LIFE’S BOOMING SERIES 6: Dying to Know

Episode 6: Finding the funny side

Many of us are embracing more humour following the death of a loved one. But how do we make space for laughter without feeling like we’re getting it wrong? Comedian Michelle Brasier and grief counsellor Marianne Bowdler share their experiences.

About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors. 

Join James Valentine for the sixth season of Life’s Booming: Dying to Know, our most unflinching yet. We’ll have the conversations that are hardest to have, ask the questions that are easy to ignore, and hear stories that will make you think differently about the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience: Death.

In this episode, we explore the psychology behind our fear of death and how humour can help us face it. From heartfelt eulogies that land a laugh to finding the line between lightness and respect, we look at how Australians are using comedy to cope, connect and heal.

Michelle Brasier is an award-winning comedian, writer and performer known for her sharp wit, musical talent and deeply personal storytelling. After losing both her father and brother to cancer, Michelle channelled her grief into her stage show Average Bear (on ABC iview), and book My Brother's Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag, which blend humour, vulnerability and hope. 

Marianne Bowdler is the clinical services manager at Griefline, where she supports Australians experiencing grief, loss and trauma. She draws on years of experience to explain how laughter, when used thoughtfully, can offer relief, connection and healing.

If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note – [email protected] 

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For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast 

Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel Sonic Experience Agency

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Disclaimer: Please be advised that this episode contains discussions about death, which may be triggering or upsetting for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.

If you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, please know that you are not alone  and there are resources available. For additional support please contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.

TRANSCRIPT:

S06EP06 Finding the funny side

James: Hello and welcome to Life's Booming. I'm James Valentine and this season we're talking about death, but it's not all doom and gloom. On this episode we're going to embrace the funny side of grief. Forty-seven percent of the over 50s want to embrace more humor following the death of a loved one, according to an Australian senior's cost of death report.

Helping us navigate this somewhat confusing terrain are two women who've built their careers around talking about death in very different ways. Marianne Bowdler is a grief counsellor and clinical services manager at Griefline, who's worked extensively supporting marginalised communities through bereavement, attachment and loss.

And Michelle Brasier is a comedian, writer and actor. Her frank and fearless brand of cabaret comedy has never made death funnier and has taken her all the way to Broadway. Marianne, Michelle, welcome to Life's Booming. 

James: What's Griefline? Who calls? 

Marianne: Griefline, we interpret grief very broadly. So grief is any response to a loss. So we lose lots of things, don't we? Might be, you see a house flooding down the river after a flood, could be redundancy, could be bankruptcy, might've lost your keys, the dog might've gone missing, so anything. 

James: Do people think to call you in that sort of thing? 

Marianne: More and more they do, more and more, and also ecological grief, which is that kind of nostalgia that we have for how the climate used to be.

Michelle: Oh no. Right. Yeah, right. 

Marianne: And the landscape that was. And the beach that used to be at Byron. 

James: Yeah, so it's sort of an existential grief. 

Marianne: Grief is existential. 

James: Yeah, yeah. And then what, what can you offer? What happens when I call? 

Marianne: It's that annoying concept, isn't it? We hold space. It's about listening without judgment.

And it's about enabling people to actually shine a torch into the darkness of the sorrow and the anguish that they might be experiencing. 

James: Yeah. 

Marianne: I mean, I think a lot of times you might be a young mom and you can't really be grieving because you've got to look after the kids. There's lots of times when you can't express your grief and it's quite helpful to be able to talk to a neutral third party who can be supportive. 

James: Yeah. There'd be cultural issues as well in some cases. Yes. And who's on the end of the line, like who's listening? 

Marianne: Our lovely band of volunteers. Yeah. So we have hundreds of volunteers and oftentimes it's someone who's been through a significant grief experience and therefore they know what it's like and they want to support somebody else.

Or it might be students who are trying to learn something a bit beyond psychology, a bit more about existential things. 

James: Yeah. 

Michelle: Hmm. 

James: Michelle, you know about grief? 

Michelle: I know about grief. I'm an old hat at grief for such a young dog. I, yeah, I talk about this publicly all the time, but to do a little recap, we talk about this all the time.

You and I, but I, my father was diagnosed when I was 18, with cancer and he died a week later. And shortly after that, my brother was diagnosed with a similar cancer and he died a few months later. And, I am now… assumed Lynch syndrome, which is a genetic… what's the word I'm looking for?

