In this episode, Bruce Feiler explains how rituals help us find meaning in times of change. He shares why rituals have been essential to human life for thousands of years—and why they’re more important than ever in today’s rapidly changing world. Drawing from his new book A Time to Gather, Bruce discusses how meaningful rituals can help us navigate grief, celebrate milestones, strengthen relationships, and create a greater sense of connection during life’s biggest transitions. Along the way, he and Eric share personal stories of loss, family, and the healing power of gathering with intention.
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Key Takeaways:
- Why humans instinctively create rituals during times of change
- How personalized rituals are replacing traditional ceremonies
- Bruce’s five essential life rituals for today’s nonlinear lives
- How rituals help us process grief and strengthen relationships
- The surprising role of the “group keeper” as a peacemaker
- A simple framework for creating meaningful rituals of your own
Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including Life is the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads. His three Ted Talks have been viewed more than four millions times and he teaches the TED Course “How to Master Life Transitions”. His latest book is A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World–and How It Can Save Us
Connect with Bruce Feiler. Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
If you enjoyed this conversation with Bruce Feiler, check out these other episodes:
How to Harness the Power of Rituals with Michael Norton
Science and the Sacred with Sasha Sagan
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Bruce Feiler 00:00:00 The top down, prescriptive, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, in many cases patriarchal ritual. That’s what people don’t want anymore. They don’t want the mindless meaning free birth. Right? The funeral that’s just reading from the script that has no personalization of the life of the person. That’s what people don’t want anymore. But what’s happening is that people still crave the ritual, which is why basically they’re going off script.
Chris Forbes 00:00:32 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:16 When my mom died recently, the hospice did something I wasn’t expecting when the funeral home came for her. The staff wheeled her down the hallway and everybody on duty stood along the walls, ringing a small bell. I stood there, too, watching my mother recede down that hallway. And for those few minutes, nobody in that hallway was grieving alone. Bruce Feiler would say, that’s the whole point of a ritual. His new book is A Time to gather, and this conversation goes from grief to Ohio State football, sometimes in the same breath. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Bruce. Welcome back.
Bruce Feiler 00:01:59 Thank you so much for inviting me, Eric. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:03 I don’t know how many times you’ve been on now. I don’t really closely track it, but this is at least three. I think so, possibly more. You’ve got a new book, which is why we’re talking. It’s called A Time to GatherL How Ritual Created the World and How it Can Save Ubs.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:17 And we will get into that in just a moment. But we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Bruce Feiler 00:03:00 I didn’t remember the third part of that question, and I knew the parable was coming, and I purposely didn’t think about the parable in advance because, as you said, you’ve been kind enough to invite me on the show at least twice because I wanted to answer it in the moment that I heard it, not in the lying awake in bed and thinking about it.
Bruce Feiler 00:03:18 And what was interesting, hearing the parable again, is that as we have this conversation, I have young adult children, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between having younger children or even adolescent children and now young adult children. I’m the father, as you know, of identical twin daughters. They’re 21 now, and I think maybe the first couple of times I heard this, I would have thought a bit as myself. And now I think about it as as my talking to them. We’re also taping this conversation. Father’s day is approaching. And so what I hear in the parable now. Is one wolf representing be true to yourself and the other wolf representing. Be true to the people around you and I. Think that we are in this very challenging moment, in that the voices of the people around us are stronger than ever, and our ability to hear them is easier because our phones bring them to our ears and to our souls at all time. And I think learning to. Feed the still, quiet voice of yourself. And maybe that’s even the still quiet voice of God is more important than ever. So to me, the balance is to tune one out and tune the other end. and that’s, to me what feeding means at this moment in life. Because to me, it’s feeding the soul. But even more than that, it’s feeding your ability to get in tune with what life is really about. And that’s so much harder when there’s all this noise about what life is not really about.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:12 There is a lot of noise, there is no doubt about that at all. Okay, so I want to walk into the book here and tell me why a book about rituals.
Bruce Feiler 00:05:28 So I’ll use the frame that we’ve just were talking about 21 years ago. As we have this conversation, my wife and I went from empty nest to full nest in 32 minutes when we became the parents of identical twins.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:40 30 minutes, 32 minutes.
Bruce Feiler 00:05:43 as complicated and stressful 32 minutes as I’ve ever lived. because Linda delivered one of our girls naturally.
Bruce Feiler 00:05:51 And then the doctor said, the heartbeats dropping, we were going to have to cut the second one out, and the nurses around Linda’s head said, no, no, I believe she can deliver them. And she delivered the second daughter 32 minutes later. I later learned it was an old obstetric trick to threaten, to threaten a C-section, to get an exhausted mother, to push the second one out.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:13 You’ve got to be kidding me.
Bruce Feiler 00:06:14 I’m not kidding. I’ll linger on the story for a second because the doctor. This was April 15th, 2005, and the doctor at the end of the 30th, two minutes looks at his watch and says, oh. April 15th, tax day, early filer and late filer. The single funniest joke I’ve ever heard. And the single, like the example of someone like in his own, like this is what he did. He was a humorless person for the entire time we were with him. He delivers this unbelievable joke in the circumstance, and then the next moment he comes to check on, you know, to check on everybody.
Bruce Feiler 00:06:45 And I was like, doctor, that was a great line. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it, and he’s like, you’re the writer kid. And he went to being in person and he was never funny or personable again, like he was put on this earth for those 32 minutes and we got through it anyway. 18 years later, we went from full nest to empty nest in 32 minutes, when we dropped our children off at opposite end to the same college campus. And I drove back into Brooklyn, where I’m talking to you from now, today. And I walked through my front door and I had a very precise feeling, which is that I felt homesick in my own home. And I thought, you can’t use that word. That’s what kids feel on the first day of kindergarten, or like the first night of sleepaway camp. But it wasn’t just my kids. My dad had just died. You know, you and I have been carrying on a conversation through email in recent months as we both went through losses and my case, my sister in law, in your case, your beloved mother, who was so proud of you and this great book that you just published.
Bruce Feiler 00:07:39 So my dad had just died. My mom was aging. My marriage, which was built around those kids like, needs to be renegotiated. All my friendships need to be remade. And it really wasn’t just me, I think. You know, we were in this moment as I don’t have to tell you, but like, we carry the enemy around in our pocket and there’s this feeling that so many of us have that we’ve sort of abdicated our relationships for our smartphones, and we’re all craving this connection. I was like, there must be ways to connect. Like. And I went looking for solutions, and I stumbled into what I think of as the maybe the greatest story I’ve encountered in my life, certainly in 40 years of writing books professionally and the essence of it. And I know we’re going to piece it out, but the essence of it is that ritual works. We have 300,000 years of evidence. That’s before we were anatomical humans, that the first thing we ever did is to gather and bury our loved ones together.
