Welcome to another episode of Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badzin. I’m a writer, a writing group leader at ModernWell in Minneapolis, and a friendship enthusiast. I’ve been writing about friendship for at least eight years now. And this podcast all about friendship is coming up on one year!
I’m going to cut right to the chase and tell you that I have a publishing celebrity on the show today–Zibby Owens.
Zibby and I talked about a difficult subject—grieving the death of a close friend. In her new book, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, Zibby tells several story threads at the same time, all organized around the books Zibby was reading when events occurred. It starts as a personal family history of Zibby’s grandparents rising in America, her own childhood, education, and career story. It’s a motherhood story and a romance, too. But very central to this memoir is the tragedy of losing close friends too soon. Bookends in many ways reads like a love letter to three friends of Zibby’s: Stacey, Avery, and Paige.
I’ve had episodes about helping friends who are sick and episodes about friendship breakups or when friends drift away, but I’ve never discussed the reality of grieving a friend.
Meet Zibby Owens:
Zibby is an author, a podcaster, a publisher, a CEO, and this next part we have in common— she’s a mother of four. She’s the founder of Zibby Owens Media, a privately-held media company designed to help busy people live their best lives by connecting to books and each other. The three divisions include Zibby Books, a publishing house for fiction and memoir, Zcast, a podcast network powered by Acast including Zibby’s award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, and Moms Don’t Have Time To, a new content and community site including Zibby’s Virtual Book Club, events, and the former Moms Don’t Have Time to 
Write. She is a regular columnist for Good Morning America and a frequent guest on morning news shows recommending books.
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Highlights from my conversations with Zibby:
— I told Zibby a bit about why I’m 100% sure we’d have friendship chemistry.
— Zibby shared a bit about Stacy, Avery, and Paige and we talked for a long time about her their lives and their deaths influenced her path.
— I asked about the best way to help the family when a friend has died. Although Zibby was devastated when each of her friends died, she still managed to find ways to help their families. I was curious about that role and how to balance it all.
Zibby said, “No one is evaluating the person helping and thinking, is she helping enough? Is she not helping enough? Oh, she overstepped. Oh, she shouldn’t be here. No one going through grief is thinking that at all. They don’t even have the capacity to be analyzing someone else’s behavior at that point. So if you wanna be the one who does something, just don’t bother the people and ask lots of questions. Show up. . .”
More Zibby: “You just do it, you show up. You can show up uninvited. You can drop off food. You don’t stay for long, but sometimes you just have to be the one who’s looking around and assessing what has to happen. Does this person have something to wear? Should I be the one going to the mall and getting them a dress? But no one is thinking, oh, she shouldn’t be here. No one’s ever thinking that. You should always err on the side of being there for someone. That’s my two cents.”
And more Zibby: “When someone you love has something going on, you just go and you cancel and you show up. And I think if you’re ever saying to yourself, should I go to that person’s funeral? The answer is yes. Yes. You should go to that person’s funeral. Yes, you should.”
— We talked about how losing friends the way she did influenced Zibby’s path in life.
I said, “I’m gonna read something from Bookends after Stacy died, and you were struggling with what you wanted to do with your career. You were working a lot and, and you said, ‘If I was going to die at my desk, like I believe Stacy had, and if my life could end at any moment, then I had better be doing something that involved my whole self.’
And then towards the end of the book, you come full circle. ‘I found my purpose on earth, something worth dying at my desk for. I’ve gone through the depths of grief only to rise up again and again and again, because what choice did I have? My deep understanding that life is short and that I could be next, propels me to follow my heart, stand up for what I believe in and work hard to make a difference while I can. We get to do this only once time is ticking. Moms don’t have time to waste.’ I get chills reading that! Because in between those two quotes, what I read at first, and what I read at the end is an entire life’s trajectory. I mean, you meet Kyle, you change careers. Change careers doesn’t feel like the right expression. It’s like you move towards the path that you were always meant to be on. That’s what I see. You’re just moving towards it and you’re being nudged along and you’re realizing that certain opportunities are the ones you want, but it was always there.”
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Latest posts by Nina Badzin (see all)
- Dear Nina in The Guardian - May 1, 2024
- Overtalking, Undertalking, and Lessons for Friendships in the Art of Storytelling - April 30, 2024
- Dear Nina in The Wall Street Journal - April 27, 2024
- 5 Friendship Issues to Consider Addressing with a Therapist - April 17, 2024