Mutation. Yeah. Predisposition. It's a predisposition, to certain types of cancers. and so I'm always being poked and prodded and things, and getting things, you know, cut out, and early intervention, which is really lovely, but it means that grief has become a good friend of mine. And I make shows about all kinds of things, but one of my most successful shows, that you can watch on ABC iView that became my book, is called Average Bear.

And it's about, it's about grief, but it's also about hope. And I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that grief is always a bad thing. And I think that it's a really wonderful way through something in a really wonderful way to honour something. So I try to make shows that are funny about things that are sad.

James: Yeah. What did you even know of grief? I mean, there you are, 18, 19 years old. I mean, I'm thinking of 18, 19-year-old me. I wouldn't have had a clue. I would never even know what it was. 

Michelle: I didn't know anything. I mean, I hadn't, my nan had passed away, but she'd had Alzheimer's for my whole life. And she died when I was quite young, oo I didn't really have any experience of grief except the dog. And even the dog, I had been told had gone to the farm, classic. 

James: Right. 

Michelle:And I truly thought that the dog had gone to the farm until I was about 26. And I went, Oh no! [laughter] But yeah, so I hadn't really had any, any life experience of grief. I hadn't really had any life experience at all.

I mean, of course, I think, you know, it really hit me in the face. I had just gotten out of hospital myself cause I'd been in a fire, and had had third degree burns and had to learn to walk again. And I was surrounded by a lot of grief there, but I didn't know it was right around the corner for me. I saw people lose people all the time.

And I was, you know, starting to wise up that maybe the world wasn't quite so simple, but when I lost my dad so fast, grief became a very fast, you know, friend and a big element of my life and something I was so interested in, because my friends weren't going through it. It was very strange. I think when you're young and you lose somebody.

If you are the first one in your friendship group, it can be really isolating or you can choose to, you know, oh yeah. Make it a place of fun. 

Marianne: It’s like you joined a club you didn't want to…

Michelle: …the Dead Dad Club, as I call it. Yeah, yeah.

James: Yeah, yeah. But you had no prep for it. I mean, it'd be something if you had cancer for a few years.. 

Michelle:…Yeah.

James: You know, you'd, you'd have a chance to talk to you your mother about it, everybody about it, start to realise this was going to happen. You know, it must have been just like some, it'd be like a disease itself, wouldn't it? 

Michelle: Well, it is. I mean, I think it just happens when it does happen so fast like that, it was an assault on the senses. And I have a chapter in my book that's called ‘the actual stages of grief’ because that's how I've experienced it.

And I talk about how the world becomes small, like the world just closes in and you find yourself, you know, just assaulted by all these ideas and they don't feel real until you finally eat a piece of pizza again. And, you know, I think it, it was a really fast introduction into perspective and a really quick, life lesson in being curious and trying to open yourself up to as many experiences as you can because you don't know how long you have. And I mean, dad was just that, that was the canary in the coalmine.

I didn't know it was going to lead to my brother and all the, you know, we didn't realise it was like a first domino. I was like, Oh, this is the bad thing that happens in my life. It didn't feel like a marker, but now it's very clear that that was the point where my life changed and continued to sort of tumble on down.

But I'm still really grateful for, you know, the things that I've learned from grief and the way that I've learned to, to honour people. 

James: Yeah. Marianne, can we prepare for grief? I mean, is it something that, it should be something that's part of all of our lives that we think about what this might mean, or is it just something that you, you're going to have to experience it when it happens?

Marianne: It's spectacularly unhelpful to say the dog's gone to the farm. 

James: Yes. [laughter]

 Michelle: Mum? Are you listening?!

James: But I suppose that's not a bad place to start, is it? People often feel like having the guinea pig or the dog is a good way to teach children about death.  

Marianne: Exactly. And it's, how do you have those conversations? I think very little children are quite interested and curious about death because you find like a dead beetle or a dead bee and you're like: what is life that now has departed from this dead beetle or what have you. 

And it sort of disappears for a bit and then it comes back in the teenage years where you can get, you know, very emo and nihilistic and want to get skulls and crossbones tattooed. 

James: Grandma dies when you're a teenager. 

Marianne:  …yeah…

James: …That's not uncommon. That's about the age.  

Marianne: And I think it's more helpful now because we tend to take the children to the funeral. Whereas back in the day when children were really excluded from any of the processes around death, or even from going to visit grandma in hospital, we don't want your memory of her to be with all the tubes and what have you.

