Ep 12: Death Does Not Get the Last Word, Friends Do | Mary McGreevy

What will you be known for after you die? Your life is so much more than a resume. Will your legacy of kindness live on? Your grudges? Your struggle to forgive? Or will it be hating cold butter, loving salty chips and chive dip, and the time you saved a goat from drowning? The stories that live on are only the ones you dared to share, and the ones you told. Being known, and knowing others, might be the richest human experience there is. One that outlasts the physical, maybe even the spiritual. So why do so many of us hide our real self?

Mary McGreevy runs Tips from Dead People, the account where she reads obituaries most of us would scroll past, and finds the ones that say something true. In this conversation, we talk about the value in exposing mistakes, leaving things messy, living our real true life. Mary walks through what she's learned about forgiveness from self-written obituaries, and we talk about the strange grief of a friendship that dies while both people are still alive, still out there, still not finding their way back to each other.

In This Episode 

• Being known and knowing may be the richest human experience there is
• The stories that live on are the ones you dared to tell while you were here
• Self-written obituaries are often where the deepest forgiveness shows up
• A friendship can end, and still deserve its own honest reckoning, even while both people are alive to feel it

About The Best Friend Podcast

The Best Friend Podcast is where original friendship research meets real-life stories. Host Rachel Joy Swardson, founder of The Best Friend Project, investigates how women find, make, lose, and keep the platonic loves of their lives through original data, personal experience, and candid conversations.

To learn more, visit The Best Friend Project.co . While you're there, discover your Friendship Archetype by taking the  Friendship Survey We'd also love to stay in touch. Come say hello on Instagram  and Facebook (we will follow you back!)  If you need to reach us, you can always email us at Hello@TheBFProject.com.

Connect with Mary McGreevy and @TipsFromDeadPeople on:

Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok

LinkedIn  

Chapters: 

00:00 Mary's theory about honest stories

00:52 Welcome to The Best Friend Project

01:20 Meet Mary McGreevy of Tips from Dead People

02:20 The obituary that gave a best friend top billing

04:15 Why the bends in the road belong in the story

05:20 Scorched earth obituaries and the comments they get

06:45 Forgiveness in self-written obituaries

11:50 Bronnie Ware's regrets and the one nobody quotes

13:15 The little things that turn out to be the big things

16:20 What Mary's friends make of the work

20:40 How reading obituaries changed how she lives

24:10 Take that, LinkedIn: the herring factory woman

28:20 Rachel's grandma, the joke, and the empty funeral

31:20 Being the keeper of the stories

33:40 Tennyson took 17 years to write it

36:45 Can you write an obituary for a living friendship?

41:10 Tig Notaro and the end of a friendship

43:20 The loneliest grief nobody has a book for

47:50 The narratives we tell ourselves to keep going

48:40 Takeaway: let yourself be known

49:40 Where to find Mary

50:40 Rachel's reflection

53:00 Next week: friendship and menopause

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I actually have this theory that an honest story that talks about the mistakes and the chapters that you don't love is healing in a way that a copy and place template could never be. What rises to the surface are those things that were meaningful that you thought were just marginal, like childhood friendships, um, quote unquote trivial parts of your life. At the end of life, that's what rises to the surface. That's what has meaning.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Look around and you'll see them. Women. At walking, in restaurants, at the airport, stores, driving in their cars. Women are everywhere. And every time you see a woman, you're seeing someone who has, at some point, struggled with a friendship. Because it's one of the most complicated, meaningful, and rewarding relationships of our lives. But how to do friendship well isn't talked about enough. So let's start. I'm Rachel Schwartzon, former private investigator and TV journalist, and now host of the Best Friend Project, where we use original data and real stories to better understand how women find, make, and keep their friends. Thank you for listening. And we're back with Mary McGreevy. So she is the creator of an unexpectedly viral media account. I'm sure you've seen if you're on social media, because it is everywhere. It is called Tips from Dead People. And this is a page where Mary shares unique obituaries and wisdom that we can all extract from them. And she's so interesting. She'll read the obituary and then she'll sort of reflect on, like, well, you know, this is what I'm getting out of it, or um, and and her take on it is is absolutely worth all of the visits to the page. Um and, you know, really it was born from this ironic question of what life advice can be gathered from stories from the dead. And what started as an everyday hobby for Mary turned into a bigger objective, which is really to help people think about their own lives and their own choices in a new way. Welcome, Mary.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