Bruce Feiler 00:08:28 We know rituals from 500 academic studies. We know that rituals, calm us when we’re stressed and synchronize our heartbeats and make our families and our neighborhoods and our communities and our teams stronger. And yet, for the first time in the first century, in the 300,000 of them returning our backs on traditional rituals, right? Birth and coming of age rituals are in rapid decline. Only half of us are married. Only a third of us get married anymore. Which is shocking to me because cremation is rising so rapidly in this country. You know, it took us all these years to build up norms and we are abandoning these norms. And yet and now this gets into sort of some of the subtext of what we’re talking about. There’s been a human response to this, which is people are creating astonishing new ways to gather all around the world what I call a renaissance of ritual, kind of really the pushback against loneliness and big tech overreach and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, that’s a great story, because the old rules don’t apply.
Bruce Feiler 00:09:24 The new rules haven’t been written. And so I spent three years going to rituals in 16 countries on six continents. And the time to gather is both kind of a great adventure story, like how I spent The Empty Nest, but also kind of a toolkit for how to make gatherings that everybody will love.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:38 So I want to ask a question about ritual and when it’s useful and kind of when it’s not. I’ll give as an example. On my dad’s side of the family, there’d be a funeral. We would go, but we didn’t live really close to the rest of the relatives. There was no real sense in that ritual beyond that moment really connecting us. So it wasn’t like the ritual bonded the family together. And, you know, sometimes I have a suspicion of like the one time event versus the ongoing maintenance of things. So talk to me about what makes it so. The event, the ritual actually is something that brings people together and that that carries forth.
Bruce Feiler 00:10:24 Well, that’s such a subtle and thoughtful question.
Bruce Feiler 00:10:27 I’ll give you the short answer, and then maybe kind of then take a step back and work my way back to the topic. I think the short answer is the quality of the ritual. Right? Okay. A lot of what’s happening is in the world today. And I could talk a little about how we got here. Is that the top down, pre-scripted and institutionally mandated? Hierarchical in many cases, patriarchal ritual. That’s what people don’t want anymore. They don’t want the mindless meaning free birth. Right? The funeral that’s just reading from the script that has no personalization of the life of the person. Like, that’s what people don’t want anymore. But what’s happening is that people still crave the ritual, which is why basically they’re going off script and they’re creating their own. I mean, so that’s the short answer. The longer answer is that we think today that ritual kind of the default is that it was created, that religion created ritual. And so we sort of take our kind of complicated relationship with religion and impose it onto ritual.
Bruce Feiler 00:11:27 It’s the opposite. It’s the other way around. We have evidence of ritual, as I said, 300,000 years, like anatomical humans are only 150,000 years old. Right. And we didn’t have civilization or organized religion until much, much, much later. So we have hundreds of thousands of years where we’re burying our dead, right? Or, you know, celebrating unions or having occasions to mark any kind of instability. And if anything, it’s the narrative izing of that. It’s the turning it into replicable ritual. That’s what creates the religion, and that’s what religion is good at. So organized religion, broadly speaking, I don’t have to tell you this, but I will just say it out loud, more or less comes in the second half of the second millennium when you have Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism and Shintoism and Confucianism all come about in a period of a few hundred years. And those institutions turn out to be very good at institutionalizing ritual. Right? Five of the sacraments, you know, the Jewish calendar.
Bruce Feiler 00:12:26 We can go on and on and on and on. So that makes them replicable, portable, and they can spread around the world. So you go back to 200 years ago when for the first time, organized religion, let’s just say, takes a step back from being the center of life. What happens then? The academic study of ritual. Oh, wait, this is something that may be different. It can have a life outside of religion, right? Then you have. Durkheim comes up with collective effervescence. He’s a the great social scientist at the Sorbonne. Arnold van up, a German anthropologist. He invents rites of passage and a book in 1909 that creates the term. And he says, it’s very simple. You have four in order in your life birth, coming of age, marriage, death, the problem and the reason there’s so much kind of turmoil now is that that kind of normative, linear life, it might have been the first one, but certainly you and I had a conversation about my book, life is in the transitions.
Bruce Feiler 00:13:17 Right? And the essence of that is that the linear life is dead, and it’s been replaced by non-linear lives and have many more twists and turns than just kind of 4 or 5 once every birthday that ends in zero, whatever. And those are the lives we’re living now and people want new rituals. So if you look at the new rituals, they’re often for things that no one ever honored before. Right. Gender reveals, NICU graduations, cancer versaries, sober versaries. You know, death doulas, end of company doulas. Pet funerals are a $3 billion business now, right? Daddy daughter dances. Mom proms. These are all ways to mark transitions and in many cases, that institutions never honored, right? So not just marriage, but divorce. Not just birth, but stillbirth. Not just fertility, but infertility. My wife’s favorite chapter, which I’ve been saying so much I’m now beginning to worry about, is the Taylor Swift divorce party, right? About a woman who invents a divorce party that goes viral.
Bruce Feiler 00:14:14 And so the difference is that these don’t have the prescriptive, boring rituals that you just said you don’t like. And as a result, what’s going on is that the old rituals are being modernized so that we do not because they need to compete. And the new rituals are trying to find kind of traditional elements to give them the resonance that once we’ve done for thousands of years, might still carry.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:54 When my mom passed. Recently, we realized we didn’t really know what we were going to do. We knew she wanted to be cremated, so we had that.
Bruce Feiler 00:15:03 This was very recently that you said that to me, that the family gathered. You told me that on stage. And so you’re discussing this. And is she religious? And the kids are not or everybody’s the same degree of religiosity. Are there some kids that want religion and some how much conflict is there? Because the purpose of the ritual in part, is to modulate the conflict.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:23 So those are good questions. My mother was mildly religious, but not really.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:29 She also, over her life, alienated most of the people that she was close to. Unfortunately, so she was living in Denver now and she hadn’t made any real friends there. Her friends in Columbus were kind of there’s maybe like 1 or 2. So there’s a funeral. Doesn’t quite make sense. We’re having it cremated. But what I realized was we hadn’t planned any of that. We hadn’t really thought about any of it.
Bruce Feiler 00:15:52 And you probably had not made collective decisions as a family for a long time.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:57 Not like that. No. I mean, I guess my mother gave us the benefit of, you know, God rest her soul, running into trouble often enough that the three children. And then we we discovered there’s a fourth child who’s entered into the family later. We often had to come together and be like, well, how do we bail mom out of this one? Or how do we share her expenses? So she’s in the hospital again.
