Marisa Renee Lee: Grief, Uncertainty, and the Work of Realistic Hope

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (0:10)
I was very, very fortunate. I just had one of those really amazing moms. You know, our house was one that kids in the neighborhood were just always in and out of, you know, everybody knew where the snacks were. Like she was PTA Sunday school teacher. And then one day, almost exactly 30 years ago, she got sick and she just never got better.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:38)
That's Marisa Renee Lee, former Obama White House appointee and author of the 2022 best selling book, Grief is Love, subtitled Living with Loss.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (0:49)
I was 13 at the time. She was in her late 30s and it would take doctors three and a half years to figure out what was actually wrong with her. And it turned out she had multiple sclerosis. And by the time they figured it out, the disease had done permanent and irreparable damage to her brain. And so growing up, there was a lot of grief and uncertainty.
And then as I was graduating from college, mom got really sick again. They were trying to figure out, is this a complication from MS? And it turned out she had stage four breast cancer that had already migrated to her skeletal system. And so that's why she was in so much pain.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:34)
Marisa split her time between New York City, where she worked as a banker on Wall Street and the family home in the Hudson Valley, helping to care for her mother until she passed away three years later.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (1:45)
I thought I was prepared for that loss.
I knew it was coming. She and I had very honest and upfront conversations about it. I was one of the primary people managing her care.
I am just naturally a pragmatic and strategic person. And so I was like, okay, like, you know, I'm going to read on death and dying. I'm going to do research to figure out how else I can support her. And so when it happens, it won't be so bad. And then it happened and it was terrible. I felt like I must have done something wrong because I just had no sense for the experience of grief and how daunting and disorienting it can be.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:23)
Marisa was a high achiever. She wanted to get over her grief as quickly as possible and return to her life as a 25 year old woman building a career in finance. But she quickly discovered that her productivity and social life were not necessarily a part of grief's schedule.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (2:40)
It was about six months after she died, I decided there's nothing wrong with me.
Like where the problem exists is in how we treat people we're grieving and how we talk about grief and loss, like in our society. And I wrote in a journal back then, I'm going to write a book about grief and loss. It won't be sad and depressing and it will be a New York Times bestseller. And that book finally came out in 2022 with lots of life twists and turns in between. And more recently, I have found myself in a place where I feel closer to my mom in certain ways than I ever have, even though she's been gone for over 18 years. Because a couple of years ago, I became a sick mom myself.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:32)
Soon after the release of her first book, Marisa became one of over 20 million Americans living with long COVID. She has suffered from life altering symptoms like chronic fatigue, severe asthma, and debilitating joint pain. Since her diagnosis in 2024, Marisa has been forced once again to think deeply about what healing requires of us and our communities.
These new experiences led to her second book, Waiting for Dawn, subtitled Living with Uncertainty.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (4:01)
There are very few guarantees in this life. I think one of them is that at some point, we are all going to encounter different forms of grief or uncertainty or pain, that we're going to have to figure out how to navigate.
And if we can really deeply accept that, when it shows up, it's a lot easier to ask for help or to explain to someone else what you're experiencing and reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation and shame.

**Lee C. Camp** (4:33)
Today, Marisa shares the lessons she's learned about healing, identity, and embracing joy in whatsoever way it arrives.

**Marisa Renee Lee** (4:40)
I think back to my mom's funeral, like this, oh my goodness, it was so bad. The pastor, one of his responsibilities, he was hiring this gospel singer to sing His Eyes on the Sparrow.