On Anxiety, Loss, and Grief with Sara Billups
What is the relationship between anxiety and grief?
For Sara Billups, that question became deeply personal during a season of significant loss. Her latest book, Nervous Systems, was released while she was caring for both of her seriously ill parents. Her dad died that same month, followed by her mom just six weeks later.
In this conversation, Sara joins Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen to explore the surprising ways anxiety and grief can interact—sometimes intensifying our distress, and sometimes shifting or even quieting as we face what we feared or cannot change. They also talk about why we often hesitate to bring up loss, how making space for grief can make room for love and joy, and what it means to receive care when you’re the one who is used to caring for others.
Join us for a tender, honest conversation about sitting with grief, living with anxiety, and leaning into hope.
About Our Guest
Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and others. Sara writes Bitter Scroll, a monthly Substack letter and co-hosts the podcast That’s the Spirit. She earned a Doctor of Ministry in the Sacred Art of Writing at the Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary.
Sara works to help wavering Christians remain steadfast through cultural storms and continues to hope for the flourishing of the Church amid deep political and cultural division in America.
Her first book, Orphaned Believers, follows the journey of a generation raised in the 80s and 90s of evangelicalism reckoning with the tradition that raised them and searching for a new way to participate in the story of God. Her second book, Nervous Systems released on November 4, 2025, from Baker Books.
You can order your copy of Nervous Systems on Amazon, or find it at your local bookstore.
About the Allender Center Podcast
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.
To become a supporter of the Allender Center Podcast, click here.
If you and your organization would like to partner with the Allender Center Podcast, please reach out to Clay Clayton at cclayton@theallendercenter.org
Episode Transcript
Dan: Okay, Rachel, I have a simple question for you. Have you recently had a meal with someone you just met where you literally grieve that the meal is over and that you have to depart?
Rachael: Oh, I have not had that experience recently, but I have had that experience and it is one of those great gifts of life, I think.
Dan: As I introduce Sara Billups and a bit about her, I’ll just say, first of all, welcome Sara. It is so lovely to have you with us, but this is what I experienced with Sara and her husband, Drew. We had the opportunity, both of us, to be part of Curtis Chang’s documentary on anxiety. And we were, what were we, Sara? Talking heads? I don’t know what we were…
Sara: I think so, yes. Camera crews and boy, my whole living room got transformed. That was my first time. Dan, you’re probably a pro, but that was new for me.
Dan: Yeah, I like those events, but I was sad that often they have somebody who make you up. Did you have a makeup artist at that?
Sara: No, that would’ve been lovely. I did not have one of those.
Dan: Yeah. It’s one of the few times where my rosacea, the little pink things on my face get covered. They wanted just absolute goodness, honesty in the conversation. So I didn’t get to wear makeup. All that aside to say, the time with you and Drew and DT, the one who was working with us, just one of those sweet, sweet gifts. So let me just say, Sara is a prolific and profound author and your Orphaned Believers and in some sense of the word, a book that will not sound like a book. It sounds like a fact that is Nervous Systems, but it is an engagement with the reality of story, your own experience of growing up in the ’80s and ’90s Christian realm, but also the profound failure on the believing community to address anxiety. In some sense, the two of you have, for me, been really helpful in opening the door to understanding what the body does with anxiety and how so often so many verses, so many approaches into the scripture get used as just brutality against those who have neurological systems that experience more anxiety than what “seems appropriate.” So your two books are incredible invitations into the heart. So let me just say a delight to have you here, but one of the things that came up…
Sara: Thank you. Dan, I have to interrupt you. Can we end the interview now? Because I’m feeling really good. I’m walking on air over here after that intro, so I think we’re… I think we can call it.
Dan: No, no. we can’t because it has the same feeling of ending that lovely time meal that we all had together. Oh, thank you. So no, we’re going to keep you a little longer. But one of the things that came up in our conversation, because I did plead with you to join us, was which book would be most enjoyable for you to talk about? And that’s the normal… Again, we love talking with authors and talking with folks who are inviting the believing community into a way of thinking that we find so deeply consonant with what we’re hoping to accomplish. But you were pretty clear that you have gone through a significant and long season of loss. And you said, I’d rather talk about the experience of grief. And so I want to set that before you to say, what have you been through and what is in your heart and mind?