And then it's just not real. And you try and explain to your young child and they're like, Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. But is she coming to my birthday? 

James: Yeah. 

Marianne: There's that sort of, you didn't quite get it. 

James: But I feel like that's, that's, that's learning about death, not necessarily about grief.

Grief is what you're going to feel, that, you know, grief is the price we pay for love or grief is, you know, when you're still trying to love, but the person isn't there. Like those are the things you can't know that until it's your mum that dies or your wife that dies. Right. 

Marianne: Well, I think literature can help, we, you know, develop our empathy from reading, but really nothing prepares you till you go through it.

Michelle: I think even the grief of losing a relationship can be really hard. Any grief, your first experience of grief, and I think it's just wonderful to have someone on the other side of it who can say, I went through it. Here's how it felt. Here's what the aftermath was like. Here's what it was like when all the flowers died and people stopped bringing lasagna and they forgot that I was grieving and they moved on.

Here's what that pocket is like, and here's what it's like five years after. And here's what it's like 10 years after. And that's what I think the stories bring in value is going, Hey, it's fine. And here it is. And I survived and here's how. Day to day, here's how. I think that's really beautiful because I remember just going, how am I ever going to be okay?

How is this going to be okay? And calling people that I knew that were older than me who had lost people and saying, can you just please tell me it's going to be okay and tell me why and tell me examples of how it's okay. 

Marianne: And then the only downside of that is that you can get this sort of narrative of this is the way to grieve. And then what we hear are many stories that people have different ways of grieving. 

James: Yeah. 

Marianne: Yeah. It's not, not everybody, like when I grieve, I kind of cry a river and then get a headache. 

James: Right. 

Marianne: Wish that weren't true, but that's, that's just it, but not everybody does that. 

James: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this was this, you know, Elizabeth Kübler Ross was very popular and talked about for many years with the seven stages of, of grieving, but there is no fixed… you might be angry for a minute, you might be angry for a week, you know, like there's nothing fixed about it, is it?

The duration, neither the duration nor the order. 

Marianne: Exactly. And you might feel all the emotions all at the same time. 

James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Michelle: Or none of them.

Marianne: Or none of them. 

Michelle: And that's something that a lot of people don't talk about as well. 

James: Yeah. 

Michelle: You might feel just numb for quite a time, and that's okay. Like there's nothing wrong with that.

It is, it is an interesting thing to go through, but such a beautiful and human thing. I mean, I love how we make meaning of things that aren't necessarily meaningful as, as people. And I think that's how we add value to our lives. And honour those who have died, but yeah… 

James: When you say that, what do you, do you mean we will make meaning out of; do you mean we're making meaning out of grief because grief is very meaningful, isn't it?

Michelle: Well, just meaning out of the little things. So like taking control of your story, and I suppose this is my experience, but I always tell the story of my, when my father was dying and he had been diagnosed with cancer and I had just learned to walk again and got out of the hospital. And I had this feeling that I should go home to my country town where my dad lived.

I was just like, I just feel like I should go. I feel like something's gone wrong because they'd said to us, there'll be another Christmas, which is another thing you go, okay, and that's a bargain. You go, okay, all right, great. I'll be at least another Christmas. And I had this feeling in the middle of the night that we weren't gonna get another Christmas, and then I, we weren't gonna get another 24 hours.

And I got in the car and I drove, and my brother called me in the middle of the night and said, I've, you know, I've just gotten back to Wagga. We've booked you on the first flight. Dad's asking for you. He's not good. And I was like, you can cancel the flight, I'm in Albury, I'm an hour away. I just knew. And I'm not religious.

I'm not, you know, I don't necessarily think I'm super spiritual or anything like that, but I make meaning where there is none in that I felt I had to be there. And so I was there. And when I say there is none, it's because I would have been on the first flight in the morning anyway, and I would have seen him and I would have got to say goodbye anyway.

But there is so much beauty and poetry in driving through the night because I had a feeling and it could have meant nothing. It could, he could have not gone and he did. He went the next day. But that's where we put meaning, you know, as somebody who's not religious, I can see the value of religion and the value of faith and going, Well, I don't have necessarily religion or faith, but I have this meaning in stories, you know, it's that it's the meaning and then the humor that undercuts all that meaning.

And I think that's what makes it human. And that's what makes it special. 

