A poet talks candidly about her experience of losing two close family members.
This week, we welcome Danielle Badra to the show.
Danielle was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan and currently resides in Virginia. She is the author of “Dialogue with the dead," a collection of poems in which she responds to the recovered poems of her deceased sister.
She joins Tyler to talk about the difficulty of losing our loved ones and how creativity can build a bridge to connect with them once they’ve left us. In a raw and candid conversation, Danielle highlights the importance of being in touch with family and the little things in life that bring enormous meaning.
About the Guest
Danielle Badra received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College (2008) and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). While there, she was the poetry editor of So To Speak, a feminist literary and arts journal, and an intern for Split This Rock. Her poems have appeared in journals, papers and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021.
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The Team
This podcast is a production of The Story Producer.
Executive Producer & Host: Tyler Greene
Senior Producer: Tricia Bobeda
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About Us
This Is My Family is an unapologetically full-hearted interview show about building a life with the people we love.
As a gay dad in an interracial marriage, host Tyler Greene’s life is a testament to the fact that there are many ways to define family today. Each week, his conversations with guests reveal funny and heartfelt stories about how you can make a family, and how your family makes you.
Join us for a celebration of the beautifully messy connections that shape our lives.
Danielle Badra:
Not only were these poems a way for me to talk to her and go through this healing process with her, but it was also a way to be able to highlight her voice and get her published and to remember her, not only for myself, but for her loved ones and even for people who didn't know her.
Tyler Greene:
Hello there and welcome to This Is My Family, a podcast about building a life with the people you love. I'm your host, Tyler Greene and I am so glad that you're here. In our first season, we talked to people with families of all shapes and sizes. Now, we're back for a second season with lots more stories to share about how we make our families and how those families make us. A little about me, if you're new to the show. I am raising a baby with my husband in California.
Sam:
Hi.
Tyler Greene:
Who is that?
Sam:
Baba.
Tyler Greene:
And who is this?
Sam:
Dada.
Tyler Greene:
I'm dada, yeah. Oh buddy, you're the best. I started this show to talk to people who can inspire us to think about family in new, bigger, more inclusive ways. Some are people I've known for years. Others are creators whose work is important to me. We're kicking this season off with three conversations in the next three weeks, featuring people who I consider heart friends. These are people who have really changed the way that I think about friendship. And quite frankly, how I show up in the world. This week, it's poet, Danielle Badra, who has had a sort of unconventional family, but one that is full of love. Her family story includes tales of leaving the clergy, of coming out of the closet, of losing multiple loved ones. We talk about how she uses her writing to connect with family members she's lost, including a sister who died almost a decade ago.
Tyler Greene:
I've known Danielle since college, Kalamazoo College, sometimes affectionately referred to by those of us who were queer students there as gay K. We were classmates, friends, roommates eventually, and we could spend an entire episode talking about our history and all the fun things we did. Dani B., as I affectionately call her, is deep but approachable, kind, but firm, and honestly, one of the most amazing writers I've ever met. I started our chat by asking her about her family of origin, specifically her mom and dad's unlikely partnership.
Danielle Badra:
He was 53, or 52 and a half, when he had me. He was 24 years older than my mom. From what he told me actually later in life, he'd never actually planned on having children. But I guess when he met my mom and things changed for him, he ended up having a family and he went from being Father Badra, in the priestly sense, to being father Badra in the family sense and he was a darn good dad. Said weird stuff. He was older, so I feel like I had some phrases that a lot of kids my age were just like, "What are you talking about?" Gee, willikers-
Tyler Greene:
Yes.
Danielle Badra:
For example.
Tyler Greene:
Oh, that's great.
Danielle Badra:
He was a good father.
Tyler Greene:
Yeah.
Danielle Badra:
Just didn't play ball with us and stuff like that. My mom took on those roles because, well, my dad couldn't catch anyways, really. I mean, he wasn't super sporty to begin with, but also I think just being older, he was the relaxed parent. Let's say that.
Tyler Greene:
So then in eighth grade, your mom came out as lesbian. Yes?
