Greg McKeown:
I mean, you tell me? I mean, where did it stop? Where does this story start?
Erik Newton:
Well, Greg, I’ll just tell you, I’ve had some ups and downs that have made for good stories on podcasts, which we could tell. So I could go back, I could go back. Let me give you some highlights and you tell me where you want to start.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, great.
Erik Newton:
I used to run the largest, most successful family law firm in the Bay Area in Northern California. It was called Heath Newton is a divorce firm, divorce law which is not something I ever planned to do, but found myself doing. And found myself doing really, really well, actually from the heart, doing extraordinary work, making good money. But something was missing, and I went on a vacation, not a spiritual vacation, but just a vacation in Tibet, and ended up coming face to face with my first glimpse of my ego, identity as a separate thing from self, which is a way that I view the world now and it was a fairly traumatic story, which is a long story, and it shattered me. I came back a completely different kind of a man in all of the right ways, if I may say so, about myself, and re-met my future wife. I’d been courting this woman for three years, and she’d been ignoring me, but she came to an event that I was hosting just after returning from this trip, and we saw each other. I looked at her as a whole human as opposed to a conquest, and I think I don’t know what she saw, but she saw something different, and the long and short of that is we were together from pretty much that moment ever since. And then I lost my law firm. It turned out my partner was embezzling from our clients, and the only way to stop that was to shut the firm down and pay the money back myself. I lost everything.
She stuck with me through that downturn, and then I had something of a spiritual awakening experience that I don’t make too much of. I don’t assign enlightenment to myself. I just had a mystical experience, but a strong one.
Greg McKeown:
Which was?
Erik Newton:
The CliffsNotes version? Is that what had begun on this trip to Tibet, seeing my ego identity as a thing separate from myself, resolved in one sudden moment into an experience of allowing that ego identity to fall away and lose prevalence in the experience that I was having of consciousness, which is a really heady way of just saying my identity just became a lot less important. I’m just a lot less important, like massively less important, monumentally less important. I just suddenly wasn’t important.
Greg McKeown:
How you show up, or rather how you’re seen by other people, what they think of you, whether you’re important in their eyes, where you are on the social status, like all of these things that can become so consumed in a life or in a relationship. They just shifted into something like its proper proportion.
Erik Newton:
Yes, and I would give a lot more emphasis to it, if you like around what it means to have an identity and how that can fall away and how we’re over-identified with an identity. I think, or I was, I can’t speak for others, and letting go of holding on to this firmest belief in who I was and what mattered, et cetera, released extraordinary energy, and then I felt immense bliss. I could feel and taste the texture of the world with a clarity and passion that hadn’t been available before. That lasted for a long time.
During that time, I launched a podcast about relationships that was also very successful and was a lot of fun, and I eventually put down to join the startup. But the part of the story I think that would be relevant to you, or interesting perhaps to you, there is the relationship with my wife that blossomed out of that surrender was one that I didn’t know you could have before, and this then sets the stage for her death, in a way, for me when I reflect on it, because we were really in love. I mean, we were really in love, and we had really hard times. We fought just like people do. We fought bad, actually, but we never let go of it wasn’t even a letting go. We never lost connection to our connection on this fundamental appreciation level. You know, appreciation is really not the word. We were just connected kind of at the gut.
Greg McKeown:
Can you describe Aubrie for people that have never met her.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, I often describe Aubrie as my warrior queen, my Viking warrior princess. Aubrie means king of the elves, but we often joke that she was more a warrior queen, perhaps of the elf people, I don’t know. She had blonde hair, and she was slender but so strong and she had these shredded, defined arms because she was always holding a camera and she had an extraordinary aesthetic. You know, Aubrie was a photographer. She’s a well-known food photographer and really sought after for her curation of imagery and her ability to create a scene. But behind that was this eternal fierceness. She was just, deeply and never ending, ready to take up the sword and fight for the people in her lives, really. It was the people she loved that she was going to fight for and she’d come from a childhood of abuse, a really deep, really traumatic abuse. And she also knew that the best way to survive was to fight. So she was always ready to fight, and she fought with me. And I think she fought with me at times that it wasn’t necessary perhaps to fight, but she did anyway. And it took a lot of work in our relationship for the two of us to find a way to hold the inevitability of those fights well and use them to drive intimacy as opposed to tear us apart.
And it’s not just done her, I had my own things. I’m casting this in the light as if it was all her. Of course, I have my own issues to deal with and they, for certain, reared their head, but that was the dynamic that came from her.
Greg McKeown:
Was she tall, short?
Erik Newton:
Yeah, she was tall for a woman. I guess five, eight, you know, with the shock of blonde hair and green eyes.
Greg McKeown:
What did you notice? Do you remember the first time you ever saw her?
Erik Newton:
Yeah, I do remember the first time I saw her. I used to attend these red carpet type events as a way to promote my law firm, and before her photo career took off, she would attend these events. She would work these events to take photos for magazines, and so there was always this woman. I would see her all the time, I would see her several times a week. There was this woman, you know, she would always be in her all black outfit to sort of blend into the background. But she couldn’t blend into the background because she was like a pillar of light. Everywhere that she went, she was a force, you know, she was an inevitable magnet. She drew your at least my complete attention, and so, of course, I started hitting on her and she, of course, started ignoring me, because I was just another douchebag trying to get his photo in the paper as far as she was concerned. So it took a while for me to melt her defenses and show to her that I was a genuine character, I suppose, but yeah.
