The subject of this episode is the experience of losing your mom at a young age. After the success of very personal episodes like Eugene's body image one and others, we decided to tackle something personal to us: what it was like to lose your mother much younger than you had expected. In planning the episode, we'd refer to it as the "dead moms" episode and even though that title may seem cavalier, we like that it's blunt and familiar about a topic which many people have trouble discussing. To call it an obsession seems incorrect at first until as Kate points out, you realize that you DO get obsessed with it: how to deal with the absence of a person, the sadness, the resentment, the absurdity, the sanctifying, the ebbing and flowing of grief in the years after and how rarely you get to really talk about it. Things that people said which you appreciated, and things that you didn't. We each tell the story of our mothers' illnesses and then our incomplete thoughts of how we and our families seemed to deal with it. This is difficult territory and there's lots of aspects of it that we don't fully understand, but we believe that for the many people who have to deal with losing a loved one, there's something healing about discussing it and hearing people discuss it, and so here it is. We also, making a hilariously tone deaf moment, get around to reading the names of people kind enough to leave us reviews!