Bruce Feiler 00:16:21 What do I know about her son? Eric is he’s also had a lot of experiences with bailing himself out of difficult circumstances. So you probably have a very a voice with a lot of authority in those conversations.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:30 Yeah, yeah. She had a difficult life in many, many ways. So we ultimately are still right now, like we don’t quite know what we’re going to do now. I probably shouldn’t state this on air. I’m going to distribute some of her ashes at a place that was near and dear to her heart. That probably doesn’t encourage that. So that’s coming. There’s a little covert activity I’m not going to again, I’m not going to indict myself.
Bruce Feiler 00:16:56 From having right of time to gather in the Walt Disney World. They have a group called Team Grandma when someone decides to be ashes in. It’s a small world and it freaks out the kids. They have to stop and bring in hazmat suits, and so they actually have some experience with this in the event that it’s a Disney property.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:14 This is going to be just like a couple sprinkles. I’m not going to dump like a big giant thing of ashes. So we were then like, well, what could we do? And this is still all in progress.
Bruce Feiler 00:17:26 Everybody knows I’m taking over this podcast. Now, you and I are going to help design that ritual in the second half of our conversation in real time.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:33 Okay, well, I can tell you what we’ve thought about, okay. And then we’ll get to that. Okay. So real quick ritual. Incredibly valuable. It’s been part of what we as a species have used forever. Religion sort of ritualized some of those rituals and that the big four birth, puberty, marriage, death are important. But you in the book propose five recurring non-linear life rituals. Do you want to share those with us?
Bruce Feiler 00:18:03 Yeah, I think that it’s just very, very clear that that framework that was put up a century ago just is irrelevant to the lives that we have today and wanted to capture them. So I think that there are five that recur, each on a kind of bespoke fingerprint of whatever particular life course you and I have had. Linear lives that have parallels but are very different.
Bruce Feiler 00:18:29 Right. When we have the transitions by data. As you remember when we talked about life is in the transitions is we spend half of our adult lives in a life quake and in the tradition that helps us navigate through. Okay. So we need these whenever we need them. So lose their parent. You know, older in life some people lose a parent before they’re born, right. Like this happen us our lives. And so I wanted names. The reason I like life quake and life transition is that there’s no values attached to them. Like, you know, almost half of life quakes are involuntary, like a diagnosis or a death or a tornado or a pandemic. But almost half of them, 43% are in Terry. You know, you know, I didn’t volunteer life quake because your spouse cheats on you. A voluntary life quake is do you cheat on your spouse? Like, we quit jobs. We take neurons, we change our belief systems. We move. So unwanted life quake and life transition because they’re very value neutral.
Bruce Feiler 00:19:17 And I wanted that for these. So I think that there are five recurring life rituals. Welcoming. Becoming so welcoming like that would be traditionally like a Tism, but it also could be a negation party, welcoming, becoming, becoming like the adolescents that also might be quitting a job to do something else that might be walking away from a safe job, to go into an entrepreneur thing or begin a creative project so welcoming, becoming loving, right? Whatever kind of relationship that might be. It might be a wedding. It might be a commitment ceremony. It might be a thoughtful ceremony, you know, whatever it might be, which obviously can be mourning of a loved one I’ve done recently. But it also could be, you know, mourning the loss of a leg. Right? As someone who almost lost a leg to cancer or a loss of a job, if you status the loss of a pet and then renewing right, which to me captures the idea that our lives go through these periodic moments of iteration and prevention.
Bruce Feiler 00:20:16 And one of the reasons I wanted to use those words is that they’re neutral. But there’s another reason, and that is that kind of every ritual has every other ritual in it. this in a lot of ways from my kids when we had a little gathering long before I was doing this book, when we took them off to college, it turned out that they were mourning the end of their childhood as much as they were anxious about the becoming of young adulthood. That’s what I feel like we experienced also mourning the end of the sort of, you know, day to day parenting. As much as I was wondering what was going to happen, as I said about parenting young adults and is anyone with young adults will know it’s not the same, but it also it’s not a clean break anymore. Any of us. And so every ritual has every other ritual, right? Even having a baby, if it’s the first baby, it might be mourning the end of, you know, just being a couple or just being single or having your life.
Bruce Feiler 00:21:05 So we have these five rituals. They occur whenever they occur. And also everyone has almost every other one inside it.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:14 So in addition to these five non-linear life rituals welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning and renewing. You also talk about four kinds of rituals. Civic, calendaric. Is that how you say that word?
Bruce Feiler 00:21:27 I mean, I say calendar, I never checked the calendar, checked it when I did the audio. Yeah, a political ritual. A civic ritual is like an inauguration or a coronation. A calendrical ritual is like Thanksgiving or summer solstice or, you know, Valentine’s Day and have day to day rituals. Right? So handshaking, Namaste, grace over a meal. You have really what a lot of this is about, which is, are these life rituals like the mark occasions in our lives? And I’ll be worth pausing, though later. I’ll tell you why I don’t care about this definition, as you know from having time to gather, but worth it. Just to sort of put a definition on the table that we can, you know, grapple with.
Bruce Feiler 00:22:07 So I define a ritual as a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay. It’s an act because it’s a doing. It’s not a talking. Right? You know, tell a story and you can listen to a story. You listen to Roy and I. That’s verbal and that’s oral. Or, you know, that might be this is embodied storytelling. We are telling a story together, like, okay, you can have one version of the loss of your mother. A sibling could have an entirely different version depending on their relationship. Or in this case, a lost sibling might have an entirely different relationship. But this is something we’re going to tell together. And as we move later to planning helping you plan this ritual, you’ll see that part of the rule of the ritual is to accommodate all the individual stories and make sure that everybody feels ready. So it’s a doing. It’s an act. Next it’s shared, right? You know, you could take a walk in the woods with your dog and that’s a great experience.
Bruce Feiler 00:22:59 But forest bathing, which is one of the fastest growing rituals on the planet, which began in Japan and is now takes place in 160 countries around the world. I went forest bathing in the Andes mountains of Chile, done in a group, particularly with the idea of connecting not just to nature, but to those around us. Right. And then you’ve got this unnecessary thing, which sounds the weirdest. Maybe in some ways the most important. It’s unnecessary. You don’t have to get down on one knee to get engaged. You do not have to wear black to mourn. You do not have to circle the bride seven times to get married. These are unnecessary things that become necessary because we give them collective meaning. Okay, so a good example is hand washing is utilitarian. It serves a purpose. It’s necessary to clean your hands so you don’t get sick. Right. Handshaking has no utilitarian purpose. It’s basically to say I don’t have a weapon and let’s build a relationship, right? The dinner bell is utilitarian.