Danielle Badra:
So she did not come out as a lesbian in eighth grade. They got divorced when I was in eighth grade, but she did not come out as a lesbian until I was a sophomore in high school. That memory will never leave my mind because she called me and my sister into the living room and she sat us down and she was like, "Girls, I have something I need to tell you." And Rachal and I were both panicked. We thought she was going to tell us that she was dying or was marrying some other person or was pregnant again or who knows? And then she said, "Well, I'm dating a woman." And we just looked at each other, Rachal and I, and we were just kind of like, "So? Okay, what's the big news."
Tyler Greene:
Aww.
Danielle Badra:
But I mean, we congratulated her obviously, and we're like, "Oh, we support you no matter what." But we didn't see it as this terrible thing that she thought we were going to see it as, because I think we're a different generation than the one that she grew up in.
Tyler Greene:
Okay. So your mom came out to you when you were a sophomore in high school.
Danielle Badra:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tyler Greene:
You were not out yet?
Danielle Badra:
Correct. I knew something was in there. I knew there was a little queer baby in there somewhere, but I just hadn't found her yet. So I think actually, at first, I was maybe intimidated by the idea of my own queerness. I don't know if that makes any sense, but because my mom was, I was like, "Oh no, this must mean that I am too. This feeling that I've been having, oh no, does that confirm that?" I think I ran away from it for a little bit because of that.
Tyler Greene:
That's so interesting. I'm embarrassed to say, I don't know when you came out. Was it around this time?
Danielle Badra:
So I ended up coming out my freshman year of college at Kalamazoo College, gay K.
Tyler Greene:
Gay K they call it, our alma mater.
Danielle Badra:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tyler Greene:
And how does your mom respond?
Danielle Badra:
Oh, I mean, I know she was happy.
Tyler Greene:
We can go to the bar together.
Danielle Badra:
Yeah. And I think at that point we all just turned to Rachal and we're like, "Well, when are you coming out, Rachal?" And she hated that because she was pretty straight. I mean, she definitely fell on the spectrum, but-
Tyler Greene:
It's all spectrum.
Danielle Badra:
Yeah, it's all a spectrum.
Tyler Greene:
Sometime soon after college, Danielle and her sister, Rachal, ended up living near each other in Washington D.C. That's when her sister died. Since Rachal was in high school, there had been some warning signs. She would occasionally faint.
Danielle Badra:
Her heart stopped while she was sleeping. She was living with her boyfriend at the time, just down the street from me in Washington D.C. and I got the call around 6:00 AM that she had been having seizures in her sleep, from her boyfriend. He called me and I said, "Well, call 911. Why are you talking to me? Call 911."
Tyler Greene:
Yeah.
Danielle Badra:
So he called 911. The EMTs came out. They managed to stabilize her enough to transport her to the hospital, but her heart just kept failing. It just kept stopping. Basically, we ended up waiting two or three days in the hospital to see whether or not she still had any brain activity and that's when we found out that her brain did not have any activity. Her brain had died. She signed up to donate life and so at that point, it was a matter of trying to retrieve any sort of lifesaving organs that could be donated. And she was able to donate two kidneys, which I'm still very happy about to know that her kidneys are living on somewhere. But yeah, then she died.
Tyler Greene:
And do you know what the cause was?
Danielle Badra:
Yeah. So we didn't find out the official cause until after the autopsy and everything was done, but it is arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia, also known as ARVD. She fainted while she was singing in a Christmas Eve mass at our church and she fainted several times after that and none of us knew, at the time, that that was actually her heart stopping. Everybody should know this. If somebody faints for more than one minute, you should probably call 911 because the chances are that their heart may have stopped.
Danielle Badra:
I did not know that obviously, at the time, nor did anybody else who was around. I still don't quite understand it, but essentially, from what I understand, is there's fat cells that form along the wall of the heart and that sporadically start and stop the heart and one of the first symptoms can be sudden death. And I was actually told by her cardiologist while I was still in the hospital before they had officially taken her off of all the machines that I had a 50% chance of at some point in my life developing the same condition because it's a genetic condition. But thankfully, because we know of that possibility, I am able to get testing every year.
Tyler Greene:
So that week, did your parents come to D.C.?
