Steven Tomlinson, Episcopal priest, playwright, and former economist, shares his personal journey through grief and healing after the sudden loss of his partner, David. Tomlinson reflects on how community, faith, and the process of writing his play Curb Appeal helped him navigate the complexities of loss.
With wisdom drawn from his unique career in theology, theater, and business, Steven explores the raw realities of grief, the role of love in healing, and how faith has shaped his understanding of death and resurrection. His story offers deep insights into the power of presence, the mystery of life after death, and finding peace amidst the uncertainties of loss.
This podcast is produced by Larj Media.
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sarah Kavanagh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode, we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page.
Sarah: My guest today is Reverend Stephen Tomlinson, an ordained Episcopalian priest and also an accomplished playwright. He holds a Ph. D. in economics from Stanford University. and ended up in the church. He tragically lost his partner in a car accident. And we talk about how this tragedy transformed his life.
Sarah: Welcome to Peaceful Exit.
Steven: Thank you.
Sarah: Did you grow up in the Episcopal Church?
Steven: I did not. I was sent to it by a mentor in my 20s. It was, it was his discernment [00:01:00] that that was not only the Episcopal Church, but St. James in particular was the community he believed was going to finish getting me ready for life.
Sarah: How did you grow up as a child? Did you have a faith community as a child?
Steven: Mm hmm. We went to church every Sunday, every Wednesday. My family introduced me to church early and I took to it really quickly. I've always been drawn to the big questions and to mystery and to, you know, this promise that there was someone who knew us intimately that was with whom we might be in communion.
Steven: So, even as a kid, I sought out solitude and prayer and church as often as I could because I loved hearing the scripture read and the prayers.
Sarah: I also grew up in the Episcopal church, but, uh, when I had kids, one of ours could not pronounce Episcopal, so he called it Eucalyptus.
Steven: Ah! That's good. That's very good.
Steven: And hopefully it had the same tonic effect on his [00:02:00] soul. The Eucalyptus. I love that. It's very good.
Sarah: You wrote a play called Curb Appeal. After losing your partner David, there was a sudden crash in 1997. What prompted you to write this play?
Steven: After David died, and I had had the conversation with people that you have when you lose not just your mate, but someone who has been a mentor and friend in the community.
Steven: So David belonged to everybody. And when he first died, I had friends that said to me, You know, Stephen, it would have been easier for the community if both of you had died in the accident, because then we wouldn't have to deal with what is the truly frightening, reality that any of us could suddenly be separated from our mates.
Steven: And you're still around, and you are a [00:03:00] sign to us of that horrible prospect. And I was feeling that. I was feeling that people were seeking me out in my grief to process their own anxiety and fear. And people want to comfort. I mean, we all know how deep that impulse is. We also know how there are no words.
Steven: And that most of what any of us do is likely to just, you know, to be beautiful only in its pathos. You know, how clumsy it is and how, how vulnerable we are in those moments. And so I started writing down all the things people said to me, just as a way of collecting and letting them be outside of me so that I didn't just have to have the, the awkwardness of those conversations and the pain on top of the grief that I was [00:04:00] skiing behind in my own life.
Steven: And I started to realize something is going to happen with this stuff. Maybe six months later, friends started saying to me, we need you to write about this so that we can process it with you. Which, you know, it's a remarkable thing. Are, are we, are we allowed to tell grieving people that we need them to do work for the community?
Steven: Only you, the one who is left, can tell us what it's like. Only you can lead us through the work that now we have to do. We are not finished with this work until you have included us in it. Remarkably, at the time, because, again, I had written about so many other things that had been painful, and the writing of them and the, and the sharing of them had been part of [00:05:00] healing, that it made sense what people were asking me to do.
Steven: Even at the same time as it felt, is it okay for people to tell you they need you, the grieving person, to lead the community in grief? It's kind of like that thing we say, you know, why, why do I have to do that work for you? That's your work to do. I never found that resistance completely satisfying because I think it's all of our work to do and it's all of our work to do together.
Steven: The work cannot be done apart. And I think I recognized it even as I was. Loath to take on that responsibility for the community. And then one morning, literally, literally, a year to the day after the accident, I woke up with this sudden consuming conviction that I was supposed to buy a house. I was supposed to get out of the house that David and I had shared together, which we had rented, and I was to go buy a house and it was to be [00:06:00] my house.
