This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 99, the flip side of love by Chris Patti of Appalachian State University. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Mullick.
What's going on, life optimizers? Welcome to Optimal Living Daily, or OLD for short and old for shorter. This is Justin Mullick, head oldie, and your personal reader of the best content I can find on personal development, minimalism, personal finance, and anything else to help you optimize your life. Today's going to be an interesting one.
I want to do something special to sort of book in the beginning and end of what's going to be a week-long celebration of the 100th episode tomorrow. And I also have an email from a listener who's struggling right now, dealing with a loss of her father. And while I went through that myself in 2001, while it's going to be 15 years, that's crazy. Yeah, so I went through that.
But there's really one person that comes to mind to I feel like is an expert on the subject, having also lost his father, even before that, about five years earlier. And that's my best friend since 5th grade, Chris Patti. Chris, or Dr. Patti, I should say, formally, teaches at Appalachian State University.
And as an ethnographic writer, his research highlights intimate, relational processes at the heart of human experience through listening to and richly representing stories of love, loss, and transformation. He's published several peer-reviewed articles and chapters on the theme of suffering and compassion, and his other passions are rock climbing, longboard surfing, and intentionally doing nothing with his mindfulness meditation club, Zen, and the art of applied communication. And you can find them on Twitter at Awareness Bites. So not only having gone through the loss of his father, also at a young age, but also immersing himself in it, interviewing Holocaust survivors, and teaching courses on this stuff.
There's no better person in my mind to address the issue. And I actually did already reach out to him when my girlfriend had to put her dog down, Luciano, who she rescued and felt a deep connection with. She's vegan and will admit that she probably loves animals more than humans. So that was a very difficult time for her.
And so I reached out to Chris back then a couple of years ago, and asked if he could offer some sort of help, really. And he wrote this letter, which I'm now going to read to you. The Flip Side of Love by Chris Patti. Hi, Olivia.
I must say your letter about Lucie is quite beautiful and touching, and I'm glad you sent it. It brought to mind a few things that may make sense. The first thought is what an inherent bummer it is that those we love cause us the most suffering. So in many ways, I think your sadness at losing Lucie is a tribute to how much he meant to you.
This isn't to say we ought to get stuck in our grief, which I can tell you're not seeing as you're functioning well through all of it. But it is to say that we also shouldn't be worried about quote, getting over it, which tends to be the canonical social narrative about loss. I can tell you that my dogs are like family. One of them, Bodie, the Frenchy, has been dealing with some chronic, fairly serious allergies, lately, hives, et cetera, and has been really stressing me out and upsetting me.
The thoughts that we and the vet don't know what's going on and that she may need to be on steroids for the rest of her life. So I can imagine how hard it's been going through all this with Lucie. I'm sorry. Which brings me to my main feeling in regard to your note.
I think it makes a lot of sense to still feel sad on a daily basis about his passing. I think since you have such a good support group around you, that you should allow yourself to process and feel that sadness for as long as it takes. I think expressing it and coming to terms with it, in various forms, you are note to me, talking to people who genuinely care and even writing and journalism for yourself, are all healthy ways to deal with the loss of this kind. In a Buddhist sense, I think it takes a strong person to embrace that loss and let it in, to sit with it and allow it to be as profound as it needs to be without allowing you to dictate your life or becoming a self-fulfilling monster, which I'm not concerned about at all in your case from what I know.
Personally, in a lot of work I read or use or write, at some level, I don't think we ever quote to get over the major losses in our lives, the loss of a family member or beloved companion. Instead, I think they transform us. I think we can use these losses to open us up, to continue to widen our abilities to feel compassion for ourselves and for others, including other animals. I think they teach us about the rawness of experience and about the femoral nature of this life we have.
I think they can help us to embrace the moments we do have with those we love. So I'm not a fan of quote getting over things. I'm a fan of allowing things to transform us, if that's of any help. One of my favorite books that deals with lots of this stuff is Pima Chodrons, When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Difficult Times.
It's a book that has helped me and continues to help me to deal with the loss of my father and help me deal with the stress of finishing my PhD, which is to say it's got some range and for me at least applies to so many areas of life and death. If it sounds good, it might be worth ordering and I've told Justin about a few times he'll read it too. And if Justin's anything like me, which I know he is in many ways, he won't mind being there for your loss. I don't think you need to worry about stirring up his losses.
I don't think either of us mind dealing with the losses of our fathers these days or bringing back up those memories, even the bad ones. Remembering my dad is a tribute to him. It reminds me to re-center and focus on what's really important as opposed to focusing on the little things that tend to get me bent out of shape on a daily basis. And I seek to remember all the details I can, even the tough ones.
And so many of those tough memories have over 15 years transformed into some of my most precious, powerfully beautiful memories. They're the times when I heard or loved the deepest. I don't think there's a healthy way to speed up these processes. And I think each of us and each loss is different.
So if anything, I guess I'm saying that like you showed Lucci so much compassion, you can show yourself compassion and allow yourself to take your time and feel what you feel. As for guilt, I can identify there. This to me is where the death and complexity of self-compassion is really needed and often the hardest to muster in the moment. From the outside, I know that Lucci was so lucky to have you in his life.
He did so much more than other people would have and made a humane and difficult decision at the end. I bet Justin knows that you have no reason to feel guilty and I trust him on this one. But ultimately it's about feeling and realizing that for ourselves. I know you've got a lot of compassion for animals and rescuing animals and feeling a lot of loss and connecting to animals is a part of that.
That's where the word compassion comes from. Passion meaning to suffer and calm meaning with. I hope this response resonates with you and gets across the sentiments I'm trying to express. Sorry that words fail in these cases.
I'm glad Justin mentioned me and that you took him up on it. Say hi to that dude for me, I miss him. Let me know if this makes any sense and how things continue to go. And thanks for introducing me to Lucci.
He helped get me back to what's important on a day when I'm swamped with grading and class prep for tomorrow. Doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore. Warmly, from a cold day in the mountains. Chris.
You just listened to the post titled The Flipside of Love by Chris Patti. And I'm a C2, man. It's a special post and episode for me. And I don't want it to be a sad or low point to start the week-long celebration of the episode here at OLD.
But more of a positive note and a tribute to Chris's dad, Olivia's dog, the listener who reached out to her dad, and my dad to thank them all for what they've done for us and to cherish the good memories. You can always remember to come back to this episode if you ever need it in your own life if you're dealing with any kind of loss. I really hope you don't have to do anytime soon, but also just a reminder for everyone else to be grateful for every person and animal in your life. And Chris has graciously provided his email too if you want to reach out to him.
And that's PattiCJ at appstate.edu. And his last name, Patti, is spelled P-A-T-T-I. You can also reach out to me at oldpodcast.com and join the newsletter there to show your support. And that's what I wanted to do to launch into the next hundred episodes of this podcast.
And I'm going to end it there. Just tell someone that you care about them today. And I'll see you in the big and special episode 100 tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.