for a long time, who had been missing for a year. And that was quite an experience, you know. 

I think that it's only in my doula training that I've come to sort of get a term for what I experienced, you know, that it was a kind of ambiguous grief. 

Wakil David Matthews (04:47.545)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (05:00.735)
 Like, who is this person to me and what are my responsibilities to her and what are the right things to do? And one of the challenges of that was having to discover for myself what the right things to do were. Other people said, oh, you called the police. Thank you for doing that. That was the right thing to do. Only later coming to understand that only someone that looks like me can, you know, so easily call the police and expect to go home, you know, that afternoon.

Wakil David Matthews (05:14.252)
 Yeah. Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (05:30.655)
 But also then go to like a crisis counselor and the crisis counselor telling me, you you did the right thing by calling the police and you did the right thing by talking to me. But that didn't satisfy me in any way. There was some other kind of thing or set of things to do. And so that sort of started me on the journey and part of part of which led to this book.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (06:03.959)
 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a very, very profound story that you tell at the beginning of the book. It just really sets the tone and wow, what an incredible thing to go through. Thank you for sharing that.
 
 Annalouiza (06:15.02)
 Yes, and know, part of my question would be how death impacts the story and death has impacted your story. This is was it Tanya? 

Michael (06:24.072)
 Yeah, Tanya.
 
 Annalouiza (06:33.772)
 Was it her name? Tonya, right? And, know, how you mentioned in your book that what are the.
 What's the elements of mourning or grieving this person whom you've never known who has gone missing for a long time and nobody was really looking for her, right? So can you just tell me more about, you know, what did you do? What are the little pieces of it and how long did it impact you?
 
 Michael (06:55.259)
 It impacted me for a long, long time. And I ended up, because I'm a writer, so I wrote, you know, and figured that if I just knew everything there was to know about her and where she came from and the circumstances that she experienced living on the streets and all of that, that I would, you know, kind of bring her back to life or tell her story in some way and kind of memorialize her. And that wasn't enough, really. 

Annalouiza (07:33.813)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (07:34.211)
 Hmm.
 
 Michael (07:51.677)
 And it was a slow, I slowly got introduced to some of the literature on death and dying. So the work of Stephen Jenkinson. had a big impact on me and a lot of other stuff in the anthropology of death and dying that led me to understand that really what I had encountered was a situation of some psychic threat and that I had been, and I really came to kind of believe that I had been kind of given this task by the place itself. And because it was a place where we had gone over and over, my wife and my three year old son…

Wakil David Matthews (08:41.418)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (08:50.015)
 picking blackberries over and over this little kind of trashy corner, peripheral edge of the city that nobody loved, but we loved it. But that we had been kind of tasked with this burden. I was alone when I found her.

And that took a long, that took a fair bit of time, you know, to understand. But it wasn't until I just went back to the spot and talked to her, 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (09:09.645)
 Mmm.
 
 Michael (09:19.743)
 … which was very out of character for the way that I had approached these things or lived my life up to that point, but I brought her a donut and some flowers and some tobacco. So I have a friend who is, you know, kind of prides herself on her knowledge of sacred practices. And she kind of gave me a little ritual to do. There were some stones involved to. 

And I made it a practice every single year, you know, on the day that I found her to go back to that spot and make that offering. And the first time that I did it, it just made so much sense to talk to her. it's not, you know, most of the book that I wrote is about the things that we say that we encounter in this world. But the place that the book ends is kind of the ways that those conversations continue and opening the door to other ways of being social.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (10:39.381)
 Mm hmm. Yeah. Wow. What a great story. 

Annalouiza (10:43.042)
 I have so many thoughts, I know, I'm like, wow.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (11:09.155)
 Yeah. Where do we go from there? Well, actually, I think, you know, I'd love to hear more. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the book and some of the, you know, and your work in general that you're doing now and kind of what, especially the kinds of things that like we talked about, our audience could use or could be useful for them in understanding how those two, the first words and last words are first not even words, as we spoke about earlier, the first communications and the last communications, how those are tied together and how those can be useful for us to understand better.
 
 Michael (11:22.727)
 Yeah, well, I just wrote a book, so there's the answer. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (11:28.185)
 Yeah, right. Read the book.
 
 Michael (11:50.705)
 I mean, I think for me, the end of life stuff, I think starts, so one important thing I think to point out is that you don't have to have a baby or live with children, you know, to kind of understand how it is that babies come into language, right? 