Greg McKeown:
You have a child. You have a child together.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, we have a little girl, a three year old three in February who has her mom’s shock of blonde hair and my mom’s blue eyes and her mom’s fierceness and my excitement and drive for adventure. She’s a beautiful spirit.
Greg McKeown:
Speak more about that with you for a second, like somebody that’s. You’ve told me a bit about work profession, but if someone’s never met you before, never seen you before, describe yourself.
Erik Newton:
I guess that’s the eternal question for me. I don’t know how I’m seen from the outside. I have a big furry face. I’ll tell you that my wife demanded that I have a beard, so I grew one and now I have it and it’s become part of me yeah it’s still.
Greg McKeown:
She said, you have to have a beard.
Erik Newton:
She just loved it. Yeah, I grew a little bit of scruff right after we met and she just loved it. So crow more and it just kept growing. There was a time during COVID when I had this huge just I don’t even like a beaver on my face just too much, but yeah, I still have a beard. I think it’s a dominant characteristic of my look Today. I’m wearing glasses. Usually I don’t because I’m a surfer and you can’t really wear glasses in the water. So I’ve usually injured my eyes while wearing my glasses today. I’m tall and it’s always been a lucky fact. I’m tall and so people notice me. I also have a big, funny nose and I think I have angular features, and so people tend to remember me. I don’t look like your average person and I’m comfortable in my skin so I’m easy to be around, but I’m also I think I also am a force. I think people remember me and I think they probably assigned me too much importance as a result of these physical features that I was just born with and don’t deserve. But they are there.
Greg McKeown:
But you’re intense.
Erik Newton:
I am pretty intense. Yeah, I get very excited about things. I get very sad about things. I have the full scope of emotions. I don’t-.
Greg McKeown:
You’re a, you’re emotive.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, I’ve never used that word. I’m emotive, I don’t hide it. I’ll try to let it flow. And lately I’ve been pretty damn sad. I’ll tell you, sadness has been the dominant one of recent of late.
Greg McKeown:
So why is that? Well and maybe, if you don’t mind, like bring me back to the first moment of that sadness.
Erik Newton:
Uh well, so it was March 7th, 2023 about 7 pm. Aubrie had been feeling ill, you know, out of sorts for about six months, going to the doctor’s. The doctors have been saying look, you’re just a parent of a toddler, of course you feel sick, but it’s nothing to worry about. She finally convinced them that she needed some blood work and about a week later we got this call. March 7th, we were sitting in bed, we just put our kid to bed and we were just starting a movie something on Netflix, I don’t even remember what and the phone rang and it was One Medical, our primary care provider and we got on the phone that’s a little weird and they said, “Look, you need to go to the emergency room right now.”
So, and you know, we looked at each other and thought well, “Okay okay, take it in stride. This is probably nothing, but we just got to follow the proper steps. So pack a bag. I’ll do some research and find the best emergency room near us. It doesn’t have too much of a weight. You head to the ER, I’ll stay here with the kid, we’ll be okay.”
So she packed a bag, went to the ER 15 hours later. So the nanny came to pick up our kid and I went and joined her at the ER and just about then the test results started coming in. She’d been in the waiting room all night, but they had managed to get some blood work and the doctor, the team of doctors, came up and pulled us into a little alcove and pulled a curtain and their faces were ashen. This team was not really prepared to deliver the news that they had, and Aubrie and I knew something serious, something was happening. We held each other’s hands and sat down on this little cot and the attending physician said, “I’m so sorry, you either have an extraordinarily dangerous blood infection but we can’t detect that, or you have cancer and it’s probably cancer.”
And so of course we took a beat, a breath, held each other tighter, asked more questions and it turned out that she was absolutely covered in lesions, nodules. Essentially that means tumors all over every conceivable organ, her lungs her kidney, her spleen her stomach covered, and at that moment we didn’t know what kind of cancer it was. It was either a physical cancer, as they call it, that had metastasized and was therefore spread all over her body, which would have meant that she was gone probably in a matter of weeks or months, or perhaps, maybe there was a prayer that it was a blood cancer, like lymphoma, and a blood cancer that has spread that widely can in fact be knocked back in some cases.
And that kind of news just knocked us both over. But we held it together for one another that day and I stayed with her at the hospital, of course, the rest of the day until our little kid was coming home and I had to go home to collect our little one. And I remember coming home and looking at her closet in our bedroom with all of her beautiful clothing hanging in the characteristic way of hers, and her jewelry and her shoes, and realizing that there was a good chance I was never going to see her in any of those things again. The person, the spirit that inhabited that space might be gone.
This was when the roller coaster began, because the next day, when I got to the hospital, there was some hope that it was now a blood cancer – turned out eventually to be a blood cancer. I will spare you the exceptionally difficult details of the next eight months, except to say that hope was followed by impending disaster, followed by hope on pretty much a daily basis. I was at the hospital during the day. I would come home to put our kid to bed and go back to the hospital for the night. Some friends were staying at the house, take care of her if she woke up, and then I would go back in the morning to get her off to school and then come back to the hospital. And during this time, test results were coming in and new complications were arising and she would go into surgery and she would come out of surgery and we would think she was going to die from this thing and she would survive that thing. And we went through that for eight months. And then ultimately.