Sara: Yeah, goodness. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Rachael. The week that Nervous Systems came out, which was last November, I think about that time and how the intensity of that week, a time that should have been joyful with the book that you’d worked really hard on finally coming into the world was, do you know how when in real life there’s something profoundly awful happening, but yet there’s this kind of joyful moment? And so the tension or the sort of irony there was almost too much for me to handle. And so I didn’t talk about it then because there’s this idea that I think all of us online, if we see someone talking about their pain too soon or in a way that’s related to something they’re producing or selling, there’s just a kind of feeling of grossness or there’s something that can surface. And so it was important to me to not do that. But if I think about that week, which was around having an appointment with my mom and her neurologist because she had a brain bleed and my dad who had just been diagnosed from, or sorry, released from the hospital after another diagnosis of a stroke from his cancer and chemo and we’re like, changing his bedding and walking him to the bathroom and spoonfeeding him oatmeal. So the way that we live sometimes and then the things that happen on the outside can feel so profoundly different. But I mean, all that set up to say that my dad passed away the week after Thanksgiving from multiple myeloma, which is a kind of blood cancer. And then my mom passed just six weeks later, just after New Year’s, after a much longer journey through Parkinson’s disease and then later a dementia diagnosis. And so losing them both so soon as a person that doesn’t have siblings was just a pretty wild process that I’m just now six months later beginning to emerge out of and able to talk about well. But I would just add that I had drinks with my friend the other week and she had lost her mom and said, I feel like before I lost my parent, nobody knew how to talk about how I was doing or checked in. She’s like, I really like talking about my mom now that she’s passed and I feel the same way. I love talking about my mom and dad. It’s such a joy. It’s a painful season, but a joy to remember them and to talk about them. And even to talk about that time as a way to better understand our relationship. And so when we had that dinner and you asked, thank you, it felt like honoring to them to talk about it. So it feels good to talk about it now too.
Dan: I’m so glad. It’s one of the big mistakes. It took me back to when I was pastoring in a church and a older woman lost her husband and I met with her and it was like, I don’t want to bring up this death because I know it will only surface more pain. And at the end of this conversation, probably more than an hour, she looked at me and she said, “Why won’t you talk with me about my loss?” And it was just, again, a revelation to a young immature man that the fact is most of us who have these losses, there’s something both honoring, but also so necessary to talk and to have people open to hearing. And that’s unfortunately not often understood.
Sara: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I think that it’s okay that looking back, I wonder what would I have told myself to be more comfortable inviting my own friends to talk about their grief or suffering around their family or someone they love? And I don’t know. I think that in some ways when you live through it, you more fully understand, but there is, I think, a goodness in anyone being invited to ask. I think something is profoundly connecting. It’s kind of like when you find yourself in these rooms and you don’t expect to be there, but you look around and there’s all these other people. I feel like the whole journey of caregiving and of loving my parents through illness and thinking about grief, there’s just so many people in the room. And so I wish that I would’ve known or understand that I would’ve been invited to see into that room a little bit more maybe, even if I wasn’t quite there yet, I guess.
Rachael: Well, I think it’s also because I’ve had similar experiences of loved ones and someone very close to me. I remember talking with her and she said, “I just wish anyone would say his name.” It was her child, young adult child. Everyone’s so afraid that if they say his name, somehow it will make grief real when the grief is real for me every second of every day. And it’s almost like I need them to get close to my grief to be with me, but people feel like they’re putting something on me that is already there in such fullness. It’s like when someone can ask me about him, I actually do, yes, grief, but I also get to live into, he lived and there were these things that we loved and he’s more than just this moment that brought the grief. And I think about this a lot, how many of us have just had so few experiences of witnessing or seeing, which I think in the church is actually a really sad missed spiritual formation opportunity, seeing grief actually be shared and to see that God meets us in these deepest places, not in a way that just resolves the pain, but in a way that is kind of expanding that room that we’re in with people that maybe we didn’t even know we’re in a kind of room like that and we have a greater capacity to make space for that full spectrum of joy and grief that do coexist in ways at times that feel almost insane even as it’s beautiful. So I’m curious, I don’t know, just as you’ve pondered this or lived this, how has it, thinking about, I could say “our” because I’ve read enough of your stuff to be like our formation around very real reality of grief and lament that’s a part of being human. And I actually think it’s such a great expression of love and a great expression of hope.