Steven: And, uh, that very day I found a real estate agent. That very day I had a contract on a house. And because of a foundation problem that was discovered during the inspection, it was not gonna go through. But now I was in the house hunting adventure. And it was funny that looking for a house was also helping me recognize the beginning stirrings of wanting companionship again, which I am convinced is a critical part of grief.
Steven: There's grief that you do not finish until you start to imagine what it would be like to be with someone else. And friends have been trying to set me up on dates, and I had not been amenable to that. But as I was going through the process of house hunting over the next few months, I was also starting to go on dates.
Steven: And it just became very obvious that the process of looking for a [00:07:00] house and the process of looking for a mate had so much in common and were so humorous in their similarities and so stark in their differences that I had to write a play about it. And as I started writing it, I recognized this is how I share with the community.
Steven: That I'm okay, that I miss David like they do, that this is what grief feels like and these are the ridiculous things we do to try to make things okay when we're in grief. And the play was extremely well received and it seemed to start or support the conversation that my community was looking for.
Sarah: So the title Curb Appeal Is from real estate.
Steven: Yes.
Sarah: Does that have another meaning?
Steven: What is appeal? All appeal is fundamentally our desire for each other. And the, the idea with curb appeal, my [00:08:00] mentor had said to me when I came in, particularly excited about a house that I had just got a contract on, he said, your attachment to that house is unhealthy.
Steven: And I said, what, what does that mean? He said, every house that excites you is a fantasy. about what your life could be. And until you have discerned the fantasy, you must not buy the house. And I thought, well, that's pretty good. I mean, he had very much a spiritual Jungian approach to this whole thing. And I thought, you know, isn't it the same thing with each other?
Steven: You know, we have curb appeal. We experience curb appeal in our connection with each other. How much does that really have to do with the possibility for intimacy and, and love, and how much of it is, like my mentor said, a fantasy of what our life could be like with this person. So to me, curb appeal is that suspicious form of desire, that one experience is driving by something.[00:09:00]
Steven: And if what we really want is intimacy, if what we really want is love is if what we really want is. Home. Uh, in the play, it turns out that that has relatively little to do with curb appeal. And I think that's why the title seems so apt.
Sarah: I love the title. In Grieving, David, and the Loss Are you grieving that fantasy future together?
Steven: I don't think I was grieving what David and I didn't live together. I don't think I was grieving some future that didn't come to pass. I think that the grief was actually more gut level and unglamorous than that. I think literally my life with David It was sweet daily domestic moments, like the [00:10:00] smell of lentil soup when I came home, like trimming his beard, like making the bed together and doing the laundry, like just how was your day?
Steven: And those things are representative of a pattern of habit that, that has sensory reinforcement that becomes to feel safe and comfortable. And then that's what's interrupted. When your spouse reveals themselves to you in some surprising, new, beautiful, awful wrinkle. That's the thing that's interrupted. I thought I'd figured this person out and now there's more.
Steven: What I was actually grieving, I now realize. Were the arguments that David and I had routinely that were at the core of our relationship. Things about how we spent our time and the balance of introversion and extroversion and money and just the basic things that a couple [00:11:00] has to figure out in order to have a common life.
Steven: And those things become about everything else. Your entire life aspiration and anxiety. suddenly is triggered over how we're going to pay for the plumbing disaster. And I realized after he was gone that I kept looking for someone to have those arguments with. And those arguments had become to me comfortable, They had become intimate, they had become an affirmation that I was seen and heard by another person, and they were also where I was working my junk out with another human being that had all the resources needed to play my games.
Steven: And when he was gone, it was like I was pinging out there and nothing was coming back. And to me, there is nothing remotely sentimental about that. It is just a raw, Unmet, hungry, grasping [00:12:00] after something that was working and now it's gone. And I've seen this in other people in my life that I'm close to that when they lose their mates they start casting around for other people to have the same argument with that was the basic liturgy of their marriage.
Steven: And that, for me, was why, when I got together with Eugene a little more than a year later, part of the grief was, I'm not going to have the same arguments with him. I'm not going to have the same games with him. I'm not going to get comfortable with my anxiety and his in a pattern that feels like what was comfortable for me for the many years with David.