Danielle Badra:
I called everybody I could think of that would need to know and within hours, I mean, we had 20 people coming to D.C. immediately. My mom and dad and my mom's partner at the time, Mary, dropped everything that they were doing and raced out and made it within a few hours and so did almost all of her best friends. It was incredible, actually the people that showed up.
Tyler Greene:
Was everyone able to gather and say some sort of goodbye in that moment?
Danielle Badra:
Yeah. Well, of course, at that point we still didn't know that her brain was dead and so the 20 or so of us basically just gathered at her hospital bed every single day and spent hours upon hours beside her, singing to her, playing music for her, reading poems to her, holding her hand, telling her stories of her life, just doing anything to try to mentally stimulate her or try to let her know that we were there. I've been told this a few times, that even if somebody is non-responsive, often their last sense that they'll lose is their sense of hearing, that they can still hear you so make sure you're saying what you want to say. So that's basically what everybody did. We went around and made sure we said what we wanted to say to her.
Tyler Greene:
After Rachal's death, Danielle still felt like she had a lot to say to her sister. She wanted to keep talking to her, so she started writing poems in a very particular way that made it feel like she could have a conversation with Rachal, contrapuntal poems. I asked Danielle to explain how the poems work.
Danielle Badra:
Like when you read a book written by one author, it's typically just that one author's voice. It's not a whole bunch of other people in there, unless it's an anthology. It does this polyphonic thing where I bring in voices of a lot of people that I love. There's a poem in there between me and my partner, Holly, where her poem's on the left and mine is on the right and there's a poem between the two. There's poems with Rachal, poems with my dad, poem with a Facebook post that my mom wrote on my sister's wall, where she just said, "I love you and I miss you," basically. There's a whole community in this book and that is certainly not always the case.
Tyler Greene:
The big idea, I think, of at least this chapter of your life to me is that your poetry was a way to communicate with someone who was your most important person, for all intents and purposes, who tragically passed away very suddenly. And so for a very long time, you wrote these contrapuntal poems to Rachal with Rachal's writing and actually I think for a while, you just pretty much exclusively did that. Right?
Danielle Badra:
Yeah.
Tyler Greene:
So how do you keep a relationship with a family member alive through writing?
Danielle Badra:
Well, when she died, I found a folder and inside of it were a lot of Rachal's poems, and I did not know that she was writing at the time and knew that she had written in college, but I didn't know that she'd kept writing. So when I found this folder, I just knew I had to do something with it. Actually, I got to go back for a second because when she was in the ER, I had her purse on hand and in her purse was little black Moleskine book and inside of it were poems from the last month and a half of her life, including a poem that she wrote on February 14th, 2012, the day that she ended up, everything happened, and that definitely was the moment I knew I had to do something with her poems. And then when I found this collection, this folder with her poems in it as well, I knew-
Tyler Greene:
It was a like a reminder. "Hey, come over here."
Danielle Badra:
I was like, "Okay, okay. I need to do something." And I thought, "Let's just see what happens. I'm just going to take some of her words and I'm going to put them on a page and I'm going to write alongside them." And I am not kidding when I tell you that I felt like I was communing with her, like she and I were talking. I was talking with my dad. I mean, it did not feel like she wasn't there. It felt like she was there and I was talking to her. I mean, I needed to have these conversations with her. She died before I could ask her why she didn't tell me. She knew. I could tell from her writing that she knew something serious was going on inside of her. I mean, she wrote about having out of body experiences, of wondering whether or not she was dead or alive. I mean, very intense stuff that she never told me about and so I needed to have those conversations with her and so I did, using poetry. Yeah.
Tyler Greene:
And how long were you in conversation with her in that way?
Danielle Badra:
Two years after her death, I pretty much wrote every single day. I had a folder where I kept all of the poems I was writing with her and I think there's close to 400 poems in there of just contrapuntal poems, which I mean is a little crazy because it's a very complicated form at the end of the day. It's basically like writing a puzzle every day, but it was my therapy.
Tyler Greene:
So I believe you said that when Rachal was alive, she was really shy to share her poetry with you. And so I don't know, I would love to hear you talk about that and then how you negotiated that for yourself when you started writing these, presumably for yourself, but I believe some have been published or at least shared externally, right?
