Listening In preview - Clarissa Moll

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Coming up next, a preview of Listening In. This week, host Warren Smith talks to author Clarissa Moll. In 2019, her husband Rob died in a hiking accident during a family vacation. He was only 41 years old. Ten years earlier he’d written a book on the art of dying well. In this excerpt of their conversation, Clarissa reflects on how her husband's words proved to be true.

CLARISSA MOLL: Thinking about death in advance makes a difference. Acknowledging our mortality makes a difference. It makes a difference in how we live, it makes a difference in how we die, it makes a difference in how we grieve— how the people who are left behind make sense of death, of loss.

And so I think over the first year that I lived after Rob died, there were many times where I thought to myself, “honey, you were right! All those times I didn't want to talk about this subject and you pressed into it. Every time that you encouraged me to think about what our life would be like if one of us were gone, and I wanted to plug my ears.” I'm glad he did it. I'm glad that he leaned into that really difficult subject because, you know, I don't think anything can prepare you for grief. There's nothing that can prepare your heart for the magnitude of what it feels like to lose a person that you love, the radical reorientation that happens after loss.

But I think you can prepare yourself to meet death to face death. And so even though, you know, I don't think our conversations prepared me for grief. I think they certainly prepared me well for death.

BASHAM: That’s Clarissa Moll talking to Warren Smith. To hear their complete conversation, look for Listening In tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.

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