One Man’s Journey Through Unexpected Grief – Episode #388

Grief, it’s our natural response to loss. And whatever the loss, there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. But to stay emotionally healthy, you must grieve. After seeing The Art of Grieving, Ryan was moved to interview Preston Zeller, whose art project is the film’s focal point. Talking about grief is not easy, but Ryan felt it was important to share their conversation on this Dentist Money™ Show.

Show Notes
TheArtOfGrievingFilm.com
ZellerHausArt.com

 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, and welcome to another episode of the Dentist Money Show, brought to you by Dentist Advisors, a nil commission, comprehensive fiduciary financial advisor just for dentists all over the country. Check us out at dentistadvisors.com. Today’s episode is kinda different. It’s very different, actually. About a month ago, a man named Preston Zeller reached out to me and said, “Hey, I made a film, a documentary film about my brother dying and how I chose to process my grief through art, which was something that was big in his life.” And he said, “I know it’s probably kind of different, but if you think your audience might value it, I’d love to come on the show and talk about it.” A few weeks after that, unfortunately, for the first time in my career in 15 years working with dentists I attended the funeral of a really dear client, someone who became a good friend, their family became good friends of mine over the years, and I attended their… His funeral. And after coming back from that funeral, which by the way was really beautiful, it was a celebration of life, and it was just packed full of friends and family and patients and community, people honoring this person’s life.

Ryan Isaac:
And it was really beautiful. And when I came back, I reached back out to Preston and I thought, this is something that we all deal with as humans, and certainly dentists as well in the industry and how it affects our lives just generally, but also just how it affects someone’s life who runs a business and who has hundreds and hundreds of patients in a community counting on them and needing them and family and friends and their own grief. And so I reached back out to Preston. I watched the documentary. He and I had a really great chat before we recorded and as we talked, I just thought, especially as I watched the documentary, I thought, this is really cool. And not typical. This isn’t financial advice and these aren’t wacky stories related to financial advice that we usually try to bring. But I think this was a very, very human story, very relatable. The film was beautiful. It’s called The Art of Grieving, and it’s available on all kinds of platforms. I bought it for 5 bucks on Amazon. I think it’ll be streaming on Amazon Prime here soon. And it’s streaming on other platforms, The Art of Grieving Preston Zeller.

Ryan Isaac:
So anyway, Preston came on the show and we talked for 90 minutes. This is a longer episode, but he walked us through his life, his brother’s death, where his life was before and where his life was after, and how he chose to use the medium of art over a pretty exhaustive long period of time. The project… I won’t spoil it, but the project is really cool. You gotta go watch the show. And it kind of just really showcased this grieving process that he went through and how the process he went through specifically using art has been really helpful for him. And what I assume is thousands of other people. So I hope you take from this episode a good story, a good connection. There’s a lot of reflection in here about empathy and grief and humanness. And I just wanna thank Preston for reaching out, and it was really cool to have something different on the show, and I really hope that it’s valuable to all of you. And I’m sure there are people listening as we do this episode and as you’re listening that are going through something similar. So I hope it helps, and I hope it’s inspiring and uplifting and gives you something else to think about in your own journey. So Thanks to Preston, this was cool, The Art of Grieving. Go check it out, and thanks for being here. I really hope you enjoy this episode.

Ryan Isaac:
You now live in Arizona, right?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, I’m in Mesa, Arizona, so it’s actually the largest suburb in the country, I think I read. So yeah right outside of Phoenix, if no one knows where Mesa is. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. You’re a nomad, kind of a move around kind of person, huh?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
I got that impression anyway.

[laughter]

Preston Zeller:
Not really like intentionally. So I did travel a lot when I was younger. I studied abroad in Europe, in France, and so I went to 10 countries there, but there’s some amount of moving that makes, it like stretches your inherent, your comfortability, your limitations. If you look back at… And I’ve done genealogy reports and stuff like that, really going into like records of genealogy and seeing where people moved and for a long time it was like people moved because they had to or is opportunity, but moving was really hard. You didn’t have movers or anything like that. And [laughter] when you meet someone now who’s like, “Yeah, I’ve been here for 50 years,” and you’re like, “What?”

Ryan Isaac:
Weird. Why? Yeah, totally.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Yeah. So but I… Especially with young kids now, it’s like, okay, well I gotta buckle down for a while, so I’m not like ripping them outta places.

Ryan Isaac:
Stick around. Are you in the house where you did the paintings and did… And filmed?

Preston Zeller:
No. So funny enough, that house is sold. So if this movie goes truly viral and blows up and people drive by the house, [laughter], there’s gonna be somebody else there.

Ryan Isaac:
Just don’t knock on the door. I noticed on the front of that house there was like, the house number was in a Texas plate. So were you guys in Texas when you filmed that?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. So we were in Leander, Texas when we filmed all that. And that was so wild and we can talk about that, but just how all that came about to be able to film it was pretty a godsend, for lack of a better word.

Ryan Isaac:
Super cool man. Well, let’s go rewind a little bit. So the name of the movie is?

Preston Zeller:
The Art of Grieving.

Ryan Isaac:
The Art of Grieving. Would… Is it… It’s a documentary? Movie? Documentary?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, it’s a documentary. Actually. Someone asked me, they were like, “What are you, a documentarian?” I’m like, “I sound like I work in a library.” [laughter] I just I mean, some of them I say, “Okay, filmmaker.”

Ryan Isaac:
Cool.

Preston Zeller:
But yeah, it’s technically a documentary. It has been funny actually to see how like different platforms categorize it. Some of them have like subcategories. Like special interest?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Okay.

Ryan Isaac:
I mean, just as we’re kicking this off, everyone listening, I just bought it on Amazon. It was like five bucks, six bucks or something. I think you sent me a link, but I’m like, “I’m buying this thing.” [laughter]

0:06:44.5 PZ: Oh, thank you. I appreciate.

Ryan Isaac:
You probably got like two pennies on that, so we wanted to kick you a couple cents, man.

[laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Or zero, I don’t know.

Preston Zeller:
No, I appreciate it. No, I do get some for sure. It’s actually filmmakers make more off of I think purchases than they do streams on…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Cool.

Preston Zeller:
It was on Amazon Prime streaming, like included, you don’t need anything.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I’m sure man. So Art of Grieving and I have like all these notes and questions and they’re kind of in order for how… Like I just sat with my iPhone and the Notes app. It just like types questions as I watched the show. So it was pretty cool. One of the… One of the first things I wrote down about the show, and maybe you could just give us a premise too, but just to set it up, there was this phrase you used in the beginning of grief recovery. And it was something you used kind of throughout. And I want to touch on a few other phrases you use, but to set this up. The Art of Grieving is this film about your own grief recovery. And maybe just walk us through… You’ll have to leave some teasers for people to go watch this. But…

Preston Zeller:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Walk us through your life at the time, how this film starts at a certain point and walk us through kind of the events in the early part of the film of your life.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Well, and I wanna comment on that term grief recovery real quick.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, please.

Preston Zeller:
Because the grief space, I think like… I don’t know any kind of stage of life thing these days is sort of rife with, you know, here’s how we used to think about it, here’s how we think about it today. What terms do you use, all that kind of stuff. And grief recovery is kind of you get into the semantics a lot and any documentary is going to be biased to some degree. I mean, mine’s clearly biased in that I’m sharing my own story, but I use that term grief recovery, specifically to frame sort of a transformation. Not that it’s like, oh, now I’ve resurfaced out of grief by the end of this documentary, and I don’t have it anymore. Some people are gonna interpret it as that. But it’s to say like, you have evolved through this process emotionally and spiritually and all these different things so that you can like start to look at life in this more positive and productive way versus… And we can talk about this some, but, a lot of what you find with people who’ve gone through heavy, heavy grief, and this was me and this is kind of addressing kind of where I was. What sort of prompted the documentary, people can get stuck in like reliving those really kind of initial moments of grief. Whether that’s the first week or month or whatever. And so there’s a couple things there. One is I think you get caught in this cycle of, if I don’t torture myself, this maybe not be like the exact thought, but…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
It’s implied. If I don’t keep reliving the moment of that person being lost, then I’m not honoring them being gone. Or you just don’t see a way out. So you’re just caught in this vicious cycle. And it’s… I think to some degree… Because the film does have to do with addiction, it can be like this addiction, and I’m not… Let’s not to say people are addicted to feeling like depressed or anything, but depression it’s something that you find yourself in, you’re like, you could feel like you’re never getting out of. I think for me and leading up to deciding to do this project, I’m very much a doer and I like breaking things apart and I like understanding how things are made. And so there’s nothing more sort of profound than going through some intense emotional experience and then deciding to break down how you’re made and how you think. And that’s really what I think grief requires you to do. So instead of someone remaining busy or remaining in a certain kind of thought loop, and we could talk about the OODA loop later too.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
You’re… For me it was like, I’m gonna go on this journey myself because I have to, I felt like I had no other choice. And I mean, the only other choice being, I’m just gonna continue to be kind of like a love sum not fun person to be around, or I can be really proactive about it. So I can come up with this dramatic project to do for myself, not for the sake of busyness. Some people have kind of argued that, but for the sake of how I know best of how I process my own emotions. So I said I’m gonna pain a year to process my brother’s death and at least attempt to do that in my emotions probably more so. Work through those emotions and have this set of work at the end of it that’s this mirror.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. You said a few things in there I think are really interesting. I’m not qualified to diagnose these things, so I don’t know. But it is an interesting thought to think about. Maybe the… You said… You called it the addiction to grieving or just maybe the connection that someone must feel like a responsibility to continue in their grief or relieving certain moments or the moment in order to honor, in order to not… I’ve heard people say like, feel guilty moving on and enjoying life and having a life and having survivors guilt and those things.

Ryan Isaac:
I thought that was an interesting take. And then also interesting that you were talking about… This wasn’t like an a means to an end. You didn’t end grief. In this phrase, what do we say? Grief recovery. You weren’t recovered on day 366. When it was over. Right? You at the end of the film, you actually, there was… I wrote in this quote, you said, there’s more work to be done, which I actually want to get to later. But I just liked that. I just wanted to connect those thoughts that I thought developed over the film, that you began this thing and it ended, but it didn’t end everything. There was still more to be done. And I’d like… Later I wanna ask the question, what is next? What does that mean for you? More work to be done?

Preston Zeller:
I think the thing for me is my brother passing and the nature of our relationship and him having… Experiencing him doing drugs and different overdoses. Like I really prepared myself many times in the case that… So it’s like you kind of rehearse this person’s death and you think that, okay, well I rehearsed it enough, but, and now it’s happened and there’s the shock. But then… And I’ve gone through the funeral and all the things, now I can just go back to life.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And I think, especially for men, we like compartmentalize pretty well. I don’t know how many women out there would say that, but as many men are like, “Alright, I’ve shut the filing cabinet and it’s just there for now.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Just pause it. Shove it down and move on. [laughter]

Preston Zeller:
I will lock it. I’ve broken the key in there.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
So no one can ever open it. [laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And that’s like totally, not true.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
So, yeah, working on software and that’s… I don’t cover too much of the gap between, like there’s some of the initial after my brother’s death, and then a little bit of… And then there’s six months that goes by and then there’s a lead up to deciding to do this project. But yeah, in that six month gap, that’s where you… I felt the most kind of like bipolar in a way where…

Ryan Isaac:
Okay.

Preston Zeller:
Instead of being this really like, level steady person, I mean, I’ve… My wife deals with the anxiety, so I’ve… I’m kind of all as the counterbalance there where I’ve been with her through extreme anxiety before where it’s like, we gotta pull the car over because it’s that bad.

Ryan Isaac:
Sure.

Preston Zeller:
And I’m like, “Okay, wow. It’s gotta be the steady rock here.” And then I find myself going, “Oh my gosh,” I am… Now, I can’t even feel like I’m in the right place. In the process of grief to me. And I’m like, you’re going to… You didn’t realize by now I say a lot of existential things ’cause it’s…

Ryan Isaac:
Great. I love that. Yeah. Big thinking, man. Yeah. I like this.

Preston Zeller:
That’s kind of the why I even made the documentary, but…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Good.

Preston Zeller:
I think in the sense of grief, right? Again, talking about people, holding on to this person, and it’s like being okay with just like things come and go in your life. Friendships come and go. Other work, relationships come and go. Your hobbies come and go. It’s just how it is. And I think we have really different kind of attachments to, you how we are willing to let those things go and not… Or form new bonds for that matter. Right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
I mean, there’s the whole, like, you could have relational issues too, where you never let anyone in. And that could likewise be a problem, but yeah, I was like… There’s… I think most people come to a point in life, hence the kind of, midlife crisis where you’re like, I’ve made a series of decisions that are really not supporting me being a whole person. And so I’m gonna push the reset button and, I’m gonna… And that’s one of the craziest things to me is you have… Like, you’re making decisions every day to do or not do something, and you can choose to do or not do things. And if you aren’t happy with something go figure out. Make a game plan to change it.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool.

Preston Zeller:
And it’s really… I think people are unwilling to do that to some degree. It’s the whole saying that, “When the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. That’s when you change.”

Ryan Isaac:
At some point you decide, I’m gonna channel this into a project, and our project, were you in like, marketing and everything before, so probably really artistic. But did you paint before or… When it showed your setup in your house and the lights and all the paints. I’m like, “This guy’s a pro. Of course he started painting. He’s so good at it.” I would’ve like three watercolors and not even know what to do, even if I was determined. So did you do art before? And then can you walk us into the decision to how did you form this project in your brain?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. So yes, I’ve been an artist my whole life.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. That makes some sense. [laughter]

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. In different mediums though. So this is kind of the bizarreness of this project. Right? So if I go way back, my mom and dad are like, polar opposites as a lot of spouses are. They’re like [laughter] I don’t know how much overlap there is. [laughter] And they’re…

Ryan Isaac:
Sure. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
My dad’s like this business guy, he doesn’t… He actually learned to enjoy abstract art through my painting. At first he’s like, “This is stupid.” You know?

Ryan Isaac:
: Cool. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Give me a western or something.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
But my mom’s really… She’s the artistic one where I think a lot of that was cultivated, but I did music from a very young age. I did music in high school. I got into painting. And in a more sort of formal sense, I studied abstract for the first time there. I did analytical cubism and it was just kind of… There’s a really good book called Range that describes this. It’s sort of the opposite of the book Outliers. So if anyone has a lot of diverse interests, and they don’t like the whole, I have to do something from the age of three like go read that book. But…

Ryan Isaac:
Range. Do you know who’s it by?

Preston Zeller:
Range? The subtitles is like, how generalists succeed in a specialized World. We need a Jamie for this. But, [laughter] by David Epstein.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Oh, okay. Range, David Epstein. Cool.

Preston Zeller:
So I… This is the funny, this will make more sense. And I didn’t really, there are parts of the documentary where it’s like, yeah, I could go this way. I could go that way. You know, like how do you keep it interesting and engaging and not being something that just goes off on like a rabbit trail. But I played music for a long, long time. And, but where I really got into music is, I studied theory, like blues theory. And so I’ve been a guitar player for a long time and singing as well, lyric writing and these kinds of things. And part of the reason why I learned blues theory is so I could write my own backing tracks to solo over them. And so I got into that, eventually done quite a bit of music and was… Did like cue tracks for TV and stuff like that. But how I got even into that is I went to film school. So, I went to film school at Chapman. So that’s not too far from where you’re at out in Orange. And I went to, it was mainly for producing. Like I was very intrigued by like the end to end process of doing the film. I liked kind of directing.

Preston Zeller:
I liked writing, but I really liked the idea of like putting together all the components of a film and actually thinking about before you make the film, is this thing like watchable? You know, I mean, you go to film school, people have tons of crazy ideas that you’re like, is this, what is this?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Who… For who?

Preston Zeller:
The story sucks or whatever the case is. A lot of… Actually a lot of it’s just story. Is it a good story? Do I believe it? Are the characters good? That kind of stuff. And so when I got into marketing more, a lot of like my visual skill set, transitioned into branding and design on the computer, right? And Photoshop, Illustrator, all that kind of stuff. But also like, because I was in film school, you learn principles of cinematography. So you actually like, if you’re going to really learn cinematography, you should probably start out doing photography. A lot of people don’t do that. I think these days they go buy some, $2,000 camera that’s a, whatever, or a DSLR that has movies on it and filming on it and they go and shoot. But I was… I got so into the photography side of it for a while. So it’s like all these like strange skill sets that I just acquired over time. And then by, when it came to this movie and making it, because of all that, it made me feel confident. It’s like, yeah, I can do this. I don’t… I’m not going to know all the, the answers. ‘Cause I had been on films time after time and corporate films as well, where you, it was even like someone got wind that I went to film school. So they’re like, “Well, you’re going to start a video department.”

Ryan Isaac:
This guy will do it. He’s an expert.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, exactly. That happened all the time. Like every single job I’ve like ever been at, they’re like, “Hey, well you have this background,” like up to a point. And so I would get roped into that stuff. I’m like, man, this is just so weird how I keep getting pulled into these projects. This is not what I was hired for. But yeah. So, and it was just like a constant matter of figuring it out and resourcefulness and that kind of thing. So by the time it came to say, to decide to do this project is like, I was actually visiting family in Phoenix, oddly enough when this happened. But I had like a journal entry in one of my books back here that it said paint every day for a year, and make a documentary about it. That was the line. So.

Ryan Isaac:
As you were talking, I was wondering, did this… Was this more about the painting or more about the film in your head when it first started? I’m sure it evolved in a lot of ways, but what do you think was the major theme, film or the painting themselves?

Preston Zeller:
It started out as just the painting. ‘Cause I couldn’t… I couldn’t really… It was like, as I got into the groove of painting, I started thinking… Like it was always on my mind in one way or another, like how is this going to happen? Because you gotta imagine, like I started this late 2019 and then COVID happens. And I just moved. So my original kind of vision for this was to do like three quarters of the documentary and then have a public exhibition and then show the full thing and then film that event and like get people’s reactions. And you know, that was going to be part of the end.

Ryan Isaac:
I wondered the whole time if that… Yeah, okay.

Preston Zeller:
So, well, at some point I think actually, I kept staring at that point in the wall where it is. And I remember saying to my wife, I’m like, “I think we’re going to have to hang this mosaic here.” She was like, “No. I’m not having it.”

Ryan Isaac:
I wondered the whole time. What does the wife think?

Preston Zeller:
I think she initially was like, no, I’m like, okay, we’ll see about it. And then I came back and I’m like, “No, really though, this is the only place and this wall is made for it.” And she’s like, “Yeah, but how are you going to do it?” I’m like, “Yeah, we’re going to like bring this heavy equipment.”

Ryan Isaac:
That stressed me out.

Preston Zeller:
She’s kind of… She’s amazing. So she’s used to my crazy ideas by this point that she’s like, “Alright, fine. You know, you’re probably going to do what you’re going to do anyways.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Okay. So yeah, a little bit of film, a little bit of like therapeutic art projects. So it was kind of amazing to me. I didn’t know quite what to expect as I started watching. It was kind of amazing to just see like, oh, how big were the canvas? It was like the size of a laptop kind of like a… How big were all those canvases that you used?

Preston Zeller:
Oh, the canvases are eight inches by 10 inches.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Eight by 10, put it under on your desk. It’s kind of these cool lights and a little camera above it. And you were just… Started painting. What do you… What was day one like? What was the first painting like? Do you remember just sitting down to it and just thinking like, here’s the start?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I originally, and there’s some posts on my Instagram that has this, but I bought like 90 canvases. And I had this whole stack of them and it was like, “Okay take one off the top, put it on.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I guess I’m doing this, you know?” But actually, I… Some of the paintings I show that I had this exhibition on, those were four feet by four feet, three by four, they’re bigger in size. And I love working in these bigger canvases. I just did one that’s like a 10 feet by five feet or so.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow, cool.

Preston Zeller:
And so I like working on these bigger canvases. Working on a small canvas is really kind of a… It’s… Like people do it for study pieces. And that’s kind of in some ways what it is. It’s like 365 study pieces, but I hadn’t done a lot of small pieces. So you go, “When is this thing over?” I guess it’s just over. You develop a different workflow because the purpose of the paintings and the approach to that each one is just, it’s a different thought process. And I think… Especially the essence of the project being, I’m gonna sit down and do this and not create anything intentionally. And that’s where the whole intuitive abstract comes into play.

Preston Zeller:
But just know that, again, based on previous experience, that I can just let my sort of unconscious mind do the work. And I come back to the music thing because, if you’ve ever seen one of your favorite musicians just go off and do a solo, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s someone who knows an instrument and they know their way around the fret board so well, whatever instrument it is. And they’re just letting… You’re emitting your emotions through this musical instrument, and I’m just doing that in this visceral way. So that’s essentially how it plays out there.

Ryan Isaac:
How long did the first painting take?

Preston Zeller:
I don’t remember. I mean, maybe they took… So on average, I would say it was probably like 12 to 15 minutes. There were some paintings, not a lot that were like maybe two or three minutes, just because I ended up doing some really simple thing. And then there are some paintings, I think the longest was like 35 minutes. Yeah, 35 or 40 minutes. But it was that I was using some really weird technique for that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s what got me thinking. Like this guy is either just really creative naturally or he’s done this before. Because you would like… It would just kind of amaze me. You’d like paint this thing and I’m like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, that’s finished.” And then you just paint over the whole thing again and then like put tape on it and scrape it. I’m like, “How would you even… ” I have a kid that actually would think of that stuff. It’s just like natural in their brain, but that must be something you’ve done before, a technique you’ve used in abstract art.

Preston Zeller:
Well, it’s… A lot of that was actually experimentation. So it wasn’t just like having the paints, there’s of course brushes, but certain things I added, or I would actually… My kids would occasionally paint there and it’s like I’d find something there. When you’re designing in Photoshop or Illustrator and any kind of graphics program now, anything that’s on a tablet or whatever, you have layers, you have undo, you have just version history, whatever it is, you can erase the things you don’t like.

Preston Zeller:
And when you’re painting or using any kind of visible medium, even if you have a pencil, you can erase. The closest thing to that with painting is maybe I remove the paint, maybe I paint over it, I gotta let it dry, or I just say, screw it. And I wipe the whole thing clean and I put paint on a different part. And that’s what’s kind of, I think, intriguing to me about the process of painting because you just have to commit to what you’re doing and you just go with it. And you’re not always gonna like it too. And there’s paintings in this whole series that I came out of it, I did the painting, and I’m like, this is weird. Like, I don’t enjoy it. And I was… I actually… For a while I had prints on my site, I took them down, I’ll have them back up at some point. But I had people buy prints of some of the paintings that I’m like, I don’t know why you bought that. It just wasn’t, it wasn’t an appeal to me, but I think that’s kind of how it goes. The things that people really like are often times not what you do.

Ryan Isaac:
You never… Yeah, you never know. When you put the mosaic together, I noticed there were like, and I couldn’t tell how they were… Were they arranged like day one, two, three, four, five, like sequential order? They weren’t, right?

Preston Zeller:
No.

Ryan Isaac:
I couldn’t tell how they were arranged. Because, and I’ll just say this first, and you can answer that question. I noticed that maybe this is why you did that. They were grouped in like colors, almost like themes. Is that how you ended up grouping them eventually?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, so this is another thing I don’t really explain, like intentionally so in the documentary, because again, it’s like just to keep it flowing. The process of assembling that image was kind of a trip in and of itself. So, it’s like, first of all, doing the painting, it’s like… You know when Danielle says, there’s much more to it than that, it’s kind of like a very loaded statement. But once I did a painting, it’s like, okay, now I have to let it dry, and then I have to let it seal. And then I’m taking super high res scans of all of these things, because I know I’m going to do something with them later. In fact, I could reproduce an even bigger version of the mosaic, if you were printed on like, inside of a building or something, I could reproduce it with the proper fidelity at 3X the size of the actual canvas. So, I scan all these in, and I always knew that it was like part of the… Also a hypothesis there was, hey, if I’m really kind of true to this and I… And I go through the process the way I set it out to be, then I will have this collection of paintings to then reverse engineer into some separate image.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, yeah. Okay.

Preston Zeller:
And so it’s like, the whole is greater than sum of the parts that kind of saying. And so I wanted to use all that as a material for, hey, what to me feels like what it means to move through grief. And the only thing that was really kind of, I guess orchestrated in this… In a way was in the middle, there’s that black rectangle.

Ryan Isaac:
I was gonna ask about that. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. And I didn’t know how those…

Ryan Isaac:
I was like, whoa, dude, did you plan that in like July? For four days in a row, you painted black rectangles? How did you do that? [chuckle]

Preston Zeller:
Well, I… This was really early on. It was in the first 30 days. I was… I just had six of them on the ground and I was like, I’m just gonna put masking tape in a rectangular shape across all them and kind of see how it works out. And I think I did the first two where it was like, I painted the inside part black and I, it wasn’t just like pure black, there was something else in it, and then painted the outside. And so that was one where I kind of continued that theme, and then I was like, “Okay, I’m not doing that again.” The black part was pretty like, okay, I’m gonna do that part black, but when I went to lay it out, I did three or four versions of it, I think four.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Preston Zeller:
The first time was just in numerical order.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Sequentially, that’s the word I was looking for. [laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Sequentially.

Preston Zeller:
It was sequential.

Ryan Isaac:
How did that feel? Yeah, that didn’t feel right, right?

Preston Zeller:
No, I was like, “This looks stupid, this… ” [laughter],

Ryan Isaac:
Because I’m… Sorry to cut you off there, now I’m loving the mosaic even more because the mosaic ended up being its own art project.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Where like every canvas was it a paint or drop of paint or brushstroke that you built together. And that just makes it even cooler. I had no idea. That makes more sense why it was so… I was like, man, did you go through like a green phase where you just painted green for three weeks?

[laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Or like, then white. How did you do that? So, okay, yeah. So you laid it out sequentially and you just didn’t like it. Didn’t feel right.

Preston Zeller:
I didn’t like it. No. And it didn’t… I was like, okay, that’s like the odd… I just… I had to do that at least to see, okay, how does this look? And I’m like, ah, this isn’t it. It was just like, I gotta confirm. In some ways I’m like, what if I put it together sequentially and there’s this crazy thing, and I’m like, no.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, yeah, yeah. It didn’t happen. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
No, that didn’t happen.

Ryan Isaac:
Like spells out a word or something you’re like, no way. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
But here, I’ll tell you this though, the next one I did, I made it. And I was kind of trying to heatmap it, like getting those two sort of flow together as best possible was really weird. Kind of a very different exercise. But, I made like this next version, and I look at it, I’m like, “That’s funny. It looks like an ostrich is staring at me.” And [chuckle]..

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Preston Zeller:
I’m like, an ostrich, what does that have to do with anything? And it’s of course like, it looks like a bird with a beak and two big eyes.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
So ostrich is the first thing that came to mind.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
So I’m like, oh, that’s ostrich symbolism.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And ostriches have different symbolism depending on what culture you go into. But one of the symbolisms is death and rebirth.

Ryan Isaac:
No way.

Preston Zeller:
Yes. [laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Whoa. Okay.

Preston Zeller:
And, the eggs are like, there’s a whole fertility thing around them, and the feathers are really revered. ‘Cause they’re really long, it’s the largest bird, right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Wow.

Preston Zeller:
So they’re very… They have a mysteriousness about them in like ancient culture. And I’m like, that’s cool. But at the same time, I don’t want to make this to be an ostrich.

Ryan Isaac:
Ostrich. Yeah. I would take away from… Yeah. But what was that order? How did that end up the… He said heat map? Like how did you order it to… When it turned into the ostrich? That’s pretty cool.

Preston Zeller:
Oh it was just… I was just rearranging them, and, so it was kind of like, putting… It was… I was so focused, because it… I’m on a computer screen up close like this. Right. So I’m just… I’m arranging them and it comes out like that. I’m like, okay, well that’s interesting. But I’m gonna just.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I’m not gonna do that.

Preston Zeller:
Move them all out again. So.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow. I’m curious, so when I was watching this, I was thinking, and you kind of mentioned this, like some of those you were pulling out of the box for the first time in a while and you’re like, “Oh, this feels like a time capsule.” And so I was curious if you look at any of those, maybe not every one, but can you look at some of those and just zoom back in to where you were mentally, emotionally, what you were thinking that day, how you were feeling? Does some of those just take you right back when you see them?

Preston Zeller:
This is the interesting thing about, like, I think abstract and we’ll get into this, later with doing this for other people, but, abstract is, I think unique in the sense that because it’s nondescript, you can look at it later on and you just see it differently. It feels different to you, whatever the case is. And that’s really very much like what that’s like. And even… I remember when I first approached Lindsay and I was like, “Hey Lindsay, can I give you this set of paintings and I want you to like, psychoanalyze me.” She’s like, “Well, no, not really.” Because it’s more like in the moment.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
They gotta be… Like, formal art therapist, they gotta be there with you going like, okay, talking through your thoughts and how you’re feeling and that kind of stuff. And so you can… To go back retrospectively and go, ah, I see here where you were just like, a really mad person. And over here you were, thinking about your career a lot. Like, that’s like fortune teller stuff. [laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t work that way.

Preston Zeller:
No. So looking at the entirety of the image now, it, like… It makes me think of it differently over time because for one thing I’ve been able to like, share it with more people, but also, I’m changing as a person day by day, so my, attitude towards it and how I feel. And like, it could hit me harder one day and man, like, I feel like I gotta go cry. Or other days I’m like, “This part over here makes me happy.” So, and I’m working on… So I need to get like a high res version of it done because I’m gonna get a larger print done. I don’t know, that file will be extraordinarily huge, but… [laughter] But yeah, I… So it is, it does change a bit. I think one of the most gratifying things in many ways though is people who got to see it in person at my house.

Preston Zeller:
And it was just at my house, I like toyed with, doing some kind of weird at home art exhibit at some point and I’m like, “Nah, I don’t, I don’t really want much of randos walking through my house.” So but I would have people come through, like an HVAC tech or internet person, whatever the case over the course of that time. And, both people who were friends and both… And the kind of like, strangers walking through the house would just like, stop. And they go, “What is this [laughter]? Like this is crazy. What is it?” And they kind of explain it to them and they go, “Can I take a picture?” I’m like, “Yeah, don’t post on social media yet though.” [laughter] ‘Cause it was…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Part of the documentary being out, but it always opened up this crazy conversation that like, normally that, the guy would go fix the thing and be out of there. And I can’t tell you how many times too they’d be like, “I lost so and so last week or last year.” And in many cases it was someone very close. So, I was like, “Dang man, I can’t wait for this to be out in the public eye in a physical way at some point.” ‘Cause that’s where I think it really… You get the full impression of it. Right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. The whole story. Can you talk about the final picture?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Oh yeah. The one with my, brother’s eyes.

Ryan Isaac:
The brother’s eye. The eye. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. The eye. Well, so I think eyes are interesting in that like, you can… You can tell if someone’s usually like tired or, whatever, like they’re very… And there’s a reason that like the eyes are the windows to the soul type thing, you can tell a lot. But like, that was… For my brother, that was always this thing where I could tell how like, kind of sober he was or not. And so that was, pretty trippy. And, I don’t really talk about this… I don’t talk about this in the documentary because the way it does end. But like, I remember just breaking down and bawling actually after that. I didn’t know what to feel and then, my wife started crying and I’m like, “Oh yeah, this is really sad.” So, then I sort of join in and it… I’m actually more curious in a way to like, eventually as my kids get older, because my kids are so enwrapped in all this, like, what they think about that. But the one real quick thing I was gonna say about the, final image is… So that black box, right? The black box is actually supposed to represent the inception of your grief.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh.

Preston Zeller:
And then everything around it, like you said, it’s color mapped. That’s how you move through grief.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh.

Preston Zeller:
But the black box is still there. That’s your grief. But the size-wise, relative to everything around it, it’s much smaller. So it’s the growth you have and the experiences you have, how you’re able to grow around this thing of grief. So it’s not like the grief has shrunk, it’s still there, but you have grown that much more around it. That’s…

Ryan Isaac:
You’ve grown around it. Was there any symbolism to put it into the center for you? ‘Cause I was trying to picture that thing like, oh, that’d be kind of weird to see the little box and like an offset kind of not symmetrical part of the overall piece. But the… You put it in the center for a reason.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. But I mean, like, compositionally to me that made sense.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. That just made sense.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I love, that’s a really… That’s cool. Now knowing that I like… I’m gonna have to go back and see that part now because… Yeah, I’d loved how there were these colors kind of like moving and… What that means. So do you… I want to get to, some of the… What, what’s the term for it? Art therapy.

Preston Zeller:
Oh yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Grief, art therapy. I want to get to like, what that means in the foundation that was in New York, that you’ve worked with and are probably still working with. I wanna talk about that. But I’m just curious through this experience, how your view of grief changed because that was part of the project. Like how did you… As you talk about the colors, like how did you move through that and cycle through that during that year?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think for one it’s like self-awareness, emotional self-awareness and also being like working through, emotions that you do have. Because I’ve talked about this in some other places where it’s like… I think one of my hopes in people watching the documentary is like they’re seeing this guy with a beard doing this. I think actually if it was a woman doing this, it would actually be like a little bit more on the nose. Like obvious. Like, yeah, this seems like something to me that a woman would do. Because women are just generally like more emotionally in touch. Like we are, I think taught to be pretty stoic as men.

Ryan Isaac:
Sure. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And I was certainly no different than that. In fact, like the community of grief, sort of, I don’t know people who talk about it right. It’s like probably 95% women. [laughter] It’s pretty rare for men to be talking about this thing. I didn’t really know this, at the time. I’ve just… I’ve had people be like, “Hey, you wanna talk about this?” They’re like, “Oh, you’re a guy doing this.” Like, “We don’t… Not all guys don’t talk about it.”

Ryan Isaac:
Interesting. Yeah. So that… In that community, in that realm that really stood out as different.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Which, I’m just like, man, I’m just someone who happens to be like, okay with like, putting this out there I mean, I know the bigger this gets, there’s gonna be people who are like, just go, “This art’s terrible.” I mean, I’ve already had people go, it looks like a 5-year-old did this. And I’m like, “That’s cool. Whatever.”

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks for… Yeah. Thanks for noticing the whole point of the project. Appreciate it. Yeah. [laughter]

[overlapping conversation]

Preston Zeller:
And it’s okay. I’m like, “Look, if I made you feel one way or the other, then great.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Cool.

Preston Zeller:
At least I…

[overlapping conversation]

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks for watching.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. [laughter] But, no, I mean… I… So yeah. Coming out of it, it’s like, part of it was like, it’s made me also that much more aware of just like, a lot of people want to have a conversation about these things. They just dunno who to talk to about it. And so even like, we have an ad running right now, on Facebook and it has, like 70 comments or something on it. And like half of those comments are people just saying, “I lost so and so four months ago and my life’s in a rough shape because of that.” And like, they’re just sharing like these… I’m like, this is a random post for like a grief documentary that’s like, you’re sharing these things.

Preston Zeller:
And so I’m like, okay, well if I can continue to kind of be, vulnerable in that way, then hopefully I’m propelling other people to talk about it. But like, just on a really personal level, I’m like… I’m, I have exposed, my family more to this, right? Because it’s not just me grieving, it’s my family. My family could be… If I go unaddressing of this, they could be grieving the loss of like a dad and a spouse. Because I am not the person I was in a really tangibly negative sense. I become just… And so anyways, what I was saying about like, us as men, we tend to resort to anger. And anger is the opposite of what people think it is. A lot of like men become angry and puff their chest because it’s like, that makes you feel in control. But it’s… Yeah. It’s uncontrolled. It’s being out of control because you are not actually showing some like observance of these things you’re feeling. So you just act an outrage.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Preston Zeller:
And that was… And I had have had tons of times where I’m just angry and had to like, really kind of reel that in. And I think that was one thing for me that, was sort of a catalyst to this of just realizing like, man, I’m just like a really kind of angry person, quite often. Like, I’ve actually noticed this in my dad more so, because he’s 80 and so he’s really from a generation that’s like…

Ryan Isaac:
Oh yeah.

Preston Zeller:
You’re… It’s almost… It’s borderline depression era their parents were. And you’re just… You’re gonna pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get along and anything personally that you’re feeling is like, push that aside. Still pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but man, like the things you shove down, become pretty dramatic. And I… And we could talk about this more if you want. That’s one of the things I realized actually in the process of this, is how much grief my brother was in and why he resorted to the things he did.

Ryan Isaac:
Whoa. Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
I didn’t know that at the time. I realized that actually when I was like, editing, it had like a… There were several times editing where it’s just like…

Ryan Isaac:
You’re saying you were editing the movie and, doing the parts about your brother and his life and his struggles, and it dawned on you that, oh my gosh, his addictions weren’t X, Y, and Z but they were these emotions that he wasn’t expressing and was feeling and was just trapped and unhealthy.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Well, so he experienced… So prior to going in the military, I remember, I wanna say he was like maybe 20, something like that. He didn’t hang out with the best of crowds. Some of it was like, the drug sling culture and SoCal and… But he wasn’t, I don’t think… He wasn’t involved in any gangs, but he got caught up in like a gang shooting at a restaurant. Somebody in this gathering was, on a hit list or whatever the case. But this guy, the way he explained it to me, like basically like fell down kind of an embankment, one of the, big like kind of drainage embankments you have in parts of SoCal there. And, my brother held this guy basically try and stop the bleeding and the guy like died in his arms.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh my gosh.

Preston Zeller:
And, so I’m four years younger, I’m hearing this. And of course I don’t process really much about it other than like, wow, that’s pretty crazy. And, then moving on. And I remember him talking about it though in bits and pieces after like, why experience this thing? And I don’t know if it was a cry for help or what, but he had, some… Something there I think was not good for him. And then he what, goes in the military. He goes to the Middle East and I know he saw stuff, I know he experienced stuff, in terms of people dying. And, again, comes back and it’s like, be normal, just be average American. And so he’s sort of trying to reacclimate to things here and I’m like, oh my gosh. He was, medicating partly I think what these things that he didn’t know how to deal with. And in some degrees had his stoicism was just, he didn’t want to deal with that or whatever the case. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I did… In my perception, to me it’s like, this project is kind of like grieving for the both of us.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh.

Preston Zeller:
And hopefully, like in a way, like… I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t think he’s like looking down on me right now per se, but I do think it’s a really, trippy kind of way to bring about his… My relationship and that attachment there into this like, physical form.

Ryan Isaac:
I like that idea, man. Of that’s kind of like the… Maybe the deepest form of empathy you can have for another human is to be in their shoes. And I like that idea of thinking about this project in terms of your own expression and discovery and acknowledgement of feelings and trauma and all those things. But also including his, like recognizing, validating, honoring his and then pulling that kind of in the… In your journey too, alongside you. That’s a… That’s a really cool picture. I was gonna ask, maybe we could talk about the art therapy project and…

Preston Zeller:
Sure.

Ryan Isaac:
I thought that was cool. I didn’t… It’s really intuitive. It makes a lot of sense, that, that exists, but, I didn’t expect that in the film and that was really cool to see. How did that ge… That’s someone you knew or something you had reached out to, or how did that get brought in? You wanna explain what art therapy… The art therapy project is?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, so, I literally was like cold emailing [laughter], different…

Ryan Isaac:
Sure.

Preston Zeller:
Organizations. Feel like, “Hey, I’m doing this thing, here’s my pitch. Do you wanna be a part of it?” And it was kind of hard to find. Like, some people were like, “This is interesting, but like, we don’t have time for it.” All that kind of stuff. Like, they were like really truly the one organization that probably fit the best and…

Ryan Isaac:
Wow. Cool.

Preston Zeller:
Responded. So it was, meeting with their executive director, several times and then bringing in Lindsay. She… She has since left there, she started her own art therapy practice.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool.

Preston Zeller:
In the northeast. But, yeah, I think we realized that our like kind of principles and all this aligned, really well and I wanted it to be like, Hey, hopefully this thing, blows up and it brings great exposure for them. And also just like art therapy in general, because it… It’s actually kind of, on a side note, kind of trippy to me how many like therapists have said, “Wow, I never thought about painting.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And [laughter] And they’re like, “Wow, okay, I’m gonna go paint.” I’m like, “Oh, this is… Like, you’re in this field, aren’t you?” [laughter]

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. They’ve never… Well, can I ask you a question and again, this is not my realm, but isn’t there something with the way we… Our brains and emotions process trauma and grief and extreme swings of emotion where the creative side of… Or the creative part of our brains, the thinking’s, kind of like in one part of our brain, and then like emotion trauma processing and being another. And being artistic, feeling a flow in some medium of art can pull us out of that maybe loop or cycle of being stuck in a certain emotional cycle, pull us out of that and maybe even give us a more high level objective view of what we are actually feeling or going through. Is that remotely true?

Ryan Isaac:
I heard that somewhere and I, that makes sense to me if that’s true.

Preston Zeller:
Well, I… Lindsay actually talks about that in the documentary, but yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Okay.

Preston Zeller:
Taps into your limbic system.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Okay.

Preston Zeller:
Where you store those emotions, but yeah, I mean, overall, like our therapy project day, it’s actually kind of wild to me because art therapy, I’m like 99% certain on this, but you become like a licensed therapist. Right? And then you go get additional licensing to become an art therapist.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool.

Preston Zeller:
So it’s like a more credentialed thing to get into. But, yeah, I mean they do all sorts of different kinds of people a lot of… Like, they’re in New York, so they’ve had a lot of people from like 9/11 who.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And Lindsay told me about in some cases, like people drawing like really tight, pencil lines and lack of color and this, very abstract in its own way. There’s nothing nondescript about it. And then people eventually getting bigger in their strokes and then eventually like, oh, they put in a tree, oh, they put in a bird. Like life gets reintroduced…

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Preston Zeller:
To their artwork and then they may use color again eventually and stuff like that. That was one example she gave me, but yeah. Lindsay is fantastic, I’ve developed a really good relationship with her over this time and just being willing to support the release…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
Of the documentary and art therapy project has put out a lot too. And yeah, it’s a… I think the more people can know that solutions like this exist, it potentially helps like offer a more suitable solution. ‘Cause you know, as she kind of points out like talk therapies, you can have a conversation and you just forget about it. And that may not work for everyone. I actually, I went to a group therapy session one time and I was like, this is like too much.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay.

Preston Zeller:
‘Cause everyone is going around a circle talking about how they lost someone. I’m like, I just… I am not capable of really handling your loss and you’re loss and your loss right now. It’s…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
It’s not working out for me.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah man. I said this in the beginning. You had mentioned you came to the end of the project, but you had said, this isn’t the end for me. There’s still more work to do. What are you up to these days? What does that mean for you? What’s next for you? I guess I’m just really interested as an artist, professionally, what you’re up to, but also as you continue down your own journey. Oh, something else that was said in this that I really loved was the, integration of grief into your life. This concept that you don’t just put it in a little lockbox and then hide it and stuff it down, and then never… It has to come out and then just be a part of your big life and all these different ways.