I'm so happy you're here. And so I discovered you, I believe it was February 9th of 2026, and in this episode, you said I want us to start normalizing, including friendships in obituaries. And because the algorithm is so amazing and I work in friendship, I think I was given this um episode, but it turned out to just be one of the most provocative conversations I had in my head, and then I'm like, I just gotta reach out to you.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Even before the family was mentioned, there was a paragraph that was pretty much a tribute to her best friend, and her family kind of became part of their family, and it was basically the Sue and Robin show, and it struck me that in most obituaries, there's probably a friendship or two like that in the person's life, but they don't often make it into the obituary because people are so hobbled by etiquette and copy and paste templates that they don't even think to do that. So I found that very refreshing.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Well, and I can imagine, I mean, it was refreshing as a as a listener to hear about it, but I do get the sense that we wouldn't have gotten to know her as well had her best friend not written the obituary. And I would imagine for some families, it's like, well, no, she was our mother, sister, you know, aunt. We hold the keys to that narrative and we will be the one writing it. And yet and yet the what we'd miss out on is so much about the person that families don't ever get to see because we're really a different person when we're with our friends sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Right. I think in her case, her kids wrote the obituary, but they gave the friend a prominent place in the obituary, which was kind of what struck me. And I think the other thing that is so interesting is that we wouldn't have had that story of friendship if the kids hadn't also included her divorce in there, which is another thing that I love and I'm drawn to in obituaries, which is things that happen, complications in life. I don't want to say mistakes because often they aren't mistakes, but um, bends in the road that you didn't anticipate when you were 21 crop up all the time, sometimes for the best, sometimes not. Those bends in the road make for the most interesting stories. And it's not just that all obituaries have to be interesting to me. I actually have this theory that an honest story that talks about the mistakes and the chapters that you don't love is healing in a way that a copy and place template could never be.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, I I can see that it would be cathartic and healing in so many different ways. And another thing you pointed out in that very episode was normalizing cattiness. And I think that that came up because of a very subtle line that she was the only one that raised her children, or she got to take credit for her incredible children. And I I laughed out loud when you talked about the normalizing cattiness. You know, because it is kind of our last chance to get that, you know, little thing that we never got to say when we were living out there, in a sense, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Some of these other obituaries that I've found that are what what I usually call like a scorched earth obituary, and the the gist of it is the world is a better place because this person isn't there. And every time I read one of those, whether they're short and serious or they're kind of funny, kind of darkly funny, I brace myself for the worst of the internet for comments that are negative. Why would you find this interesting? Why would you share this? But in fact, what happens is the opposite. 99% of the comments on those what I call scorched earth obituaries are um positive. Glad they got to tell their story. Why would you airbrush somebody that wasn't perfect? It's their story to tell. Finally, the victim gets a voice, all that, and any all those themes. People feel it strongly, like they jump right in to say those things. Um, so yeah, that's also pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

That is. And, you know, it makes me think about the forgiveness because some people, I mean, and and I'm coming at it from the perspective that I've gleaned from watching so many of the episodes on your page, but you know, there are the writ episodes or the obituaries that are written by family, they're the obituaries that are contributed to by friends. Some people have the self-written obituary. Um, you even had the one that was so amazing. I guffawed and laughed out loud of the woman who wrote her own obituary with her daughter, but Doris had made a surprise um ending to that story that you told, um, which was beautiful in another way. But I think that what I'm getting from some of the self-written obituaries, like how often is forgiveness mentioned? Like, how often are people reflecting on their passing of like because I'm coming at it from this perspective. Like, I have this theory, we're all alive, and I think it's the living human perspective is becoming so much more apparent to me in this world of AI, you know, ever-increasing posts written by I by AI and AI doing everything. And so it's making me think of human beings differently. And when I think of human beings, I think of living human beings. But then when I read your s your work, I just imagine a whole bunch of dead people hovering over us as we're fretting over just petty stuff and you know, how she looked at me at my brother's wedding or who didn't invite who. And I just imagine the dead like banging their scepters and being like, you idiots, you don't get it. It's about love, it's about forgiveness, and you're wasting your life worrying about all these things and destroying friendships and relationships when that's not what life is all about. But do you do you see any of that coming through in forgiveness and the obituaries that you read?

SPEAKER_00 8:44

I do. I love self-written obituaries, and I'm I'm always gobsmacked by um comments from people who say that my little account helped them craft their own obituary. I've I just, you know, that just kind of thing brings me to tears. But I can think of three right off the top of my head self-written obituaries that address this topic of forgiveness. Now, the first one was an older woman named Bernadette, and it was a gentle, lyrical, almost poetic type of self-written obituary, but it spoke very um beautifully about her own regrets and hurting people, and she did the best she could, but she knows it wasn't always good enough. And encouraging people to forgive themselves, and especially women to forgive themselves for their perceived shortcomings, whether it be how they look in the mirror or how they treat other people. It was, it's almost like you would want her as your life coach. It was so good. Then there was a self-written one by this guy named Gary who probably would have scared me in real life. Honestly, he seemed like kind of a big, uh outsized, kind of loud, brassy character. And he basically said, I'm sorry to everyone I wronged. This was really blunt, including, and then he listed like someone in grade school that he made fun of. So this is something that this big brash, sporty guy had kept in his head till the end and wanted his own form of like blunt atonement for. And then I just recorded today actually an obituary that I'm gonna post in the next couple of weeks, and it's self-written, and it's someone who was a drug addict and relapsed again and again and again, but ended up in recovery, ended up dying of colorectal cancer, which is just you know terrible. But had such a self-aware, detailed perspective on I was chaotic, but I grew. I was this, I was that, and I challenged people, and I wasn't always um the right person at the right time, basically. And it the sum total of it is just she's forgiving herself for having caused so much trouble for her family, which you don't even have to read the law between the lines. It's very evident that they cause she caused a lot of trouble, and there was multiple periods of estrangement. But to be that self-aware and to put it in the obituary, this feels like the kind of thing that her family can go to in the middle of the night and say, This was our person. This was complicated, but was also healing for all of us.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Oh, that is yeah, you could see where the gift that she would continue to give by what I'm hearing you talk about too is the grace that she allowed herself in the midst of of her final words to apologize, you know, to her family um for what she put them through. And it's um, you know, it it brings to mind the work of um Brawny Ware, the hospice nurse who had done, you know, it's like the top five things that people talk about before they die. Um and I think we all hear, you know, and if you've ever been to a corporate talk or whatever they talk about, I think it's uh the second one is I wish I hadn't worked so hard. You know, the first one being um I wish I had the courage to live my true life and pursue my own, you know, things that I wanted to do. Um number three was I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, but little known, often not shared, number four is I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. And, you know, this is uh a hospice nurse that has famously taken care of countless people before you read about them. So before they die. And that's one of the things that they regret most. You know.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

