Artist and composer Laurie Anderson reflects on the death of her husband, rock legend Lou Reed and also her beloved dog Lolabelle. She talks with Anderson about grief and the unexpected feelings she has experienced surrounding loss.
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I took a break this week from going through boxes of stuff from my mom's apartment.

I've been feeling a little overwhelmed and was reminded what my mom's friend, Wendy Goodman said to me in the first podcast about pacing myself and not feeling like I have to go through everything right away.

Gloria would have said, I mean, sure she did say it to you, Anderson, let's go forward, go forward.

And you've done a job to honor her and you've done a job that she knew you could do and would do.

So don't feel rushed, don't feel pressured, Give yourself time with it all so that once this is done, you can think in a different way about all of these things.

Even when you know what you should do or feel or what your loved 1 who's died would want you to be doing or feeling doesn't mean you can does it?

I've been reading your DMs on Instagram and your notes have been incredibly moving, and I want to thank you for reaching out.

There really is this deep ocean of grief out there, and the currents are strong.

At times I still feel like I'm on a little life raft alone, but doing these interviews and hearing your stories as well, talking about it, it helps.

I've been wrestling with how much longer I should keep doing this podcast.

A big part of me doesn't want to stop having these conversations.

They feel really meaningful to me, but it's also painful at times, and yeah, overwhelming.

But there'll definitely be at least 2 more episodes in this current series.

So let's get started because I really can't wait for you to meet Laurie Anderson.

This is All There Is My mom first introduced me to Laurie Anderson's music when I was 15.

Specifically, it was a record called Big Science that Laurie released in on it called Oh Superman that I love.

Oh Superman, oh John, oh mom and dad, mom and dad.

The song is more than 8 minutes long, so I recommend you listen to the whole thing online if you want to.

Lori Anderson is 75 now and seems like she's constantly in motion.

She's an artist, but she works in a lot of different ways.

She's a composer who's won a Grammy for a chamber music album about Hurricane Sandy.

She plays these strangely wonderful violins of her own design, and she tells stories in songs and words, on stages and films, on canvases and in virtual reality.

She just had a big exhibition at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Lori was partners with rock legend Lou Reed for 21 years, the last 8 of them as husband and wife.

Walk on the Wild Side was just 1 of the many songs that Lou Reed wrote in his long career.

He was 71 when he died from liver disease in 2013.

Laurie also experienced the death of her beloved dog Lola Belle, and in 2015 made a moving and fascinating film about life and loss called Heart of a Dog.

And that the purpose of death is the release

Laurie Anderson, thank you so much for being here.

As you know, I love you and I think you are a first.

And you live in the apartment that you still, that you share together.

I'm 1 of those people who isn't moving on because I just like it the way it is.

So a lot of the stuff is kind of more or less where he put it.

The concept of moving on feels like something on a refrigerator magnet.

I like objects that have a presence, especially things like somebody's phone or things that they touched a lot.

Lou had a lot of weapons and so those are the things that...

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Not a gun-murderer.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: He was a martial artist.

So I imagine that your mother has left some of those things all over the place.

But everything my mom had, it's not that it was incredibly valuable, and I'm sure some of the things have value, but they were all things that had history with her, that had been with her for the 95 years of her life, had been with her for decades and decades.

There's nothing more valuable than that, history.

I find all these objects are infused with so many memories and because All of the family that I grew up in the little family of my father my brother and my mom I'm the last person who knows the memories of all these objects.

So in throwing them away or giving them away or whatever, it's like extinguishing that memory.

Well, yeah, you are a last man standing here.

But it could be really interesting instead of feeling the heaviness of that.

I found that it helped me a lot to give things away.

And for a while, I gave away a lot of loose leather jackets.

And then I'd see them walking around on the street with my friends.

Wait a second, that was just a loan, really.

Wait a minute, I remember recently you emailed me and you were giving away a lot of your books.

I did get rid of a lot of books And I think it helps to let them fluid off and have another life.

I do like that idea of these things having a new life.

That my tendency is to like hoard everything in boxes even if I'm not using it.

But then I think, well, that's ridiculous.

My brother and I used to play Dungeons and Dragons as kids.

And the notes he kept for that game, I don't know what to do with them.

Well, I think rituals were made for stuff like this.

When Lu died as a Buddhist, and he was as well, it was really important to me to do this 49-day period of the bardo.

And this Bardo is this period of time when supposedly according to Tibetans the consciousness, let's say they don't use words like soul or whatever, the consciousness shifts into another form.

And so it's a period of kind of great confusion.