Ryan Isaac:
Which makes the way you arrange the painting even cooler, that that little box is there and it’s kind of swirling around it all in all these different forms and colors. But, if you wanna talk about, yeah, let me know what you’re up to, like what is next for you? But maybe this concept of continuing to integrate that in your own life and what you hope for other people and how they can integrate grief into their own lives and, not get rid of it. Not forget about it. Not stuff it down, but live with it.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. No, that’s… So the first part of that is, like after I was done editing the documentary, I realized and like, I have this kind of a… I’ve sort of unwittingly developed some process here that may be of help to other people. So I started, talking to a lot of people on like social media, just having conversations and developed an offering for other people where I essentially walked them through, somewhat of a version of what I went through where, or at least I can like, do it for them. So they’re… It’s a… Like memorial painting basically. Abstract, memorial painting. So, I will basically meet with people over like two or three sessions. Once they decide to do it prior to that, there’s more conversation. And we’ll go through your story like who it is you lost, and I’ll… Like, they just get to tell me all the things about this person, and we dig into that whole relationship. And then we go through creative exercises where it’s a combination of like, ascribing meaning to color and this person and techniques they like. And that’s a super fun part. And I take all this information and depending on the size of canvas that we decide on, I go and paint this abstract piece.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh wow.

Preston Zeller:
That is a reflection of that relationship. And then when I present it to them, I tell their story back to them through the painting.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh.

Preston Zeller:
And it may or may not… Like I’ve had people use ashes and people not just depends.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
But, yeah. So that’s one of the things… I’m not doing that full-time right now because I did get… That’s part of the reason I came to Arizona is I got an interesting role in, like software world. Again, this is kind of my last time I’m doing this, but, I started doing that quite a bit and I actually feel bad because I’ve had more people reach out to me. It’s just… It’s a very intense process, you might imagine.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Very.

Preston Zeller:
Very gratifying though because, they’re getting something that’s so utterly unique to them. And I kind of talk about this on the website, on zellerhausart, where it’s like, you could get a fancy urn, that’s fine. You could get… Crush the urns down or the cremation ashes down into a diamond or tattoo, whatever. But this is something you can actually like, look and reflect on. And none of those other solutions really kind of help with that. So I do wanna eventually get back to doing that on a full-time basis. But I… The other thing long, long term that I don’t know how this will play out, but what I like to do is actually be able to like implement and measure the impact of bereavement programs in corporations. Because part of what, sort of got me into this was this, like realizing bereavement policies, they suck. I call this out in the end of the documentary with no legal job protection. I mean, I’ve talked to a woman who miscarried in various terms of a child’s development and their company says like, that afternoon, “We want you back at work.”

Ryan Isaac:
Oh my gosh, man.

Preston Zeller:
Like crazy stuff like that. And they can legally do that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yep.

Preston Zeller:
So it’s just wacky to me. So, and the whole thought process there being that… One, stat I read, and I forget where it is, but it’s somewhere out there, there’s like an estimated $56 billion productivity loss a year from bereavement, like death related grief. I’ve experienced a loss. I go to the funeral, I come back to work, I am checked out.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
And that’s what happened to me. And so it’s like, yeah, you have a warm body in the seat. They don’t care what’s in front of them.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
They’re not doing the work. And so, if there was a way to create a program where you could, support their rehab through, just a more kind of comprehensive program. Like not only would you actually create a greater sense of loyalty to the company, but you would actually have less productivity loss. So, I mean, if you wanna look at it from a sheer numbers perspective, it would be a greater investment into like your benefits. But at the same time, you’re investing into your people, which, unless you just… Everyone’s truly a number to you, like…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
You’re caring about the humans in that sense.

Ryan Isaac:
What do you hope people take from this when they watch the film and do what they’re gonna do with it?

Preston Zeller:
I hope it inspires people to like A, if you have any inkling… Or even if you don’t to like go, just try some art tonight, tomorrow. Like go do it. Go and just try like work on that what you were as a child creative free willing, just go be creative and no one has to see it. Just do it for yourself. But the other thing is like, I think just like being reflecting on your own loss and like, go have a conversation, I challenge anyone listening to this. Go have a conversation with one person that you’ve been avoiding because you feel too awkward to talk about it. Or just go open up to someone you… Who you feel comfortable with and just say, “Hey can I talk to you about this thing in my life?” Whether that’s a loss or something else. And if it’s someone you know that has been dealing with a loss, just be like, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you. Like how are you doing?” And they’ll appreciate that. ‘Cause I think we tend to view people as being like, “I don’t wanna touch this subject. It’s too heavy for me.” It’s like, no, like go outside of your comfort zone because that’s gonna challenge you and it’s also gonna be beneficial to the other person.

Ryan Isaac:
Last but not least, where can people find all the stuff, the film, your Instagram I think would be a great place to keep in touch. Where do they go?

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, so for the film, go to theartofgrievingfilm.com. You can see different places to stream it there. It is like fully international, I think too, except China. So, for whatever reason. And then if you wanna learn about the art commissions, it’s zellerhausart.com and then just Instagram is prestonzeller so.

Ryan Isaac:
Alright.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah. Pretty straight forward.

Ryan Isaac:
Right on, man. Well thank you for, you’ve probably done, how many podcasts have you done now, you’ve probably told this exact story, these exact questions, like a hundred plus times now?

Preston Zeller:
No, actually people approach this… I’ve actually… Most of the podcasts I’ve done have been like in the grief space, so I was just stoked when you reached out because it’s like, “Okay, I know people listening to this are probably maybe not expecting this topic,” but it’s a change up and that’s exciting. Those are the people that need to like hear it too. Not just the people who are like…

Ryan Isaac:
Already in it.

Preston Zeller:
Yeah, I’m grieving and I need to hear some different perspectives.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Preston Zeller:
So, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m really excited about this too, man, because we’re financial advisors for dentists, but money is just a tool. And after you get past the strategy of money, like paying down your debt or saving some money or putting money in a 401K or buying insurance policy, when you get past that, then it’s just like life and emotion. And everyone’s really just trying to figure out like, how do I enjoy life along the way? How do I minimize my regrets? How do I have strong relationships? How do I be authentic, express myself, be a real human? And then the one common thing all of us just share no matter what at some point in our lives, is this common thread of death. I mean, it’s just what we all share. So I think this is such a cool subject. I’m really glad you reached out. We made it happen. So thank you very much for spending so much time with us this evening, man. I really appreciate it. This was super cool. Love the movie too. It was awesome.

Preston Zeller:
Nah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Ryan. Yeah. I’m looking forward to your audience being able to hear this.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, yeah, for sure man. We’ll send you a link and add all this stuff in the bottom and I hope a lot of our listeners and go watch the film. I think they will. This is cool. So thank you very much. You have a great… Have a good night and a good week. And thanks for everyone for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time on another episode. Have a good night, man. Appreciate it.

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