Sara: Yeah. You know how when we’re with our family, our worst selves often come out. It’s like the people we love really are the ones that see all sides and that is normal and probably as it should be or at least how it usually is. But it’s like seeing who you are caring for someone at the end of their life. I don’t know. I think there’s a way to invite kindness in. I mean, my caring for my parents was very administrative. I was great at dosing pills and scheduling appointments. This was not like a, let me walk around the Green Lake with you Dad and push you in your wheelchair and try to… I realized, and that’s okay. I wish that I could have in that time seen my love, my profound love coming out and doing little things because that was how I was present. And there were moments that were very sweet, but there’s so many boring, mundane moments. I mean, my friend Tony told me before when my parents both got sick, before things really got bad, he said, “Sara, you’ll never feel like you can do enough.” And I realized, oh, I could quit my job. I could move in with my mom and dad. They’re 10 minutes away. I could give every moment of my life. It would never “feel enough”. So I think there’s this invitation to self-kindness. And then the other thing that happened to me, which is we go to the Oregon coast every year with my kids. I’ve got two teenagers we’ve gone since they were babies, toddlers. Last year, it was a few months before my parents began to be towards end of life and things were intense. And I just remember being on the beach before we drove back to Seattle and feeling this intense sense of anger and sadness and frustration, and I think just a lot of fear. So my anxiety was manifesting through, I think, some anger and some sadness, the deep anger of having no control over the fact that it was bad and it was going to get worse. And you know that unless there is a miraculous healing, God can do what God wants to do. It’s going to get worse. And so I think that what came out last year in the last year of caring for them was almost this sense of being an inner teen. I mean, we talk about being an inner child, but when I was 16, I was totally tethered to my parents because I was in their home. I could not escape if I wanted to. I was with them and so I acted out. But I noticed in my mid – 40s, the same thing was happening last year. It really came out, this need to be independent to pursue my own life, but I was tethered to them. I was tethered to them because I loved them and I chose to be with them and I wanted to be there, but this other deep part of me was bristling against it. And so that came out this last year, then I was just at the beach last week. And to contrast it, I cannot tell you how within a year, six months after their passing, I got home and I thought, I just want to call them and tell him we got home okay. You know how you have the person you call when you get back? It was just this sort of sweet, sad impulse. There’s no one waiting to hear if you’re okay. And so it has shifted pretty profoundly from inner teen to just kind of an adult without irony or just an acceptance a little bit more, I guess.
Dan: Well, we’ve heard so often that the phrase that extremity introduces ourselves to ourselves and that, shall we say, the intensity of that kind of inner sense of being a teen yet also being an incredibly mature woman simultaneously, to me, so much of the experience of loss in one sense brings how shattered we really are to the surface, in some sense how divided we are, fragmented. And yet we operate and I think with incredible integrity, a wholeness and goodness. So I’m just curious, given how much brilliant work you have done looking at our nervous system, looking at particularly the role of anxiety, as both, I think of you as just such an excellent theologian, but also such a reader of the human heart, but also kind of a profound social commentator. All that to say, what have you begun to see with regard to the interplay between anxiety and grief?
Sara: Yeah. I think there’s this anticipatory fear that we will not be okay when they are gone, that we literally will not be able to put our pants on and our shirts and walk the dog, that we won’t be able to… Looking back, I think I am surprised by the fact that I think in seasons of caregiving for somebody who maybe has a complex illness, I think this can be our own experience if we have a terminal diagnosis. I think that there’s this kind of pre-grief and anticipatory grief that is common in caregivers. And so I think that I had this almost bracing. I could feel physically in my stomach like a worry baby. That’s how I would describe it. I would carry around almost like I could feel this worry baby and then this complete fear that I would not be able to function or that I… And maybe that was okay, but I think that was kind of the root of that worry baby. What if I’m not able to live my life well, or to feed myself or my family? But then the reality of the years of pre-grieving, little bits of letting go, as my mom’s dementia and cognition changed, the sort of soft landing into the intensity of their death was like nothing else. But in terms of the work that I think we can do ahead of time, I think that we can maybe trust ourselves a little bit more if we’re in a situation where we’re caring for someone that maybe is sick for a little while. And so there is a way in which there is a hidden gift to something as awful as watching your mother go into moments of psychosis and her falling. It is so awful, but there is a sense in which we are invited to have a little more time. So I think that in a way, my body was almost preparing me, and then I would get to this point where I would have to work through in the present moment practices to address the worry baby feeling as I would call it. So there were sort of two factors at play a little bit, I think, in my nervous system.