So the idea is to focus on that person in the time, not on yourself, and put all of your energy into thinking of that person who's trying to make that transition.

Because it's, according to the Tibetans, confusing.

All your memories from all your whole life are like swirling around.

It's like everything breaks and you see sort of pure energy.

So it's like supposedly exhilarating and also very confusing.

There's 1 guy who is my teacher at the time named Bob Thurman and he talks about that transition.

So I just want to play you 1 little section of Bob Thurman's and it's called Liberation Upon Hearing in the Between.

here we are in the between, in the between, dealing with the so-called Book of the Dead.

First thing about it, of course, is that the title, The Book of the Dead, is totally wrong.

Because the great insight of The Book of the Dead is that there are no dead.

You're either in this room or in that room.

The door is just like a line, you know, it has no width.

I'm going to tell you, the title is crazy because there are no dead people.

So that woke me right up and I was like, what did he mean by that?

I actually feel that I feel that oh, yes, I feel that that line is not Doesn't not exist.

I feel those kinds of definitions are no longer so clear for me, you know, dead, not dead.

1 of the things that this teaching is about is like that we are in a kind of dream state now that we're trying to wake up from.

That rings a bell for me because some of the happiest, craziest moments of my life I realize are sort of outside of time and I feel connected to things and people, dead and alive, you know, plants, fish, whatever,

MATT PORTER That sounds like, it sounds confusing, but it also sounds wonderful.

JANE MCLAREN Well, it's kind of hard to describe this, But I, for the last, especially 10 years, I...

Since, so for me that was the first really intimate death because my parents had died, but it was different, you know?

It was like, we were partner dying, it was a whole new thing for me.

the expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died.

His hands were doing the water flowing, 21 form of Tai Chi.

I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world and talking to him as he died.

I'd gotten to walk with him to the end of the world.

Life, so beautiful, painful and dazzling, does not get better than that.

And death, I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

What does that mean that the purpose of death is the release of love?

Because you said that also in your film about your dog, Lola Bell, who died.

You said death is so often about regrets or guilt

Why didn't I say that it's more about you

I guess that I wasn't following any kind of script about what grief was supposed to mean or death was supposed to mean when Lola Belle died.

And I know it's really dopey to talk about your dog's death but you know unless you have a dog.

Like when my cat died I was like it was fine.

So Lola Belle, her death was a...I felt an unexpected happiness.

And I expected to feel like, oh my God, she's dead.

But no, I tried to feel what I was really feeling as opposed to what, you know, grief was supposed to mean.

And happiness is the feeling that came to you?

It was a delirious sense of freedom, like as if something exploded.

Matthew Feeney, Freedom for her, for Lola Bell.

Like the way you see a movie about love and it's not the person in love in the film, you're also in love too with that.

It ignites a feeling within you when you see a film about love.

The whole thing is like, you get confused with the main character.

You think, oh, you know, It's just like waking up from a film and you've been sort of like paralyzed.

Because the film took you somewhere and you were that character and you were that person in love.

So we're capable of jumping into other creatures pretty easily and kind of doing that.

And I did feel that and it was really a shock to me.

I was like, why do I feel a burst of energy and happiness when I'm supposed to be crying?

And he said to you, you need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.

You told me this, I met you doing an interview with you on 60 Minutes, and that's something you said, and I've thought about it ever since.

And when you first said it, The ability to feel sad without actually being sad.

I This is this is confusing to me and I've been like I really have been thinking about it a lot and I think it's kind of an amazing idea Yes.

Yeah, And I've been sort of trying to figure out how to practice it or just let it come to me.

It seems to me because you're very engaged in the world without being defeated by it.

And that's the whole point of what he said is, you know, if you push away things that are sad or tragic or horrible, you're kind of an idiot because they're all there.

I've tried to push it away for a long time.

But to actually let yourself, allow yourself to feel that as intensely as you can.

I think to feel suffering of other people, to walk by someone and see them lying in the gutter and you're just going to go, what would that feel like to be there in that body right now?

What would it feel like to be running away from a tsunami?

Not like it's some kind of thing that's happening to someone else, but as something that's happening to you.

But the most important part of this teaching is the second part, which is do not become sad yourself.

So I mean I'm an optimist only because I've chosen that.

You know so this gloomy sort of you know apocalyptic pornography in a way that's you know everybody's going all this this is really going down.

But I have chosen to be optimistic for 1 reason.

It's based on you'll have a happier life if you're an optimist, period.

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Laurie Anderson: The Release Of Love