Greg McKeown:
So, before we get to that part, and thank you for sharing this already sacred journey, am I to understand, then, that Aubrie was in hospital for eight months, like that?
Erik Newton:
Mostly.
Greg McKeown:
Really.
Erik Newton:
There’s, of course, nuance she was in for. From that moment we went to the ER 52 days.
Greg McKeown:
She went from the ER. She was in hospital for 52 straight days, yeah, so then she comes out for a little while and back in again for yeah so it was 52 days then she, during which time something happened.
Erik Newton:
They punctured her colon, she started to have sepsis, so they had to do an emergency surgery which resulted in an colostomy, which is something horrendous that nobody should have to live through, but she did.
Once that stabilized, she came out after those 52 days and began chemo as an outpatient but had to be admitted several times over the course of the next several weeks because of complications with various conditions that she had.
And then a side story, if you’ll permit me Aubrie’s career was quite extraordinary and when cancer began she had to put down all of her contracts and it felt like a huge loss. But one particular contract came through and she had to turn it down and it was an opportunity to shoot a book with Dolly Parton, and it hurt terribly that she had to turn it down but there was just no way. And one day when she was just about to come out of the hospital and I was sitting there with her and she said, “You know, do you think it’d be okay if I reached out to Dolly and just said, ‘Things looking good, I think I’m going to go into chemo, but I’d be willing to make it work if you would’?”
And as long as you word it, not desperately, it’s probably okay. So she did, and I mean within minutes. They answered and they were like, “Oh, we’re so glad, we really wanted to work with you. We didn’t think it was possible. Yes, of course, we’ll make it work.”
So my wife booked the shoot in Nashville, this two week shoot, which was scheduled to occur the day after her last chemo dose. And if you know anything about chemo, you know each progressive dose gets harder and harder to manage because it compounds in the body. She schedules the shoot for a week after her last chemo dose and, true to form, the chemo dose is done. She can barely move. You can barely get out of bed. She rallies because she’s an absolute warrior. We pack up the whole family, fly out to Nashville, set ourselves up in an Airbnb, and she proceeds to knock a book out of the park for Dolly and her sister and then comes home after that two weeks, and we’re feeling great, you know, we’re feeling great Like, wow, we kicked cancer.
Not only did we kick cancer but at the tail end of it, we went and have this extraordinary job. Your career’s not over. And not only is the career not over, but we had. We lived the dream of bringing the entire family so that you could have both family and career at the same time. Like honey, this was a difficult time, but things are working. This is amazing.
And then back to the primary narrative two days after returning from that trip, we’re scheduled for what’s called a PET scan, which is to see how the tumors are doing. We got the PET scan, went in for the appointment with the oncologist to find out the status of things and got the news that the cancer was back. It was back. It was worse than ever and it was growing faster than ever, and they laid out our options.
And now, as a, to finally answer the question that you were asking about hospital inpatient versus outpatient status. She needed to undergo first a surgery to put the ileostomy back in, which required her to be inpatient, followed by something called CAR-T cell therapy, which is a particular kind of lymphoma treatment which is really difficult on the body. So she needed to be inpatient for that too. So she went back in for the surgery and then never left the hospital and was there for another three months roughly. So you know of the eight months of this eight-month span of time. She was in for 52 days, out for about a month and then back in for another three.
Greg McKeown:
So for people that haven’t been through an experience like this, it’s not necessarily obvious how high the highs are and how low the lows are. I mean, everybody knows this is tough, Everybody knows this is really tough, but there’s a very distinctive kind of suffering brought on by an ongoing fight with cancer or an ongoing fight with, I suppose, any terminal illness, which is that at each end of hope, each time you started to “Okay, everything is possible again, maybe there’s a normal future ahead, maybe there’s a long future ahead.”
Every time you get the bad news, you really mourn the death of a person, even though it hasn’t happened somehow. You are really experiencing that whole additional cycle, I suppose. First of all, having made that statement, do you relate to what I just said? Does that sound true, or is it not like that for you?
Erik Newton:
Yeah, it’s really insightful. You’re mourning the death of possibility, you’re mourning the death of hope, and then you have to face the loss of that person each time. During the first portion of the first hospital stay, we found ourselves very much at the whim of the physician’s schedules and the comings and goings of surgeries and procedures and we felt ourselves adrift in an extraordinarily difficult weather.
We were at the mercy of external forces and though we came in with a lot of reserves, realizing every single day that your partner might die that day for her, realizing that she might never see her daughter again in a matter of hours. It was not healthy. We did not have a healthy way to approach the inescapable fact of those circumstances.
And so we tried to form one, and so we tried to form a healthy way, which I think we did, and, yes, it is exactly as you described. The healthy way includes acknowledging the inevitability of loss, the probability of loss in those circumstances, opening yourselves up to fully, painfully, excruciatingly, terrifyingly feeling it and then connecting in whatever way. You have to do that, and for us it was. We had our indescribable tender moments where we held each other and whispered about these things, but we created a very specific practice too, and that practice was to time box conversations about death so that we could spend most of our time living in hope because hope drives a certain kind of energy that allows you to prevail but also discuss what needed to be discussed, and things need to be discussed.