James: Yeah. Marianne, you know, perhaps we can only learn to grieve when it happens to us. We could learn, we could all learn to deal with other people's grief, right? As a society, are we well equipped with dealing with the grieving? 

Marianne: Kind of saying, no.

James: Well, something we'll leave in question. 

Michelle: So polite of you.  

Marianne: Yes. Because our statutory bereavement leave is only two days. 

Michelle: Is it? Yeah. I don't have a real job, so I don't know these things. 

Marianne: Yeah. So that's not. 

Michelle: Two days? 

Marianne: Two days. And so workplaces struggle to know how to support people. We do trainings for like work, you know, how to support your colleagues, how to support the teammates, how to cope in the office.

A lot of, there's a lot of interest because people just like, we don't know, we don't know how to support the team. 

James: So, you know, I'd struggle to know whether to say something or not. I didn't, probably don't want this mentioned in the workplace, but then I should have said something and then it's all too late.

Michelle: But I don't think it's ever too late. And I think that it's the struggle that's about you. It's not about the person who's grieving and you can go to a person and just say, Hey, Would you like to talk about this, or would you like to leave it? That's not going to make a person cry, and if it is, they're so close to crying that they're going to cry anyway, and that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with crying. We sort of want to just hold it. It's a Britishness in us, I think. We just want to hold these emotions in. I just think we can't treat people who are grieving, or who are dying for that matter, with cotton gloves, we can't, you know, and that's why I make these shows for people to come and laugh.

And I have so many audience members who are actively dying and they come and they're like, tonight might be the night. Let's go. I was like, yes, like, let's have a laugh. If you only have 24 hours left, the least I can do is give you a laugh. Like, I think that we need to invite people into grief and into dying.

And, you know, it's the problem with our society is that we go, Ooh, and, you know, people who are dying so often – and I'm sure maybe you even have this experience – but people get diagnosed with cancer and people just back off because they don't want to say the wrong thing. People aren't going to be upset with you for saying the wrong thing.

They're going to be upset with you for disappearing in that tiny little period where they needed you the most. You'll get it wrong and that's fine. They'll tell you how to do it right. And you'll fix it like an adult, grow up. 

James: That is a fundamental thing, isn't it? We're too scared of getting it wrong. I'm sorry for your loss.

Oh God. Was that terrible thing to say? Like maybe, maybe it is a terrible thing to say, but it's better than not saying anything. 

Marianne: Or, or in the workplace, where everybody's looking at the children's photos from the holiday and then the colleague whose child died.

And the colleague will say, you know, I think about my child every moment of every day. It's not like you've done something to remind me. I'm fully aware. Michelle: Yeah. I know my kid is dead. Yeah. I don't need you to remind me. I know. It's okay. I already know. 

Marianne: And the best things you can just say is, I've got your back.

James: Mm. But I suppose this is the kind of thing we could all help one another with, isn't it? Yeah. This, this could, we could be, we could all be a little more instructed in this. 

Marianne: And I think there were, perhaps if you look at the like English, Victorian tradition, it's like now they're wearing black. Now they've got a little bit of purple. Now they've got jet jewelry. There were all these signifiers that let us know how far, you know, how long ago the mourning process started, we don't know anything, we can't tell by looking at a person, what happened last week, what happened 10 years ago. 

Michelle: yeah.

James: Does humor help? 

Marianne: Absolutely. We would look at the distress, if you're just going to go a bit sciencey, the distress that you experience in grief is called situational distress. You know, a thing happened, then you got distressed. And part of that would be a very low mood, for example. If you do nothing to break the low mood, that can run into depression and that can run into a major depressive 

But the best thing that will kind of, it doesn't take away the distress exactly, but it ruptures that, is comedy, is having a laugh, because it alleviates the mood, it alleviates the tension, you feel more connected and certainly in a comedy show, you just feel connected to everybody else in the room.

Michelle:Yeah. 

James: And you, you went, I mean, you went to it – it is you, isn't it? I mean, I'm the same. I tend to talk in humor. You know, that's my tone. My predominant tone is to try and be funny. And so therefore, whatever happens, you know, I had cancer. I was automatically making jokes about it. I still do, you know. So you, but is it more than that?

Is it more than just your way of speaking, your way of being? 