Wakil David Matthews (12:00.323)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (12:20.703)
 To just kind of have a general model of what happens and that you can't walk up to a baby and start talking to a baby as if, you know, you're talking to an adult, right? 

Wakil David Matthews (12:12.493)
 Yeah, right.
 
 Michael (13:17.959)
 You need to change what you’re doing and the person that you’re, you know your communication partner is limited in some ways. And if you come from a culture that does that with babies, and not all cultures do. Right that’s important to acknowledge. But that I don’t think that there are as robust cultural models of how to interact with and understand the language at the end of life. 

Wakil David Matthews (13:25.027)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (13:47.293)

And maybe it was just me and my relative lack of actual lack of experience of working with dying people at their deathbeds. But there was this persistent notion that well, there has to be something that someone does at their last time, and then they’re not alive anymore. And that just turns out to not be the case.

So, what I really, one thing that I hope the book does is to help start to build some of that cultural model that default understanding of what happens at the end, part of which is, you know, about physiological decline, right, and about people's loss of function, but which is also about people's socialization. You know, we don't come to our deaths as blank slates. We come to it understanding something about how to die and something about what a good death is or can be. And so how can we achieve that and how can we help other people achieve that? And then what are the modifications that we need to do in our communication in order to do that? One of the things I introduce in the book, and you'd mentioned this earlier, was this metaphor of the interaction window. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (14:47.852)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (15:13.727)
 This was first, yeah, it was first offered to me by Katherine Mannix, who's a really wonderful writer and public figure in the UK. She's a former palliative care doctor who now talks about death and dying topics. She talks about the conversation window and she meant it, you know, really in reference to the end of life where there's a brief, you know,period where someone is cognitively and communicatively available and you need to use that, you know, window, use that space however you can. I broadened it in two ways. One, I called it or renamed it an interaction window, right? So it's not just about verbal conversation, but it's about lots of other you know, communication forms that are also, you know, linguistic or that depend on our language abilities and in many ways are continuations of the ways that we've been socialized as language users, right? 

Wakil David Matthews (16:02.019)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (16:12.575)
 We're responsive. We take turns. You know, you say something, I say something, you say something.
 
 We don't take up too much of the conversational space and so forth. 

Wakil David Matthews (16:19.233)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (16:41.971)
 And one of the nice things then is thinking about how the interaction window operates, you know, at the beginning of life as well. And that very first time that you, you know, look at a baby and the baby's eyes kind of focus on you, you know, and you can feel the the window kind of taking shape. Yeah, in that way. Yeah, and the brain activity, the brain activity is in both of you because there's a mutual recognition for the first time. 
 
 Annalouiza (16:45.067)
 Woo. That brain activity right?
 
 Wakil David Matthews (16:52.44)
 Yeah.

Michael (17:09.215)
 So what does it mean for that interaction window to open up? And then how does it close later on? So those are you know, some of the things that link the language at the beginning of life and language at the end of life. I think also culturally we've been led for lots of reasons to privilege speech. 

Wakil David Matthews (17:36.633)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (17:38.567)
 So famous last words, you know, there's no discussion of famous last gestures, right, or famous last
 you know, hand squeezes or anything like that. But when you start talking in your audience will know this, you know, that the stories that people often have about those those moments, those final moments often are about, you know, a facial expression, which means so much, which can be interpreted, you know, in such a rich way and have such relational power or a hand squeeze or, you know, an eye gaze.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (17:40.964)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (18:08.475)
 And I think, and I was always really moved initially by those, by those stories.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (18:15.363)
 Yeah, yeah, thank you.
 
 Annalouiza (18:16.952)
 Yeah, I was going to, I wanted to hold this, your framework right here about communicating at the end of life and, you know, speak about that privilege of speech. And oftentimes folks who are in active transition may not be speaking a whole lot and there may actually be gestures squeezes. And I just want to hold, I want to share that it is important to also hold silence and to not be so nervous to get that message. But just as we we shift our language and I wish more people would understand language isn't 100 percent the same all the time with everybody. Right. Like we make assumptions. 

So speaking. Slower and. Offering lots of space for people to communicate and not just wait for the audible message. But but you know, as a spiritual person, too, I'm like, what you feel may be a transmission, like, don't decide that that's just you being cold. And so yes, I you know, I love the idea of not privileging or being aware that speech is a privilege, and not every elder who is transitioning will will have lots of words to say, maybe few or maybe none at all.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (19:37.113)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (19:42.365)
 Yeah. Yeah, no, there's you just you just said so many important things and and I'll just like pick up on one the the part about silence, right? That in some ways that is from a linguist perspective, the most ambiguous thing that happens, right? So what what is the meaning of the silence and…
 
 Wakil David Matthews (20:11.96)
 Mm.
 