I wholeheartedly believe that. I don't even need the data to show me. I I believe it from for my own self and also for the tens of thousands at this point of obituaries that I've read. When the moment comes to do a either self-written or to write about someone at the end of their life, what rises to the surface are those things that were meaningful that you thought were just marginal, like childhood friendships, um little little trivial, quote unquote trivial parts of your life. At the end of life, that's what rises to the surface. That's what has meaning. Our whole lives, we're taught to believe that what has meaning is your level of achievement, your resume, the things that you can score, apply metrics to, and that sort of thing. But even for the most highly traditionally accomplished people, the obituaries that I read include references to things like what you're talking about. It was the biking to school, it was the shenanigans that they did in college. I mean, all of those things rise to the surface as having more meaning, more power, more impact on their life than anything else.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Wow. And you know, we are made up of all the little things, you know, and it's it's so weird when you think of like friendship as a little thing, because it's not, it's a huge thing, you know. But when you think about like C.S. Lewis talks about a diamond and all the different facets is what makes it the m so beautiful because it gets all the different life light reflecting off of it. And the more facets we have, the more we shine, the more beautiful we are. And I feel like the voices of the friends that come in through the obituaries and you know, because of the lives that we've lived, bring more color and light and shine that person's uh personality more, you know, forward for people who didn't have a chance to get to know them while they were living.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Absolutely. I like it when uh friends like that are named. It's not just a general reference to he had so many good friends at this part of his life or she was part of a great neighborhood group. I've read obituaries where those people are named. I suppose you run the risk of leaving someone important out, which is a problem. But I I just think it's so sweet. I think sometimes we put too much weight on the etiquette around what's been done in obituaries, and it's not usually done to name the friends like that as meaningful important parts of your life. But I think it's really important to do that. The truth of it all is, unless we are presidents of the United States or something, most of us will be forgotten in a few generations anyway, even by our you know, grandkids and great-grandkids. They're gonna remember maybe our names, but not the details. So, what is preventing us from putting the rich stuff at this moment into those stories? So those are the ones that I'm drawn to sharing online. I'm getting um so many submissions now that it's I'm having to like figure out what can I learn from this, what is unique about it. And if an obituary goes into those little things of life that turn out to be the big things, that's almost always a bullseye for me.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Well, and in the midst of this, so you know, you're we kind of jumped right into the friendship stuff because I'm so eager to talk to you about what you've learned from the dead about friendship. But uh in saying that, and on the heels of what you're saying, like we're not gonna live forever. Our stories will be hopefully carried on for at least a few generations. But um while we're here, what do your friends make of this work? Was were were people surprised by it or really like Mary, that's a little like dark, or you know, what has the been the reaction of your friends for um tips from the dead?

