The eighth season of Kate Bowler’s podcast opens with a conversation with Katie on allowing loved ones to die with dignity.
At age 35, writer and professor Kate Bowler was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Her struggle with the question of whether her diagnosis was meant to be a test of her strength and character or was just a random and cruel twist of fate led her to write her bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I’ve Loved. Bowler followed up her book with a podcast, where she interviews other people whose lives have been upended by tragedy. The eighth season of Bowler’s podcast, Everything Happens, starts off with who we think is the best guest she’s had thus far: our very own Katie Couric.
When discussing Katie’s memoir Going There, Bowler describes the shock of reading about how Katie’s seemingly perfect life as a young wife and mother co-hosting the TODAY show was turned upside down when her husband Jay was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer: “You have this very intense before and after in your life,” says Bowler. “There’s something about everything going so right, that when it goes so wrong so quickly, the unraveling is something that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.” Katie agrees, remembering what it felt like to have her entire life change in an instant: “It’s really hard to describe the vortex of confusion, terror, and grief that you get swallowed up in. And it’s so quick…April 3rd, 1997 is a day I will never forget. It went from light to dark in a matter of hours.”
Being able to talk about that feeling of unraveling is what Katie hopes her book will help to normalize for other people who are grieving. “There’s so little written about illness, and about grief, and about what happens when someone you love is diagnosed with a terminal illness,” Katie says. “It’s incredibly lonely…how do you do it right? How do you help someone? How do you say goodbye in a way that is right? Nobody gives you a handbook on this.”
Katie also tells Bowler about the importance she sees in allowing someone to die with grace and dignity, something she doesn’t think she allowed Jay to do: “I didn’t have the tools, or the vocabulary, or the mental acuity to support Jay emotionally. I didn’t know how to do it…I think we were in fight mode until the very end, because I don’t think we knew how to talk about surrender.”
To hear more of Katie’s conversation with Bowler, including how Katie has changed the way she thinks about coping with a terminal illness, make sure to listen to the new episode.