You’ve got to talk about estate planning, you’ve got to talk about schooling for the kids, you’ve got to talk about guardianship, you’ve got about passwords, but you’ve also got to talk about the whole of the unsaid, unfinished business of a love affair, all of the moments of misconnections, of hurt, of regret. There’s so much regret in the human experience. It must be outed. It will either be outed in the moment, with the person who is the source of that thing, or it will come out later and if you wait it’s more painful and we both realized it. So we would time box and have these really rich, full, complete conversations and we got very, very, very good at saying goodbye. We must have said goodbye completely, from soup to nuts, 50, 60 times, and I am so grateful for that. I’m so grateful for that.
Greg McKeown:
It seems to me that all of what you’ve described was like a delaying process where at first you feel like you’re intimate because, after all, you’re married, you’re together and so on, and so there’s an inherent intimacy in that, and so you think, okay, we’re already operating there maybe not every moment of every day, of course, because it’s practical matters too but then each layer of hope and then death, and then mourning the reality of this, et cetera, layer after layer, you’re getting deeper and deeper into that intimacy. There’s fewer and fewer facades fewer places to hide, and that leads, if I understand the story, right, up to a point that turned out to be six weeks before Aubrie actually died. What happened at that six-week mark?
Erik Newton:
You are into something so rich and beautiful. It’s such a deep vein for me. As you said, Aubrie and I had done all the work. I had a relationship podcast and built a relationship seminar on how to plan for marriages, for goodness’ sake. I mean, I know all the tools, I’ve read every book, we did all the work, and yet there was a kind of surrender to our love for one another that we could never quite – there was a kind of barrier we could never get through. And we felt it. We felt it, but we never named it.
And, as you said, in the beginning of the time, the hospital we began to try to name it. It began with apologies and it began with acknowledgments of difficult times and working through them and connecting in words of love. But even through the process of being in the hospital, we were both trying so hard to survive that we still were not fully, fully surrendered in that final way that is, in fact, possible. And Aubrie finally broke through in an unbelievably palpable way.
Aubrie, I remember I came into her room one day, and she was just gazing at me. She was just gazing at me with such complete, unadorned clarity, just such such joy. She was obviously in love with me, and it just melted me. I didn’t even know there was something to be melted.
I think I had never quite allowed that love fully in until that moment, until that moment when I completely felt it from her, and then I observed that she was loving everybody around her, our nurses, the people who came in to change her linens, her friends, her mother, I alluded to earlier in our conversation the difficulties they had, and it began to that depth of surrender. That depth of appreciation that she was allowing herself for everybody around her began to infect all of us. I was able to open a part of me that I didn’t know needed to be opened and melt a part of me that I didn’t know needed to be melted. To love her more fully, to allow her love in and to love her back, to love everybody in the room, to love our daughter.
Aubrie carried that clarity with her, really unwaveringly, from that moment until she lost consciousness. I will acknowledge that extraordinary fear came and went during that time. What’s the word for that sense of wrongness, unfairness?
Greg McKeown:
The sense of injustice.
Erik Newton:
Those feelings remained present and came and went, but the surrendered love never left after that, and I have since been able to bring it out into the world in my life in a way that I didn’t have access to before that as well, and I’ve reflected a lot on where did that come from? How did she have access to it? How did she give it to me? How can I give it to other people? And I honestly do suspect there are a lot of paths to this kind of I’ll refer to it again as a kind of surrendered appreciation, kind of completely unvarnished. I find that I can really adore anyone if I allow myself to do so. I can really adore and cherish not just people but experiences if I allow myself to, even the painful ones, even the difficult people. It’s a matter of allowing. It’s not a matter of doing, it’s a matter of allowing.
I think there probably are a lot of paths to this, but the one that we found was great loss. It was being faced with great loss. You know, Aubrie was, I think. She knew what she was facing; she was running out of time, and it pushed her over into a new paradigm. And then the force of her will, the force, not will, the force of her surrender, pulled the rest of us in with it, and I am now, I guess, what you might call a great proponent of death meditation for this reason, which is a tall order, but I think it’s an extremely terrifying, raw, to come into direct contact with the joy of what we are presented with on a moment-by-moment basis but refuse to see, and that was the message I was trying to convey that I think you first noticed, and it was the message of my eulogy. And it transforms, it’s shifted from then to now, but it is essentially the same. There is a kind of love, there’s a depth of surrender, a depth of joy that is available even in the worst of circumstances, that most of us do not allow ourselves and that we can. We can, we absolutely can. And we are in times of upheaval, we’re in an era socially, where I think we probably need this kind of appreciation more than ever. This kind of love is more useful than it ever has been. I’m here for it.
Greg McKeown:
What struck me, as you’ve shared that part of the journey, are a few key words. You described the kind of love that Aubrie was exemplifying as clarity. She keeps saying she was looking at me with clarity, looking at people with clarity. She had that clarity which is curious to me because it’s not obvious.
I think when people talk about love, especially the innumerable ways people talk about love, that as you get to deepest love, it’s about seeing things clearly,
Erik Newton:
Allowing.