 Michael (20:12.447)
 … and what does it represent? So it can be, you know, part of a functional change, right? But it can also be a deliberate intentional, you know, I want to say withholding, 

Annalouiza (20:27.554)
 Yes.

Michael
 But you know, like, not a behavior that's not a behavior, right?
 
 Annalouiza (20:35.072)
 Right. It could be an exclamation point, right? 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (20:35.543)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (20:37.437)
 Right, Yeah, precisely. Yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (21:03.63)
 Yeah. And, know, years and years ago, I worked with developmentally disabled, folks and a lot of folks on the continuum would use speech boards and there was, you know, I was 20 years old working with, you know, a lot of different folks, but I remember one time I had to the privilege of working with a woman who wasn't verbal and we actually had to hold her hand and help her move to the words. And there was a huge part of me that was like resistant to this as communication because I would say to my supervisor, I'm like, am I just making this up? Is it me just moving her hand? 

Wakil David Matthews (21:19.961)
 Right.
 
 Annalouiza (21:31.274)
 Like, I don't like, where's the information coming from? And she's like, you're receiving information. She's trying to, you know, like she wants to be heard. So you are the conduit for her.

 Michael (21:54.557)
 Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (21:55.354)
 And I think that that was such a huge, like that must have been a huge life shift for me because I continue to call myself a conduit. And I love the idea of listening to people on so many levels and never disparaging a silence or a facial gesture as something just as nothing. It's... And at the end of life or working with people who are who are ill or children, like, these are just so like they're so filled with information, like just stand in awe of it. Right. What are you saying?
 
 Wakil David Matthews (22:08.377)
 Yeah, exactly.
 
 Michael (22:12.391)
 The, that relationship or that phenomenon that you're talking about there, where one person is kind of lending their agency to someone else is something that is very present in both first words and in last words. And it's, you know, sort of shot through our experiences and stories about both of those things. 

Wakil David Matthews (22:43.767)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (23:10.495)
 I'll just give you one little example. I was absolutely thrilled to discover that in the ancient Roman religion, there was a god of first words whose name was Phoroneus. There are no images of Phoroneus and there are no, you know, descriptions that exist anymore. But the idea was that
 When a child said their first word, the parents would go and make an offering at a temple of Phoroneus, you know, fruit or meat or honey or something like that. What was the relationship between what the child was saying and farinus? Well, the idea was that the God had made himself present in the speech of the child had kind of lent this sort of agency to the child in order to make the speech kind of more authoritative or more meaningful in a way. It was still the child's, 

Wakil David Matthews (23:50.467)
 Hmm.
 
 Michael (24:05.503)
 it was still the child speaking, right? But the God was doing something where they were, he was loaning or sort of infusing the child's actual phonation with this other spirit, right? And I really loved that, yeah. And then an example, a story, this is also in the book, from the end of life, there's a famous Czech composer named Leos Janacek, who was famous during his lifetime for notating all of these acoustic phenomena in musical notation, some of which he would do with people's speech. 

Annalouiza (24:51.938)
 Hmm.
 
 Michael (25:04.255)
 Quite a lot of these thousands and thousands he made were bits of speech and they're called speech melodies. very sadly, his only daughter came home to to Berno after getting typhoid in St. Petersburg and to recover and it looked like she would maybe recover for a while, but then it was clear that she was gonna pass away. And he did some speech notations of her final words over like the last three or four days of her life. 
 
 Annalouiza (25:11.769)
 Hmm.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (25:31.32)
 Mmm.
 
 Michael (25:32.207)
 And they’re incredibly beautiful. The things that she says, which and so I engaged a cellist to reinterpret these melodies. And there's so much to say about these things. I actually hope to have a radio piece about this experience of reinterpreting in
 
 Wakil David Matthews (25:57.389)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (26:01.427)
 these and listening to them, because you hear in the music, her, you hear her, you know, at these moments. But in the interpretation, you can't help but also hear the cellist, right, who's adding her thing, 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (26:20.109)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (26:31.109)
 and the father who has made certain kinds of notational decisions. And so they're not they're not Olga's purely, all of these people are contributing together and making them together. And that's one thing that I say throughout the book is that we attribute these first words or the last words or the last gesture to the individual who produces them. But they really are constructed together.

