The Studebaker Who Stayed
There is a particular kind of grief that Cody Delistraty walked into the Armchair studio carrying — not the loud, performative kind that gets a DSM code and a five-day bereavement policy, but the quiet, decade-long kind that a young man from Spokane carries around like a stone in his chest while he interviews Michael Lewis and David Sedaris and tries to be a good griever the way he studied for final exams. With flashcards. That detail — that he approached grief with flashcards — says everything about the impossible bargain we make with loss: that if we just do it correctly, we will be done.
What this conversation reveals is that grief is not a problem to be solved but a relationship to be renegotiated. Cody went looking for a cure — through AI chatbots that got too horny, through optogenetic mice in San Diego mazes, through bibliotherapists in Brighton and laughter therapists on Zoom, through breakup boot camps with dominatrices in Northern California — and what he found instead was that the Western world has been systematically dismantling every tool humans once had to carry loss together. The mourning stationery with the thinning black border. The death portrait hanging in the parlor. The public square where people wore their grief like weather. We stripped it all away and handed people five days off and a pamphlet about the five stages.
Dax, whose own father haunts him as a 1989 wheeler-dealer car salesman in his dreams — the swinging dick version, not the final decade version — understood this immediately and personally. Two men who lost parents too young, sitting in a room with exposed wires coming out of the ceiling, talking about whether you could delete the memory of an IED, whether Kanye's hologram of Robert Kardashian was comfort or horror show, whether acceptance means you're okay with something or just that you've stopped fighting reality. The answer, as always on this couch, turned out to be both. It turns out to be both.
The deepest thing in this episode is something Dax said almost in passing: nothing would break his heart more than knowing the people he loves allowed his memory to ruin their lives. He said it about grief in the abstract and you could feel him meaning it completely personally. That is the ulcer Kirk Rutter saw on psilocybin — that holding on tight to the dead is almost a betrayal of them. You owe it to them to remember them skiing through the neighborhood with the chocolate Labrador, not drooping from failed trials. The rose-colored glasses, it turns out, might be the most loving thing.