Dear Dougy

We cannot separate grief from the context in which it occurs. This is true for Nicole Chung whose adopted parents died just two years apart in 2018 and 2020. The world of 2018 was very different than that of 2020. In 2018, Nicole and her mother could grieve for her father, together and in person. In 2020, Nicole was on the other side of the country, grieving for her mother in isolation during the early days of the pandemic. The other context that played a role in her parents' lives and their deaths is the structural inequality that exists in the U.S. economy and end of life care. Nicole chronicles all of this in her new memoir, A Living Remedy.  We discuss: How hard it is to describe people and what they mean to us What it was like to be cut off from more traditional grief rituals during the pandemic Grieving an unexpected vs (more) expected death Learning to distinguish between guilt and regret How grounding her parents' deaths in a larger context helped alleviate some of her guilt The pressures Nicole fel