Michelle: I think it, yeah, I think it is, you know, that second nature. You can't, if you're a clown, you're a clown, you can't turn it off and you shouldn't turn it off unless you want to. But I also, back on the sciencey stuff, you know, there, there is such a similar physiological response that we have to crying as we do when we're laughing or when we're singing. It's just, it's our release, it's, you know, all this vagus nerve stuff, just getting it out. A release is so valuable. And if that release can be laughter, you're not going to get a headache, as quickly as you will with the, with the tears and show it, maybe it comes along with the tears and maybe they're, they need to be friends and they need to, you know, be together.

Um, and you know…

Marianne: …it's the catharsis

Michelle: It's the catharsis and we need it as, as animals, we need it. So I think that's why it's so… 

James: It's also the truth as well. Like, I think, you know, some of the best laughs you'll have is at a funeral. 

Michelle: Oh my God, yeah.  

James: Because you will tell each other truths about the person and about your relationship to them, and somebody will start telling you a story and you'll go, Oh my God, they never told the story like that. You know, like…

Michelle: …Yes, exactly. 

James:…All those sort of things. It's fantastic, you know. It's the, you know, humour is often truth telling. 

Michelle: And the reason it's so funny is because it breaks the tension of this wild ritual of funerals that we have, that is, it doesn't really suit us as a society. It's somebody speaking on a microphone that doesn't really work and they don't know how to use the microphone.

They're making a speech. They're not a good speech writer. They shouldn't be making a speech. Somebody else should be making a speech. It's never going well. And that's kind of funny. My dad's funeral was excellent. He went, he'd made, we'd made this playlist of his favorite songs for him to be carried out of the church too.

Unfortunately, there was like a bit of a mix up and that playlist didn't play when he was carried out of the church. It played as he was lowered into the ground in the cemetery, which would have been fine had the first song not been ‘Ring of Fire’ by Johnny Cash. And it was the funniest thing that's ever happened in my family was in hysterics.

Everybody else taking it very seriously. Didn't know what to do. Didn't know how to touch it, trying to keep it away. But the rest of us, the ones who really, really knew him and really loved him were in there having a laugh because it was like, this is absurd. 

James: He would have loved it. 

Michelle: He would have loved it.

And death is absurd. And so is life, and that's fine. You know, I think we just need to go gentle with ourselves and with the people that we're trying to help, but gentle with ourselves in our own approach to it, you know, let yourself have a laugh, you deserve it, it's hard. 

James: Yeah. I sometimes think that death is the ultimate joke because we, we live like it's never going to happen.

So here’s, all of us live every single day as though we are never going to die. How do you think people react to you, you know, like, I'm thinking of, you know, ‘Lasagna won't bring back my dead dad’, your famous song about the fact that, you know, while grieving you'll get a lot of, a lot of lasagna.

Michelle: Yeah. 

James: How do people react? Like, have you had people just go, this is too much, I can't, I can't deal with this. 

Michelle: I've never had that reaction. And I've done the show so many times, people have watched it on TV and I've never gotten a DM saying this is rude or this is wrong, you know, disrespectful. It's always the people in the show, like the people who have grieved that think it's the funniest.

I even say after I do the song in the show, I say if somebody next to you is laughing quite loudly at that, I'd like you to turn to them and say sorry for your loss.. 

James: Yeah. 

Michelle: Because that's, you know, it is, it's universal. It's so universal. Yeah. so no, I've never had somebody complain about me not taking death seriously enough.

James: Has it helped you? 

Michelle: Yeah!

James: Yeah. 

Michelle: If I didn't have humor, if I took myself seriously, I would be terrified every moment. I'm already terrified. Look at the news. Yeah. You know. 

Marianne: Don't look at the news. 

Michelle: Yeah. Sorry. That was bad advice. Don't look at the news. but do vote well. but I just think, you know. I don't know who I would be if I, if I took things seriously, if I took myself seriously, I would have such a difficult time and I'm already stressed about every lump and bump.

And you know, it's, it's really scary. I'm scared of dying, but it means that I think I live my life like I am going to die tomorrow. And I, that's the gift that I've been given by grief, but I also… 

James: …and by your own diagnosis, I mean, we should just emphasise that again, you are living with the threat that the same thing that happened to your brother and father can happen to you.

Michelle: Yes, exactly. And I think knowing that – even though everyone could be hit by a bus tomorrow and it really doesn't make me any more likely than anyone else at the end of the day – but it's a gift, it's a gift, the gift of perspective of knowing that like, you're only here for a short time, so you might as well make it a good time.

