He chose to honor his mom's life with a psychedelic cartoon

Transcript

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

When comedian Duncan Trussell interviewed his dying mother, she told him something. The closer I get to physical death, she said, the more alive I feel. In this week's Enlighten Me, Rachel Martin talks to Trussell about that experience and what he learned from it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: OK, so I hope Duncan Trussell doesn't take this personally, but I didn't know who he was before I watched his Netflix show called "The Midnight Gospel." But after a couple of episodes, I was hooked. I had to know more about the guy because this show is so bizarre, and I mean that as a compliment. Real-life conversations about the biggest existential questions from Duncan's podcast are then laid overtop these wacky-yet-genius animated videos that are created by his friend Pendleton Ward. At first, it seems like some drug-induced fever dream. Like, why am I listening to writer Anne Lamott talk with this dude about alcoholism and grief and God as her voice is coming out of a blue dog with deer antlers, or the episode where Duncan's moving conversation with his mom as she's suffering from cancer is laid overtop an animation where we see her and Duncan die and get reborn over and over again while she tells him what she needs him to understand before she drops her body, as he would say?

But the longer you live in Duncan Trussell's world, the more it all starts to make sense, I think. Or maybe it doesn't. And that's OK, because it feels like a safe place where you can say things you've never said before, and there are no wrong answers because everything is absurd. And why not scream and wail at all the things that hurt us? But also, why not laugh even through the hardest of things? That's where this conversation starts - at the hardest of things.

DUNCAN TRUSSELL: When my mom finally passed, I went crazy. Like, all the stuff that I'd read about grief, and it's a roller coaster, it's not normal sadness and all this stuff that you read and you're like, well, that sounds horrible. And then suddenly you're just out of your mind. You don't even realize how out of your mind you are. And that other weird thing happens, which is you become an accidental grief counselor. Like, other people are grieving, and suddenly you, who've just been, like, sobbing, considering, like, wetting the bed instead of going to the bathroom, you're, like, giving this, like, lofty grief advice to - well, let me tell you about how to handle grief. You're like - (laughter)

MARTIN: Oh, my God, that totally resonates with - so my mom died, I think, a year before your mom died. My mom died of cancer in 2012.

TRUSSELL: Sorry.

MARTIN: And I remember, even just a few months later, I went to one of my dearest friend's weddings. And I was just in this - you know, that weird fog of grief.

TRUSSELL: Yeah.

MARTIN: But - and it's all you can think about. Everybody was getting up to give toasts at the reception - or a few hand-picked people. I was not one of them. And then all of a sudden, I was just like, I feel moved to speak in this moment...

TRUSSELL: Good for you.

MARTIN: ...And to talk about the significance of life and death. And...

TRUSSELL: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...I mean, whatever. I think everybody was like, poor Rachel. Let's not give her too hard a time. Like, she's going through a thing. But you do - it's all you can think about.

TRUSSELL: Yeah. And I think it's a beautiful thing that you did that - very brave and good. People are so afraid of death. They want to avoid it at all costs. So someone right next to it then becoming the mouthpiece of it - that's probably a little too much for people. You just wanted to talk about how cool your mom was.

MARTIN: Right, right, right.

TRUSSELL: ...You know, not like, this is going to happen to all of us...

(LAUGHTER)

TRUSSELL: ...You know? So, yeah, I think that's great you did that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: I want to talk more about your mom 'cause she seemed awesome based on just what I've read. And...

TRUSSELL: She was.

MARTIN: ...You did this amazing interview with her for your podcast, and then you turned it into an episode for "The Midnight Gospel," which is this very amazing series on Netflix.

TRUSSELL: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MIDNIGHT GOSPEL")

DENEEN FENDIG: The closer I get to physical death, the more alive I feel and the more present I feel and the more real I am.

MARTIN: How did that interview come to be?

TRUSSELL: Well, you know, she was very close to dying - the one you heard on "The Midnight Gospel."

MARTIN: Yeah.

TRUSSELL: And I was doing everything I could to avoid what was happening - everything I could. I was reading "The Hunger Games" on my Kindle. So anyway, she called me up to her room. I knew she wanted to do a podcast, but I was so heartbroken and I just - I don't - I knew it would be our last...

MARTIN: Right.

TRUSSELL: ...Podcast.

MARTIN: Right. When my mom was going through the same thing, I remember thinking, oh, this is my thing. This is what I do. I talk to people, and we share these intimate conversations. And I remember thinking, I don't want to do that. I was in denial, too, because to somehow do that was, like, the end. Like, I was asking my mom for these big thoughts and that that was going to be the end of her. So I can't - it's brave of you to have decided, like, OK, Mom, yeah, let's do this.