Danielle Badra:
Yeah.
Tyler Greene:
So how do you just assume she'd be cool with it kind of thing?
Danielle Badra:
Yeah. I don't remember which friend of hers told me this, but someone told me that Rachal was intimidated by my writing and that's why she didn't share her writing with me because she thought I wouldn't, I don't know, see it as worthy or I don't know what she was thinking. But when I found it... And I mean, she's an excellent writer. She's an excellent poet. Basically, I wanted to publish her. That was my first instinct is I need to get her words out there because they're amazing. And so not only were these poems a way for me to talk to her and go through this healing process with her, but it was also a way to be able to highlight her voice and get her published and to remember her, not only for myself, but for her loved ones and even for people who didn't know her.
Tyler Greene:
Can you read us one of those poems that is part your words, part Rachal's?
Danielle Badra:
I'm going to read Phillips Collection, which is the location that Rachal worked at, actually, before she died and the last day that she was alive, she worked at the Phillips Collection, which is an art gallery in Washington, D.C. And she wrote a poem based on a traveling collection. It was just a gray, an all gray painting, and she wrote a poem about it. So I've included her lines from that last poem, in this poem. "Phillips Collection. There was a gray painting on display that day, a traveling exhibit, she was told to rotate through, monitor the artwork, make sure it isn't touched. Tell everyone to just breathe it in. She worked her whole life for this moment. The chance to stand and study light the way it forms pigment on canvas, a white wall in an old windowless room.
Danielle Badra:
She prayed for this perspective, her heart pasted on with a trowel. She always knew there was a storm coming, one she had met before. Been soaked by such torrential, she walked around prepared for it. Pen ready, and paper, she sheltered her words close. She must have known this would be her final Rothko. Her last time worshiping in the stark open chapel, a poem in the black book she kept in her purse. She carried it with her while she worked the Collection, guarding art and guiding art lovers. Where the greens and reds of the flowers will fade, sunlight is carefully located. The thickly painted clouds will press their way in, will rearrange the way she lived so close to vibrant colors, her arm hair electric, her skin aglow in a way. She understood the after effect of living and how it pays homage to both birth and death. All in one fleeting moment, she predicted that there will be no room for light in halls."
Tyler Greene:
In just a minute, I talk to Danielle about losing her father during the pandemic and her hopes for the future of her family. Stick with us. And wherever you're listening to the show, make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss an episode. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to check out our episode from season one, with Peabody Award winning poet, J. Ivy.
Tyler Greene:
Hey, everybody, just Tyler popping in here with a podcast recommendation for you. I am highly recommending that you check out 3 Righteous Mamas. Do I even have to say anything more than that? This is a show where three all-American moms who are Latina, Muslim, and queer, talk about the issues of the day with some of the biggest change makers and thought leaders in our world. These three mamas are on a mission to transform our country and celebrate the power and hope of pissed off mamas who are building a better future for all of our children. There's no podcast quite like it, so check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Again, it's called 3 Righteous Mamas. I was lucky enough to meet Danielle's dad once over pancakes and coffee in Southwest Michigan. He was gentle and sweet and you could tell right away that they adored each other. I asked Danielle to tell me more about his life story and how different it is to experience his slow decline due to dementia, compared to the unexpected loss of her sister.
Danielle Badra:
So he was born in 1933 in Lansing, Michigan. His mom was from Tebnine, Lebanon and his dad was from Aleppo, Syria. And he entered the priesthood when he was 13 years old and he was a priest from, I believe, the age of 25 till 30. He ended up not agreeing a hundred percent with a lot of the church's teachings. He did end up leaving. He was not ex-communicated though. He was still able to perform certain priestly functions, but he became a professor.
Tyler Greene:
Just dropping in here to say that we actually have audio of him in the classroom. I think that you can hear how much he loved being there. He begins by reading from a book.
Father Badra:
I reached up so as to make chair in bed, exactly stand upon that snow [inaudible 00:21:31] and that crystal lamp. Wow. But what the hell was he saying here? Damned if I know. So I went...
Danielle Badra:
He was one of the first professors at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. He started one year after they opened and he taught there all the way through until the fall of 2019. He taught there for 51 years. Yeah.