Bruce Feiler 00:23:56 Come to dinner wherever you are, out in the fields upstairs doing your homework. The chemo bell, which, by the way, I had chemo 18 years ago. There was no chemo bell. It’s an entirely new ritual of. Let’s gather at the end of this.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:07 Share what a chemo bell is.
Bruce Feiler 00:24:08 A chemo bell is when someone finishes chemotherapy, there’s a bell on the floor. They ring the bell, but they don’t do it alone. The nurses come. Maybe the other patient. The family comes. Were the last one. I ended chemo when I got the last test. That said, I don’t have to come. I cried by myself on the sofa. The chemo bell is a way of making that a collective event so I don’t feel alone. I feel the sadness of, oh my God, what I just did to my body. The hope of what I hope it will do to my body, which is ravish it, but kill the cancer and the collective event for all the people. It’s a perfect example of a modern ritual.
Bruce Feiler 00:24:45 It’s a shared, unnecessary act, and the most important that makes us feel at home. And what do I mean by that? Safe. Secure. It’s scary. I just lost a loved one. I’m a die of cancer. Okay, it’s coming in. We’re getting married. What is that going to mean? I’m moving from one place to another. I’m changing a job. I lost my pet. You know, I was just given an organ donation. I’m getting divorced. Whatever it is, it in the moment of most instability. It gives you the preciousness of stability.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:15 You tell in the book. And I don’t remember the person’s name who invented a ritual like the chemo bell. This happened at the hospice I was at. They have a thing where, when the funeral home arrives to pick up your loved one, they wheel him down and everybody who’s on duty stands there. Oh my God. They ring a bell. They encourage you to stand there. And it was this beautiful moment. They said they were going to do it.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:42 And I was like, all right, fine, whatever you want to do. But it was really.
Bruce Feiler 00:25:45 Tell us what you feel, because what you describing is what I’m describing, which so worst here. And you think a little woo woo. I don’t really care. It’s not so important. And then what do you actually feel?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:56 Yeah I mean I wasn’t that dismissive, but what I felt was I don’t know, I guess I felt that we were marking this thing in a very special way that we were together. It felt like an opportunity to honor my mom, but also honor the nurses who had taken care of her. It was very emotional. The main thing I felt was a lot of emotion, some of that grief. You know, watching my mother recede down a hallway on a stretcher. Right. But also, it was uplifting in the way that often causes tears. I have that a lot, right? Where it’s like, I can’t say like I’m crying because I’m sad. I’m crying because there’s a strong emotion present.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:36 I can’t even always put my fingers on what it is. But it was that experience.
Bruce Feiler 00:26:41 First of all, that’s a beautiful description. And let’s just all pause and like, hear that for a second. For and thank you for sharing that. I know it’s still relatively recent and raw. As we have this conversation, I will tell you how I process what you just said. As of now, having been thinking about this for four years, first of all, I want to say that we sacrilize what is scary. I mean, think of the fairy tales. Right into the woods. Right. Where do the ogres live? The ogres live in the woods. The ogres live under the bridge. The ogres live outside like in places that are liminal. That’s what’s scary. And we are sacrificing it like the wolf, the ogre, the dragon. Like, these are scary things. Why are scary movies surging in popularity as we have this conversation? Because we have a lot of upended and unmarked fear in us because of the pace of change that we’re all living our lives.
Bruce Feiler 00:27:35 So that’s the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is what’s going on here is that we have outsourced so much of our lives to big tech and to algorithms that are designed to divide us and breed hate among us. Ritual is the original human algorithm and the craving that we have and that we are expressing. I am saying we should do this, but even before I say that we should, I’m saying that we are doing this, that it is happening because we feel the craving and the craving is. What the heck do I do with these emotions that I just lost my mother? Like minutes ago we were looking at, you know, blips on a screen and wondering, do we need to give her water and what’s going to happen? And maybe five days ago or five weeks ago or five months ago, our family was scattered everywhere. Now we’re brought together in a way that we haven’t been together in a long time. Or if there’s a, you know, a child you didn’t know before have never been together.
Bruce Feiler 00:28:28 Like, that’s complicated and things to do. And now suddenly we have this emotion. And it was so described so beautifully by a death doula who told me the story about when she gets to the root, to the to the room, and three in the morning when the body, when the person dies, it’s like there’s this gray, murky mess. We spend a lot of our times in a gray, murky mess right now in our lives. That’s just a fact, and we have nothing to do with it. And what the ritual is. Vessel to convert the gray, murky mess into a slightly less gray, slightly less murky, potentially thing of beauty so that someone shows up and says, let’s put a ritual here. It is a vessel. It creates structure, okay. It creates a sense that this is a, that we have non ordinary feelings. And we’re going to create a non ordinary space in which to accommodate it. Right. When we get to designing a ritual or any ritual right.
Bruce Feiler 00:29:23 The first thing you need is a sacred space. And it’s, it’s a this is why circuses have rings. Right. Or you know, we just have courts or fields and trials have courtrooms. They are spaces that hold these complicated things. They say outside I was that and inside that I’m this. And what they’re saying is you are going through a non ordinary experience. And the way this woman Sarah her is her name. The way she said it to me is so good. She said trauma is when things are happening faster than your mind can process them. So your body is experiencing this and your body and your mind and as a result, your relationship with the other bodies and other minds around you are out of sync with one another. And so by ringing a bell, by paying tribute, by having an honor walk, that’s the story that I tell in my book about this woman, Missy Holliday. And we can get into it. But now I’ve sidetracked with all this theory, but it’s creating a vessel for you to have a collective experience.
Bruce Feiler 00:30:20 It’s embodied storytelling, its values lived out loud. And that’s what it does. It forces you to do it. And once you stop, what happens? All the emotions come pouring out. But they’re there when other people to to catch.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:33 Yeah. I mean, and I remember, you know, we knew my mom was within days or hours for days, a few days, not too many. I can’t find it right at the moment. But I was like, all right, I need to write something that I say after she passes because I don’t think anybody else. I just don’t think anybody else in my family is going to do that.
Bruce Feiler 00:30:55 Public ceremony, but just to one another in that moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:58 Right after she passes. At her bedside. When we’re all there, you know. It took a little while. I was the one who was there overnight that she passed. So of course she passed. I called everybody. There’s a really interesting odd story in there also, but I called everybody once everybody got there, then I, you know, I’m a certified interfaith spiritual director, I should be able to pull this off.
Bruce Feiler 00:31:19 So I actually, Kristen turns in my life that I found meaning through so I can help everybody. I’m the you know, this is my life. Like I’m the know it all. But turns out yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:28 Yeah so I yeah. But it was the same thing. Like you said, there was this gray murkiness that I knew was there. Again, since we hadn’t talked about any of this or planned any of this, none of us really knew what to do.