SPEAKER_00 17:04

That's a great question. I feel like a lot of like a lot of people, I have these concentric circles of friendships. I have the nearest and dearest, and then I have like the parents of my kids' friends from school, and then neighbors, and then uh people that I consider friends, but I don't speak to all that often. Um the in the inner circles, I would say people are incredibly excited because they've known that I have done some zigzagging in my work life. And, you know, if you're ever a certain age, you remember that you were supposed to read that book, What color is your parachute in your youth? And I just hated that book because it's like I don't have one color, I don't know what it is that I need to do. What if I'm a generalist? Isn't that okay too? Or, you know, this whole idea that you have to find your passion. I always chafed and rebelled against that. So I think the people who know me best know that that's sort of been my history. So to in a way, sort of back into this hobby that has become something more, they're cheering, like you would for any good friend. The weirdness of it or the the kind of morbid quality of it is almost an afterthought because they've known forever that I'm interested in obituaries, that I was known to be someone who would open that, open the newspaper when I got a newspaper to that page first. Um, and that it was something that my mom was interested in herself. And we had that in common before she passed away. Um I do think for my age group, we don't know too many people who are climbing in social media, at least not here in St. Paul where I live. I'm not, we're not, I'm not friends with people who are like out there worried about their social media metrics. So that part feels a little foreign, I would guess, to my friends, or they say, Why are you doing what are you on now? What are you doing? Um, but I the the person you see on Tips from Dead People is no character. That is me. So there would be no gap between what I talk about online and the kind of person I am in a friend group. So I would imagine that if someone took the time, a friend, to see this, they would say, Well, that's her. That's authentic.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Well, and that to me is what makes the page so interesting. You know, first of all, you're giving visibility to something that we've all done in private, which is, you know, pour your cup of coffee, read the headlines, and go straight to the obituaries because it's interesting. I don't know why, but it's interesting. And maybe it forces us to uh, you know, consider our own mortality, um and hopefully live a more empathetic life because we know that we're not gonna be here forever. Um so I love that you're giving visibility to it. I love that we also have a place to go to read them because most of us don't get the newspaper anymore. Um, but it is your take on the things that you're reading that to me make it so interesting. Like, yes, you're an incredibly gifted curator of interesting artifacts of human life. And, you know, they're all different from each other. And but your take on it, like sometimes it, you know, you're like, I don't know if I really believe that, or you know, and it's so refreshing, like, and it does make you feel very like parasocial relationship, like I feel like I know you because you're so conversational about these things that surprise you. Um and I I think it's it's you know, I think that's part of to me why you're so successful in your page and people are just gravitating towards it. Um, but it's it's gotta be on some level reflective for you, right? To be able to read these things and think about like how am I living? Like, how has it changed how you live or treat people or choose different people to spend your time with? Like, do you feel like it's thrust your mortality into a different sort of spotlight?

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yes, to all of that. Um just on a very superficial level, I went to um the Brandy Carlisle concert in Minneapolis, which was a couple weeks ago, with some friends. And for the first time, uh, of course, this is the right demographic for tips from dead people. It's mostly, it's a lot of women of a certain age, but um for the first time ever, people stopped me in the merch line to say, My partner is obsessed with you. Can you get a selfie? And I was like, so the friends that I was with were Were they like, What is going on? What's happening? So that's uh, you know, like one superficial thing. I love that. I think. Um as I think about this account, and so you know it started off just kind of whimsical. What I always want for it to be entertaining. I want for it to be entertaining in the same way that the moth, humans of New York, other story core, other these other storytelling platforms where non-famous people's lives get elevated are by definition entertaining. So I want on a basic level, I want that. Um has been punctured a little bit to the people that follow this account. And so there's some shifts happening, which I am thrilled with. And then to me, on an even deeper level, I think why this is still compelling to me every single day is that I'm the case study for how sitting inside all these stories has changed the way I think about life. So it's entertaining, you think about death, but for me, it's also thinking about life. That all of these tendencies toward a LinkedIn culture that we've been raised in don't mean anything. That's not winning. If if I take my 10,000 obituaries as data, that's not winning. What's winning is the hot mess of a woman whose obituary is still oozing with love, whether it be from friends or family. And you read that and you think, that's what I want to be. That's how I want to live my life. Um, I don't, I don't want to worry about these material things or these competitive things. And I came to this as fully part of that competitive material culture. And I have seen my own self get changed by this. So all three of those things together, all of those levels combined to make this something that I don't think I'm ever gonna get sick of. Wow. It's it's so fun and it's so helpful to me.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

So changed you in a way that you feel like you're more compassionate or empathetic or braver or riskier. Like, what do you can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by changed you?

SPEAKER_00 24:28

I think it's I think it's worrying a lot less about resume culture, to the point where that stuff in an obituary doesn't even interest me at all. Skim, skim, skim. But let me get to the list where they say Trish loved David Sideris, she loved bullet points, she loved capri blue candles, she loved the long and lean trouser from the gap, she loved Skittles for breakfast, she hated cold butter, she hated uh daylight saving time. I mean, that's the part of the obituary that means everything to me, those little details. And I feel like I've been trying to apply that to my life too, to stress way less about all that other stuff and to focus on these tiny little things. That's a that's a tactile change that has been happening for me, and I hope for anyone else that comes to my account.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

And what you just described, I feel like I, whoever that person is, if it's even I know that person. Like you because the way you described it, I can see that person, I can relate the things that you just said, which makes me feel a connection, versus if you said, Oh, they went to this school or that school or they were a journalism major, I'd be like, okay, you know. Um, but I think to to have what you're saying actually happen also means that we have to let people see that side of us so that they know us, you know?

