Suzanne, bedridden in hospice, asks if the ketchup is organic, and Genevieve thinks: "we're still doing that."
1. Where's The Grief? Episode 117 features comedian Genevieve Joy recounting the year-long death of her friend Suzanne from stage-four cancer and a later, very different loss of a former roommate.
2. Jordan Ferber hosts, and Genevieve Joy is a comedian and writer who co-wrote her mother's memoir and wrote a play that ran in Hollywood and Edinburgh.
3. The core thread is how Genevieve found dark comedy inside a dying friend's final year, including the line "you're not dead yet look" that Suzanne dreaded from strangers.
4. Suzanne was a comic and actress told in 2011 she had six months to live; after the cancer returned in 2018 and fused to her chest wall, she rejected chemo and radiation and tried diet and meditation, and she left a Grace and Frankie Screen Actors Guild event early because of the stares.
5. Genevieve describes the hospice bed in Suzanne's apartment, a doctor Suzanne called an "asshole with no bedside manner," a lamp Suzanne mistook for "the light of God," and the wooden frog with a bowl of rice tied to a shaman's miscarriage theory.
6. Suzanne planned what she called her "croak fest" and asked Genevieve to call Reverend James as emcee, who told her "your energy is not being served by hanging around in this body," and Rick Shapiro had earlier told Marianne Williamson at a 2011 fundraiser what a real course in miracles would be.
7. Genevieve juggled the memoir book tour with her mother, Danny LaBelle's baby, a friend's wedding and a streamed eulogy within weeks of Suzanne's death, and both she and Jordan mention people posting profile-picture tributes for someone they barely knew, with Jordan adding that at his brother's funeral he was "not the most visibly upset."
8. Genevieve's 2012 roommate Stephanie at Doheny Plaza paid roughly a thousand dollars a month for a furnished room, claimed to work in PR with Corey Feldman as a client, and brought home a date she met on Craigslist who ended up hiding in Genevieve's room.
9. After a cousin told her Stephanie's mother had died, Genevieve skipped the service so as not to restart the friendship, then learned Stephanie died of a drug-related cause, and she says the contrast with Suzanne shows "I put in the time with this person because this was a real friend."
10. Suits listeners who like dark, funny, honest conversations about death and caregiving.