Bruce Feiler 00:31:42 One of the things I remember from my dad’s death back in 2021, during Covid, but not from Covid. I remember actually looking at the social science of this and writing about this in my newsletter that’s now in Substack, the Non-linear life. Sarah Kerr, in that same story, which she said is after they say goodbye to the body when she leads them through a ritual where they wash the body, you know, she invites the spouse to take off the wedding ring. Her narrative is that is that there’s a land of the living, and there’s a land of the dead, and that you call out people and that the job of the family is to push the body, like on a canoe, to go from the land of the living to the land of the dead.
Bruce Feiler 00:32:19 It’s a beautiful way of framing it. And she has people call out, oh, uncle Bob is over there, right? Or maybe the family pet is over there, like call out the Aunt Judy, or maybe the lost child or whatever to beckon the land of the dead to receive the new member of the community. But that’s not where it ends for her. She then says, look around, this is the family now, and we need to reassign that. You know that spirit, okay? And that’s what. Interestingly enough, what the social science says, what the social science says that happens in that moment is that the role that the patriarch, right? Or the clown in the family, or the baker in the family or the storyteller? my son, Eric the storyteller. Those roles get reassigned. And that’s part of the essence, right? There is the mourning of the saying goodbye. But there’s now the becoming of a new rule that those of us play. Okay. So the relationships among the survivors, the relationships among the people who were no longer like the parents left behind and the empty nest, or the siblings who’ve gone off to, you know, into young adulthood or to join the army or whatever it might be.
Bruce Feiler 00:33:28 There’s and that’s what’s going on here, right? So if it’s true that you and I met with life, as in the transitions, that book of mind was how each of us individually handles the transitions and the life quakes and the twists and turns of our lives. What we’re talking about here is how the group handles them right. It’s not a life quake. It’s a group quake. It is a group reimagining it to welcome someone new, to get a little larger, to get a little smaller and reassign the roles. It is tending the group. Right. I’m very much, and I think that what really got me excited about this project was that I’m a group keeper. I just am I’m the one who runs the family dinner game, who runs the Backyard Olympics, who runs the you know, who leads the family meet, calls the family meeting, leads the family meeting, collects the family stories. I’m not really a joiner outside of my life. Like I don’t belong to forge, you know, or to the rotary or to white people.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:19 That would have been a surprise to me. Have you just pulled the 4H card?
Bruce Feiler 00:34:23 Really. I’m really a joiner in my family, like, you know, and I’m in it. And we all have to tend the group. We all have groups. Maybe it’s not your family, maybe it’s your office, maybe it’s your team. Maybe it’s your co-religionists, the people you protest politics with, whatever it might be that your AA group like, I don’t really care, but we need groups. Our biggest source of happiness and meaning is our relationships, and we need to focus more time to cultivate our relationships. And the internet is not helping.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:10 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things. A challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call the still Point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago, so you don’t have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm. That’s oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm .
So I don’t know quite where in the book this is, but I remember you talking about this idea of being like a group keeper and like, what are we actually if we are that role.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:41 You said that what we are is mediators. Yeah, talk about that.
Bruce Feiler 00:36:43 It was a surprising thing. Like we’re talking about the five things that rituals are. And soon we’ll talk about the five things rituals do to help people plan their own rituals. But there’s a couple of things that the four things actually that they do, they connect us. We’ve discussed that right. They chronicle our lives. If you ask anybody listening to us like, give me the ten pivotal moments in your life. Most of them involve rituals, probably weddings, births, deaths, new jobs, achieving something, whether in work or in sports or whatever it might be. They create special places, but the surprising thing they do is that they correct imbalances within the group. We’re often afraid of the ritual because of the conflict, but the conflict resolution is a main part of the ritual. It titrates and modulates the conflict. Let’s go back to my dad’s funeral. So my dad, just to remind you of the story, or people who don’t know it just to tell the story.
Bruce Feiler 00:37:31 My dad grew up in Savannah, Georgia. He was like a civic builder of the kind of 20th century stranger stopped him in airports and said, you look like an interesting person. He stopped strangers in his hometown and said, are you lost? Can I direct? Like everybody loved my father. He was never depressed a minute in his life. Until he got Parkinson’s, he got depressed. He tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks, and he lost the plot of his story. And like, we tried everything. The only thing that kept him alive is when I sat down one Monday morning, one Monday morning and sent him a question. Tell me about the toys you played with as a child and he who was not the writer in the family, like Eric, wrote that story. And I sent him another the next week because I was so excited. Like, tell me about the house you grew up in. This continued for eight years until weeks before he died. He finished a 65,000 word memoir.
Bruce Feiler 00:38:22 One question, one answer at a time. Like it’s an astonishing story. We finally published the book last year, got the whole community together. They could not during Covid anyway. So he dies. Eight years later, we all go back to Savannah, Georgia, my hometown, and I’m in a conversation. My job, my role. Actually, it’s not the storytelling. In this case, it was interfacing with the rabbi to plan the funeral. I’m the planner here. The group keeper attend the group ritual. My mother says I don’t like throwing dirt on a coffin. I find it barbaric. I want it nowhere near its funeral. I think we should have long stem yellow roses. At which point my little sister says the throwing of the dirt on the coffin is the only part of the ritual that I like. There is no ritual without it, and we must have it. Okay. And I think long stemmed yellow roses is to hallmark, okay. And I’m like, no one was backing down.
Bruce Feiler 00:39:16 I was like, Rabbi, I’ll call you back. At which point I then proceed to middle child my way through a solution, which I later learned from the designers is how you do it. Like, okay, mom, what are you really after? And. Okay, Carrie, you know my sister. What are you really after? And I was like, by the way, she lived with a guy for 60 years, including taking care of him in very dirty. Like she once let her have the roses. Right. So what did we do? We ordered three dozen long stemmed yellow roses. And then we also went to his beloved Tybee Island at the beach. And we got little packets of Tybee Island sand. And we gave everyone a choice. Like the ritual created the conflict. And the ritual resolved the conflict. And if I could just jump ahead and yeah, people are group keepers. Are we huggers? Are we talkers? You know, are we planners? No. You know, we are.