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I haven't ever said it out loud that way, but I agree.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

You know, our quirks, I think, and the things that make us us aren't necessarily the things I'm readily sharing with people. You know, I think is anyone gonna care that, you know, in in the example, I also hate cold butter. Maybe, you know, but I would love for that to be my lasting legacy because it's it should be banished. But, you know, so I think what you're also saying is like we have to be just ourselves as as much as we can be and not hide the things that we might feel are unique or different or weird, and we don't want people to know about us.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Right. I read this uh obituary a few years ago for a woman from Atlanta, and it it it um went into her job history and colorful background, I think multiple marriages and all this kind of stuff. But the the biggest paragraph was that she was a lifelong tester of uh not paid, just for fun, tester of Coca-Cola products. So she had this elaborate system of testing all the different versions of Coke and comparing them one against each other, see if the recipes have changed, what you know, what's better. And I thought that's it. Take everything away. That's the paragraph I need. Um, and then I'm I read one this morning that I'm gonna post in a couple weeks, too, for this woman from Maine. She left school in eighth grade to take care of her sick mother, went straight to work, never went to high school, went straight to work at the herring packaging factory. She was known as the fastest picker in town. She would come home smelling like fish scales, but she would say to her kids, you know, well, the money I make doesn't stink, right? The fish might stink, but the money I make doesn't. But they had an uh paragraph there about how she was very competitive about board games and didn't even let her grandchildren win when they were playing games. And to me, this is everything. Like she wins, like, take that, LinkedIn, she wins. She she was working in a fish packing factory her entire life with no high school degree. She wins. That's a lovely story, and she was clearly a quite a character and very well loved. And we are so lucky that we get to hear about it because they took the time to write that in the obituary.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Well, and to your point, if they just said she worked in a herring factory, be like, wah, wah, like that's a stinky job. You know, but the personality that she brought to it and the perspective, um, I think is is is meaningful. Obviously, that's why you're sharing it. Um, and it makes me think a little bit too about when you know, like how people will only remember us by what we let them see of us. And when my grandma was dying and no, no, actually it was before she died. She had a hip injury or something, and so I was visiting her in a little recovery home place, and coincidentally, a friend of hers happened to stop by and she told this joke. And I had heard my grandma laugh a bazillion times, but just in response to like the twinkling chuckle a grandmother makes when a grandchild is adorable. And when this joke was told to my grandma, I'll just tell it really quick just because it's so it's not weird. It's a good it's it's it's an old people joke. So my this woman tells my grandma this joke. And the joke goes, um, this old man went to his card game and he told his buddies he just got married. And his friends were like, What? I didn't even know you had a girlfriend. And he said, I do, and now I have a wife. And they said, Well, what the heck? Is she beautiful? And he's like, Not particularly. And they're like, Well, is she really smart? He's like, Not so much. And they're like, Oh, well, she must be really rich. And he's like, Nope, not a dying door name. And then they're like, Well, what why'd you marry her? And the old man says, Because she can drive at night. And my grandma howled. She was laughing so hard. And I just remember stepping back. And this was, you know, my grandma had to be in her 80s, and so this other woman's in their 80s. They had been high school lifelong friends. And I just, I will never forget seeing my grandma laugh in a way that I'd never seen a family member make her laugh. And it was so touching to me that I actually told that story at her funeral in her eulogy. And, you know, again, it was weird at the you at the funeral because my grandma's well in her 80s. I was in my 30s, and I just was like, hey, we're gonna need, you know, overflow parking. Do we have security there? Because it's my grandma. I think the world is gonna come out to come to her funeral. And it was really shocking to say it was just a heavy smattering of family, and then just a few random, sort of fluffy-haired old people no one knew. And it was explained to me that, like, well, no, all of your grandma's friends have died. They're all dying.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Right.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

And I was like, but they're gonna take her stories with them.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Yeah, that's the well, first of all, I love that story. A side note, I remember sitting around with my friends in grade school and we tried to, we each tried to imitate our mother's laugh. Oh, and I couldn't do it because my mom had a silent laugh. And like you're saying with your grandma, I don't remember a belly laugh from her. I remember struggling to come up with an impression. Everybody else's moms had these like smokers' laughs, you know, from the 70s. Um, but I couldn't, I just couldn't do it. Um, and I so not to get serious, but my two two of my best friends from college died young. And one was one died of cancer in her 20s, and one was actually murdered in her late 30s. And the thing that that just got me more than anything else was that I was the keeper of the stories. This shouldn't happen to us this young, that of our little posse of three, I would be the one now tasked with holding on to all those stories because they weren't there to embellish or retell or giggle about them forevermore. And I I've of all the injustices, of course, in those situations, that one felt to me like the hardest to absorb over the decades. Just me, I'm the one, I'm the only one that remembers about you know these funny things that happened in college. I guess I am. And so, yeah, I know, I know what you're talking about with your mom or grandma and the funeral and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

That is heavy. And long after our friends pass, um I have had several friends from high school have passed away, not during high school and and we had sort of gone our separate ways. Um, but there is no one left from that time of my life to retell those stories, which maybe is some way of saying no one needs to know what really happened in high school. Um the the love that lives on after our friends have passed. Yes, you know, you felt that immense like, holy crap, I'm the keeper of this story. But what an honor, obviously, but just a heavy um assignment to be that that carrier. Um and it makes me think about um Tennyson, Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, poet. Um, the poem in memorandum, which we all famously know for the line, um it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. He wrote that poem for his best friend. Um AH A H Alfred Henry Hallam, I believe A H. But or A H whatever. But it took him 17 years to write that poem. And this was his very best friend. He died at age twenty two of a brain hemorrhage just suddenly. Um Alfred was also engaged to um Tennyson's sister, so he would have been his brother-in-law. And so he was obviously mulling that deep, deep grief for so long because it took 17 years to write that poem. But we uh I mean everyone has heard that quote. It is better to have loved than lost than to have never loved at all. And I I was shocked to hear that he that came from a friendship love.