Greg McKeown:
Oh, I like that, allowing yourself to see things clearly. And one reason I’m intrigued by that is because it’s been my experience that when I have felt, let’s say, the highest form of love, I know it seems to have a sense of love as its primary characteristic knowledge, but it’s really rich knowledge. So it’s like you still see somebody’s faults; you still see who they are. It’s not like rose-tinted glasses in which you don’t see the reality of them, but you start to see other realities of them that were less obvious. In fact, many, many other things that were not as obvious that you couldn’t see for whatever reason. And that’s the first thing that’s been interesting to me.
Erik Newton:
Can I respond to that?
Greg McKeown:
Respond to that, for sure, yeah, and then a couple of others. Go ahead.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, the reason that I refer to it as an allowing is, and yes, I use the term clarity it was. The experience with Aubrie was as if she had taken away fogged glasses and could see what was actually present versus which was confused or clouded by agenda or assertion or some kind of desire or aversion.
You know, for me, the way I interpret it harkens back to something I mentioned earlier in our discussion was that the essence of joy that I found, I found when I had that mystical experience, was that the joy of the universe, the joy of being, is to be found in letting the world be as it is. You just got to let it be what it is. You got to be, let it be what it is before you could do anything else. And if you and I think that, and that’s what it felt, you know I wasn’t thinking about that previous mystical experience, but when I reflect on it now, looking back at the time, that’s that seemed to be the essence of it for Aubrie. She was just allowing all of us to be who we just were, just allowing us to be who we are, and then she could, and then she could see it. Then she could actually see it for its magnificence.
Each of us is so magnificent, as you say, we are so layered, the tapestry is so exquisite. There’s so much here and if you just try to pull in one thread of that tapestry, yes, it’s a mess, but there’s so much more there.
You know, there’s this other analogy that comes to mind of it feels like going on a roller coaster. For me, when I am on a roller coaster, if I clench up and try to resist that drop, you know my stomach turns and I feel awful. But the moment, every time, the moment, I just throw my hands up and relax and just go with the drop, it’s exquisite, you know, it’s exhilarating. Just allow that drop to be what it is. It’s beautiful and it’s a little scary. Of course it’s scary, yes, it’s scary, and people are scary because they have, they are unpredictable, they have agendas, but they’re beautiful, beautiful, and that’s the clarity that I, when I intellectualize it. That’s the clarity that I think I’m talking about here. And she could see clearly because she was getting all of her previous stuff out of the way.
Greg McKeown:
Well, what you’ve just rift on really was sort of my second observation about what you’d shared, which was that this wasn’t an additive process. Primarily, it was a subtraction process. Yeah, for sure, because you’re using the word allowed, if you allow yourself to see it. So it’s not something you’re fighting to see or something you need to add. It’s it’s really seriously letting go of your need for someone to be different than they are, the need to try to control how the other person will show up and what form they will show up, and to just see, to see them as they are right now, to get rid of all that noise in your head so that you can experience them.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, it’s so great, right? Like I’m doing it with you right now. It’s, it’s, and I’m just noticing, I’m noticing in this moment I can’t actually get, I can’t completely get myself out of the way. It’s just, you know, like I can’t get myself out of the way, you know, like I can’t completely. I’m still here, I’m still interpreting you, but the more I pull away everything I think I know about you, the more beautiful you look, like you physically look more beautiful, as I just start to just like let you be, you know, and then I can hear your voice, and I’m like God, really…
Greg McKeown:
Keep going, Eric. This is great.
Erik Newton:
It is, though, you know, even the way you just said that and maybe second guessed it for a minute because you bit your lip, that was sweet. It was actually so sweet. It made me want to come over and give you a hug, and I, I just can notice you more, not completely because I am still here. My ego is still asserting itself; it’s still here, but I can let it calm down a little. You know, just be a little bit less, and Aubrie, in those moments, was letting it go completely away. You know, it was just complete. Her Aubrie was completely gone, and she was just here to love us.
Greg McKeown:
I mean, this is, of course, the you know we’re getting to the close, to the heart of the matter because this is why you’re saying. This kind of love is completely inherently, not just connected to but dependent on, like the reality of death, you know, the idea that death is the great simplifier, that that it strips away the. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a perfect word I’m looking for for this. Ah, it’s the name of great, a great book. It kind of means ego pride, but it’s, it is another word. It’s like, the nonsense of the world. But what’s the word I’m looking for here? There was a, there was an adaptation of this book that was made into, like one of these BBC classics. So, on the tip of my tongue, it’s worth getting to it. Vanity, Vanity Fair is the, is the book and the adaptation and, of course, the magazine, Vanity Fair. That, the Vanity Fair of life, that would con us into believing that utterly non-essential things really matter and that essential not things, even, because in the, in a very real sense, there are no essential things but that the essential people, the essential relationships are either unimportant or, at the very least, they can be put off. “We’ll get to that. I know they matter, but we’ll get to that, we have time for that.”
That is the Vanity Fair, that is the lie that holds us, that traps us into living a really false life, and and death seems to be one of, maybe it’s the thing that can strip that away from us and and and that’s certainly what you experienced it’s a kind of therapy by therapy by death, or something like that.
