When the Flames Go Up

Over the weekend, Magda got the biggest glimpse of her new husband’s life before they knew each other when they attended his high school reunion. They didn’t know which classmates would be there, so there was no chance to prepare for whom to embrace (or avoid). So everyone was essentially a blank slate. As it should be.

You never know how a night surrounded by people you haven’t seen in 35 years is going to turn out. But you can’t deny that meeting them at that formative time forms a unique life bond. And those same people become so much more interesting after decades of life experience have their way with our fully formed prefrontal cortexes.

After you hit 50, reunions are also great for discussions about the topics we talk through on this podcast: launching our kids, caring for parents, making the life decisions that we think will optimize the time we have life, etc. They can be great reminders that although Time is undefeated, we have each other to help us prolong the battle.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We had plans to talk about reunions the whole time, but of course we couldn’t help but digress into heirloom apples, a touching update about Marty and Dennis, and what if Silence of the Lambs and The Rocky Horror Picture Show had a mashup?

Other links:

* A hug from Big Gretch is great for what ails you.

* Try some sheep’s nose and reine des reinettes apples.

* The My Tiny Bottles podcast.

* The Head of the Charles regatta.

* A post about Jim Gillespie, Doug’s HS classmate who died in 2019.

* Elevator Repair Service’s production of Ulysses

Now that her daughters are adults, Carlotta Stankiewicz thinks a lot about how she and her sister will take care of their parents, who split up decades ago and live two time zones apart. And really, nobody among the foursome gets along with the others as well as they might like.

She’s also getting remarried in the spring and just quit her job, mindful of how difficult it might be to re-enter the workforce as a woman of a certain age. It’s a lot, but you wouldn’t know it from how well she finds the humor in the chaos.

This point in Carlotta’s life is one of the more vivid examples of that essental conundrum of middle age: finding the line between your options and responsibilities. After a career helping to build someone else’s legacy, she’s thinking of her own. She’s taking a leap and betting on herself, in part to set an example for her daughters. And she’s chewing over a puzzling question: After a contentious childhood, what do you really owe your parents?

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also discuss a few online dating hacks for 50-plus-year-olds, making a list of things she still wants to be able to do in her 70s and beyond, and waiting out Texas’s death sauna before you can clean out your attic.

Other links:

* Follow Carlotta on Instagram

* Austin City Limits

* Watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

* Cortés burns his boats

* The ERCOT grid blackouts of 2021

* Yet another reference to the Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

* Jitterbug phones for seniors

* Outlive by Peter Attia

* Episode 58 with MaryBeth Lewis-Boardman

We came up with the idea for this podcast topic after gauging the different reactions from men and women about the vice presidential debate last week. After a weekend of canvassing, Doug found that most men listened to the bearded guy’s glib, shameless horseshit and wanted to take him outside. But women reacted more fearfully, recognizing him as the oily gaslighter they all knew who disguises his blatant lies with practiced charm.

Whether you’re in a long-term relationship and are focusing on each other after the kids have gone, or you’re dating and trying to unpack each other’s decades of baggage, empathizing with how the opposite sex sees the world takes a lot of practice (which, unfortunately is not guaranteed to make perfect).

Do you think it’s harder or easier to understand your partner now? And do women understand men better than men understand women? And doesn’t that underscore the whole friggin problem in the first place?

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

Tune in to learn which former astronaut Doug met, why LaCroix is a bad beverage on the campaign trail, and the story that Magda reacted to with a deep, extended gasp!

Other links:

* Tex Avery cartoons bent reality

* Dustin Poynter and his red flags

* Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson

* Men’s suicide rates in their 50s

* The symptoms of alexithymia

* The Episode 28 discussion with Kate Anthony:

* The Episode 58 discussion with MaryBeth Lewis-Boardman

* The Episode 31 discussion with Bill Braine

If you’re considering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat your menopause, this is the reference for you. Dr. MaryBeth Lewis-Boardman stopped delivering babies in 2021 in order to concentrate on menopause treatment full-time, and she’s very enthusiastic about how much the medical community has learned and how committed it is to keep learning.

We cover a wide spectrum of menopausal symptoms (dementia? itchy ears?!) and discuss the initial questions that determine whether you’re a viable candidate. Then she outlines how the treatment starts, how and when to adjust it, and how it works compatibly with other medications (and not with others).

Magda continues her passion to debunk the flawed Women’s Health Initiative that wrongly correlated HRT with breast cancer, praises the efficacy of vaginal estrogen cream, and makes the case that menopausal accommodations in the workplace are an easily defensible investment in better productivity.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about the best ways women can advocate for themselves by finding the best caregiver through Menopause.org, becoming as informed as possible before meeting that caregiver, and recognizing that women are “dynamic structures” who don’t need to tolerate the pain they’ve been told to tolerate.

Other links:

* The rules of the pickleball kitchen

* The dark, impenetrable Fangorn Forest

* The petition to remove the boxed warning label on local vaginal estrogen

* The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter

* Come As You Are by Dr. Emily Nagoski

* A Tired Women’s Guide to Passionate Sex by Dr. Laurie Mintz

* The Episode 26 discussion with Jackie Piasta:

What is happiness to a middle-aged person? Does it still feel like a realistic goal? Or have we lived through too much to aspire to anything more than contentment? Or satisfaction?

In midlife, the pursuit of happiness can feel a bit like rubbing two sticks together to start a fire in the snow. The process can feel urgent and/or futile, but when you do manage to find that spark, your first thought is to remember how you got it and do whatever you can to keep it going.

Among our consultations, the central ingredient of feeling happy is empathy for and connection with our fellow people. Magda basked in nostalgia in Stockbridge, Mass. Doug found cordial political debates in Livingston County, Michigan. We both consulted Logan Ury’s strategies in How Not to Die Alone. And we debated the merits of Facebook’s artificial interaction.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We’ve all heard that happiness is a choice that requires effort sometimes. At least we’ve been around long enough to know ourselves pretty well, so we can decide what makes us happy and feel reasonably certain we can do what’s necessary to find it.

Other links:

* The DuPont family really did cover Montpelier in pink stucco

* Mr. Darcy confesses his ardent admiration for Elizabeth Bennet

* The Menopause Brain, by Lisa Mosconi

* The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama

* Cambridge Analytica sold private data of millions of Facebook users

* Ivana’s last resting place is a mess

* Simon Rich talks about why he’ll never use Facebook

* Matteo Lane on the Working It Out podcast

* The MAD Magazine exhibit at the Normal Rockwell Museum

* Enjoy the JOMO!

We’re back! And there’s a lot to catch up on since Season 1 ended a few weeks back. We got the college drop-off experience we always wanted. We traveled. We saw family. We got sunburned. We turned off the news for a little while. It was all pretty damn great.

And after Doug biked his first metric half-century, he jumped at an opportunity to ride for more than double that distance just four days later. It was a time to try something challenging and not entirely all that well thought out, because it was the Rivalry Ride, a 65-mile trek from Spartan Stadium to Michigan Stadium to raise money for ALS research. (And this was no Twinkie Run.)

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also didn’t see each other much during the time off, and returning to the mics made us realize how much we miss talking about stuff like hot dog costumes, Ann Arbor’s new Obama exhibit, how to slay with the labels, and how to talk with people who somehow still want to vote for that guy.

Other links:

* Follow Doug on Strava

* The second nap spot: Joe and Rosie’s Coffee and Tea

* FitMi is a huge deal

Does just staying alive seem more difficult to you? This is the question on our minds as we end Season 1 and break for the rest of the summer. Because when you reach your 50s, you start coming to terms with the weird pains and limitations that your body starts imposing on you, often thinking “OK, what now?”

It also becomes apparent that asking someone “How’s it hanging?” is absolutely a gender-neutral inquiry. In fact, anyone at this stage of the game who only has one “it” that’s “hanging” is making out pretty well, tbh.

We’re all dealing with something, and nothing works for everybody. But we see value in sharing some of the maladies that we’ve had, the remedies that have worked, and the “meno-posses” that we’ve consulted. The more knowledge we all have, the more ready we are to take our pain seriously when we need to, and to wait it out when we don’t.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also wonder: Is vegetarianism an important exercise in empathy? Was Magda’s husband born to be a Marine? And what’s the right term to call yourself when your ex-spouse dies?

Thanks for listening over the past 15 months, and have a great rest of your summer!

Other links:

* Kakotherēs = “unfit to endure summer heat”

* The musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause

* Frozen shoulder syndrome

* The gender gap in life expectancy is getting bigger

* Noma is closing because “fine dining is unsustainable.”

* How to do chair yoga

Sarah Lyman Kravits appreciates when people refer to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, even though she knows they’re not based in reality. And she doesn’t feel all that brave about surviving breast cancer, since all she did was follow through on her only treatment options.

After marking a decade since her brother was killed by a drunk driver, Sarah knows that grief for her only sibling is part of her now. And she’s content knowing she doesn’t know much else about how her emotions will behave day to day. She’s learned to keep functioning by adapting to those emotions—and reassessing much of what she was raised to believe—so she can live without judgment.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

Sarah has downsized her empty nest, moved closer to her parents, and channeled her hard-won wisdom into a new position coaching college and grad students. We also talk about the massive retail opportunities of cold caps, what surfing and gardening have in common, and that rare, relaxing feeling when someone paints your head.

Other links:

* In the grief browser, all her tabs are open

* Edith Piaf sings L’hymne A L’Amour

* The Romans were literally swimming in -ariums.

* Wim Hof wants you to breathe deep and get cold.

* Stephen Colbert learned “to love the thing I most wish had not happened”

* The split realities of Sliding Doors

* The Ring Theory of condolence: “comfort in, dump out”

It’s hard to keep up with the swift pace of death, which claims 11 people every second. When we recorded this, we were still processing the departures of Shannen Doherty, Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Since then we’ve lost Bob Newhart, Lou Dobbs, John Mayall, Sheila Jackson Lee, Doug’s cousin Tim, and about 6.6 million others.

Oop. There go 11 more.

With that as a launching point, we got to chatting about what we’d like to do with the rest of our lives, and what might happen when they end. How do we want our funerals to go? How do we pay for them, and who’d bother to show up? Will we be remembered the way we hope to be? And should we hire a death doula?

Or maybe our mortal lives are already over, and each of us is living our own subjective afterlife. Are we even here? Is everyone we see just a stray synapse firing in our posthumous brains? And if they attend our funeral, will they ad-lib the eulogy?

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

These are probably the exact gushes of questions that people discuss at a Death Cafe. We also talk about being deprived of Vernor’s ginger ale as a child, whether evangelicals excel at the marshmallow test, and what if heaven is really boring?

Other links:

* The cultural phenomenon of “Bev Niner”

* Shannen Doherty “put it all out there” on her podcast

* The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

* The Shining: Shelley Duvall finds Jack Nicholson’s demented script

* Jim Henson: Idea Man is a must-see for Muppet fans

* John Cleese eulogizes Graham Chapman

* Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, by Neal Peart

* Mail boat cruises in Norway

* The Collected Regrets of Clover, by Mikki Brammer

* The life and weird legacy of Mitch Hedberg

After Carolyn Sklar’s grandmother (and namesake) died of breast cancer in her 50s, the family learned that its women carry the BRCA 2 gene. Rather than risk cancer, Carolyn opted for a prophylactic double mastectomy not long after her kids were born.

When she wanted to answer their questions about why her body and mood were a little more fragile, she didn’t find any helpful resources. So, in her “spare” time, after parenting young children and maintaining a full-time (and thankfully work-at-home) job, she stayed up into the wee hours and wrote M is for Mastectomy.

Mastectomies exact a profound physical and emotional toll, and Carolyn’s book is meant to help lift the mental load of explaining it all to younger, inquisitive minds. And because every woman’s experience is individual, she took care to consult other women in order to make the book’s message as universally applicable as possible.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

American culture is still entirely too weird about 1) working from home, and 2) boobs, and the existence of this book will hopefully help shift the thinking around both. We also talk about missed opportunities to market Ichabod Crane, why you can turn almost anything into pepperoni, and why Carolyn is grateful she doesn’t need a mouse jiggler.

Other links:

* Follow Carolyn on Instagram

* Joey Chestnut dropped from the Nathans hot-dog eating contest

* Molly Baz’s lactation cookie ad that was removed (and restored) to Times Square

* Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann

* Tig Notaro talks about filming her standup special topless

* Axios CEO Jim VandeHei’s Happy Matrix

* BBC Dad’s viral video and its amazing ripple effect

* The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

* Carolyn’s maiden name (Pilkington) gets her confused with the odd wisdom of Karl Pilkington