Steven: It was letting go of that that was an essential part of my confusion and unsettledness in the grief that came with losing David. Do you still argue with David? I have [00:13:00] had the most vivid, lucid dreams where David and I are having an old argument, and it's funny, when he was first gone, that happened a lot.
Steven: Now it happens less, and it's almost as though the dream is saying that memory is still sweet, the memory of that argument is still sweet, the memory of that activation of yourself with this other person that you desire, that is still sweet. It's kind of like when you try on something that you haven't worn for 30 years and Maybe you're lucky it still fits somehow, and yet you think, Did I ever really look good in that?
Steven: Why did I love that so much? The experience of intimacy in these arguments is so personal and idiosyncratic to the two people that bonded that way, that now it's Sometimes a little hard [00:14:00] to make sense of.
Sarah: If you're lucid dreaming, do you want to get in there and win the argument?
Steven: You know, I think maybe that's what I'm saying to you.
Steven: I realize I don't care about winning that argument anymore, which means the argument has, the spell has broken somehow, even as the memory is sweet. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to win the argument anymore. Yeah. I had a very funny dream that David came back to the house that Eugene and I live in now, which David never lived in.
Steven: And he came in and he liked the house and I showed him around and we sat and we had a very sweet talk. And then he said something to imply that his stuff was out in the car. And I remember thinking, well, this is complicated because you don't live here and there isn't a room for you. I remember being very clear in the dream thinking.
Steven: This is an odd conversation, and yet there's not going to be a way of it working out where David comes. David is present [00:15:00] in our relationship in the most beautiful ways. And Eugene said to people very early when we were together, within the first year, he would say to people, yes, we, meaning him and me, we love David, David is still with us.
Steven: And I remember thinking what a generous and beautiful and insightful perspective that was. So
Sarah: generous.
Steven: So generous. I could never have said that, but he said it, and we began that way, which again is part of grief, I think, is that there was grief work to be done, which meant David was with us, and David was going to find his final resting place.
Steven: in my heart through how Eugene and I made that place for, for him.
Sarah: What were those initial days like for you?
Steven: We were on the way to have Christmas with my parents in Oklahoma, and then we were [00:16:00] going to meet his parents for a cruise for their 50th wedding anniversary. And it was a rainy night on the interstate, and a car crossed.
Steven: The median flipped over and hit our car and knocked us into a 18 wheeler. And so David was killed instantly. He was, he was gone. And I, uh, I got out of the car with the help of some people who stopped. And I just I became very, very aware that I said, receive care. People right now are going to want to care for you.
Steven: Receive it. There's nothing else for you to do. And so I just held people's hands and let them wash my face and sat in the ambulance as they drove me to the hospital. Harris Methodist in Fort Worth, and I imagine that David's spirit was still [00:17:00] close enough that he was caring for me. The men that tried to get him out of the car came back to me and said, I'm sorry, he's, he didn't make it.
Steven: And they were very, very emotional at the time. I wasn't crying. I, uh, I don't know what kind of state I was in, but I just remember being extremely aware of their tenderness and their love. Um, their own grief in the presence of a tragic accident and the death of someone who was about their age. My parents came down and got me in an SUV.
Steven: I rode back to their place in Oklahoma, stretched out in the back. I was 36. And I stayed at their house for a few days while people from all over the country called to, just people called and wanted to touch me. And then I woke up, [00:18:00] as I do, uh, on, I think maybe a couple of days before New Year's, and I said, I'm, I'm going back to Austin.
Steven: And I had an eye that was completely purple with bruises, cuts. And I just decided that, um, I was gonna go be in my house where David and I had been. And some friends met me when I got to the airport, took me to the house. We went in together. It was exactly as we had left it. The bed was unmade. The pillows were kind of arranged in a way that looked like David was still in the bed, asleep.
Steven: I knew I was gonna be okay. But I also knew that this journey was beginning, that Was going to be unlike anything else and that was going to be completely unpredictable and my uncle who had lost his wife young came over to see me and said You must decide right now that whatever happens is okay. Grief is [00:19:00] not controllable.
Steven: There's not a right way to do it And why don't you not put that on top of everything else? And that was all the permission I needed to just let things happen And my bruises faded before the first day of classes My closest friends came over and they said nothing. We just sat together, maybe ate, maybe sat outside in January when it's nice in Austin and just enjoyed the crisp air and maybe took a walk and went and got a cookie at the grocery store.