Annalouiza (26:55.662)
 Elective, 

Wakil David Matthews (26:59.009)
 Yeah, yeah, wow.
 
 Michael (27:01.042)
 They're something that we do together. Yeah. And it's our end. And I was just going add that it's the attention and the mutual attention in those moments, you know, at those particular points in the lifespan that make them in some ways so special.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (27:19.757)
 Yeah, yeah. Wow. Thank you.
 
 Annalouiza (27:22.146)
 Yeah. Well, and I was just also going to say too, that's the collective in the dying moments, right? We're, we're holding that space. so Wakil and I have talked to people and we use the language of hold that space and it's, it's a really, it's hard sometimes to explain it, but when you're listening at the end of life, everybody in that room is holding that space, contributing to the the story that is spooling out, right? It's like, so, I can't wait to listen to those speech melodies or yeah.
 
 Michael (27:56.211)
 Yeah, yeah. And can I just share another...
 
 Wakil David Matthews (27:57.049)
 Right, yeah, yeah.
 
 Michael (28:02.847)
 … example from end of life? And this is a phenomenon that I'm starting to delve more deeply into because I think it's really fascinating. But a lot of the things that have been written about language at the end of life were kind of famous last words. So the individual unique things that people said and you ask people like, what happened? You know, they'll talk about sort of memorable things that are idiosyncratic or very individual perhaps. 

Wakil David Matthews (28:47.96)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (28:59.153)
 But I started to wonder like, is that... is that true for in other cultures as well? And you might even have examples of this that you can  share, but there are religious traditions where you are supposed to say a prayer or the name of a god or a sacred sound literally as the last thing that you do. 

Wakil David Matthews (29:19.609)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (29:28.859)
 And there should be nothing else that that intervenes. And one of and I find that quite remarkable and beautiful. mean, when you were talking about holding the space and, you know, lots of people being there and also this this notion of the collective, these ritual last words are not unique to that person. They are the things that everyone has said. 

Wakil David Matthews (29:50.157)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (29:59.081)
 And it's kind of remarkable. It's kind of remarkable that in that moment that people are
 sort of joining that collective, you know, of ancestry or however you want to call that by saying the thing, by saying the same thing. So it's not an individual marker of their time, you know, in this world. It's the thing that everyone has said before them and will say after them.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (30:24.299)
 Yeah, wow, that's incredible. 
 
 Annalouiza (30:25.782)
 You are blowing my mind.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (30:53.153)
 And when I also as you were saying that I was thinking there's another piece to that too, is that not only the people in the room, but as you're speaking about the culture that came before the people who have walked before them, and the people that you know, that are in there, as they're getting close to that veil, you know, and they're probably even experiencing some of the connections to people who have gone before or people who are coming later. I mean, so there's a lot more in the room that's contributing to that conversation and to that sharing and to the interactions that are happening.
 
 Annalouiza (30:55.509)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (31:04.255)
 Sure. Sure.
 
 Annalouiza (31:06.574)
 That's just, I don't know, Michael, but that was really imperative for me to hear from you today. And I want to say this because also lending back to people's end of life stories, my sister died a few years ago. And I was her death executor. And I asked the doctor, please ask her one more time if she's OK with this decision. 
 
 And he said to her, and it was like she had been in a coma for a few days. woke up. There were like 20 people around her because people just loved her in the hospital. And the doctor says to her, Vivian, your kidney is failing. We could put you on dialysis and we could take care of it. Or you can choose comfort care and be done with this. Would you like dialysis? And my sister looked up, and she was like, no. And that was it. That was the last word she ever spoke.
 
 Michael (32:11.963)
 And she and she she she said no she vocalized no? Okay, right on.
 
 Annalouiza (32:16.534)
 She did. And you know, so thinking about this as her last words, I really am just so struck how much agency that actually had, right? Like, how much power how much like awareness and I just I don't know, just, it's really remarkable. I really am like, I'm kind of like overwhelmed over here.
 
 Michael (32:35.571)
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (32:39.737)
 Yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (32:42.68)
 But, know, and I want people to know, like, a no is a powerful last word too. It's okay, right?
 
 Wakil David Matthews (32:48.749)
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 Michael (32:49.597)
 Yes, right. exactly. And no is quite a frequent first word, actually.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (32:58.751)
 That's true.
 
 Annalouiza (33:02.19)
 Oh my gosh, I wouldn't be surprised with her too. She would have been a no. No, no.
 
 Michael (33:03.067)
 In similar ways. Yeah.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (33:06.425)
 Right.
 
