100 Goodbyes

When psychologist, Dr. Nicole Anders, lost her beloved brother Cody to overdose, she navigated her grief through writing daily love letters to Cody. Her book, One Hundred Goodbyes is a collection of those love letters, bridging the personal and clinical dimensions of her grief.

Nicole discusses that she frequently talks with her kids about their Uncle Cody. She suggests answering questions about a loved one’s overdose factually, but also keeping the answers simple for young children. She says when kids are older, discuss that their loved one took a medicine and didn’t know what was in it. Co-host Daniel emphasizes the centrality of people taking a substance and not knowing what’s in it, and how this drug poisoning crisis is entirely preventable.

Nicole coaches that grief doesn’t make sense, but our brains continually wrestle with it. In her own bargaining stage of grief, she wishes she would have been more loving in her interactions with Cody. In her humanity, even though she’s a psychologist, she wishes she would have dropped her judgement and frustration and just listened to Cody more. She now utilizes the phrase “how human of you” to disarm her own shame, and the shame of others she works with.

The conversation wraps up talking about the importance of person-first language so we see the human in front of us and don’t identify them by one particular struggle.

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