Bruce Feiler 00:40:04 We’re peacemakers. We want the group to hold together. And there we will make the peace, even if it doesn’t make everybody absolutely happy. And just to tell one quick addendum to this, the ninth of the ten funerals that I attended in my week of attending ten funerals in Ireland was in Dublin of an older woman, and she loved Broadway musicals. So even in the church they play played some of these songs. And everybody sang like she was a very modest woman, I can tell you. Half of her grandchildren were dressed in Prada. And then we’re going to go to the cemetery. And the undertaker, the mortician is a woman who’s the head of the Funeral directors society. She says to me, how are you getting to the cemetery? She’s like, how did you get here? And I said, I took an Uber, like the most modern natural answer of all time. And she says, well, how are you getting to the cemetery? I’m like, I have no idea. And she says, ride with us.
Bruce Feiler 00:40:54 Before I could think, I said yes. At which point she opened the back door of the hearse, puts up the jumper seat. I sit down and there I’m riding to the funeral. Excuse me? With the dearly departed soul of the woman being buried. So we get there. By the way, did you? I didn’t know the difference between a coffin and a casket. Coffin has. The ankh is a hexagon. It’s got the angles for the shoulders, whereas a casket is rectangle. So she’s in a coffin because they have to. She. They’re going to put her in the same grave with her, which is what they do in Ireland with her loved ones, with the family. So you need the body to deteriorate, which is why they don’t have steel coffins. Anyway, they lower and the priest is there. He does. The traditional service actually dust to dust and ashes to ashes and all of that? Right from Earth, we came into Earth. We’re going to return. They lower the body, and then someone steps forward and each member, about three dozen members of the family, that’s the only one to come.
Bruce Feiler 00:41:50 Each gets a long stemmed yellow rose and tosses it into the grave. And I’m sitting there like, we’ve all been to weddings where you think the wedding is every wedding I’ve ever been to. And like this suddenly was every funeral had ever been to, including my own father’s. And I’m sitting there weeping all over again. Because again, that’s the emotion that you talked about when the body leaves the hospice. Right. Which is I didn’t know I was carrying around this emotion. I’m like a reporter. I’m taking notes, you know, I’m thinking about it analytically. But yet there is the emotion living there. And as soon as they do that unnecessary, that shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home of throwing that long stem yellow rose. I’m back at my father’s grave feeling the same things all over again.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:31 I’m fascinated by the logistics of how did you make this happen? So how many funerals again?
Bruce Feiler 00:42:36 So I went to a group baptism at the Vatican. Adolescent tooth filing in Bali. Traditional bride price for negotiation in South Africa.
Bruce Feiler 00:42:44 Six weddings in a day in Las Vegas and ten funerals in a week in Ireland.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:48 Okay, so those last two are the ones, particularly the last one, even the weddings. You know what day it is you can kind of figure out. But funerals don’t happen on a schedule. Did you just show up in Ireland and start asking people, do you have a funeral I can go to?
Bruce Feiler 00:43:01 Like so funerals, I mean, they call them the national pastime is slightly disrespectful. Funerals are a big deal in Ireland. Like like you were supposed to show up at the wake and as a result, funerals. It used to be passed around when everybody lived in the same area. Right? Then it went to the newspaper, then it went to the radio, where four times a day, still to this day in Ireland, every radio channel have nine, noon, six and nine. They own the radio. Recite. Is that a law? It’s what people want to expect. They tell you who died so you can know who to show up.
Bruce Feiler 00:43:36 Okay, then. And I tell the story of the book is, you know, somebody put this all online with report is the extension for Ireland and now it’s online. So people go, you know, and their traffic is like 9:00 in the morning, which is like right when people are getting to work, they are checking. So therefore, oddly, it’s actually not that hard to find out who is being buried. I have no idea how to do it in Brooklyn, where I live, or even in Savannah where I grew up. But it’s actually not that hard. And in this case, I knew I was going to Waterford, which is the oldest city, and I knew I was going to Dublin, and I actually wrote and became connected to the head of the Funeral Director Association. And through a combination of reply and people willing to help, I got invited to all of these funerals, and these are the ones that I happen to go now. That’s the sort of short answer turned out to be the country in the world where it’s easy enough to find the funerals.
Bruce Feiler 00:44:32 Now, within that, it turns out that the funerals are very different. And that’s another story that actually, I think is very moving. Tell it, well, I think so. If you look at the difference between the first and the 10th in Waterford, okay, that’s the oldest town in Ireland and this is the oldest business in the oldest town are Thompson Funeral Directors. And they invite me over. Actually, I’ve never seen a dead body before. Right. And there were three. I mean, within 15 minutes of walking there, they were getting their makeup done, their hair done. And this was someone who died in his 90s, and he was religious, but the children were not. We were talking about that earlier. Right. And the children say, you know what? We should honor dad with a traditional funeral. But Catholic funerals are so in rapid decline because of the church sex abuse scandal, because of the scandal of people taking babies from Edward Weathers and putting them into what are called Magdalene laundries and 50,000 women were there’s a whole bunch of reasons.
Bruce Feiler 00:45:27 There’s no priest in the cathedral in Waterford, Ireland. So they got to get a rent a priest from the next town who’s going to do this funeral? And they have to wake in the funeral director’s home. Funeral home, not the home. And the guy has a kid in his 60s who is in the one percenters. He’s a Harley writer, and the one percenters is the 1% of motorcycle riders who don’t mind being called hooligans. Right. It literally says, we don’t give an F on their website, and the F is spelled out, so they come with their motorcycles. So we got two motorcycles. Then you got the funeral director in the top hat looking like Fred Astaire in his 80s. They put the body in the hearse, and then four Harleys behind, and then all the family. And we all walked to the church where the rent a priest runs this what would have been an impersonal funeral. Except funerals are changing because they have to. The church has to respond, okay. So they allow them to have personal objects.
Bruce Feiler 00:46:25 In this case, they got a soccer ball. They got a red and white scarf because he’s a big fan of the Liverpool Reds. And as they lead the body out and the guy tells the story of coming by the way. Great time to have this conversation. The World Cup. As we taped this we’re having the World Cup. He went to the World Cup in Ireland. Never left the country. Finds one fish and chip store to eat out for ten days. They play the theme song of the Liverpool Reds, which is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s You’ll Never Walk Alone. So they play it the Jerry and the peacemakers version of it. People are singing. People are crying. People are booing because some people don’t like this football team. An amazing spectacle. Fast forward a week later to the 10th and final funeral I go to, which is at the biggest cemetery in Ireland, but the body is being cremated, a man in his 40s who is a theatre performer, and he dies by suicide. Conflict.