 Annalouiza (33:10.21)
 That person, that soul had a lot of like agency for herself. She was this disabled woman who was, we were told that she was gonna live just days and she ended up living 47 years. And she said a whole heck of a lot of no's in her entire life.
 
 Michael (33:23.561)
 Oh my goodness.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (33:25.465)
 Right, yeah. Yeah, good. Wow. Well, let's see, where are we? Yeah. know, I'm like, whoa, this has been a really good conversation. I'm so happy with it. 
 
 Michael (33:27.123)
 Right, yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (33:39.104)
 So good.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (33:54.711)
 Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking, since the time's getting, we're getting toward the end, I just, I guess we talk about, do you have anything that you'd like to share with us about challenges that have come up as you've been doing this work or as you've been trying to share this work with folks?
 
 Michael (34:00.639)
 I mean, I think one challenge is that, you know, there's really a lot that I want to write about and there's really a lot that I want to, you know, talk about and do more research on 

Wakil David Matthews (34:20.386)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Michael (34:29.629)
 Finding the time and the resources to do that, you know, like anything has been a challenge.
 But also trying to do this in a way that is, you know, that's oriented towards care in the broadest sense and that is not exploitative or seen as exploitative in any sort of way, but going, you know, there's really potentially something to be gained here by understanding this in a more direct way, but maybe not in the same way that the babies are studied and that baby's language is studied, 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (35:17.944)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (35:29.715)
 … which can seem to me sometimes to not be oriented towards care, but to be exploitative in that way. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (35:49.497)
 Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
 Michael (35:59.305)
 So there's a kind of, so trying to articulate and be sensitive towards that paradoxical gesture, which is let's open this space up to look at it in a particular way, but also close it off to certain kinds of motives. Open it up to some motives that haven't been present, but close it off to some other motives that might be the first impulse. So that's been a real challenge. You might encounter this as well, but another challenge is going, okay, how am I gonna get to the other things that I wanna do that are not about language at the end of life? 

 Wakil David Matthews (36:23.897)
 Right, sure.
 
 Michael (36:28.991)
 So there've been a lot of projects sort of in a holding pattern, in a holding pattern,
 that maybe I'll get to do now.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (36:29.603)
 Right.
 
 Annalouiza (36:32.802)
 Well, I'm delighted by this. I can't wait to finish your book. yeah.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (36:35.277)
 Yeah. Yeah.
 
 Michael (36:37.599)
 I'm really, I'm so glad, I'm so glad that it's resonating with you, you know, both the first words and the last words. Putting them together was a real challenge. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (36:51.117)
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (36:57.614)
 Yeah
 
 Wakil David Matthews (36:58.059)
 Michael (37:04.327)
 When I would show the book to agents and editors, they would say, no, this is two books. These don't belong, these don't belong together. And I kind of went, no, I think they belong together.
 
 And one of the reasons that I went with the particular press that I did was they do a lot of language work and saw immediately why the two things were together. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (37:04.343)
 Yeah, yeah. great, yeah, yeah.
 
 Michael (37:33.683)
 So I'm really happy to be, you know, talking to you two and by extension, your audiences, who I think, who I think really can benefit from connecting to the other end of things you know, as well, and maybe there's some of that that they can bring to their work at the end.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (37:35.629)
 Yeah.  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wonder about that. If you had any pushback from people that were saying, this doesn't make sense, this isn't real. You're making stuff up or anything.
  
 Michael (37:54.451)
 Pushback, did I answer that sufficiently?
 
 Wakil David Matthews (38:08.601)
 Yeah, to some extent you said you had a little you said you had a little bit of pushback from publishers. But I wondered as you're doing the research and you're talking to people, was there any like either either what we we get a lot of times we just don't want to talk about end of life period. Or, you know, I don't think it's valuable. Was there any of that in in your research?
 
 Michael (38:31.199)
 No, you know, I think there was some, I mean, there was a lot of recognition by people who focus on child language that end of life language had not ever been, you know, looked at before in this way. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (38:48.611)
 Mm-hmm. Yeah.
 
 Michael (39:00.017)
 So there was that kind of acknowledgement at the same time that I, which would often open on to
 certain kinds of personal stories that people had, you know, which was interesting. I think when I mentioned it around though, people would, I mean, and I think everyone, maybe a lot of people who are starting to get into end of life work and who are not necessarily known as that encounter, you know, a kind of reaction like well, that's kind of morbid, don't you think? So I think I got some of that as well.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (39:33.099)
 Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do that. We do get that. Yeah, OK.
 