Tyler Greene:
Wow.
Danielle Badra:
He once told me he wanted to die in the classroom and I told him that would be very traumatic for his students and he shouldn't do that.
Tyler Greene:
Yeah.
Danielle Badra:
And honestly, if it weren't for that, I think he probably would have. But yeah, I mean, pretty much immediately after he retired, he started to go downhill. So I think his love for teaching and that profession really kept him going, to be honest.
Tyler Greene:
So, I'm sorry. You may have just said this, but when did he retire?
Danielle Badra:
He retired in August of 2019 and he died in September of 2020. Yeah. A lot of people didn't really see what I was seeing, I think, because I was so close to him. I called him every single day from the day Rachal died until the day he died. I talked to my father every single day and I could tell mentally something was off. Something in me knew maybe he was experiencing some dementia. And when he came to visit me the Thanksgiving of 2019, he was in a hotel just down the street from this little grocery store. He could just walk down a half a block to get an apple. He loved apples. And I said, "Well, if you need an apple, it's just down the street." And he kept forgetting how to get there. That was a pretty big sign for me that something was not right. But then it got much worse. We planned a trip to Rome, Italy in February.
Danielle Badra:
We were going to bring Rachal's ashes there, which she apparently told him before she died, that she thought she would die before him and that she wanted her ashes brought to the Tiber River. And so we planned a trip for September of 2020, and we booked it in February and within a week or two of booking it, he told me he wasn't sure if he would be able to go with me. And I was like, "What do you mean? We just booked this trip together. Why are you all of a sudden thinking you won't go?" And he said he had the heebie-jeebies, which is another one of these terms that, it's like... I said, "Well, I don't quite know what the heebie-jeebies are, but maybe you should go see a doctor." And yeah, that was the beginning of his hospital journey and physical therapy and then hospice and then it was, yeah, then he died.
Tyler Greene:
It strikes me that this was happening in a pandemic and you were trying to help as much as you could.
Danielle Badra:
It was not easy. I was lucky enough that when he first entered the hospital, the pandemic had not fully gone out of control yet. There were no lockdowns or anything, so I was able to be in the hospital with him for the first week or so that he was there. And then the hospitals went on lockdown. I had to return back to Virginia and I wasn't able to see him again for several months, which of course, he didn't understand. That was another really hard part about the pandemic is that with his dementia and not being able to see people, I believe his dementia honestly worsened quickly because of the pandemic, because nobody was able to be there.
Tyler Greene:
I'm just now remembering this video you shared when I can't remember what your father said to you, but I think it was maybe the last time you saw him alive. Did you know that that was maybe the last time you were going to see him?
Danielle Badra:
I had no idea he was going to decline as quickly as he did. I ended up finding out that usually what happens is people have a last burst of energy before they're going to die and I had been seeing him during this burst of energy moment. And so I thought he was actually starting to get better and I left and I drove back to Virginia and I had just gotten home when I got the call that I needed to hop a flight and come right back. And so, yeah, that was the last time I talked to him. Thankfully, I had asked him to say, "I love you. I love you. I love you," to me and my mom and Holly and I recorded him saying those. And I asked him if he had anything else he wanted to say. I just recorded him a lot in those last couple of months and I'm really thankful I did that because every now and then I'll just go back and listen to him.
Tyler Greene:
You mentioned traveling to scatter Rachal's ashes with your dad. I'm curious, now that he has also passed, if you have plans to maybe do that.
Danielle Badra:
I do still have plans. From what I understand, it's not necessarily legal to actually bring ashes to another country to spread.
Tyler Greene:
We'll cut this part.
Danielle Badra:
So I can't confirm or deny it, but let's just say I still have plans, yes.
Tyler Greene:
I asked Danielle to share another poem. This one is made up of fragments of things that her father said to her.
Danielle Badra:
This is Gazing At The Unforgettable, which is a line that he actually said to me on FaceTime about a month before he died. He was looking at me and he said he was gazing at the unforgettable, so that's the title of this poem. "Well, hello. I never know what I'm going to know next, unscrew my hands and wash them. Ergo sum qui sum. There's too much history here. You know, of course, that you are the epitome. I'm glad that you were born the way you were and that you were born. This is the part in the movie where we cry. There are times that touch. This is one of those times. Eventually we'll get the wallpaper. I'm going to miss this place. When I first came, I learned church.