Bruce Feiler 00:47:22 The woman running. This is not a rent a priest or any priest. She is a secular officiant. Big eyes. Rainbow colored eyeshadow. No hair from alopecia. She goes by the moniker Bold Priestess and she stands up and she doesn’t sugarcoat at all. Eric, he was so powerful. We are here to honor Carl’s life, but also our own confusion about how Carl chose to end this life. So at the end, we’re going to close the curtain, and she says, I have a bowl of pebbles. Please come take a pebble. This is from the river where he lived and where he died. Keep it as a memory of Carl, or give it back. And as we as everyone does this, and as we exit this chapel, we’re going to play Carl’s favorite song. On comes Frank Sinatra singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. And it’s the same thing I said earlier about, first of all, do the reporting, by the way, just as a writing matter. But there’s something universal about these things.
Bruce Feiler 00:48:20 One was a church, one was a, you know, secular. One was religious, one was not. One was a man who died at 90. I have a living full life. One was a man who cut his life short from mental health. Like. But yet the same ritual elements perform the same magic in both rituals.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:39 That’s wild and beautiful. All right, if we’re going to honor the promise you made earlier, we need to get to designing my mother’s, ritual, I. My family’s going to be like, what? You did. What? You designed it on air. Well, we’re going to try it, but can I first tell you what one of a couple of thoughts are.
Bruce Feiler 00:48:58 Sure. Give me all the beautiful stuff and all as much of the messy stuff as you’re comfortable sharing.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:04 I mean, there’s not a lot of messy stuff she had said to some of us over the years. She wanted to have her ashes spread in the Caribbean, or then we all inferred maybe Florida, because Florida was like her favorite place.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:15 So maybe there’s maybe we go there and do that. But the best idea we’ve had is, she was an Ohio State football fanatic.
Bruce Feiler 00:49:24 Oh, nice.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:25 Like it just the the kind that, you know, I look at and I’m like, settle down. It’s a game. But not to my mother, right. Not to my mother.
Bruce Feiler 00:49:34 Here’s the conflict. My mother went to Michigan, and we’re gonna have to deal with that in this conversation. But yeah, we all know I always matters.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:39 My brother is a big fan. And my new sister, her husband is a big Ohio State fan. And so what we thought about was all of us my brother, my sister, his kids, my son, everybody that that was there. Meeting for an Ohio State football game together this fall.
Bruce Feiler 00:49:58 Awesome. Okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:00 So let’s say that’s what we’re going to do.
Bruce Feiler 00:50:02 Basically, what these are, to boil it down to its essence, is a beginning, a middle and an end. Okay. What we need at first is we need a sacred space.
Bruce Feiler 00:50:11 We need to decide where we’re going to do this, who’s going to be there, and how do we make the space sacred. What you’re talking about with the honor walk with the hospice and the honor walk that opens time to gather with organ donors about to give donation and created some incredible story, which I won’t slow us down by telling now, but that’s trying to sacrifice a very sacred place, right? Which is a, you know, hospital corridor, right? Or in your case, a hospice hallway, which is like that. So we need to figure out where okay. So let’s just start with that. So where are we going to do this. Okay I like that. We’re doing it again. Are we going to do it at tailgate. Are we going to do it. You know I’m guessing we can’t do it on the 50 yard line unless we’re doing it.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:50 When you say when we do it, I guess it depends what we’re doing. Well, we’re going to I mean, the doing for us is going to the sacred Hall of the horseshoe.
Bruce Feiler 00:50:58 Okay. But but for me, are we going to do this? We’re going to do it in the stands. Are we going to do it in line to get, you know, before? So I understand that we’re going to do the gathering, but let’s just go back to a theme in this. So is this going to be after the game, during the game, before the game, the night before the game. Like where are we going to? So I feel like man. Remember we talked about weddings. That can be the engagement, the whatever. So where are we going to do the actual ritual of which the other stuff is going to be the dressing or different ritual parts of it?
Eric Zimmer 00:51:33 I guess we had not gotten that far. Okay, so.
Bruce Feiler 00:51:36 So ask this question. And the most important thing is to identify a place it doesn’t really matter, right? It could be a place on campus if the weather is beautiful, if it’s a fall afternoon, it could be in the hotel room the night before.
Bruce Feiler 00:51:50 Right? It could be a park that, you know, maybe she lived in Columbus, Ohio or. But we need a place. And what we need to do is then open the circle. You know, when my sister in law died, this was happening around the time your mother was dying and you and I were emailing about it. You know, my brother came. We all went to say goodbye. And she was in hospice for less than 24 hours. And by the time we got there, we did not get to say goodbye. And so we have this gray murkiness right. Where we’re bumping around, getting some food, hugging, crying, not knowing what to do. And the next day my brother comes and says, I want everyone to sit around and and share stories about Laura, because we had at this point, almost two dozen people there. and I was like, great. But, not to be pedantic, but let’s turn it into a ritual. We need to open the circle and we need to close the circle.
Bruce Feiler 00:52:37 So he says, oh yeah, we have this piece of art, this candle, this vase that we used to light every night before dinner. So we put that in the middle, lighting it. We’re here, so we need a time and a place to sort of say we are here to honor. What’s your mother’s name?
Eric Zimmer 00:52:51 Jan.
Bruce Feiler 00:52:52 We’re here to. I was going to say Janet. Wow. I don’t know if I, you know, intuited that we’re here to to honor Jan. So we need his place. And what you want to do here is choose the people and then identify the tension. We’re here to mourn. We’re here to celebrate. We’re here to connect. Okay. It’s different from when she just died. In this case, you know, six months has passed, and we’re gathering here to honor the life to whatever it is, right? Think of a time to gather comes from Ecclesiastes. There’s a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to weep, but time to laugh.
Bruce Feiler 00:53:22 A time to scatter stones in a time to gather them. So we’re here. So, number one, we need a beginning. Create a special place. Say, this is why we’re here. And this is what we’re going to do. Okay, that’s the beginning. Now let’s turn to the middle. You need compromise. This completely grows out of what we were talking about. Another death doula that I talked to in Australia, the leading ritual designer in Australia. She tells me the story about this family she’s been working. She’s like, I don’t like conflict. I’m a ritual designer. But 80% of my cases have conflict. And she tells the story of a man who dies. He’s got a second wife and the youngest son from the first wife, who was previously estranged from the now deceased, completely estranged from the second wife. And it’s in the will A prayer has to be read. And the second wife says he wasn’t religion any more. We ain’t doing that prayer over my dead body. The son says, I’ve come for the prayer.
Bruce Feiler 00:54:19 Like that was my mother. That was our life. And I don’t want that. The second wife says, you know, I want to do a poem or whatever, whatever it is. And so she’s like, my heartbeat is rising, I’m stressed. What am I going to do? And she says, what are you really after? What are you really after? And she goes home and she writes something that she’s going to say that includes the prayer and also includes the poem. So you’ve got different people here. You’ve got the storyteller in you. You might have the baker, right? You might have the dancer, you might have the strange child that suddenly come back. So you need things in the middle, embodied things in the middle, almost like what I call something old, something new, something borrowed, something new. Maybe something religious from your childhood. Maybe something non-religious. Maybe something everyone. You need a peace plan where everybody feels that it’s their ritual, even if it’s a shared ritual.