Rachael: Worry baby is such a felt, embodied. I could feel it in my own body right now. And just thinking about even in contexts that maybe aren’t as close as the loss of a parent, just that relationship between anxiety and grief. And I could say for myself, the anticipatory worry baby and the bracing can often put me in a place of anger and fight. I have to climb and I’m working on finding myself and going, what grief and sadness is actually present here that if I could allow my heart, even if I could tolerate two minutes of getting close to that, it won’t be as devastating or debilitating as I feel like it’s going to be. And that’s not to say there aren’t seasons where grief is absolutely debilitating. I just know for myself, anxiety is often in anticipation of something that I know something of what it will cost, and then there’s an unknown. And usually when I arrive, I actually have a kind of comfort or soothing and like, okay, this is really hard and one step at a time. But that anticipatory anxiety, especially as it’s connected to grief, for me has been a huge learning curve and invitation to more maturity that I do not think I’m… I think I’m still in very much baby steps just based on my current life.
Sara: Yeah. Oh, totally. I get that. I mean, the irony that other author friends say, and maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, Dan and others, but when you write a book and then you have to kind of live what’s in the book? So Nervous Systems came out, and of course where this whole book leads is this idea of Jesuit indifference, this idea from Ignatius that we can take any binary in our life, whether that be health or illness, a long life or a short life. He talks about fame or disgrace, which I love in a social media area, but whatever the two options are, are we so convicted and convinced of God’s love that we can open our hands? And so I think about this worry baby I’m carrying around, but then I’m also… I mean, I think about this idea of holy indifference every day. I mean, this idea of opening our hands to what God, if God really is for us, if God loves us, can we receive what God chooses to do because we know that it is working for a good thing in a broken world. And so the intensity of me writing about this and I wouldn’t say that… Spoiler alert, Nervous Systems does not end with my anxiety went away. Of course, it ends with God meets us in its very presence. And that is where depth comes through, through suffering, through fear, through anticipating loss and grief. It is so beautiful how we can be transformed and still carry this part of us. And so the irony of then me having to apply in real time, that week it came out with adult diapering, whatever, and then it was almost too much to handle, but also really beautiful looking back too, I guess.
Dan: Well, and it requires a heart like yours to be able to, in one sense, hold the fragmentation, but also to know at some core level because of love, there is a wholeness to and a desire in the midst of fighting at one level that the adolescent part wants to escape, but yet on the other hand, not out of fundamentally obligation, but love to wanting to serve in that process. I think, again, that theological frame of being able to hold ambiguity, ambivalence in a way in which the binaries are not given, in one sense, the kind of stature that they operate as the only alternatives, that there is something, I don’t know, it’s not of the left, it’s not of the right, it’s not in the middle. It’s just something that allows you to hold the complexity with goodness. But that whole notion of… Obviously, I’ve never been pregnant, so the idea of carrying an anxiety baby, I’m sure for both of you, you tended well when you were carrying your beloved children. How do you tend well to an anxiety baby?
Sara: It’s funny, but I’ve never thought about this before, Dan, but when I was pregnant with both kids, it was a time of less anxiety than usual. And I realized that there’s almost this sense, I think, when the big one comes, that the real baby is growing inside your very body or your parents are sick and not going to get better. When there’s almost like a revelation or the curtains pull back on what’s really happening, I think sometimes strangely we can be calmer. So I don’t totally… I mean, as a writer and not a psychologist or a professional therapist, I don’t totally understand that impulse, but I think it’s interesting that what I don’t think that I want to do, and I don’t think that we should do if we have worry babies, is spend our whole life bracing. That’s why the idea of opening our hands feels so much more compelling. But something about the bracing then finds relief in the tragedy or in the difficulty, which I think is profoundly human, but there is, of course, a better way. And so for me, the worry baby usually moves… I don’t know. I don’t want to take the metaphor too far, but let’s just say I feel it kicking. It’s usually at night. It’s usually when I’m trying to sleep. And so this actually happened last night, ironically. This literally just came up, not about grief, but just about parenting a teen. So around two o’clock, I’m…
Rachael: That’s real.