And that's true of anyone. It doesn't matter if you live to a hundred, it's probably still going to feel short. Well, if you're lucky it’ll feel short. 

James: But that's, I mean, we kind of know that, but we don't really live like that, do we Marianne? 

Marianne: We don't, but there's good reason to think that we should. In the world of grief literature, we talk about the loss of the assumptive world.

James: The assumptive world.  

Marianne: The assumptive world. As a child, we assumed it would always be a Sunday afternoon and we'd go home and have Tim Tams. And everything would be the same day after day. And then the first time you sort of meet death, it's like the rug’s been pulled out from under you and you can't assume that anymore.

And then suddenly you're unsafe and you panic. But I think what's a curious moment for all of us was the pandemic gave the whole world and everybody, we all collectively lost the assumptive world at the same time. So now we're sort of on shakier ground. but when we come back to just each and every one of us, yes, I think it's helpful to understand that we are mortal.

James: Yeah. 

Marianne: And when you get your head around that. Then you can, I think, fully be present in the moment and enjoy things. 

James: But that's always what a lot of people will say about the pandemic years is perhaps, particularly that first year, particularly if you weren't in Melbourne, but particularly that first year was sort of like, isn't this great?

We're all living this together. We are all now understanding that we're very mortal and can be threatened. Oh my Lord, our governments are all working together, but it almost seems it's like, as soon as we could get over that and forget all that, we did. 

Marianne: Yeah, we did. 

Michelle: You know, I think we just, we're looking for someone to blame.

I mean, not to get into that sort of existential divided society crisis that we're in currently, don't look at the news, but, yeah, COVID was interesting to see how people reacted to it, and the grief. I talk about this in my book as well. I say, I was born at the end of history because I was a 90s kid and they were calling it the end of history.

They were like, the war is done. The wars are done. We're done doing the wars. We're doing peace now. We're smarter than that. We've sorted it out and you can be whatever you want to be. And this is before we knew my generation wasn't going to be able to afford a house. And we really were promised… and it's why I've been successful in my career.

Cause my parents were like, yeah, I guess you can do whatever you want now. That's what they're saying. And I was like, well, I believe you, which I'm lucky I did and sort of followed my nose to where I've gotten. But I think there is an enormous amount of collective grief in every generation, but I think it really, like, hits my generation very hard because we, we can't believe we were lied to, like, you know! 

And I think we were feeling that, and then COVID came and I think everyone sort of started to feel that, but I mean everyone's different, has their own set of circumstances and I'm speaking very generally, but it is difficult. 

Marianne: But across the board, anxiety went up, especially of your generation. And some people would think that what lies underneath all anxiety is death anxiety.

Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. I think that's really true. It's definitely my main anxiety, you know. 

James: Yeah. You know, we've been talking about grief as, you know, it's, it's something I suppose we probably always sort of these sort of emotions as something that define us, define humanity. That's what makes us human.

We've had all those stories of sort of like elephants grieving and things, haven't we? 

Marianne: Yeah, absolutely. Or, and you see it with your pets as well, they'll go searching for the person who's not there. 

Michelle: Yeah, you should let your dog sniff a dead person, or the other dead dog. You should do that so they know what's happened.

James: Yeah, yeah. 

Marianne: And last year I read that blue tongued lizards grieve, which I'm still very touched by that. 

Michelle: It's beautiful. 

Marianne: Yeah. It was a lizard was trapped on a fence and died and the mate just stayed with it for I think three or four days.  

James: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So everything does. 

Marianne: So not just mammals. 

James: Yeah, not just mammals, the cold-blooded ones do, too. 

Michelle: That's beautiful. Do you think mosquitoes are grieving? 

James: Oh, totally. 

Michelle: Got a lot to apologise for.  

James: Yeah, that's right. So, when you whack one, just go, sorry. 

Michelle: I know. I'm sorry. Sorry for your loss.. 

James: That's really sad. 

Marianne: That should cover it.

Michelle: That should sort it.

James: Marianne, thank you so much. 

Marianne: Thank you. 

Lovely conversation. Michelle, lovely. Thank you. 

Michelle: Thank you so much. 

James: Well, thanks to our guests, Marianne Bowdler and Michelle Brasier. You've been listening to season six of Life's Booming, Dying to Know, brought to you by Australian Seniors. Please leave a review or tell someone about it.

Head to seniors.com.au/podcast for more episodes. May your life be booming. I'm James Valentine.

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