Steven: And that's all we did. And then I started fielding the conversation that I guess I knew was coming from everyone else who wanted me to tell the story, and they wanted to hear me tell the story, and wanted to talk to me about how I was feeling, and [00:20:00] wanted me to say more about how I was feeling, and wanted to make it okay, or to tell me how inadequate they felt.
Steven: I was okay with that and it just kept going.
Sarah: As you're speaking, I'm just curious about your proximity to David makes you the expert in other people's eyes around grief.
Steven: Oh yeah. I think, Sarah, that's what it is. I mean, grief is the response of something that's gone. It is the response to something that's died.
Steven: And so, That, as we say in the prayer book, you know, those we love but see no longer. And you don't see David anymore, but you see me. And I'm the closest thing. And so when I got to my parents house, my four year old niece came in. Her parents had told her that she wouldn't see David, that David was in heaven.[00:21:00]
Steven: And she came in and she said to me, You miss David. And I said, I do. And she said, let's call him. We picked up the phone and we called him. And that was how she got to David. Most other people, I kind of wanted some of the folks that needed to get closer to him. I said, well, let's call him, you know, or why don't we talk to him?
Steven: I talked to him. You want to join me and talk to him? And that would have been better than tell us will you be our portal in a kind of game of telephone to what happened. Did David suffer? I want them to know he didn't. Was David happy? Yes, I want him to know. Did David love me? That's what they want to know.
Steven: Yes, he did. He loved you. He loved your, his life with you. I was very eager to get rid of all David's clothes. Somehow, that was the one thing I wanted to do quickly. And so I [00:22:00] found all of his students and friends that would fit everything of his that was cool. And they got his stuff. I just, my first job was, I've got something of David's that I think you'd like.
Steven: And people would come over and that became something to do. That's grief. Grief is you just got a sport coat. Grief is thank goodness you fit his shoes. Grief is, you want to help me take all of his play scripts over to the Mitchener Library and donate them? Why don't you help me do that? Because that's, that's being with David.
Steven: I, it took me a while to figure all that out, but the clothes sort of jump started that. But it's like I had permission from my uncle to, if this is how you need to grieve, and sometimes grieving looks like being just sort of direct and calling people on what you're seeing they're trying to get you to do for them.
Steven: And sometimes grief is, [00:23:00] you want to grieve with me? Come over, let me show you what that looks like. And I think that's what worked. What worked was not worrying. My favorite line, people would say, how are you doing? I'd say, I'm doing okay. Are you really okay or is that just what you're telling people? And if it's what I'm telling people, then it's what I'm telling you, is what I wanted to say to people, but I never did.
Steven: I said, I'm okay. I'm okay. I mean, it is a pretty honest thing for someone to tell you. It would have been easier if both of you had died. That is an extraordinarily honest thing, and when I look back, I think that's the sort of kind of gift that came from being in that sort of heath, that unsettled, wild place where you have freedom from some conventions of propriety.
Steven: You [00:24:00] don't get lines like that. in polite society. You get lines like that when grief has given you permission.
Sarah: That's an extraordinary bit of honesty. Was there anything else that was helpful to you?
Steven: Oh, yes, yes, yes. And I thank you for asking because this brings back very sweet memories. One of my co workers who had an office down the hall from me at the university, She's a very, very cool woman, very professional, and gives off this aura of always having everything in order.
Steven: And I very much admired her. And she came in my office when I was first back at school, and she closed the door. And she sat down at my desk, and she said, When I was young, I was married to the most beautiful man that I loved with my whole heart. [00:25:00] And I cannot imagine ever being happier. I was at his basketball game, and he just fell down dead on the floor, and I was destroyed.
Steven: And I don't even remember the pain and the distress and the desperation that I felt in the time that followed that. And over time, things began to heal in a way that was so unexpected. And now, I've been with someone for 15 years, with whom I cannot imagine being happier. And I'm just telling you that so you can know what it was like for me.
Steven: That's all she said. And then she smiled as if to say she loved me. And then she left.