Sara: Yeah. I’m sitting there, I’m ruminating, and I think I’ve got to get up. So I get up and I go, and our bathroom has this little skylight, and I write about this in the book. I do this all the time. I stand under the skylight and I look up, I open the window, I just stand in the air for a little bit. I just try to get into my body, and then I notice the anxiety kind of stirring, but I just kind of welcome it. And I realize, I tell myself, I know exactly what’s happening. I’ve been here before. I know it’s going to come down. I don’t know. I don’t typically do an exposure ERP in the middle of the night, but I do try to, at least sense in a sensory way, come back to myself, drink water. Last night I went downstairs to the porch. I moved around a little bit. I started to think about various other memories about my parents that were really lovely that I hadn’t thought about in a while. I told myself, “You are okay.” And I kind of mothered myself in, I think, a healthy way, and that began to calm and settle the embodied sense of anxiety that was buzzing and swirling. This process last night was maybe an hour. Typically, that’s kind of how it works over here.
Rachael: Well, I just want to say that’s so beautiful, such beautiful tending. I mean, I want to go back to even just the frame you were giving for people around Nervous Systems because it’s such rich theological and pastoral imagination, so I think you should spend time with it. I have some OCDs, so there is a place for a more cognitive behavioral, like here’s some containment around things. But the reality I found in my life is I spent so much of my life trying to control my anxiety, having a lot of contempt for my anxiety, a lot of contempt toward myself for why can’t I just give this thing up? And my experience in my body was the more I try to push it away or shame it, I think about… I love the idea of an anxiety baby because I do think about this as different parts of myself that hold a lot of stories. And I have a four-year-old and I have two teenage stepsons, and I know hard stop, if they’re anxious and I come at them like, “Well, just stop. Stop being anxious or just think about something happy.” That is not helpful or effective or kind. And so that kindness, that self-kindness to know, okay, this might take some tending. I might actually have to move toward parts of myselves and my body in a way that I have to get out of bed, or I’ve got to find those things that allow me to find some safety in my body, is such a kindness. And I think tending to the anxious parts, and for me, I just try to imagine welcoming them because for so long I was like, “You got to get out of here,” and then they got more agitated and louder because it was like, “There’s a real thing here, and it’s okay that you feel this way. Maybe you need some more resourcing.” I just think that’s a really beautiful picture to be like, “We tend, we tend.” And sometimes that tending does take us to doctors or body care or friendships or all kinds of things, but that internal capacity to just be like, “Okay, you’re here. Welcome. Okay, let’s do something different.” I can do so much better, I think now being a parent than I could even do before I became a parent, though I was starting to imagine re-parenting my body, re-parenting parts of myself.
Sara: That’s exactly what I was thinking when you were talking, Rachael. I mean, I talk in the book about having an anxious kid and the experience of being a mother with an anxious son and the amount of skill building that I’ve been able to learn in my almost five decades or whatever, I think it’s really coming up in a way that I hope is helpful. I hope that I can understand his own rumination a little bit more. And so the other thing I think about with anxiety is how there’s, of course, these hidden gifts. I don’t know that creativity and anxiety are exactly the same side of a coin, but there is, of course, a tendency to be a person that can imagine pretty wild stories or that can have big ideas if we’re anxious. I think we also can imagine, and I wouldn’t trade that, especially because we happen to live in an anxious era where I think we could use a little bit of imagination instead of being so stuck on either side of the aisle. In Nervous Systems, I speak about anxiety in the body, but even if you’re not a person of an anxious disposition necessarily, I wanted to think about anxiety in the church, anxiety in politics and in our cultural moment. So I think about the body politic and the church body and some of those other more broad factors, because even if we don’t live with worry babies, we still live in a very anxious, very polarized world. And so I think there can be some interesting helpful practices or through lines to think about that too. I explored that just a little bit in the book.
Dan: Well, what are the experiences of reading you before I had the chance to meet you and Drew was how, the two words would be how inviting. You’re a brilliant writer, but there was something in the process of reading that just felt like I am being invited into my own humanity in a way that sometimes as I’m reading, I get information, but I’m not being invited into the particularity of my own body, heart, mind, and world. Then after meeting you and Drew, Becky said, I forget who said first, but it was like, that’s one of the most hospitable couples we’ve been with in so long. So how now? How was hospitality in the way that I think is so deep in you, how did it come to be?
