Leah Chase, the famed New Orleans chef and inspiration for a classic children’s animated movie, has fed musicians, Presidents, and countless visitors in her restaurant Dooky Chase’s. In this audio clip, she discusses the challenge and the need to keep living our lives after the death of a loved one. I lost my daughter who was in here with me at the time and my partner. I lost her. She was forty-three years old. But you keep going. You can’t do anything about death. You cannot do one earthly thing about death. You can’t bring them back. You can cry, you can mourn, but you have to keep going. And you keep going, and it’s a pain that never goes away, never ever goes away, but you learn to live with it. People told me that, you know? I was so broken, and they said, ‘Leah, you’re going about this the wrong way. You think it’s gonna go away. It’s not gonna go away.’ You have to learn to live with it. And that’s death all the time. When somebody dies, the hardest thing for us is the people it leaves behind. We’ve lost the people we love. We can’t get them back. But we have to keep living. And that is hard to do, but you do it. You keep living. You don’t sit down in a corner and moan and moan and moan and do nothing. You keep living, and you keep doing something. Sometimes you do it in their memory. I tell that to young people for Dr. Martin Luther King. You’re not listening. This man died. Can you imagine giving your life up for something you believed? He died for things to get better, so you’ve got to move on that. You have to make it better. He gave up his life for you to come together, work together, get your act together. And you’re not doing it? No, that’s terrible. To me, that’s a crime. That’s terrible.

MORE STORIES

Earl Frost

Earl Frost discovered his talent for music thanks to the support that others showed in him. In this audio clip, he shares what he has learned about faith.

VIEW THIS STORY

Tom McGrath

Clearly my father understood his situation: he was dying and there was more pain to come. And yet here he was saying, as if he was letting us in on a secret, ‘All in all, we’re in pretty good shape.’ Was this just the medicine talking? The truth is that I had heard those words…

VIEW THIS STORY

Joe Schneider

I was a bomber pilot in World War II. We were the bombers who were knocking out hundreds of bridges in Italy. We became known as the ‘Bridge Busters’. We had to fly straight and level, otherwise we would never hit a 100-foot bridge. It was very touch-and-go. And we lost an awful lot of…

VIEW THIS STORY

Tony and Grace Naudi

[Grace] You want to get on in the world, you want to be a success, and you think that’s really important. But in the end, that’s not what’s most important. The important thing is to find yourself, to know yourself, and to be grateful for what you have. You tend to exclude the frivolous things…

VIEW THIS STORY

Razanamialy Simone

[W]ith the grace of God I changed. I continue to work as a laundrywoman and now have some savings. My community does not see me as a parasite anymore. I have a good relationship with my daughters. They give me pocket money that I use to buy yogurt. I even managed to improve my house;…

VIEW THIS STORY

Earl Frost

I think my faith grew the most when I left home and came to Boston. I knew nobody. I wasn’t going to church at the time. If somebody wanted to hire me to play the piano at a church, I’d go, but I was looking for money. Don’t play with my money! But they told…

VIEW THIS STORY