Sarah: Beautiful. [00:26:00]
Steven: I love that. That was extraordinarily helpful. And I think it was extraordinarily helpful because it was her offering something intimate that none of us knew about her to me. in a generous way. And she did not need me to respond to that in any fashion whatsoever.
Steven: It was just, the spirit led her to offer that in hope. And it was, it was so perfect. Here's another moment. Another woman that I admire very deeply, uh, who's an artist who has class in everything she does. She came to my house, uh, And she left a loaf of bread and a bouquet of flowers in the tub of the washing machine that had broken down and we had hauled out onto our front porch.
Steven: And I came home and the lid of the washing machine was open, and there was bread and flowers inside. And there was no message, no words. [00:27:00] And it was not just that there were bread and flowers, both of which were nourishing, but it was as though she found what it was for. And she and I had an inside joke on all the stress that washing machine had been.
Steven: Here it was in the moment that we needed it. That was beautiful. That was just perfection. The last thing was, uh, my closest friend was teaching on a Fulbright in Tunis that year. And he called me from Tunisia and said, come stay with me on spring break. And so I did. And I spent a week and we traveled around the country and spent time with his friends and I got to see his life there.
Steven: And we talked about David as often as I wanted to. And he, Never brought him up, and never seemed uneasy if I did. And Tunisia is a pretty enchanted place. Warmth seems to be the first language of everybody. [00:28:00] And so the hospitality, it was as though he said, come receive this hug from a culture that knows something about how to love people who are grieving.
Steven: And that was, that was the beginning of something.
Sarah: Has your relationship with grief affected your religious practice?
Steven: It was not long after David died that I woke up one morning aware I'm aware that I no longer care about the afterlife. The question of the afterlife had suddenly become irrelevant to me.
Steven: I still believed somehow David was around, and I was experiencing that in ways that were hard to argue with, because I was arguing with him and he was still around. He was around in the words of other people, and he was around in my walks at night. And I just stopped at that point thinking about what comes [00:29:00] next.
Steven: Because whatever comes next was the fulfillment of the most beautiful possibility that I was already trying to live out of. And David being taken, gone, dead, just suddenly made all these questions like, where is he? And am I going to see him again? And does it matter whether I'm good or not? It was like the deck was reshuffled and they were not turning up anymore.
Steven: What was turning up was more immediate. It was the same question of, God, and spirit, and intimacy, and grace, but it didn't have anything to do with what comes next. It had to do with what's trying to happen now. And I think I have David to thank. That's how I experience my faith now. I don't have much to say to people about the afterlife, just about the fulfillment that we're hoping for.[00:30:00]
Steven: promised in this creation when it's refreshed and healed and when we are raised from the dead.
Sarah: Do you think his death lessened your own fear?
Steven: I don't know. I don't have any fear of death. I think a lot about mortality in the sense of how much longer Well, I have the wits and energy to try to live into the imagination that comes from a life of faith and friends who provoke you in that all the time, and the power that comes from having piled up some stuff in the course of your life.
Steven: And I want to make sure that that counts. That something beautiful happens with that. I would say that the fear that I have right now that's really in my stomach and sharp is that I would die and someone would come find all this junk in my house and have somebody have to clean it out. And I think. [00:31:00] My nephews were here the other day, and I said, These dishes, guys, would you start reading about them?
Steven: Because they're, like, really cool, and you guys should, like, be given dinner parties on them. And if you want them, come get them now. That is actually a really real fear. Yes. That I would have piled up stuff that then becomes a problem for someone else, or is dumped on the trash heap in an undignified fashion.
Steven: Because that would be a judgment. of my life. I'm afraid of that, so I'm letting that fear motivate me to try some different stuff right now. Well,
Sarah: you're not alone.
Steven: Mercy, there's another club we can all join.
Sarah: Yes, yes. I'm super curious if there's anything specific that the Episcopal Church and its teachings tells us about dying and death.
Steven: The funeral liturgy, the burial rite in the Book of Common Prayer [00:32:00] is To me, one of the most gracious and hopeful bits of liturgy in all of the Episcopal tradition.
Steven: And it is an Easter liturgy. It's a liturgy of celebrating the hope of the resurrection of the dead. And that is the principle teaching, I think, that is, that the Episcopal Church, if it has a distinct emphasis in the way it thinks about death, that it always thinks about it in the context of the resurrection.