SPEAKER_00 35:04

And you wonder, okay, so in the 17 years between when his friend died and when the poem was written, what the evolution of thought was, I could see the first few years not only not believing that, but believing the opposite. That to have somebody taken from you so dear at such a young age, uh, I wish that it hadn't happened at all. Like I can't carry this pain with me for the rest of my life. But then you you let 17 years go by, and you've entered other doors and other chapters, and you think they did make my life something better. So it's better to have that than not. Um, and I I am making that guess about him because that's how I felt with both of my friends who died too young. I just like this is too painful. We can't, we you know, how could how can a person do this? But now, of course, I I have pictures and I look back and I try to do right by their kids and so forth. Um it's complicated, but that's really interesting. I'm gonna go look up that whole poem now once we're off.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Yeah, it's it's very beautiful. Um, but then it's also they were 22, they had a wedding coming up. What's to say that at said wedding somebody wouldn't have gotten drunk and punched the other person and had some altercation and their friendship would have ended, and this poem would have never been written. And they, you know, I mean, I think we can romanticize sort of friendship when we don't have it anymore. I think I fall into that with my friendship that has broken up, um, and it's to me a very living death because she's alive, I'm alive, but our friendship is dead, and it's a really weird place to put it. Um, I think that I fall guilty of sort of romanticizing how great it was, and through this project, you know, like how you have sort of changed and have this, you know, evolution of kind of being and how you see the world because of your work. The work that I've done and the people that I've interviewed for this show has really helped me see how maybe dishonest I was being about how great this friendship was to begin with. You know, because it it's easy to look back and romanticize it. So um the living death of something has been something that I'm struggling with. And I was going to ask you, would it be like a weird thing? Because what I hear you say too is that it's very cathartic for people to write these uh obituaries and it's healing and they can reach into some empathy and grace that maybe they didn't have for that person, or they can get the closure with that scorched earth approach. Um would it be weird for someone to write an obituary about a living relationship and just sort of give closure to me, like you know, just journaling about like this friendship was alive and now it's dead, and this is what I loved about it, and you know, R.I.P.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

I don't think so. I guess in a sense, that's what Tennyson was doing. They didn't have a rift, but it took them that long to write that kind of tribute. I did write about one of my friends that uh that died. I wrote an essay about her and our friendship, um, which I can send to you, but it it it was very cathartic to me. And I like hearing about the evolution of your perspective on that friendship breakup because you wouldn't be saying the same things about it three years ago that you are saying now, and you may not say the same things about it three years from here that you would today, and there's probably no way of rushing or condensing all those thoughts. You kind of have to go through the evolution, just like Tennyson did, before you arrive at a day when you are compelled in a way to write about it. You're emotionally compelled. I am gonna put this down, I am gonna write about it. Here's how I'm seeing this, and this feels right to me. So I don't I don't think it's weird at all, honestly. Again, life is short. I think the goal for you would be to help verbalize and process it. And maybe in writing, it helps you put it on a shelf for a little bit and not think about it in a painful way.

SPEAKER_01 39:45

Yes, that I could see that being the case. And um, you know, I also believe in reincarnation. So, you know, just because it's dead now doesn't necessarily mean it will be dead forever, maybe. I don't know. Um but it's um I think if I ever heard that something horrible happened to her, I would be I would never forgive myself for letting it end the way it ended. You know, and so all of this reading about these obituaries and talking about friends contributing to this. I mean, this was someone who like we had, you know, we would joke that we like knew where each other's bodies were buried. We knew what files to delete if one of us got in a car accident. Like we were like, I mean, we've damn near written each other's obituaries because we were gonna have the funniest funerals ever. Like one thing I miss about her is that she was a very funny friend and we are very unmatched in humor and thick skinnedness and just you know, like audacity. Um, and so I just think like, okay, who's going to tell that story? And you know, I have a long life hopefully ahead of me, and I'll have many other friends and things like that. But, you know, it was always a running joke between us, like, oh, I'm so gonna say that at your funeral, you know?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Um Right. Did you see uh just in the last few days, there's been this interview circulating online between I think Nicole Wallace and Tignataro about the end of Tignataro and Cheryl Day Cheryl Hines friendship.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

I have yet to watch it, but I do know the article you're talking about, and I love love Tig.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

I do too. She's so wise. But I I saw that this clip existed and it was just on my feed, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna come back to this because she's so funny, and I I don't have time to listen, but I'm going to. But in my mind, I was like, oh, she's gonna roast her. It's gonna be this is gonna be a satisfying thing to watch because she's funny and cutting, and this is gonna be really it's gonna make me feel better just to hear this. But it wasn't that way at all. This was a like a very gentle way to talk about the dissolution of a friendship. I think as online people, maybe we were hoping for a sick burn in there, but it's just it isn't that way at all. It would there's pain, there's bewilderment, like what the heck? She just stopped calling kind of thing, or it just couldn't got too weird, couldn't do it, or whatever.

