- What's your definition of death?
- I tend to think of it quite literally
in terms of ceasing to be alive.
Their consciousness is gone forever.
- For me, God is the mystery.
For me, somebody who believes in evolution
and believes in science without that other sense,
I would feel like I was missing
some kind of essential flavor in my life.
- Since I graduated from school,
I've been a software engineer,
pretty stereotypical, very rational, logically oriented.
That defines a lot of how I interact with the world.
- I mean, it's not my job to convince you of anything.
What I would say is it's hard for me
not to believe that there's something
that is really a mysterious source.
- I am very curious about that as you say,
additional flavor, and wish that
I had a way to sort of get a foothold
into understanding it better,
but it just feels completely divorced
from the observable world.
- How old is your daughter?
- Eight months. - Eight months old.
I think sometimes putting other beings
in the next generation into the world
changes us a lot in terms of
what we previously thought,
what we think now, and what the impact
on being a parent, spiritually.
- Right, right.
Like, because she came out of nowhere, right?
- Well, I hope not.
- Well ...
To be honest, I haven't experienced
a ton of loss over the course of my life,
which sort of scares me.
I don't think I'm very well prepared for it,
but I don't feel good about death.
I very much want to avoid it
and I'm not comfortable with the concept of it.
When I was young, my dad lost his brother,
his older brother.
I experienced it as being very sad,
but we didn't spend a lot of time talking it through.
We weren't practicing a religion,
we didn't have rituals that we performed.
That's the part that's scary,
just feeling this unpreparedness.
- It's almost the flip-side of what you said,
which is really interesting.
You feel because you haven't experienced
a death, that you're more fragile or vulnerable.
And because over two decades
of burying hundreds and hundreds of people,
I almost felt like, "Oh, I'm the expert."
So that when my dad died,
it wasn't deferred grief,
or it wasn't somebody else's parent anymore,
it was my own parent.
I just recall so many people saying to me,
"Well, you can't really know what it's like
"until you lose a parent."
But now that my dad's gone, I really believe it,
which is when you do lose somebody
who's that profound to you,
it knocks a part of your life out of you.
To be there when somebody takes their last breath,
who was there for your first breath
was one of the most profound,
intense, sad, beautiful moments.
It was very peaceful, and he just
opened his eyes wide and just looked out,
just like he was looking past something.
And all of us had our hands on him,
and were telling him that we loved him.
And...
His breath was gone.
- What is one thing you really want to accomplish
before you die?
- I'm done.
No, I'm kidding.
I have been a rabbi for two decades,
and I have this creative part of me,
this one-woman show that deals a lot with death
and with life, so what I'd like to do
before I die is to really put it out there in the world,
so that conversations like this become commonplace.
Last year, I was on a panel,
and the panel was an interfaith panel,
and it was a minister and a priest,
and I happened to be the rabbi.
And so the very last question on the panel
to the priest, the minister, and the rabbi,
"We ask you what would you like said
"at your own funeral?"
So the priest starts, "I want them to say about me,
"I was a man of God, and that I was faithful
"to my community and to my congregation."
And the minister said, "I want people to know
"that I walked in the way of Jesus Christ.
"I was always there for my flock."
And finally, they turned to me, the rabbi,
and they said, "Rabbi, what would you like said
"about yourself at your own funeral?"
I looked around at everybody and I said,
"What I'd like said about me at my own funeral
"is just this: 'Look, I think she's still moving!'"
- So watching your performance the other night,
it was cool to see your ability
to talk about death in a lighthearted, engaging way.
It's good to be reminded that that's possible,
even though it's a very serious and upsetting topic,
you can present it in a way
that makes people feel better about it and not worse.
Then people come out of it actually with
a slightly better relationship with death.
- One thing that our culture and our society
frowns down upon is crying.
And so, for a lot of people, it's hard to cry.
I find that it's much easier to get people
to start crying if you get them to start laughing first.
And people say, "Have you ever told a joke at a funeral?"
I'm like, "I tell jokes at funerals all the time,
"because it's part of the cycle of life."
- I've never stopped to think about
maybe grieving and death and humor
are actually not polar opposites.
- So what would you want me to know
if you were to suddenly pass away right now?
- I'd want you to know whatever those things are
that are sort of lodged deep inside of me,
the love that I haven't expressed for people,
or the gratitude that I haven't shown.
I'd be sad if those things just died with me
and were never revealed.
- That's the thing about human beings,
it's like we have to get slapped
so hard in the face or knocked down so hard
before we say, "Oh, this is so short and precious."
- I understand why people believe in God,
and I'm sympathetic to it.
As you said, it's like the representation
of the mystery for you.
It's a way of interfacing with that unknown.
That makes sense to me.
- Well, if I turned you into an agnostic?
- Agnostic atheist.
- Okay, close enough.