Bruce Feiler 00:55:11 So tell me, what might that be? By the way, everybody can add one of their own.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:16 Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that there’s a ton of conflict. Like my sister Mary, who’s the sister that we discovered a number of years ago who has been welcoming to the family. And her and my mom had a beautiful, beautiful, healing relationship. You know, I think her and her husband lean a little bit more religious. So they wanted the chaplain to come in and say a few words, as my mom was in her last days, and none of us had an objection to that. Like, that’s not my thing or my brother’s thing, but sure, let’s do it. So I think there’s there’s a there’s an openness to finding what different people need. So I think I would have to sort of group sourced. Yeah. Like what would be meaningful for you in this? Like what?
Bruce Feiler 00:56:02 That’s all you need to know. Something as simple as everybody contribute one thing. Give us a piece of music. And by the way, have that thing grow out of your relationship with her, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:56:16 So maybe you mean each person.
Bruce Feiler 00:56:18 Each person. Oh, yeah. With me, we always baked oatmeal cookies, so I’m gonna pass out oatmeal cookies with me. She always sang this song. Okay. You know, to me, I gardened, and she and I, she loved tending roses. And I tend roses. So we’re going to hand out roses. So something that expresses your own. Something old, something new, something borrowed. Something you is the one I’m adding. Like it’s not blue and it’s not a sixpence in your shoe. It’s something that makes it both universal, but also very specific. Okay. And we’re going to do that in the hotel the night before in the parking lot, the day of literally the interview that I had right before you, someone was talking about, you know, is tailgating a ritual? Right. It’s a shared, unnecessary act. So maybe she was a tailgating or maybe she was a gardener.
Bruce Feiler 00:57:12 Again, that’s the middle. Now it’s the end. What do you need at the end? You want to end with a moment of hope? A thing about funerals that’s a little surprising is that funerals are for the living, not for the dead. You know, I like when people leave things behind. They want. But ultimately, this is for the group to reconstitute itself. I have this weird factoid in my head from my time when I was working on my book, The Secrets of Happy Families, and when I was writing a column in The New York Times about contemporary families. And the weird factoid that came from the editor of reunions magazine was that most family reunions grow out of funerals because people get together under duress for something that a sad occasion. They realize we kind of like one another and we should do this more often, and they do the reunion. So you want to end with that. Okay, we’ve had the time to mourn and the time to dance. Now we want the time to hope.
Bruce Feiler 00:58:07 We want to look forward. Right. What I’ve been doing in the rituals that I’ve been leading, I ran to its head this spring in Vancouver when they were moving, you know, to Florida for the next years. Ted, I did it at LinkedIn recently as I’ve been doing what I did, what I saw in that funeral in Ireland, as I’ve been taking pebbles and having and, and bringing Sharpies and having people write a hope for the future and then turn that pebble upside down in the middle of the circle, and then everyone take that so you have your own hope you’re trying to manifest, and then someone else is hope. But you want. Psychologists have this term, I’m sure, in the many episodes of The one you feed, you’ve done this where your best possible self, like you cannot get better at your tennis game, or your souffle will not get souffle, or your garden will not get greener if you don’t identify the goal. This is our best possible self, our best possible selves.
Bruce Feiler 00:58:59 You want something at the end that reassures us that the group will survive without the matriarch, and the group will continue. And that’s what you want. So what is that? Is that a pebble? Is that a song? Is that a food? Is that a walk to the park? I mean, to the game. What is the act of hope that now takes? We’ve honored the past. We’ve created a special place outside of time. We’ve honored the past and everybody in it. Now we want to project to the future. How are we going to end this ritual for your mom?
Eric Zimmer 00:59:30 Storming the field and tearing down the goalposts?
Bruce Feiler 00:59:32 There we go. Okay, I kind of like that. Let’s go in and let’s get. Let’s get a chili dog. You know, that’s what the weird thing that she likes to do. What does she wear? Why did she like the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Ohio State Buckeyes, he says.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:45 I think she just. She grew up here. You know, she was here her until the last two years of her life.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:51 So, you know the Buckeyes were the big thing.
Bruce Feiler 00:59:55 So what’s the corny thing about the Buckeye? Is there a weird food? Is there a fight song?
Eric Zimmer 01:00:00 Buckeyes are delicious though. Just hang on Sloopy. That’s a little bit of a strange fight song.
Bruce Feiler 01:00:04 Okay, right. So I got a fight song. I got someone dotting an eye, you know? Look at me. You know, I, I want something that’s a little goofy, possibly. Right. And that represents. This is her. She’s. She was the dot in the eye, you know, eat the buckeye, drink the drink.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:20 Contemplated how to bribe the member of the band who dots the eye. There we go. Do something so, you know there’s options there. I think this is, again, these are great ideas that are probably group sourced to see what other people like. I think my brother and my mother have shared a lot more Ohio State football stuff than I have with her, because it wasn’t as much my thing.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:43 I mean, I knew she loved it. I texted her, go bucks every week. It’s a little bit challenging because we’re entering the beginning of of summer stuff in football season. So, you know, I’m just going to be.
Bruce Feiler 01:00:54 Grateful for your vulnerability and for the connection that we have been building. I mean, by the way. Another way to do it is start a, you know, I won’t say start an Nil fund, but, you know, like. Like make a donation, have something that will carry this forward in the memory of your mom. That’s another way that you could do it. And you could announce that at the end of this occasion.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:17 Beautiful. Well, we are at the end of time. We are actually way over time. So I am going to force us to end this. However, I would love to continue the conversation in the post-show conversation because I’d love to hear a couple more ritual stories. So tempt a listener like, what’s a great story that we’re going to talk about here in a minute? Don’t tell the story.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:38 Let’s just let them know what they’re going to say.
Bruce Feiler 01:01:40 Maybe I’ll finally tell the Honor Walk story, which began, you know, in central Ohio. And the other story that I teased, which I should tell is the Taylor Swift divorce party. All right. If that doesn’t get you to come to the aftershow, I don’t know what will.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:50 Yeah, exactly. Listeners, if you’d like access to those fascinating stories, all the other post-show conversations and free episodes. And if you want to support something that is valuable to you and mean something to you, go to one you feed net slash join. Bruce, as always, it’s a real pleasure.
Bruce Feiler 01:02:12 The pleasure’s all mine. I just love this conversation, and I’m so.
Eric Zimmer 01:02:19 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
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