Danielle Badra:
Command me, command me. I was crying last night. All of this had to mean something. I know exactly how I'm going to sleep tonight. The first thing I do when I wake up is go back to sleep because I don't want to wake up. I don't want to get rid of you. Good night, sweet princess. Bricks and stones may break. But when it's warmer, I will walk you around the villa. When I walked into the earliest place, well, I thought, 'Do we know what we know?' I don't know why, but I love you. I don't know what to say when I pray. Spread yourself a thousand ways. Take me with you."
Tyler Greene:
That's beautiful. Before I wrapped up my time with Danielle, I wanted to talk to her about the future of her family, which these days centers around her fiance, Holly.
Danielle Badra:
Holly is amazing. She has been my rock through all of it and I still don't understand how somebody knows how to be so supportive of somebody who's grieving without necessarily having gone through that same type of grief before. I sometimes don't know how to comfort her through some of the grief she's gone through. It's very different kind of grief.
Tyler Greene:
She was close to your father, right?
Danielle Badra:
Yes. They were very close. They were very, very close. He was a religious man and she came from a religious upbringing and as a queer woman, she has been rejected by her family for being queer and they are religious. And so to have a religious man like my father accept her, I know was a big thing for her.
Tyler Greene:
I think I relate and connect to this part of your story in terms of a disapproving family. My husband's parents were not supportive. And in fact, we had to live in this existence of we weren't together, but we were together. So I'm curious how that plays out for the two of you, sort of the challenges of partnering with someone whose family is not initially approving.
Danielle Badra:
I definitely relate to that experience because still, Holly's parents don't want to know that I'm around. Her mom has actually said, "I don't want to talk to you if she's there." It's definitely a challenge, especially because I, as the partner, who has this really loving and accepting family, I don't exactly know how to navigate that space. I wish that you could just snap your fingers and make somebody's prejudices go away. But unfortunately, it takes a long time and sometimes it never does change and we are currently on the path of it not changing. So I don't exactly know what that's going to look like going forward with marriage and potentially children, but we've gone through a lot already, so I know that we'll just navigate it together.
Tyler Greene:
Yeah. It's very tricky. And I think in my case, there is acceptance, but I think there's always going to be a sense of loss from their end, but the children make it better almost on some level in their case. And I think there's no way to compare people's exact scenarios because everybody is arriving to the decision to do what they've done or haven't done based on their journey and their experience and their beliefs and their value systems. And so I think it's useful to people who are listening to a podcast, who may relate to this, to know that they're not alone. I guess the important thing, right, is for us to just try to stay as solid as we can with ourselves and our partner.
Danielle Badra:
Yeah. Yeah. And just to make sure that throughout any of the confrontations or difficulties, the family side of things, that might bring in that you have your own family unit and that there's still this love that we can continue to foster and continue to grow.
Tyler Greene:
What kind of things from Rachal, your dad, your mom, do you want to pass on to your future spawn?
Danielle Badra:
Well, honestly, I feel like I won the lottery when I got my mom. She is one of a kind, amazing, brilliant, beautiful woman and I hope I can be like her, in a lot of ways, when I am a mother, but perhaps with some of the flare that Rachal had and a sense of style and fashion, pass that on. And then with the wisdom of my father, because he was this very wise man, and I will certainly be passing on some of his weird, weird lingo. I'll be sure to say heebie-jeebie all the time and his corny, corny dad jokes, of course. I'll be the one passing those on, for sure.
Tyler Greene:
Yes.
Danielle Badra:
Yeah.
Tyler Greene:
I'm very grateful that you're willing to share these stories and just aware that you have been through so much thus far in your journey and life is incredibly beautiful and unfair and I just have always thought you're such a fucking powerhouse of a human. And so I just am grateful that you're sharing this story with this show, with this community, and looking so forward to squeezing some cheeks, yours, Holly's and your child's.
Danielle Badra:
The feeling is mutual.
Tyler Greene:
Loss doesn't have to mean goodbye. We can keep people we love alive in our life, have conversations with them through the things they leave behind and our memories of them. Whether it's abrupt and unexpected, like the loss of her sister, or a slow decline, like the loss of her father, grief is gut-wrenching and also sort of a gift because it is a sign that we had something meaningful. If you're at a stage like Danielle, where you're looking to grow and expand your family, it's an important step to take stock of what family means to you, the things from your family of origin that are worth holding onto and trying to recreate and the things you want to let go of. My husband and I have started the journey to have a second baby. Yes, I know, buried the lead there. It's exciting. More to come soon.
Tyler Greene:
But as I navigate the various steps needed to make this happen, and it's a project, I keep Danielle's family at the forefront of my mind. This is a family built on love. No question. A family that shows up for each other in so many profound and selfless ways, a family that has gone through it, and still that kindness, that love, it pulsates through them today as they keep growing. Meeting Father Badra, or Baba as Danielle calls him, is a kind of sense memory that when I'm able to recall it, I can access this instant calm. It's really rare to meet someone like that, someone who is so pure and rigorous with their love and who clearly has an absolute awe at this place we call earth.
Father Badra:
I don't know how I can account for my success unless I had been here before.
Speaker 8:
Do you think you could come back again?
Father Badra:
I don't want to come back again. I'll never be this lucky, including my losses. I'll never be this lucky.
Tyler Greene:
Thanks to Danielle Badra for joining us on This is My Family. Her manuscript, Like We Still Speak, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnon Poetry Prize and is forthcoming through the University of Arkansas Press in fall of 2021. Next week, our guest will be another heart friend of mine, Emily [inaudible 00:36:02]. Their journey to sobriety and experiences as a sponsor in a 12-step program, have redefined their relationships and can teach us a lot about chosen family.
Speaker 7:
By the time I was considering getting sober, it was truly a matter of either I get sober or I kill myself and my therapist said, "Can you just give it 30 days?" And I was like, "Sure. And then I'll let you know how much it sucks."
Tyler Greene:
It's been really cool to hear from those of you who are listening and offering gratitude for the stories on this show. It really makes everything worth it and I know that's a cliche, but I don't know how else to say it because I am a walking cliche. I want us to share one letter that I received from a listener named Alexandra, who apparently knew me when I was in high school. "Hi. You and I went to the same school, but you were older than I, and we never knew each other. I went to plays you were in, in high school, and even followed you when you did a production, I believe, at K College. You captured my attention because one, you were a fabulous entertainer." Thanks.
Tyler Greene:
"And two, because I knew I identified with you. There was no gay representation. I didn't know I was until I moved to Grand Rapids and figured it out in hard ways. I'm now back in Kalamazoo, after living in Grand Rapids and Cincinnati, and I've learned to love this town that I used to loathe. I wanted to be so far away from it, but now there are representations of all sorts of people. I have a family of three, my fiance, my future step-daughter, myself, plus a couple pets. Listening to your podcast just makes me so proud and appreciative. I just wanted to say, thank you."
Tyler Greene:
That's really intense and I cried. And I just wanted to say, thank you, Alexandra. And for that message, there have been dozens more. We've only made eight episodes and I can't wait to see what we do next. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at TIMF Show. Our website is timfshow.com. We're also on Podchaser. Just search for This is My Family and Patreon, patreon.com/timfshow. The show is a production of thestoryproducer.com and it's made by me, Katie Klocksin, Tricia Bobeda, Jackie Ball, and Bea Bosco. It is edited and mixed by Adam Yoffe. Our music is by Andrew Edwards. Social Current takes care of our social media and show administration. Find them at Social Currant, that's socialC-U-R-R-A-N-T.co. And last, but certainly not least, our art director is my handsome husband, Ziwu Zhou. If you liked this show, please help spread the word.
Tyler Greene:
No, literally, word of mouth is the best thing that you can do for us. We want to get tons of ears on these conversations and hopefully more people feeling connected in these disconnected times. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Tyler Greene and until next time, stay beautiful and messy. Is the podcast all done, Sam?
Sam:
All done.