unknown 42:26

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

Um, but I I was grateful that she didn't jump into like immediately packaging this up. This was this, this, this, this. She was expressing the real confusion that people feel at the end of a friendship. How is this gonna go? I don't quite, I guess we're here. And I guess this is happening, but I don't know how it's gonna go from here.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Interesting. I definitely have to read that. I I have seen it circulating. And I mean, friendship breakups, we see them all over the place, you know, between the controversy between like Blake Lively and Taylor Swift, or you know, the two girls that did the Call Our Daddy podcast. I mean, you know, it's we see that, and when they're public people and they split up, um, I think we do want to jump in and be like, oh, what happened and pick a side or things like that. But um, it is the weirdest, loneliest, most disorienting grief. Um, and I've shared this with you too previously, but like when I got divorced, I knew what to do. I went, okay, these women have gotten also had been divorced, I can connect with them and they can walk me through this. Or I looked around when I got the text from her and I'm like, okay, I've got books on parenting, okay, I've got books on marriage, I've got books on cooking, I've got books on how to start a business. I didn't have any books on pa on friendship. You know, I had never really given the time and the attention that platonic relationships require. I just sort of thought we were friends. You know, it it didn't feel complicated. In any way, shape, or form. But I'm learning that it is and it should be because these are really deep, meaningful relationships. Safety is a significant part of a friendship. You have to be able to be vulnerable. And I think where I felt comfortable talking about all different kinds of things, like I joked where our bodies are buried, like, oh my gosh, there's the one person I could tell that I knew would not judge me. Why couldn't I express certain things that she was doing that were really hurtful to me? Um and you know, I think ultimately I just didn't feel safe for whatever reason. You know, and we are where we are, but um it is interesting to consider. Obviously, I'm not the only person to do this. I'm certainly not the only person to research friendship. But since I've been doing this, I have uncovered, uncovered several resources um that have been extremely helpful for for me, one being C. S. Lewis, um, the f the four loves. It's when I read that, I was like, well, we're done. That's the only thing that should ever be said about friendship in the history of the world. Wrapping this up. Um I didn't even know he wrote more than the line The Witch and the Wardor, frankly. But this book has just it's been like, okay, this can be my blue blanket as I step forth into new relationships and new friendships. Um and also just wanted to add about Tig Nataro. She was the executive producer for a movie that is up for 2020 Six Academy Award. It is called Um Come See Me in the Good Light. And it's about a friend of hers that um and and Tig isn't in the movie, she's a producer, she's has an appearance, but it's the relationship between these two women as one of them is dying. And it just makes me think about her. I haven't yet read the friendship article about the um Charles Um Heinz. But I just wonder if Tig's perspective on friendship has changed in watching one of her friends die. And maybe it's made her more empathetic and gracious in forgiveness to not carry bad feelings herself, maybe. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 46:15

I I would guess you're right about that. Everything that happens like that will inform the next step. As you were talking, I was wondering if the abrupt end to a friendship is more or less painful than the withering, just growing apart. But the the obviously the result is the same. But um I've had both. And I don't know, I just don't know thinking about it, what what's better or what's worse, but I guess it's not a question I have to answer today. Yeah. Um yeah. But to that extent, CS a great thing on grief, grief, too, by the way. But he's he's really smart on grief. C.S. Lewis.

unknown 47:02

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 47:02

Uh good. I'm a fan. I'm uh I'm on board with him. Going back to what you just said, too, when my dad was dying, slowly, stroke after stroke after stroke after stroke after stroke. Um my name is obviously Rachel, my co-worker's name was Rachel, and her father, very fit and healthy, had a heart attack, bam dead in like a matter of seconds. And when word went around, we were at PBS together that Rachel's dad had died, everyone assumed it was me. We also shared an office, so people would come in and g offer me their condolences, and I was like, it's our dad. And but she would say, I'm so sorry to say this, but I'm so glad my dad died so quickly and I haven't had to go through what you went through. And I would think, but not say, I am so grateful I have one more day every day with my dad, even though I get less and less and less of him. So I think we make work what happens to us, and that's you know, you and I share a love of the power of the story. And I think the narratives we tell ourselves in order to survive, in order to get up the next day and do it again, have to be in our favor, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Yes. It isn't a question of if we will have devastating things happen to us. It is a question of when. And how do we wrangle our intellect, our heart, the plasticity of our brain? How do we wrangle that to make it okay to keep getting up, to keep finding the silver linings, to keep seeing the little joys in life? That's that's the big question, whether it's the death of someone that we love or whether it's the death of a friendship, which is also someone that we love. Um it's it's work. It's the work of being human to figure that out and keep going.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

And on the human note, I think my biggest takeaway from this is to let ourselves be known, to show the quirky side, to reveal the things about ourselves that make us us, because as you said so eloquently a few times, who cares where we went to school, how much money we've learned, we've earned, how big our houses, like if that's what defines us, not a very fulfilling life. You know, but really being the nuances um that are the facets that make us shine, I think is the takeaway for our lasting legacy and to continue to carry on the stories of the friends because if we are the keeper, it is a it is our duty to keep uh telling those stories of our friends or loved ones and you know that have that have passed. Yes, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mary, for spending so much time with me here on the Best Friend Project. Um, I instantly loved you when I saw you online and then we connected, and coincidentally we were from the same hometown. I was like, okay, we we have that St. Paul thing working in our favor. Um to see more from Mary, go to Tips from Dead People on Instagram and on TikTok. And is there anything else that you'd want to know? Is are you working on anything or is you know anything coming up that you want to share?

