Firing Line

- Life after loss, this week on "Firing Line."

- There you are in your home and a meteorite hits your house.

And all that's left is a smoking ruin.

- [Margaret] For Danielle Crittenden, that meteorite was a phone call in 2024 telling her that her 32-year-old daughter, Miranda Frum, had died.

- It was a physical pain.

It was my heart exploding for days and days and days.

As a writer, and actually mostly as a reporter, I felt like I needed to write about what was happening to me, as if, like a foreign correspondent from this world that I had suddenly entered.

- [Margaret] The result is "Dispatches From Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable."

What is your advice to comfort parents of a lost child?

- My feeling was you should always lean into the grief and not away, that people have a very generous impulse to wanna comfort you.

But in fact, what you want are people to lean into the suck.

- [Margaret] What does Danielle Crittenden say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, and by the following.

- Danielle Crittenden, welcome to "Firing Line."

- So lovely to be with you, Margaret.

- You wrote "Dispatches From Grief: A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable" in the aftermath of your 32-year-old adult daughter's death.

I first met your daughter Miranda in 2008 when she was 16 or 17 years old.

- She would've been 17, right.

- And I met her through you and your husband, David Frum, who I have known for many years.

Miranda became a friend of mine, and she was a founding member of our team here at "Firing Line"- - That's right.

- And helped me launch this program.

Miranda left "Firing Line" to have serious treatment on a benign but very rare brain tumor.

- Right.

- And in February of 2024, Miranda was planning a party to mark the five-year anniversary of her surviving her brain tumor.

Two days after Valentine's Day in 2024, you received the phone call that every parent dreads.

Miranda had been found not breathing on her floor of her apartment by her cleaning lady.

Her friend had called the police, and a medical examiner had fixed her time of death at 3:00 AM.

In your book, you write about the difference between knowing grief and meeting grief.

What was the difference?

- Well, there you are in your home and your life as you know it, and you get up in the morning and you have coffee, and a meteorite hits your house.

And all that's left is a smoking ruin, that everything that was familiar the day before is gone.

And the grief that I felt was of such overwhelming pain and inescapability.

It wasn't just emotional pain, it was a physical pain.

It was a, my heart exploding for days and days and days.

And the thought that my brain did not want to accept, that Miranda was gone.

She was no longer on the end of my phone.

She was not there.

- I am so grateful that you wrote this book.

I felt lost as a friend about how to relate to someone I knew who had a meteor hit their house, right?

And what your book did was give me some kind of peek into that which you have experienced in the last two years, and something to be able to attach my empathy to, even though there's no way one could imagine having to endure what you and your husband, David, have endured for the last two years.

- You know, sometimes people in our situation get resentful or begrudge the fact that people can't imagine it or don't understand the depths.

And they're not even begrudged.

They just feel not understood, not seen.

And to what you're saying, I would just say, "Well, how could you imagine it?

Why would I expect you to imagine it?"

And that was part of the book, was trying to describe it because a lot of the response that, well, David wrote this beautiful article for "The Atlantic" just after Miranda died.

- [Margaret] About Miranda's dog.

- Ringo.

(chuckles) - Ringo, who is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, not unlike Lulu, who's with you here.

- Yes, she's my now complete support animal, as Ringo was for Miranda.

Miranda adopted him as a little dog, and he ended up going with her through all her treatment at Stanford.

But the response to David's article was not just this outpouring of people who were in a similar situation, but it also spoke about their loneliness, because so few people can understand their pain.

And then like other forms of grief, they expect that person to get over their pain.

I mean, you know, there's these myths of the five stages of grief, and, you know, shouldn't you be at acceptance now?

(Margaret chuckles) And the person who's lost this child just learns to go quiet because they can't express what they're really going through.

And people, understandably, move on in their lives.

So, I was writing this book very much for myself because as a writer, and actually mostly as a reporter, I felt like I needed to write about what was happening to me, as if, like a foreign correspondent from this world that I had suddenly entered.

I get into these conversations very, the informal conversations are the worst because you meet someone, maybe you haven't seen them for a long time, it's another mother, and they say, "Oh, how are you doing?

How's Miranda?"

And they're the most natural conversations in the world.

You had them all the time.

And suddenly it's like you're stepping on hot coals and you're waiting, you're trying to dodge the conversation away before... Sometimes you just have to blurt out, "Well, actually, Miranda died."

And then you feel bad, like you feel bad for them because it's such a shocking thing and they don't know what to do with it.

And it's like hurling a grenade, you know, in an otherwise pleasant, meaningless kind of conversation.

- What is your advice now, two years into this new life, to friends or other adults who want to try to comfort parents of a lost child?

- The most helpful people, especially in the aftermath, my feeling was you should always lean into the grief and not away, that people have a very generous impulse to wanna comfort you, to wanna help you or make you feel better- - Even if they say the wrong things?

- Oh, yeah.

Like, I don't blame people for saying the wrong things 'cause, you know, they don't know.

But I think in general, they wanna give you hope.

And this is all a very nice thing.

But in fact, what you want are people to lean into the suck.

Just like, this is- - How much this sucks.

Yeah.

- Horrible.

- Even if they can't imagine how awful it is?

- Yeah, yeah.

No, you say, "I can't imagine," you're going like, "Great, I'm glad you can't, because it sucks."

(chuckles) So it's more helpful, and just to take your hand, and... You wrote me this beautiful note telling me Miranda stories.

And that's the other thing, people can be afraid to talk to you about the child or the dead person.

- Is it balm to hear stories of Miranda?

- I heard... It was the best thing.

And just, because often you hear stories you didn't even know, things that were funny or shocking, knowing Miranda.

But just, that's the thing that keeps them alive- - Yeah.

- Is talking about them, remembering them as they were, not trying to deify them.

Like I think an impulse to, you know, don't speak ill of the dead is a good rule, but you wanna remember them for all their- - All the parts.

- All the parts.

- Yeah.

- All the quirky behaviors and funny things that happen.

- I do want to just spend a moment on Miranda.

Miranda was a one-off.

She was a total original, strikingly physically beautiful, with a mind and a heart even more so.

- [Danielle] Well, she was very like her father.

She was brilliant.

She was- - She was brilliant.

- One of her friends said that he had never met in real life a person who was so casually witty, you know, as in a Thackeray novel, that she was just, the things she would come out with were so searing and funny and perfect.

- And true.

- And true, like she just got right to the heart of it.

- What you ultimately discovered is that, as a result of the devastating brain surgery that ultimately saved her life, at least for those intervening five years, one result of it was that her pituitary gland was entirely compromised and had to be removed during the surgery.

- Right.

You can replace the functions of the pituitary gland, but with everything, there are side effects.

Weight gain and bloating and mood.

And so I knew she was playing a little with her doses.

- Somehow the dosing was off enough that she couldn't tell until it was way too late.

- Yeah, she thought she had a bad cold, which is how it can present.

And that's what I later, exploring through the medical examiner and things, that that seems to have been the likely cause.

- You spoke to Miranda frequently through the project of writing the book.

- Yeah.

- You said you've talked to her in your mind.

What'd she say?

- Well, what is interesting is there are times I've had conversations where I'm saying, "Okay, what would she say to this?"

And then there are other times when her- - Voice.

- Voice has just landed in my head like a lightning bolt.

And that happened going to her apartment right after she died.

And we just, absolutely dreading.

And I heard her voice say, "You got this, Mom."

And I felt it.

And I did have it.

- You wrote in "The Wall Street Journal" recently that, you know, about the digital haunting- - Yes.

- That you have faced since Miranda died.

- Yeah.

- The emails and texts from her remain in your phone.

- Yeah.

- Every time you get in your car, it asks if you wanna connect to Miranda's iPhone.

- Right.

- You write about the irony that Facebook won't give you access to her accounts, but will continue to bombard you with photos of the two of you together.

- Yeah.

- You and your husband have gone to get court orders to get into her phone and her emails and her social media accounts, and you have been blocked.

- Yeah, no, it's the craziest thing.

Like, our digital lives outlast our physical ones.

If we had known Miranda's password, all of this would've been moot.

We tried, believe me, many combos of Ringo.

(both laughing) So we finally went and got... Apple requires its own specially worded court order.

Google requires another.

Yeah, Facebook, everything.

And we finally got, it took months, and it's painful.

Like, you know, of all the things you're doing, you're just trying to access your child's photos.

You're not trying to snoop or hack her account, you know?

And finally, we got, Apple would release only the headers of her emails and her photos, nothing else.

Google and her phone company would absolutely refuse to open her phone and unlock her phone.

Some of the things I could control, like I could switch off my, I could disconnect Miranda's phone from my car.

But then that's an actual conscious act.

- Then you're choosing to move on.

- Yeah, and I don't wanna- - You don't want to.

You don't want to lose your daughter.

- I don't want to lose that.

And now when she pops up, she sometimes pops up at very opportune moments.

And now I just sort of say, "Hi, Miranda, good to see you."

But I don't wanna go through the, I don't wanna cut, her phone number is still in my list of favorites.

Am I gonna delete that?

- Mm-mm.

- So you're put in these also weird quandaries that you wouldn't have been when you lived in an age where everything was like photos in boxes, you know, papers were in files.

- You write about your frustrating encounters with the bureaucracy of death.

- Right.

David, God bless him, took over all of the sort of legal estate matters.

Miranda was clever enough to have left a will, because that also could have been a nightmare.

Not that she had so much property, but it at least gave us control over what property she had.

Because then that would've been another fight.

But I was the one, like when they, because we didn't get to Brooklyn quick enough.

So she died, she was found at 9:00 AM that morning, we got the call maybe before 10.

And the cops said, "Well, if you're not here by X amount of time, we'll have to seal the apartment."

And by the time we get there, of course they've gone.

And there's this sticker on her apartment door, "Do not enter."

You know, and that was, okay, now to enter our daughter's apartment- - It was a crime.

- It was a crime.

And we had to get a court order to enter.

- Are there inanities in the bureaucracy of death that are easily fixable?

I mean, is this just something that we're all stuck with?

- Yeah, I think so.

I think the main thing is that you as an individual can make a lot of things easier.

- Have a will.

- Have a will, have instructions, have passwords.

A lot of people, you know, don't wanna think about their ends, and so they kind of avoid doing all of that.

But it's so important to the people you leave behind.

- Okay, over the course of the original "Firing Line," William F. Buckley Jr.

had several conversations with Malcolm Muggeridge, the British author who- - Yes.

- Of course, began in life as a young left-wing atheist and over time found religion.

And he appeared on the original "Firing Line" in several episodes about religion, about faith, and about death.

One of those discussions in 1980, he made an observation about suffering that I'd love to get your reaction to.

Take a look.

- Okay.

- As an old man, Bill, looking back on his life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly, that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering.

Not success, not happiness, not anything like that.

The only thing that teaches one what life's about, the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies, is suffering, is affliction.

- I think the point he's making about grief here isn't that it's a gift, but that somehow suffering teaches us in some way.

- Yeah, so I wrote about these, I call them happiness hucksters.

You see them on TED Talks.

And it is insane how many people, and especially people in this line of business, will come to you and say, you know, "The worst thing that has ever happened to you, you can grow from that.

This is an opportunity for personal growth."

And spun that way like, as if, you know, "You're lucky your daughter died."

You know?

(Margaret laughs) "What a gift to you to have this tragedy."

And these people, nothing has ever happened to them like this.

Like maybe they got fired from a job or a company failed, and, you know, we can all learn from our corporate failures, that's how we grow.

(Margaret laughs) But then they apply it to everything.

And I know what Malcolm Muggeridge was saying.

By the way, we were great, great friends, David and I, with his son and his wife, Anne Roche Muggeridge, who was the one who got Malcolm into Christianity.

She was so- - Yes.

- But anyway, do we learn from suffering?

And as I wrote, like, you know, have I joined the great chain of humanity that- - Has been taught something by your suffering?

- Suffering.

You know, yes.

Am I a more empathetic person?

Yes.

Do I... I mean, there are changes in me that have come from this.

And, you know, taking many fewer things for granted.

And also, I find if there's a gift, it's the gift I've gotten from embodying Miranda.

So, you know, I'm way less impatient.

If somebody's having a hard day, I don't start, you know, becoming a Karen in a supermarket line, (laughs) maybe once was my impulse.

And just, yeah, just that sense all around you that people are having a hard time.

- Yeah.

- It does make you, I think, a bigger and better person.

But, you know, as a gift, I would happily return it.

(chuckles) It's a non-returnable gift.

- How has your experience with grief changed through the course of writing this book?

- It- - Or has it?

- No.

No.

- Yeah.

- What it did do for me that was beneficial, I felt as long as I was writing it, I was close to Miranda.

I think as a mother, as long as I'm feeling I'm doing something for her, I'm still her mother.

And the minute I stop doing things for her, she's really, really gone.

And so even doing, like, a book tour for this book and promoting this book, which I've had enormous trepidation about.

It's a weird thing to promote.

It's not a book I ever, ever, of course, wanted to write.

But I find it's given me, I find, like, Miranda has been very much with me through this process, like in a more pronounced way than usual.

And that, just as when David wrote that article for "The Atlantic," that was the first thing he could write, I feel her pulling me back into life.

I feel by writing this and by talking about it and by getting this really heartwarming reaction, she is- - She's bringing you back.

- She's bringing me back.

And I know that's what she would want.

- I know that's what she would want too.

Almost 25 years ago, you wrote a book that was entitled "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us."

And I wonder, as you reflect now on motherhood, what do you know about motherhood now that you didn't know then?

- Well, the point of that book, it was written at a time sort of just post-feminism, what did they call it?

- Second-wave feminism.

Second-wave feminism.

- Second-wave feminism, where we younger women, very ungratefully, took for granted all the opportunities- - All the opportunities you had because of the second wave.

- And very condescending.

And, you know, kind of disbelief that, you know, the "Mad Men" world existed.

But in part, but it wasn't so much I was taking issue with the gains, not at all.

It was this idea that women were going to be much more fulfilled by their careers- - Than by motherhood.

- Than by motherhood or marriage or anything in their personal life.

And I felt that was a lie.

And that's what I started to write about, and I started to write that book after I'd had Miranda.

And realizing what we said earlier, that having this child, this new being in your life, didn't shrink me.

It brought me to another dimension of humanity.

And I realized until I had had a child, and I think this is true for fathers as well, but until I had a child, there was a whole side of me that had been locked up.

And I just, like the Grinch's heart at the end of "The Grinch who Stole Christmas," you know, his heart grew three sizes that day.

Like your heart grows, and you become responsible for this person and protective for this person.

– At 3: 00 AM in the morning, Eastern Time, Nat, your son, Miranda's brother, awakened on the other side of the continent.

- Yeah, he was in LA.

- He was in Los Angeles, deeply disturbed and had no idea why.

- Yeah.

- This was roughly, as the coroner later estimated, Miranda's time of death.

- Yeah, well, I think everybody who loses someone, anyone, who you're close to, you, first of all, you're always looking for signs.

But pretty much everyone I've spoken to has some story that is inexplicable and can't be just sort of written off.

So, as you say, when Miranda died at 3:00 AM Eastern Time, her brother sat up, bolt upright at midnight in LA time, West Coast Time, with the most horrible sense of dread.

And that I've subsequently found that's quite common with siblings and others, like somebody would be on the other side of the continent and just say, "Something's wrong, something's wrong."

So we have this cottage in Canada where we've spent every summer, and the kids ran it every summer.

And it's got, you know, wildflowers growing around it.

And we get tiger lilies, which are fairly common, but we never had white lilies, and that was her favorite flower.

And I was walking by our dock one day.

I walk the same path every morning with our dogs.

And I was passing by, it was about a week before her birthday.

And pushing up through the boards of the dock was what I realized was a white lily.

And I started to watch it every day.

And then on her birthday, it was perfectly open.

And I felt, 'cause Miranda knew how much I love to garden and how much I love flowers, if she were going to communicate to me, that is how she would communicate.

And that lily has come up every summer since.

- Danielle Crittenden, thank you for sharing, thank you for bringing Miranda to us, and thank you for honoring Miranda's memory in this episode of "Firing Line."

- Well, thank you for being such a friend to her and a mentor.

And I know how much she loved and admired you, so thank you for that.

(bright music) - [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, and by the following.

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