Erik Newton:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you so much for bringing us to that. It’s maybe the last missing ingredient of the recipe we’ve been discussing here, that was so important to Aubrie.
She really, before that realization, or before that moment that I described, when I came into the room and she had shifted, she had been realizing and articulating and saying over and over for months that the only thing that mattered, the only thing that mattered, was the quality of the relationships that she had developed and the time that she then spent with the people in those relationships and she meant me and her daughter fundamentally, but also her friends. But that was the only thing that mattered and it was so utterly true to her that it became true for the rest of us too.
I will say her greatest final regret I guess I should be circumspect, but I’ll say it publicly anyway her greatest final regret was that she went and worked on that book. She saw it as making the mistake of participating in the Vanity Fair one last time when she should have been following the wisdom of the insight she had.
I interpret it very differently. I interpret it personally very differently. Even still today, I interpret it as the best decision that she could make, thinking that she was in fact going to survive and creating a future for her family that she wanted to. That included balance between work and love. Because we did all the things, we went out there together, but when she realized that the cancer was back, she could only see it as a regret.
Greg McKeown:
If, if, if I might say so, I think they can both be true, because all of us, because all of us are operating at multiple levels at any given moment, it can also it can be true that at one level, she is operating out of a desire to believe that this represents a future that she can build and at the same time, at a deeper level, perhaps even at that moment not just with hindsight she may have felt this is, this is not the thing. You know that this is a, that you’re acting out of a remembered understanding, not out of your current understanding. And I think it’s really profound that you shared it with me. And I’m so glad that you did because when I hear the story the first time, I’m hearing it through level one and thinking, “Yeah, of course, I mean a great creative project and exactly the kind of things she really wanted to do and was professionally pursuing.”
And it’s a, I mean it’s like the symbolic culmination of something, somebody that’s world-renowned and they want to just work with you and you create this project with the skills and abilities you have.
Erik Newton:
I mean that’s like that’s the dream.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it’s really high on the on the totem pole that she was climbing and investing in professionally. And then you hear it the second time from her perspective, once she is fully relieved of, let’s say, the last emblem of the Vanity Fair, then she simply regrets it, she simply goes. Yeah, that was not the thing to do with that time. It was not the thing to do. And I don’t think it takes away at all from the story. I think that it produces in me a reminder of exactly the clarity that you’ve been alluding to.
It reminds me I spoke to the Dean of the Religion School at BYU years and years ago and I don’t know. I think I was asking him some sort of deep question like you know what’s the most important lesson you’ve ever learned? Or you know what really matters in life? Or what’s the mission? What’s one’s mission in life? You know this kind of conversation and he said he said that two deans before him when they were asked. “Well, you know what have you learned? When they were passing the baton to the next dean, you know what do you? What are your regrets?”
“I really wish that I’d written one less book and Gone fishing with my son more.”
And that Dean passed it on to the next dean, who passed it on to the dean I was talking about, who was passing on to me and I. First of all, I think that is quite profound story. It’s quite, of course, it gets at the same trade-off that we’re talking about here, this understanding of of how do we live a life that is stripped away, how do we live a life where we have stripped away all of the all of the fog of the fair?
But, I, remember sharing it with one of my daughters and she was like she’s like, “That story’s sad.” And that then said, “Did none of them learn the lesson?” Like she understood it differently. And it’s like what she was saying is each one keeps sharing the advice. Like, yeah, you know, I mean what I should have done is written one less book and gone you know fishing with my son more and passing it on. Now I’m not exactly sure that’s what
Erik Newton:
They’re still in the office. They’re, they’re literally in the office sharing the advice to get out of the exactly and that they’re passing it on to the next person.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I, I’m not Sharing my daughter’s insight in a way to judge these people. I know I get it, sharing it, because, because it really, really matters to actually do this.
Erik Newton:
It does. But you know, there’s another truth, though we cannot. You know, we are instantiated in this existence where you cannot dedicate 100% of our time to contemplating love because we have to make money. You know, the reason fishing is an interesting thing to do fundamentally is because you’re catching food. Food is good because it’s sustenance because it’s survival. We got, we have to survive in this world. And if we’re very good at our survival, we can turn it into a craft or an art form, as Aubrie did that also brings his passion, and very few people do it to the degree with such success that, as she was able, but it, you can. And, so when I think about that, when I think of the inevitability, the inevitability of pain and suffering, the inevitability of time constraints, scarcity of resources, the inevitability of having to make difficult decisions constantly, and also this fundamental truth that we’ve been talking about, that there is extraordinary peace and joy and love available in surrender and in allowing the world to be as it is, in those who we love to be, who they are, and then spending time with them from that place.
Both of those two things are true at the same time. And how do, how do we do them both? Is the mystery.
Greg McKeown:
That’s the tension.
Erik Newton:
It’s the tension and the you know, it’s the ever-renewing puzzle. Every time I think I have the answer. You know, when I had that mystical experience before getting into a relationship with Aubrie and now having this extraordinary insight at the end of her life, I have sort of an awakening of realization, a brightening of my ability to, connect with these essences, these life forces, and then they fall away and I come, and then I get back into a routine of life and I don’t know that that’s avoidable for anybody, including monks on the mountain who spend all of their time contemplating these issues because of the essence of what it means to be conscious.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean you’re framing that in a,
Erik Newton:
And so it’s an ongoing practice is all I’m saying. It’s must just be a practice
Greg McKeown:
Agreed. There’s loads more to go on to that subject, but, but Essentialism, you know, the book that I, one of the books I’ve written, has as a subtitle the disciplined pursuit of less, and I do think that something to this point here right, it’s, it’s not. It’s not exactly in this case. What exactly? The disciplined pursuit of less? I mean, it’s a sort of disciplined pursuit of love, you know, but but but I think it, I still think it is there’s, I still think that what you came to to be or at least I want it to be, in my life, the, the major versus the minor. Because otherwise we then get pulled into. Vanity Fair becomes the major. And this, all this other what, what we start to think of just that other stuff at the periphery.
You know the, the thing itself, the meaning itself, and in fact that’s a good transition, because when you went public with this, you wrote you know, I mean, it was a, it was a series of tweets. It ranges to about two and a half pages on a normal document. I Bolded a few phrases that to me, I would say they basically are trying to say exactly the same thing, but in really beautiful ways. I want, rather than put the pressure on you to kind of conjure what those phrases were, I want to share a few of them together and then have you comment on them. So here we go:
Facing death every day allowed us to set aside the silly things and focus on what matters.
The privilege of knowing and loving her so deeply outpaces every other experience I’ve had. It’s the one thing that matters.
Erik Newton:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
During her time in the hospital, her one regret was that she hadn’t spent more time deepening relationships with the people she cared about.
Next, the only thing that matters at all is the quality of the relationships with the people we love. Focus on that.
Okay, there’s two or three more still, if you’ll, allow me, I offer that at the center, that is, at the center of your life, of what ministers, is family, community, and connection. I know it sounds trite and a tweet, but I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that when you’re dying, and you will die, these are the only things you will care about.
More. By the end, her deeper way of loving had become very conscious and intentional. Her change was palpable. She softened and opened. She began to be with those around her in a kind of total surrender. We all felt that she was experiencing us without a filter. Somehow we were seen and loved. It was beautiful, it was overpowering, it was humbling beyond measure. As she did this, those around her began to learn how to do it as well. I learned being loved that completely is overwhelming in the very best sense. It’s probably all any of us ever crave. Loving that deeply is a practice. The key to this kind of love is necessarily different for everyone. I know only one way, complete surrender to the inevitable death of yourself and those you love. I simply want to say out loud that it is possible to love with a depth and breadth that I used to think was fiction.
And here we go. What I think, by the way, this final sentence I want to read seems to me to summarize everything else into a single idea that I think is heartbreakingly uncovered, really profound. You wrote, progressively deepening love is the goal, an end in and of itself. If there is a point, it’s that.
Erik Newton:
Okay, I was eloquent that day.
Greg McKeown:
Well, you were, but do you see in that a single thread? I feel like there’s a thread there. That’s what I see. There’s a, there’s this, I think, the thread that the thread?
Erik Newton:
Yeah, the thread that you’re pointing to, I think. I think the thread that you’re pointing to and I I fully agree is that, as you put it, let’s make this the major, not the minor. And I will say, all of that was preceded by a statement where I said something like we can’t contemplate this with 100% of our attention because we have to live our lives.
So this must be an ongoing practice. And then the only thing that matters, I can tell you when you’re on your deathbed, the only thing you will care about is the quality of these relationships, the time you actually spent, the people, the two lot. Then I mean the actual time, and the depth of that time, and, and everything. And so focus on it like, yes, have, have it be the major, have it be the major, not the minor. Yeah, because you can’t do only the one.
Greg McKeown:
And, which I completely agree with, because we live in a temporal world and we’ve got all sorts of practical responsibilities. The way that you put it at the end there I’m gonna say it again for emphasis, “Progressively deepening love is the goal, an end in and of itself. If there is a point, it’s that.”
To me, if you take that language right, the idea of this is the point, this is the purpose. Then what happens from there is that everything else falls into its proper perspective.
Erik Newton:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
So the objective is not to be a monk, right, right? Well, first of all, that, in one sense, I think quite clearly is inconsistent with the goal. Not knocking monks now, I’m just saying. What you wrote isn’t that you’re supposed to contemplate love, you know all day long. It is that you’re to progressively deepen relationships with the people who matter most to you. That’s the point, that’s the goal. Now there are lots of other responsibilities, but let some fall out of your life altogether, because they don’t contribute anything to that point. Let some things play a role, bigger role than they used to, because of that goal. You know, it’s like put everything in its proper order.
Erik Newton:
Yeah, that’s the thing. Yeah, that’s the thing. I think. In fact, I think it’s just talking about the thing I wrote in the past, I think, after I said that you have to, you can’t contemplate it with all of your attention because, right, these other responsibilities, I said, but what’s at the source of doing those things in the first place? Like, why do you need to go out and get food for the family? Because of the family. You know why do you want to be rich? Probably not for the actual paper currency or the number on the computer screen, but probably for the freedom that represents that allows you to do something more meaningful with your time, and I propose that the most meaningful thing that you can do is spend deep into relationships.