Steven: That death is something that When God became flesh, submitted to death, had the full experience of everything that human beings can experience associated with death. Death at the hands of an evil empire. Death in a way that involved shame and [00:33:00] degradation. Death in a way that involved betrayal of friends.
Steven: And all of the things that we are afraid of about death have been born in the human life of another who then triumphed over death and was raised from the dead and appeared in a resurrected form to friends who were so changed. by this encounter that they emerged from their shaking tower to tell other people in a way that was so compelling that we're still telling that story.
Steven: Something happened that was extraordinary. That is what we enact. And celebrate when we bury our dead, that even at the grave, the prayer book says, we sing Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, that death is also the occasion for the hope of the resurrection, which is a mysterious thing, not [00:34:00] anything you can nail down.
Steven: And if folks ask me to talk about my hope, I can talk about my hope. If they ask me to talk about what exactly is the resurrection, I'm going to be out over my skis really quickly, because it is something that you experience in hoping for it. It's something that you experience in all of the beautiful sparks to the imagination that we find in Scripture, in liturgy, and in our own experience of being with people.
Steven: That had been raised from near death by the adventures of their own life. Those of us who have emerged from addiction, or despair, or however many other ways we can experience death of the spirit, and that we've known that resurrection, it gives us the intuition that something else is trying to happen.
Steven: And living in that hope colors our experience of grief. Never, by making light [00:35:00] of or passing over or in any possible way minimizing this extraordinary collapse of whole parts of our life when someone that we love but see no longer is gone. And yet the hope of the resurrection is also part of that too.
Steven: And I think that to me is the teaching of the Episcopal Church. That is most relevant. We have the same grief share. Grief, exploration, conversations, I think that people of all kinds of faith and no religious faith are out searching with providing hospitality for each other through, I think if there's something we're doing that in some way is distinct, it is marking the passing of our loved ones with an Easter liturgy, one that brings together despair and hope in a way that becomes catalytic, active.
Sarah: [00:36:00] What does a peaceful exit mean to you?
Steven: My first thought, Sarah, is that I'm not on my deathbed regretting that I didn't get rid of my stuff sooner. That's my first answer. Because my exit will be non peaceful if I am lying there when I should be chanting the psalms and holding the hands of my beloved, and instead thinking, did we get rid of that air fryer?
Steven: Or is that still, that's, that's, that is a non peaceful exit. I think if I have motivation for mortality. It's to make sure, are there people I haven't told how much I love them? Are there things that I'm holding on to that belong to someone else? And I think that's pretty much it. I've imagined a lot of different ways that I might go.
Steven: Looking at family history and health and all that stuff. And I'm okay with any of that. And some of it will not be under my [00:37:00] control and I'm okay with that too. This is my favorite story about the possibility of exit and how it affects our life. There was a woman that I knew who had a terminal diagnosis, and she decided that the way she wanted to handle the last two months of her life was to write letters to everybody that she knew and tell them exactly what she thought of them, which she did.
Steven: In a very honest way. And she sent those letters out. And about a month later, the doctor came and said, turns out you're gonna be okay. I love that story so much. Because now, what is your life at that point? My life is, I was in a car accident and I should have died when I was 36. And the rest of my life, thanks be to God, has been like a free play on the video game.
Steven: And maybe that's some of the perspective and I see this perspective from other friends of mine who have survived cancer and near death and [00:38:00] accidents and their perspective has shifted and there's always this thing that's underneath and so I feel like in a sense having had an exit or Bye bye. seen the exit door swinging open once before that the next time it's not anything to fight.
Steven: Beautifully
Sarah: said.
Sarah: I just want to say how grateful I am for your time today. It was just a pleasure to talk to you and hear your story.
Steven: Thank you. The pleasure was really all mine and I appreciate the gift you gave me to get to revisit and remember some of this.
Sarah: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Kavanaugh. You can learn more about this podcast@peacefulexit.net, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram at Up Peaceful Exit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us [00:39:00] know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Sarah: This episode was produced by the amazing team at Large Media. You can find them@lajmedia.com. The Peaceful Exit team includes my producer, Katie Klein, and editor, Corinne Kiltau. Our sound engineer is Sean Simmons, Tina Noll is our senior producer, and Sid Gladue provides additional production and social media support.
Sarah: Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Kavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit.