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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Let's talk about grief.

Bozoma Saint John: I would've done anything for a few hours where I didn't have to think or even dream, but my thoughts kept returning to the terrible truth I'd learned in the hospital that day in all the unthinkable moments and tasks that were still ahead.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: For some, grief tightens the chest, clenches the jaw, churns the stomach. It can sit unmoving on our shoulders, a quilt stitched from trauma, or roll across us in waves that crash against our consciousness before receding to a hidden place.

Bozoma Saint John: Finally, I got up and wandered over to the bookcase in my living room. There sat works of literature I discovered at Wesleyan, classics that dazzled me with their melodies and prose, Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. They were required reading for my college courses, but I continued to reread them on my own. They'd always given me so much joy. Now, in the midst of my terror, I turned to them again. My name is Bozoma Saint John, and I'm the author of The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Bozoma stopped by to talk with us about grief. Something many of us on Team Takeaway are facing. Some of us have suffered the recent loss of loved ones like my beloved Auntie Iris, who we lost earlier this year. Some of us have carried grief much longer like our senior producer, Shanta Covington, who's marking the 15th year of losing her father Emmett. All of us are grieving the loss of The Takeaway itself as we prepare to air our final episode on June 2nd.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We look to Bozoma's journey for insight.

Bozoma Saint John: Isn't that just so beautiful? That is what I think is so miraculous about us humans that we don't have to be born in the same place. We don't have to believe in the same politics. We don't have to share the same religion, gender, any of the things that there is some connectivity that if you were just curious enough and vulnerable enough, by the way, because it's not just about being curious about somebody else's story but vulnerable enough to tell your own and not the highlights.

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Bozoma Saint John: All of the stuff that maybe feels like, "Ugh, this doesn't make me sound like a hero or shiny," that we have a greater chance of connecting to each other.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm thinking in this moment of this stunning little piece I actually read by your friend and colleague Adam Platzner, who talked about discovering you through your Facebook page at a time when you were writing in real-time, a lot of what you write about in the book. The loss of your husband, his illness, and then his death.

Bozoma Saint John: Oh, that just made me really, really emotional by the way. Before then, I wasn't the person really who shared a lot of personal information on social media. I was like pretty much everybody else on the planet who felt like social media maybe was the ill of a society. People go and get lost there and they fight. They have little battles, and what's the use? I don't know really, to be very honest with you, what inspired me to go on.

First, it was Twitter. Just with the question. I had woken up in the morning and felt real trepidation like there was a pit in my stomach. I almost felt like there was no one to talk to. Just a question out in the world that just said simply like, "I woke up feeling uneasy. Does anyone feel that same way?" Something like that. What a question to pose, letting people know I was uneasy.

To be honest with you, I don't know again why I was inspired to do that. I got a response from somebody who said, "Yes, I feel the same way." [chuckles] I was like, "You do?" It felt like a gift that maybe I wasn't so alone. Maybe I wasn't losing my mind. Maybe other people felt the way I felt regardless of what they were going through that we were feeling the same thing.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Like all of us, Bozoma is more than the sum of her experiences of grief and loss. In fact, she's a rather extraordinary person. She's recognized as one of the most influential marketing executives in the world and has navigated the highest ranks of some of the world's largest corporations, including Netflix, Uber, Apple, Pepsi, and more. She's done so with such authenticity that her business career has become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study and a Harvard class aptly titled, "The Anatomy of a Badass."

Bozoma Saint John: At the real center of it, that's what I do. I tell stories. I tell stories of sometimes products. I tell stories of people. I tell stories of culture. I tell stories of relevant things. I tell stories of history regardless of whether it's a soda or if it's a streaming app or if it's a ride-sharing company or, at this point, even Donna at the center of it. It's about storytelling.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I wondered if Bozoma found it easier to tell the stories of others than to share her own.

Bozoma Saint John: That's such a fascinating question because I have always felt in my corporate career that my own story was so important to the work. In telling the story of the product or the culture situation, whatever the thing was, I put myself in the storytelling. I think that a lot of times in business, people feel the need to be objective or play to the middle, right? I hate to sound like I'm going to offend somebody, but sometimes in business, you play to the lowest common denominator so that "everyone understands the point." That's actually not great for human communication. [chuckles] We like stories.

We like stories where we understand something that connects us to the storyteller. I find that the biggest compliment right now even as I've written my book and as I have sometimes run into people who are like, "Oh my gosh, I loved when you did X, Y, and Z for this company," it is usually because they identify something about it that speaks to them. That's the beautiful thing is that it speaks to me too. I think that, for me, the success I have found in my marketing career has been because I value my own story. I believe that it is connected to the greater human story. Therefore, I'm able to put myself in the center of the story while connecting all of us together.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Bozoma has had to find a way through crushing grief more than once. She lost her husband Peter to cancer in 2013. Years before that, she endured the death by suicide of her college boyfriend then.

Bozoma Saint John: I know that it was not a healthy relationship. I recognize now the pains of his mental health and mental illness. I recognize the role that depression played in my own life and perhaps what even aided in me feeling responsible for his death. Lots of therapy has helped me with that for sure. When we were in college, he was just so bright. He is an artist, a poet, a rapper. Imagine a white boy rapper from Geneva. Lord help us.

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Bozoma Saint John: Even at the time, he knew [laughs] how impossible that dream was. I felt that if I loved him harder, if I supported him better, if I was more open to his dreams and took them more seriously, perhaps he would still be alive that maybe he wouldn't have taken his life by jumping off a bridge.

I have struggled over the 20 years with the thought that regardless of what I could have done that he would have made that choice anyway, that it was up to him to see the beauty in his life or to see the beauty in his death and make that choice for himself. It's a very difficult thing to accept and understand and feel guiltless. I don't know if I ever will feel guiltless, to be honest, but I am still grateful for having known him and for the experience of the relationship with him and even his death, what it taught me.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Then there was the death of her first daughter, Eve.

Bozoma Saint John: At the time when I found out I was pregnant with Eve, I've been married to Peter for almost five years. I was doing a great job at PepsiCo, doing really well. So was he. We're living in Manhattan. Life was good. There's nobody who would look at us and say, "Oh, you guys aren't ready for kids." [chuckles] Everybody thought we should have kids. I think my mom probably called me the night before and was like, "Don't you want to have a baby?" I'm like, "Ma, calm down." When I got pregnant, I was scared.

I felt like being pregnant and having a baby would slow down my career that it would change my relationship with Peter, that it would just disrupt my life in a way that I wasn't ready for. In that, I was resentful of my pregnancy. It's important to note that because as I went along my pregnancy, as I got to become more acclimated with the idea of becoming mother, as I learned to love this child that was inside of my body also came the challenges of my health, also came my ignorance in maternal mortality.

I wasn't able to ask the right questions. I didn't have the right doctor. I didn't know that there were dangers in pregnancy because nobody talked about it. It felt as if you had gone through a miscarriage or you had a stillbirth or something else happened in your pregnancy, people shushed it. They swept it under the carpet as if it was shame, as if you did it. I didn't know. By the time I was about six and a half months pregnant and I was diagnosed with preeclampsia, I felt shame.

I felt like, "Why can't I do it? What's wrong with me? What did I do wrong? Was it because I didn't want her at first? Was it because I didn't take care of myself? What did I do wrong?" By the time I was induced into labor, I was fighting with every breath, every fiber of my body to remain pregnant. For love of her, for the guilt I felt, for the challenges I knew would come if she didn't survive, for the shame of it all, I fought. When she was born and didn't survive, all of those things came crashing on me.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We're going to pause and come right back with more from Bozoma Saint John.

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Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: We're back with more of our conversation with Bozoma Saint John and the stories she tells in her book, The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival. She shared with us the complicated love story that she had with her husband, Peter, and what losing him to cancer has taught her about living.

Bozoma Saint John: Life is so complicated, isn't it? Wouldn't it be so much easier if he just gave you a handbook and told you exactly what to do at crossroads, especially when you've made a decision and then you look back at it and you're just like, "Ah, I shouldn't have done that"? At the time when Peter's cancer was called terminal, this is going to sound so ridiculous to say, but I felt pretty good about where we were that we had finally reached a place of friendship, real friendship.

We had been friends in our marriage for sure. With our separation and some of the challenges that we had faced together and the loss of our daughter and blaming each other and all of the things, we had become enemies. Then when we separated, it was hard to find our balance. Him wanting to fix our marriage, me wanting to run away from it. We had finally reached a place where there was peace.

I just felt like, "Okay, we're doing okay. We're friends." He was fighting his cancer. My mother was also in her battle, but it just felt like, "Okay, look, we're going to get through this." Then when his cancer was deemed terminal, all I could think of was, "Oh, wasted so much time." It had been three years since we'd been separated and I started to think, "Oh, couldn't we have done something differently? Couldn't I have been a better wife to him, a better lover to him?"

Then I wouldn't have wasted the time because, now, the oncologist was saying we had a few weeks. Now, I had to pack in all of this time that I wish I hadn't wasted into two weeks or three weeks or, God help us, four weeks. It's such a thief, that idea of regret. It's a thief. It steals the present joy. Even at that moment, I really had to consider whether or not I was going to beat myself up over the things I had done wrong in the time that we had wasted, or whether or not I was going to appreciate the moment we were in.

Thankfully, Peter didn't allow me to stew too long. In his own brilliance, he created a list, which I hate lists. I wrote about that in the book. I really, really hate lists. He had a list. The list was such a blessing because we would write down or he wrote down the things he wanted to accomplish, right? It wasn't like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It was simpler things. Well, not really simple. Look, we had to get our will together.

Well, we went and ate some gelato, speaking of ice cream, all kinds of things like that. I felt like maybe I could cheat death by continuing to add things to the bottom of the list so that we were never done. It forced me also into the present so that I didn't have to spend so much time regretting what we hadn't done that I could look at the list and say, "Okay, okay, what are we going to do today?" because every day was different.

Every day, something else was wrong with him. He was unable to do some other things. It felt like, "Oh, you got to take advantage of this brilliant day." As soon as our eyes opened, it was like, "Okay, what are we going to do?" That is such a gift. It's been a gift to me since his passing that I don't wake up in the morning and throw it away even if it's a rest day. I don't think rest is a throwaway. I'm intentional in my rest.

If I have a day where I don't have anything on the calendar, oh yes, I'm going to throw on those sweats, those socks. I'm going to sit on my couch. I'm going to feel the cushions under my butt [chuckles] and feel good laying there. It's such a gift to be able to look at life in the present and not have the grief and the regrets steal the possible joy that we have right now. Even through the trauma in the incredible losses, I am so grateful to have met the people I met.

I'm so grateful for Ben's life. I'm grateful for Eve's life. I'm grateful for Peter's life, even though they are not here now, that I am a better person for having experienced them, for having had relationship with them. Even in the loss, I am grateful for the universe bringing them into mine. I don't even know how better to articulate it. It does come with tears because I'm grateful for their presence. I wish that they were still here. I really do. Even in the case that they're not, I am so grateful for the opportunity to have had them.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Through it all, you came to understand the urgent life. As we wrap, can you tell me? I feel you saying it, but I just want to give it as a takeaway. What does it mean to have an urgency in your living?

Bozoma Saint John: Oh gosh, life is really so beautiful. It really is. It's such a gift. I don't think that until-- maybe for some, but for me, for sure, I'll make it super personal, which is that it wasn't until I really went through these griefs to understand how beautiful this life is. What a gift it is to have it. I don't want to waste any of it. In the epithet of my book, I quote Diane Ackerman, who's another one of my favorite authors. I'll paraphrase or maybe I think I've now memorized it.

She says, "I don't want to get to the end of my life and just have lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it." I think that's just a powerful way to look at life that I am urgent about it. Not because I want to live it fast, but because I want to get everything out of it. In today, I want to live in a way that makes me feel satisfied with it so that should I go at a time that feels untimely, or when I am 106 that I will look at my life and feel that I lived it urgently because I did the things I wanted to do at the time that it was available to do it. That's what I wish for all of us, for everyone that we live our life with urgency and that we're satisfied.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Bozoma Saint John, author of The Urgent Life. Thank you for being here and for sharing with us.

Bozoma Saint John: Thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure to have this conversation, and I hope it continues.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you.

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