You Can Trust a Human Being with Grief

I heard this on The Moth Radio Hour. A five-year-old named Nina wanted to see her cousin’s body. Andy was four when he died, and he was her best friend. The adults around her, the chaplain Kate Braestrup among them, spent real energy debating whether to allow it. The reasons against were sensible. She was five. Why put a child in front of a thing she cannot process?

Nina was not asking whether she could handle it. She was asking whether she would be allowed to say goodbye.

Braestrup has been chaplain to the Maine Warden Service for years. She shows up at drownings and crash sites and the kind of search that everyone already knows is going to end badly. She came to the work after her own husband, a state trooper, was killed by a truck a mile from their house, and she went to seminary in his place, because becoming a minister had been his plan, not hers. She was inside the subject long before anyone handed her a microphone. So when she let Nina into the funeral parlor, it was not a clinical call. It was something she had earned. “You can trust a human being with grief,” she said. We know what to do.

I have not been able to stop thinking about that line, and about the fact that I heard it on The Moth, because the more I sit with it the more it explains something I have never been able to name about two shows I have listened to for most of my life.

I have listened to This American Life for as long as there has been a This American Life, and to The Moth almost as long. I love both. But they leave me in different states, and I have wanted to name the difference exactly.

TAL at its best is extraordinary. The reporting is careful, the structure is what journalism schools teach, and when the show is fully alive it pulls off something rare: a story built immaculately that is also true. I have heard episodes that changed how I see.

But there is a kind of segment, on TAL and everywhere else, that exists mostly because it is clever. It lands with perfect timing and nothing underneath it. You register the skill, you appreciate it, and twenty minutes later you cannot tell anyone what it was about. Not because you drifted. Because nothing in it asked you to take it in.

I have started calling this the junk food problem, and I do not mean it loosely. Junk food is not badly made. It is engineered, precisely, to taste good and feed you nothing. The clever segment works the same way. You nod, you think that was smart, and it is gone.

The Moth does the opposite when it works, and it does it with far less polish. The tellers stumble. They lose the thread and find it again. None of that weakens the story. All of it is the evidence. The stumble tells you the person is still inside the thing, still working it out in front of you instead of narrating it from somewhere safe. When a Moth story lands, you carry it out of the room. It changes how you think about whatever it was about. That is not the feeling of being impressed, and the distance between the two is what I keep trying to point at.

The difference is not craft against no craft. Braestrup is a wonderful writer. Her stories are built well. The difference is whether the person telling it is still on the hook for what it cost.

This is what I keep running into when I think about writing and art made with machines. The trouble is not that the work is bad. A lot of it is not bad. The tool knows what beauty looks like. It knows the moves and makes them in the right order. And the obvious objection is correct as far as it goes: a tool does not need to have suffered anything, any more than a piano does. The wound was never supposed to live in the instrument.

The wound is supposed to live in the person using it. That is the part that worries me. A piano demands that someone sit down and play, accountable in real time to every note. The new tools are different. They will generate the whole performance, finished and plausible, while the person who asked for it stands at a remove from everything it claims to have felt. You can produce a story about grief without ever having gone near a funeral parlor, and it will sound exactly right and mean nothing. Braestrup’s sentence about Nina does something a generated sentence cannot, not because a machine wrote the fake one, but because no one stood behind it answerable to what it cost. The machine did not invent the hollow center. It made it cheap to mass-produce, and it let the person ordering it off the hook.

I use these tools. I think hard about how and toward what. I am not writing against the tool. I am writing about the test.

The test was never who made it. A human being can produce empty work and a person can use a machine to say something true. The test is whether anyone is still inside it, answerable to what it costs, willing to ask what it actually produces. Craft serving only itself is empty whoever or whatever performs the craft. Mastery sets up the conditions for something to land. It does not do the landing. Someone has to be home for that.

Nina knew what she needed. She walked into that cool room, and when the adults told her Andy could not talk or stand or open his eyes, she said yes, yes, she knew, and went in anyway. She walked around his body touching him, making sure he was all there. She put her head on his chest and talked to him. After a while her mother, in tears, asked if she was ready to go. No, Nina said. But I’ll tell you when I am.

I did not read that in a book. I heard it on The Moth Radio Hour, her own voice working it back up from inside herself. That is the whole difference, and no machine will ever close it, because the machine was never in the room.

You can trust a human being with grief. The harder question is whether we still trust ourselves to be the human being in the room.