SPEAKER_00 50:11

I just started a Substack because I'm trying to practice my writing skills in preparation to actually write a book. So come join me on Substack if you want. It's I'm gonna talk about obituaries for sure, but also other life things. Just it'll be a little bit more random, but it's been fun. It's been fun to do that so far.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

Awesome. And for anyone who didn't catch that, yes, there is a book in the works from Mary McGreevy. So um can't wait to read it. And thank you so much. If you haven't yet taken the Best Friend Project survey, you can do so at the best friendproject.co and would love to hear from you. There's also a link um to the podcast. If you have a story you'd like to share, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Like, no one wants to think about what happens after you die, and like whenever I think about what happens after I die, I'm like, do I get cremated or buried? Like that, I think about my physical body and like what will happen after I die. I feel like my soul will go to heaven, hopefully. But what happens to like the story of me, the story of you, the story of us when we're no longer here, and that narrative goes into our children if we have them, our family if they're still alive, and our friends, you know, and knowing that death does not get the last word, our friends do, is a powerful statement. And I loved what she said too about it seems like little things, but the little things get all swept up to into one big, it matters matter, right? A pile of things that remain once we're gone. And those childhood memories, you know, she said a little thing could be a childhood friendship. In childhood, like, I feel like we are who we are before the world got their hands on us. You know, before we got hardened by life or jobs or mortgage or marriage, divorce, all the things, you know, that we needed to survive. Those childhood friendships have a much deeper depth the further out we get from them. I'm fortunate to be still in close contact with a few of my most dearest childhood friends. Paige Taranto is a big shout out to you, girl. I love you. Oh, I'm gonna start crying. I like I love you so much. Um, I'm so grateful for our friendship forever. Um so Mary's sage words are so important for all of us to hear, and I'm grateful to Mary for being on the show. I'm going to manifest a friendship with her. Um, now that you know, like I kind of know her because I find her fascinating and kind and interesting, and those are qualities that I want to seek in friends. Um, just like if you heard the episode with Melanie Curtis, how she kind of manifested a conver uh friendship with weird Al Yankovic, I'm gonna manifest a friendship with Mary, Mary McGreevy. Um, I just want to be friends with you. So throwing it out there to the universe. Uh next week on the Best Friend Project show here, we talk about something that many women feel like is killing them. Um we do survive it, it's menopause. And you're gonna meet the authors of this book, the hormonal hangover society, uh Jen Coates and Margaret Honda. We talk about how, if if here's the thing, you guys. If the key things like the symptoms of menopause are forgetfulness, fatigue, uh irritability, and the top things that women want from their friendships are people that remember things, people that show up, people that don't cancel plans, people that have grace. How in the world does friendship survive menopause? Not for nothing. I'm I was in menopause. I think my friend was out of it when we had our breakup. Maybe that factored into an absolute, like, ground floor tolerance from both of us. I don't know. Maybe it did. We'll find out more about Friendship and Menopause next week with Jen Cody, Margaret Honda, authors of the Hormonal Hangover Society. It's so funny, it's called the New Member Welcome Book because anyone who is approaching menopause or knows someone's menopause, it's like, yep, welcome. Here you go, here's your handbook. Uh, their darling. Oh, and side note, I met Jen at the Reese Witherspoon Hello Sunshine event where I kicked off this entire project by hiding my postcards in bathroom stalls. That uh the Reese Witherspoon event, here's my postcards. The Reese Witherspoon event was the first place that I did this. Intending to just like low-key stealth, put my signs up, and beat it. I had no interest in like meeting people, doing anything of self-felt like damaged goods when it came to friendship. Um, but I met the most amazing women. And so uh Jen Cody is one of them. So so excited for you to meet her, her co-author, and dear friend Margaret Honda next week on the Best Friend Project podcast. Um, also stay tuned for Saturday. We do an on the phone with. That's my 1990s kitchen phone on the wall conversation. I just call up the Tuesday guest and talk to them about feedback they got from the show, what they enjoyed about it, what they felt like when they heard it back. So on Saturday, I'm calling my new friend Mary McGreevy. So after you listen to this too, if you have any questions for Mary or want to leave any comments uh you want me to ask her on Saturday, please do so. Instagram page is the best underscore friend project, and on Facebook, it is the best friend project. So um hit me up there, DMs or just comments, and I will be sure to share your thoughts with Mary. Thank you so much for listening.