TRUSSELL: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Remember, dying people have this present moment awareness. They have - like, you know, they - there's something happening there where they're in the truth. They're experiencing truth as it is and - meaning they don't tiptoe around anything anymore. Now, when I watch that episode, which is still hard for me to do, I realized she's telling me things that she knew I would want to hear later...

MARTIN: Yeah.

TRUSSELL: ...And that she knew I wasn't hearing now.

MARTIN: Yeah.

TRUSSELL: And 'cause she knew I would listen to it later. So I'm so grateful to her for that, that she was smart enough in, like, her last few weeks of life to sort of give me something to answer the questions that I would have asked her, now that I have kids, if she were still alive. So it was a wonderful thing that she did, and that's how it came about. And so then for it to, like, end up on "The Midnight Gospel" and now, you know, every week people tell me how much it helped them with their grief or letting go of someone. I could just see her smiling. Like, she would think that was very wonderful that somehow that happened, that it spread all over the place.

MARTIN: Is there something that you can point to that you learned from that conversation only later?

TRUSSELL: Yes. Yeah, 100%. She was sort of, in a very graceful way, trying to talk about what lasts, you know? And clearly the body doesn't.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE MIDNIGHT GOSPEL")

FENDIG: If you look at the world, what you see is things appearing and disappearing, and humans are a part of the whole of that. And humans appear and they disappear off the face of the Earth. That just happens.

TRUSSELL: I think she was talking about, in a very simple, beautiful way, the body is gone but, you know, what was animating the body - or another way to put it would be if you pull away all of the quirks and the good things and the bad things of - in your parents' personality - and as a parent now, having experienced the raw, primordial love you feel for your kids, to me, I think somewhere in there is all moms. That's all moms. And I think that's what she was trying to say is that, you know, you will always have access to this love, which I think is, if your mother or a parent or someone you love says something to you that heals you or transforms you, I think its origin point is that love. That's where it came from. And it goes through many layers of personality, identity, ego, takes on its own characteristics based on the karma of the person saying it. But at its core, it's, like, born from that place. And so I think she was trying to say that to me or teach me that so that I would have a way to connect with her after she dropped her body.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: It's funny. I've - I actually have never talked about this before, but the last time I saw my mom at her, you know, that home - she was in hospice. And, like, the last thing she said to me - I was asking a question because I was also in that, like, desperate, like, tell me things about the world and I don't know what to do without you. I might get a little sad. But I asked her what she thought happened when we die, right? And she sat up, which was a big deal, and she said, so much love. And I've thought about the construction of that because it's not that she was going to feel so much love. It's that love was going to happen. Like, she used it as an action. Like, what happens when we die? Answer - so much love happens when we die. And it can seem so simple - right? - everybody - oh, love, love, love, love, love.

TRUSSELL: Yeah.

MARTIN: But it's so much more powerful than our language permits.

TRUSSELL: Yeah. When people say love, it means a million different things.

MARTIN: Yeah.

TRUSSELL: It depends - you know, and so there's that sort of love. And then there's the love where you dissolve in it - and the Bhakti love, the love where, you know, it breaks your heart. Because you have to have your heart opened up to get there. That's why they say it's heartbreaking. It's a good kind of - it's - I don't think you can - the term heartbreak in this context, I think it means it breaks the shell that you - or the armor that you have grown around your heart and spent so much time welding together your whole life. You've been working on this thing.

But it's like you were working on it when you were very young. So it's like, look at any, like, 5 year old's drawing of, like, an airplane or armor. That's what you have around your heart, a sort of cobbled together series of things you picked up from cartoons or whatever you thought would protect you. And you welded it together with your mind. That's what breaks. And that's a really terrifying thing for that thing to break, 'cause you think you're going to get destroyed and - or hurt. And it's the opposite. It's like, my God, you've been walking around - like, imagine if you had a 5-year-old blacksmith who didn't know much about blacksmithing weld you armor you had to wear for the rest of your life. It's not going to be comfortable.

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: I love that idea, though. And that the heartbreak is the liberation...

TRUSSELL: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...Actually.

TRUSSELL: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: Duncan Trussell - he is the host of "The Duncan Trussell Family Hour" and the co-creator of "The Midnight Gospel" on Netflix. Duncan, thank you so much.

TRUSSELL: Thank you. It was really a joy meeting you and getting to chat with you, and thank you so much.

DETROW: You can hear more of Rachel Martin's Enlighten Me series right here, same time next week. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.