 Annalouiza (39:38.157)
 Yeah. I really hope this becomes your gift to the end of life work. Because we do, mean, love, death is my jam. I love all the ritual and how do we care for the caregivers and how do we, know, what do we do with the body after it's passed or all these things. I love it. to really hone that ear, to listen and hone the heart to be available for those last words. And, you know, maybe it's it's it's not it's prose or poetry in the last moment and it's not words. And I don't know. It just what a gift. It's so rich that I hope that more people will will read the book and and like pay attention. Yeah.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (40:26.829)
 Pay attention, yeah, pay attention. Yeah, yeah.
 
 Michael (40:27.487)
 Yeah, yeah, thanks. I think also, you know, one other, I mean, I think gift of the book is to say that experiencing some sort of last thing or something that you can hold on to in that way is special, meaning it's meaning that it's rare. 
 
 Wakil David Matthews (40:50.381)
 Yes.
 
 Michael (40:56.709)
 And so there are people who experience the death of a friend or loved one and don't get to have that thing and walk around with some amount of guilt, I think, or shame. know, people have talked about that. Some sense that they missed out on something or that they should have been that, you know, there was sort of a mark on their experience. And I want those people to be free from that, from that from that burden and to understand what's normal. I think, you know, certainly people do get to have those, you know, things, those experiences, but there are lot of people who don't and they should not be burdened by that.

Wakil David Matthews (41:44.729)
 Yeah, so good.
 
 Annalouiza (41:43.128)
 Yeah, it almost feels like that. What is it? The lending agency to those folks to have that vacuum, that hole filled for them, right? Because it's not it's it's not. We can share, you know, and you can receive. We can receive and be like that was a gift for me too.
 
 Michael (41:51.525)
 Exactly.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (41:53.357)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (41:57.593)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (42:04.253)
 Yep, yep. And to go back to something that we were talking about at the beginning, you know, that when I went back to the pucker brush and talked to Tanya, that, you know, those moments can be rewritten, those moments can be retold, so that if you didn't have the thing that you wanted, you can still make it, and it will be just as powerful and satisfying.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (42:04.397)
 Yep.
 
 Annalouiza (42:23.778)
 Yes, yes.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (42:25.143)
 Yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (42:30.082)
 Right. Right. And for those people who are like, how do you do that? I mean, we do this all the time, but we don't know that we're doing it. Active imagination, recreating those moments, adding what you had hoped would have been that potential moment, and resting in it. Because as far as your body is concerned, that's exactly what happened. As your brain. So rest in it and have it just waft over you.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (42:33.678)
 Yeah.
 
 Michael (42:47.794)
 Exactly.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (42:54.253)
 Yeah, exactly.
 
 Annalouiza (43:01.536)
 And it's yours and that's, you know, you're good. So…

 Michael (43:02.653)
 Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you put that.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (43:02.585)
 Yeah, Yeah, it was so. Yeah, it was so beautiful that you brought ritual as a as a method for that, to create that real, that new reality ritual is such a important part of that for us and something we're going to have a special podcast about at some point. But yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (43:26.048)
 It is.
 
 Michael (43:29.416)
 Ha ha ha.
 
Annalouiza (43:31.342)
 That's one of our, you know, our stuff that we need to get done. Yes.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (43:31.929)
 It's really important. One of our things, yeah. Well, we are pretty much out of time, but we always like to give you an opportunity, first of all, to just think if there's anything else you wish you had told us and share that if you'd like, and then to share the poem you sent us.
 
 Michael (43:51.729)
 Yeah. I think I've said pretty much everything that I wanted to bring to you. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for the space. And I think we could probably do another hour and just go from experience to experience. Sure, yeah. Yeah.
 
 Annalouiza (44:10.754)
 Yes. If you were in Denver, you'd be, you'd be coming over for dinner. Cause I would be like, let's talk or let's not. That's it.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (44:11.263)
 Hahaha. Yeah, that's it.
 
 Michael (44:21.629)
 Some silence here. But the so the poem that I wanted to read is a it's called Otherwise by by Jane Kenyon.
 
 And it goes, 

I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls and planned another day just like this day. But one day I know it will be otherwise.
 
 Wakil David Matthews (45:24.919)
 Yeah. Yeah, this has been a really profound and wonderful conversation. So grateful to you, Michael. 
 
 Michael (45:39.677)
 Indeed. Yeah. Thank you.