Let me footnote to and just acknowledge, you know, something that I think I think we need to acknowledge more, which is that meaning is fabricated. Fundamentally, it’s not an objective essence, but we are definitely keyed, appreciate certain values and certain kinds of meaning more than others, and the one that is the most fundamentally, subjectively important to all of us is this that we’re talking about here.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a, I don’t know if it’s necessary to push on that point or it. Oh, what is semantics and what is the difference? But when you say meaning is fabricated, I would prefer in my own life what I would say is that meaning is detected, not designed. I wouldn’t use the term fabricated for me, I would say you detect it, you find it. It’s there, and a big part of the work of life is to uncover it. And You’ve actually given a formula for it in your experience. You’ve actually experienced it because it, by removing all the things it isn’t, by letting go of all of the nonsense, the vanity fair, and certainly from your description of Aubrie that’s so penetrating and profound, is, yeah, she’s like, once everything is stripped away, everything, layer after layer after layer after layer, and on and on it goes. I mean to live with a life and to live in that mode of today could be the final day, actually, again and again, for almost you know, you gave us months and months of the final eight months from the moment of the first diagnosis or first attempt to diagnosis, to the end, those eight months, so much of it’s in the hospital, so much of it is actually as you’ve described it. You know you’re not having a few months and then suddenly bad news. It’s like every day, or good news every day, bad news, back and forth, and back and forth. I think that there was a cleansing process. Let’s call it like like you’d purify gold. You know, it’s like hammer out the nonsense, hammer out vanity fair, hammer it out. And, layer by layer, she got to the point where she understood what it really was about, and to such a level of clarity that even the book project that meant so much and she sacrificed for so much she could also look at differently, and and and that doesn’t mean you, that doesn’t mean it was a bad thing by any stretch, but she seemed to see exactly what it was really about. That to me, that’s the detection process in a very intense, and what’s the word I’m looking for compressed experience.
Erik Newton:
Hallelujah. Thanks for reminding me of that wisdom so eloquently. It’s not it, it is a matter of semantics. I don’t think it matters, fabricated, detected, because what is laid bare in that refining and that refinement process that we went through those eight months is fundamentally the thing that, for whatever reason, we humans actually care about.
Greg McKeown:
Exactly.
Erik Newton:
And I guess to your point, I guess I don’t care why.
Greg McKeown:
I think it could be a distraction. I I’m with you on that, like in, yeah, especially if one is is If a person’s tendency is to sort of. Well, there’s a biblical phrase on this like forever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth, right? So if a person tends towards this, well, I have to kind of punt of it. I got to think about that again. I got a pontificate again about that again yes, and and, not like I’ve ever been guilty, that or anything.
Erik Newton:
Right, exactly.
Greg McKeown:
But, it’s like, it’s like just accept that it is. I mean, that’s, it is, yeah. It’s the rising point of this essay that was so touching to me and to many people. This is the point now. Build your life around it. This is a detection. Build your life around it. You cannot get to your deathbed. I mean, this is your position, I think. It is certainly my position that you cannot get to your death bed and regret making that the point. You cannot get to your deathbed and go, “I wish,” I mean, I’ll give you a trivial example: “I wish I spent more time on Instagram.” Right? Like you don’t do that, but apparently, you know, and maybe you don’t even say, “I wish I’d written another book because loads of people read.” Like you don’t even do that, which as an author, like is a thing you know. Like, I have to think about that. The trade-off, the right trade-off, here. Am I missing? You know, am I missing it, missing the moment, missing what matters all along the way?
Erik Newton:
It really is such a privilege to talk about this. It was such an opportunity. I just am so grateful for your reaching out. I’ll tell you I’m in what is it? Month two and a half, I guess month two and a half since she died, and being a single dad to a toddler is consuming, and I’ve been very proactive about mourning fully, such that there aren’t any crevices of retained and therefore you know, and resolved things, unresolved things that tend to rot. Yeah, I’ve been very proactive about this. I’ve been moving through extraordinary amounts of emotion, and writing that thread was part of that and I find myself continually relearning this lesson, frankly, in deeper ways, and sometimes being able to apply it and sometimes just not the system you know, sometimes just not being able to do it, sometimes over-intellectualizing it. I’m definitely prone to that, and I love, I love, love, love. I’m so grateful for your reflection on it.
You know, you reminded me about something about Aubrie, which was that she just didn’t have time. She was extraordinarily smart, but she just never had time at any point in her life for over-intellectualizing. She just cast away and got to the point. She was the same with her gear. It was photography. She didn’t care about gear, “I don’t care, give me the camera, I’m gonna make an amazing photo.”
You know it was, and that’s how she was at the end. And that’s the point here. It’s like it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter why this is the case. You can define it any way you want. It doesn’t matter what tradition or discipline you come from, your food. It doesn’t matter your political persuasion, or your gender. It just doesn’t matter. The truth is, this is what you’re gonna care about when you’re dying. Just remember, this is what you’re gonna care about when you’re dying. I have to remind myself I was there. I was there in the most intimate, horrible way, saw it in the most profound way, and I have to remind myself constantly. This is what I’m gonna care about when I die. When I die, build your life around that. Great. Thank you for reflecting on this. Thank you, I’m so grateful.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you for having this conversation with me and thank you for being on the podcast.
