Good Grief Episode Three: Schrödinger’s Cat
At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.
I began journaling my personal experience with grief, and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my third episode. I hope this is helpful to you, because it truly has been for me.
From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.
This week’s theme? Schrödinger’s Cat

When I woke up in my mom’s home office the morning after she passed, I lay still for a while scanning the walls the way I had done on so many visits to back home. In that suspension of half wakefulness, with my fiancé sleeping by my side, I’d forgot why I was there, what the circumstances of this particular visit were — Had my stepdad started boiling water for the french press yet? Did my mom get up in time for yoga or would she be answering emails at the kitchen table listening to NPR?
I took inventory of the pictures of us together throughout the years, like an anthology of my regrettable hairstyles, honing in on one, trying to remember if I’d posted it to instagram yet, pictures of me in my high school frosted tips phase always performed particularly well.
Then I heard the stirring of a house full of transient guests who’d made the pilgrimage across the country to say goodbye. My mom’s condo was now a halfway house for mourning southerners, and she wouldn’t be there to show them her air plants or her extensive collection of esoteric nick nacks and niche art that adorned her walls. In that moment everything rushed back to me and I had the humbling realization that there was no longer any person the world who would ever want all of these pictures me.
Of all of the barstool philosophy debates I’ve been in, few have been as practical as those on the topic of Schrodinger’s Cat. Here is a very simplified version of this thought experiment: imagine there is a cuddly little tabby cat named sealed into a box, there is also some poisonous gas in there and there is a 50% chance that it will kill him.
Until the box is opened, no one knows if the is alive or dead, and in a way he is actually both. That is to say that until someone opens the box to find a live or dead cat — until someone observes the outcome — and there is a 50/50 chance of both outcomes — we live in a world where both outcomes exist. In the instance of our little tabby, he is both alive and dead at the same time, and this is referred to as superposition (mostly mentioning that because it’s a really cool word).
Here’s where things get a little tricky: you are tasked with opening the box.
Besides potentially being a little morbid, it’s also means that you are responsible for taking the tabby out of superposition — if the gas was lethal you eliminating the possibility that he is still alive, you are in an abstract way killing him, by removing the possibility that he could still be alize.
Now, to be fair, this part isn’t the point of the thought experiment, it wasn’t designed as a moral test, but to me, it’s super interesting. And it definitely reflects my approach to looking at my credit score or how many unresolved parking tickets I may have.

When I was 9 or 10 my mom and I lived in a town called Newhall about 20 miles northeast of Downtown Los Angeles. A suburban outpost in the shadow of Six Flags Magic Mountain, Newhall’s residence were mostly low income folks priced out of the city; off-duty police, teachers, migrant field workers and day laborers. Every other corner was occupied with elote vendors and on Sundays the Salvadorian matriarchs would walk up and down block selling their homemade pupusas.
Sometimes there were gunshots and sirens. I wasn’t a nice place, but there were nice people there just trying to make it work, and we were all in it together.
My mom commuted to the city for a while, then stopped shortly after the LA riots when she got trapped on the 405 on her way to pick me up from daycare. She worked from home for a while after that as a photographer rep. Something in her changed around then, maybe it was because she was so isolated, maybe it was the political climate, but her tolerance for our situation got really low. Money was tight, and I’d find her crying at night from time to time.
Then something awful happened, the kind of thing that was so bad, that it actually gave my mom agency. It was like suffering through it made her feel like she had earned the right to do what she actually wanted to.
After the Northridge earthquake we didn’t have water for a few days, our stucco duplex was knocked off its foundation and there were cracks in the walls big enough to see daylight on the other side. The whole neighborhood was pretty messed up, and occasionally we wouldn’t get mail for a week or so. My mom didn’t think much of it. Then there were cigarette butts that would collect on the sidewalk in front of the house, a few window screens pulled back, phantom knocks on the front door.
Then one night my mom was reading in bed. She was sitting with her back resting against her open window. Like something out of a bad horror film, someone reached through the window and wrapped their arms around her and tried to pull her out of the house. She fought back, our lame, ill-trained mutt dog, for once in the entirety of his life did exactly what he was supposed to and lunged at the attacker. By the time I ran into the room, it was over.
When the police came, they told us that we weren’t the only ones, that this person had been stalking women all over the neighborhood, which made us feel better and worse at the same time.
For the next two weeks our neighbor Jason slept outside of my mom’s bedroom with a baseball bat. He was a jazz theory student at CalArts, and at 6’2” and 160lbs soaking wet, the act was more of a formality than a practical defense strategy for our household.
Within a few months we were gone. My mom had dreamed of leaving Newhall until the place became an actual nightmare. There was a small town up the coast, and as Art Alexakis once said “it’s just a name on the map, it sounds like heaven to me.” The box had been opened and we’d been pulled out of superposition — and though couldn’t really afford to go, we sure as hell couldn’t afford to stay.
There is another theory sort of related Schrodinger’s Cat that you can spin out on for a while. It states that the probability of anything existing at all, you, me twinkies, music, anything, is so infinitesimally low and the universe is so infinitely large that it is just as probable that there is an infinite number worlds identical to ours except one thing. A world where my mom never met my dad, and one where she met my dad but they never divorced, a world where Jason was actually a 250lb linebacker, a world where her stalker actually drug her out of the window. If you think about it like this Schrodinger’s cat, Toby the Tabby is always in Superposition, because even if you discover him dead in this world, there exists a world exactly like this one except he lives.
In the days after my mom passed away, I had to call friends and family, and Jason. I had to message her estranged best friends with whom she’d gone to Live Aid with an watched U2 play Sunday Bloody Sunday with for the first time ever in America. I had to open the box over and over again and tell people that this is not the world in which my mom survived pneumonia long enough to endure chemo, long enough to dance at my wedding, long enough to hold her grandchild — to amass a whole new catalogue of pictures of us to hang on her walls — But I take comfort in thinking there is a world where she did.
This has been episode three of Good Grief, thank you so much for listening. I know this episode was a little heady, and I appreciate you for staying along for the ride.
Until next time, please take care of yourselves and I’ll leave you with this line from the song on your Porch by the format, a song t hat brought me a lot of comfort while my mom was sick:
Me I ran, I couldn’t even look at him for fear I’d have to say goodbye,
And as I start to leave, he grabs me by the shoulder and he tells me,
What’s left to lose, you’ve done enough, and if you fail, well then you fail, but not to us.
Cus’ these last three years, I know they’ve been hard, but now it’s time to get out of the desert and into the sun, even if it’s alone.
