Sarah Silverman Channels Grief of Losing Parents 9 Days Apart into Netflix Special (Exclusive)

Unlike her three sisters, Sarah Silverman hasn’t seen signs from her late parents or stepparents, but she has her own ways of keeping them close.

“I always email them,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “When you have something to brag about, your parents are the only people in the world that love it. It’s sustenance for them. It makes them so happy. I’ll send some sort of braggy thing like, ‘Guess who I met?'”

The Emmy-winning comedian, known for her stand-up routines where no controversial topic is off-limits, is in a reflective state during a Zoom interview from her home in Los Angeles. “Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of my dad dying. It was such a horrible, beautiful, interesting time that kind of left us all just completely depleted and then kind of full again,” says Silverman, 54.

Her father, Donald, who owned a discount women’s clothing store, died of kidney failure just nine days after her stepmother, Janice, died of pancreatic cancer. Donald opted against hospital treatment to live out his final moments at home.

“He could have probably fought and lived a little longer,” says Silverman. “He wanted to be with Janice.”

Silverman cared for them — or “doula’d” them through death, as she puts it — and detailed it all in a stand-up tour, Postmortem, which was filmed as a Netflix special, out now. “At first I was dreading dredging it all up, but by the second half of the tour I got excited each night to tell everybody about my parents,” she says. “It was extremely cathartic.”

But she doesn’t want fans to get the wrong idea: “It’s not sad, it’s really funny.”

Silverman also shares stories her upbringing in New Hampshire and discusses her bond with her mother, Beth Ann. Donald and Beth Ann divorced when she was 6.

“I was thrilled,” she recalls of their split. “My older sisters were very upset, but honestly I still feel I was right on. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to go to sleep to people screaming? Great.’”

She continues, “They really hated each other. I never saw them smile at each other until they were divorced and became so very close.”

Each remarried and found their “soulmates,” and “because they were happy,” they eventually became best friends who lived three minutes apart.

“I don’t say this in the special, but when my mom died, she was holding my dad and my stepmother’s hands,” Silverman says.

She shares that life lesson with friends who may be going through a similar situation. “I am at the age now where my friends have kids and whenever the notion of staying together for the kids, I just beg them, ‘Kids need happy, engaged parents. They don’t need married parents. Kids know when you’re not happy, you’re not helping them,'” the comedian says.

In the past two years Silverman has relied on the “constant” support of her sisters Susan, 62, Laura, 58, and Jodyne, 54, but says she’s learned that “grief takes care of itself. You don’t have to worry about it.” (Beth Ann died in 2015, and her stepfather, John, died in 2007.)

Adding, “You can focus on running towards joy, wherever it is.”

Silverman is running towards joy in whatever comes next in her career. Whether it’s more touring, acting or working on her eponymous podcast, she wants to do it all.

“I feel wildly successful in that I am happy, I’m healthy, I’m 54, and I’m still working,” she says. “It’s human nature to be afraid of the unknown, but don’t waste anxiety on the unknown. The unknown is thrilling. We really should just be on the edge of our seat.”