Sara: Gosh, thanks Dan. Man, I just want to say we left that meal, we were on the ferry, the moon was really bright, just with a profound sense of peace. And Drew and I said, how cool was it to get to have this surprise night with Dan and Becky and our friend DT? What a gift that was. So I think you both have this way of leaving people with a sense of profound peace that is uncommon, and I can’t believe I got to experience that a little bit. So I just want to say that back to you. Thank you for bearing that. You’re bearing this non-anxious presence.
Dan: Well, again, I think it’s what so seldom we have put words to that. We have a lot of lovely people we’re with, but there was just, again, I don’t have a better word than, the ability to invite in. And I would love to know how has that developed in you? And I think it obviously has a lot to do with the people that you loved and were so central to helping them come to the face of God.
Sara: Yeah. Gosh, I mean the real answer is it works because I’m married to a person that bears a real sense of welcome and a deep kindness. There’s a way in which my feelings firstness and my partner’s thought thinking firstness is I think well complimented. If you read the whole Enneagram 4/5 thing, sorry if people are… There’s this in health, the four-five can have a special world of ideas and a welcoming. I think that if we’re in health, we can together hopefully connect with people who maybe are either a little bit more heady and want to talk a little bit more about politics and culture, but also people that want to talk about how it really feels to be in a really broken and wild world, but to love anyways. And so I get to have the profound gift of being in this world with someone that will, Drew will believe till the end. He will believe until the last… If it’s an election, the last precinct maybe is going to turn and then maybe the candidate would win that county and then maybe the state. I mean, he will believe forever and I’m much more practical, sometimes cynical, but I think together we can hopefully in health offer a more balanced picture of how to be in the world. And so if anybody ever feels anything good about that, how cool. But I think that when we got married 25 years ago almost, Drew’s vows were, we want to practice radical hospitality. And I think the way we can do that is by speaking well of our family, speaking well of our place. We love Seattle. We speak well of this city. It’s complicated and we are here for the long run, but we want to not create a story that isn’t true, but to be honest and also compelling about this is what we could do together. So in community, in a healthy church community, I mean, Drew’s a priest and managing a lot of dynamics around church and it’s a complicated time to be a priest. It’s like the idea of coming together and being honest about where we are, but also offering a compelling vision of what in community we can do, I think is something that he does well and I really feel like I get to learn from. So that’s some of it.
Rachael: I really do wish I was still in Seattle because I would definitely make you and Drew be friends with me and Michael.
Sara: I feel like we’re becoming friends right now on this call though Rachael, honestly. Gosh.
Rachael: Dan, I just want to push for a moment because you understandably pushed back to Sara, but I do want to just for a moment –
Dan: Oh, fine, fine, fine.
Rachael: Reflect back to you what Sara said about you and Becky and the peaceful hospitable space that you set that I think also invites people to bring their gifts in a lot of fullness that without threat or… So I’m just making sure you heard that and could receive it. That’s all.
Dan: Well, shall I say I stored it, but I did move a little too rapidly. Yes, thank you. And I think that’s part of friendship and part of hospitality. And it’s like, “Yeah, we need,” as you described you and Drew, I think most people find my beloved… I think of it as her house. I do get to live with her in the house, but it bears the molecular presence of her kindness. But I think in most marriages that there’s sort of one who bears one sort of grace and another who bears a disruption. And I think of my presence is more disruptive, Becky’s is more inviting. But between the two of us, I have come to be more inviting and unfortunately, at least for me at times, she has come to be more disruptive. So that playground of how we shape each other… But let me go back. So thank you, but let me go back to say, I still want to hear more what you’ve learned because you’ve spent so much time thinking about anxiety and your own experience in the world, but grief is new. So how is grief helping you rethink the structure of anxiety?
Sara: Yeah. I mean, grief being the manifestation of the thing happening, it marks if you are grieving, you have lost. And so in anxiety, I am doing nothing but anticipating the big one coming and then it comes and then I realize I’m okay and I almost can’t believe it. Anderson Cooper has this podcast about grief that’s really great. And so I would listen to episodes thinking, how can anybody have gone through that? How does it happen? How are they reflecting and talking about it? I don’t know. I think that because I’ve had a double grief, and I think those of us that have lost both parents, I think the statistic is around, gosh, maybe in the US, 10% or less of people in their forties have lost both parents. And so I think that I had a resistance to… I don’t like the idea of being the person people are sad for. I don’t think that we often like that sense. So that maybe at first, in the first weeks and months, very uncomfortable. And in the casserole season of caregiving, which is beautiful by the way, I think that we can say that that’s kind of like everyone’s around and then they’re gone. I mean, in our experience, there was an immense and abundant amount of community coming back to that in grace that I almost can’t believe. It was almost too much goodness for me, the way that people can come around if we let them. But looking back, I don’t know. I think that I had to accept the fact that it was sad, that I was sad, that I am sad, and it’s okay that people are sad for us. So instead of resisting this… anxiously resisting the idea of being known or seen as, oh, Sara Billups lost both her parents within six weeks, instead of that feeling like a narrative that was only more shameful or something, it became this really beautiful invitation for me to sit with discomfort about how I am seeing my story and to welcome and receive the complex sort of human, beautiful invitation to connect with other people that have gone through similar experiences or whatever. And so it’s really been humbling and a really healthy way, I think, for me to reflect on my own perception. But the other thing I’d say about the anxiety grief thing, I think honestly, I felt relieved when they died in my body, and then in my mind I felt a profound sense of unimaginable loss and a sense of suffering. And so this idea of being misaligned, there was a sense of guilt that surfaced, almost like a guilt that I feel physically relieved that I am not sitting by their bed as they die and that they are not suffering, but then in my brain almost not being able to handle it. So how did that come out? When my dad died, the first week I wanted to move around. I cleaned my bathroom for four hours one day. I was in the kitchen a lot. I wanted to take the ferry to Whidbey to get on the water. We went for a hike one day. I really wanted to move. When my mom died, I was very still and very quiet and just sat that whole first week. It was really different. So anyway, that’s a lot, but all that to say, my anxiety’s interplaying with all of these dynamics of grief and loss and perception in a way that I’m still kind of sorting through being about six months out.
Dan: Well, and I would say your ability to welcome and to create as you and Drew have, not only in terms of the ecclesial world, but in your writing, but in your life, that commitment to radical hospitality has been in so many ways your crown, but also your confrontation. You may not wish to have been radically hospitable to your mom and dad’s death, but because of that deep commitment prior, it actually has shaped something how you hold your body in the process one differently than the other, and yet both with that sense of I will welcome what most people not only despise, but there’s such sufficient distaste that I will engage it and get over it. And in that you miss, I think you put it earlier, Rachael, that this is the shaping of a human heart. And so any last thoughts before we end? I’m just left with, again, thinking about a dear friend right now who’s been diagnosed with severe form of Parkinson’s and I’ve been watching him radically be hospitable to his disease. And what is left for me is, though I’m not suffering any of those consequences at the moment, for whatever pain I’m in, am I actually inviting and being hospitable? It’s a great gift that you have offered us. Rachael, any last thoughts?
Rachael: Yeah, I think I’m still sitting with the hospitality of hope and the commitment to lean into a compelling imagination for the here and now and the future. I think that’s the other side of that hospitality that you bear in a world that we can shift between those binaries of, I would say, a fatal optimism, which is more denial or just a cynicism. I can’t bear this. That’s a beautiful, I would say, convicting invitation that I can’t easily dismiss because of the soil and the context that you’ve brought that within. So I’m just feeling a lot of gratitude for that invitation.
Dan: Well, I have a number of what I’ll say kids, and I don’t put either of you in that, but I have a number of kids who are like 12 to 18 that I just want to live long enough to be able to see who they become. I feel the same with regard, Sara, to your writing. I can’t wait. I know you’re going to write more and I can’t wait to see how this particular season, not that I wouldn’t even ask you what you’re thinking of writing next, other than to say all this can’t help but show up in the refraction and reflection on what you have endured and yet whom you’ve become in this process. So again, we can come back and just say to our audience, oh, you will find your heart well by coming into Sara’s hospitality, at least in her writing and certainly in her podcast and we’ll have in the show notes all those opportunities as well. So thank you.
Sara: Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Rachael. This has been a profound gift and has only confirmed for me what a joy it is to talk about our people that we love after they’re not in the world. I mean, thank you.
Dan: You’re welcome.