Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
144. In Grief, Guilt Can Be a Form of Denial-with Colin Campbell
126 Plays2 years ago
COLIN CAMPBELL is a writer and director for theater and film. The short film he wrote and directed with his beautiful and talented
wife, Seraglio, was nominated for an Academy Award. Campbell teaches screenwriting at Chapman University and theater at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Columbia University. He is currently developing a solo performance piece titled Grief: A One Man Shit-Show. His most recent book FINDING THE WORDS Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose, offers practical advice on how to survive in the aftermath of loss.
By actively reaching out to their community, performing mourning rituals, and finding ways to express their grief, readers will learn how to live more fully while still holding their loved ones close. Campbell shines a light on a path forward through the darkness of grief.
https://colincampbellauthor.com/
https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Living in the Present
00:00:00
Speaker
And so when my therapist said that it was a form of denial, it was kind of an eye opener because if I'm just thinking about the what ifs the moment before the crash, then I'm stuck in that past where they're still alive. And in a way, part of my brain wants to be there because they're still alive, right? If I'm in that car before the crash, I'm with my living children. And there's a, even though it's horribly painful, there is a certain, there's a certain
00:00:30
Speaker
desire or temptation to be there. But being there is in denial because I did make that turn and we were hit and they're gone now. And that was helpful to me to realize, right, denial is not my friend because denial means I'm living in the past and here I am in the present. And I'd rather be in the present where I can mourn my children and live and live in a way that honors them
00:00:59
Speaker
and makes them proud rather than being trapped in a fantasy past.
Podcast Introduction
00:01:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:31
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys.
Colin's Journey of Grief
00:01:42
Speaker
I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:52
Speaker
On today's podcast, we will be chatting with Colin Campbell. He is a writer and director of theater and film. His most recent book and the one we'll be talking about today is Finding the Words, Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose.
00:02:09
Speaker
And he also has a one-man show, which we will be talking about too. It's titled Grief, a One-Man Shit Show. So I already said the word shit right here in the intro, so you know it might be mentioned in the podcast as well. So welcome to the podcast, Colin.
00:02:27
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me on. I am so happy you are here and grateful to your contact person that reached out to have you on and sent me your book that I was able to read through and get to learn more about you, about your wife, Gail, and your story and your
00:02:48
Speaker
beautiful children who are the reason we are here today, Ruby and Heart. So we'll be sharing your journey of bereavement and grief and lots of other things throughout it. So let's talk about you. Tell me where you and Gail live at the moment and we'll kind of navigate that way. Yeah. So we live in Los Angeles, the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. And we've been living here for 23 years.
00:03:17
Speaker
So this is our first and only house we ever bought, and we love it here. So as you've said, how is it transitioning, living in a home now that Ruby and Heart have passed away? And by the way, let's clear that out. What word will we use? Pass away, die, transition, what word? I prefer died or killed, actually. They were killed in a car crash by a drunk and high driver.
00:03:46
Speaker
in June, June 12th, 2019. And that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. It is such a challenge. What do you do with their rooms, right? And the space that we're living in is just a constant reminder of them. And so at
The Accident and Its Impact
00:04:05
Speaker
first it was so painful to be here. And we thought, I mean, maybe we need to move
00:04:11
Speaker
But then how can we, how can we leave this home because it's filled with all these memories of Ruby and heart. Every corner of it is special. Um, and so I think that was a kind of valuable early lesson of leaning into the pain because that's how we get to the joy of it, of the memories. So, uh, you know, first handling their rooms, we, we left them as they, as they were the night of the crash. We were on a.
00:04:40
Speaker
on a family trip out to Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree, for those of you who don't know, it's about two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, the high desert. It's a beautiful little town attached to Joshua Tree National Park, which is an amazing, enormous park full of beautiful Joshua trees and these amazing rock clusters.
00:05:03
Speaker
And Ruby and Hart and Gayle and I love to go there. We love to scramble on the rocks. They're just amazing climbing rocks. They're so fun. You just head out and have an adventure, basically, and get treated to spectacular views of the desert. And so over the years, we've been going there off and on, you know, over and over again. And so in June of 2019, Gayle suddenly thought, let's just, let's buy a vacation home there. And we thought, oh my God, that would be amazing.
00:05:31
Speaker
Could we really do that? And we looked at some properties and found one that we all loved. And we were so excited to have a place there of our own. And so the night of the crash, we were actually going there to our brand new vacation home because the next morning I was going to meet with the contractor to talk about building a pool out there and building an extension for Ruby and Heart. So it was a really beautiful, exciting moment for us in our lives that was then tragically cut short.
00:06:01
Speaker
So yes, we came back from that trip, just Gail and I, to an empty home. And it was so terrifying. And like I said, we kept those rooms the way they were for about a year.
Adoption After Loss
00:06:13
Speaker
We didn't really touch anything in them. And the rooms still had their scents. And then at a certain point, it felt like to us that we had sort of sequestered
00:06:25
Speaker
that portion of our life away, they were sort of locked away in their rooms in a way. And we wanted to spend more time in the rooms, we wanted to spend more time with their things. And so we, we started to use their rooms more and change things in their rooms. So instead of Ruby had a court board, and we added to her court board, and then
00:06:52
Speaker
We took a further step, which is even more sort of emotionally challenging, but potentially full of joy, which is we are now fostering to adopt two young children, the brother and sister.
Writing 'Finding the Words'
00:07:06
Speaker
Oh, wait, that's new since your book, because in the book you mentioned one girl that you had, well, I shouldn't, again, readers, you have to go in to know more, but also this is new. Okay. This is good to hear. Yeah, it's all in process, of course, how life is. But when I wrote the book, at the time that I finished the book, we had been fostering to adopt a teenage girl
00:07:33
Speaker
And in the end, she opted not to. She said, you know, no, I don't want to be adopted at all. I changed my mind. And it really is, it sounds cliche, but it was really because the vulnerability of feeling
00:07:48
Speaker
loved was too painful for her. She wanted to be in a foster home where they ignored her because she was used to that. How long had she been in the foster system that it was so hard for her to feel that love? She'd only been in the foster system for about three years, but prior to that, she lived in very challenging circumstances, very, very difficult childhood. So her whole life was
00:08:13
Speaker
was one of chaos and neglect. And so she wasn't ready, unfortunately, to be adopted. And we had to allow her to leave because she has rights as a 15-year-old. So that's why, as you were saying, that you have two small children now that you're fostering. In the book, I was crying in that part when you guys went through that, because then here I'm thinking of another grief that you're experiencing again, right? You opened up your heart.
00:08:41
Speaker
But now you knew you had that possibility of loving, that love continued, just you could still share that love on, fostering after having gone through that grief. And then there you were kind of like, you are not sure we're going to continue going through that road. So I'm happy that you continue opening your heart. So thank you for sharing that.
00:09:04
Speaker
The book has so many things. I'm going to share a little bit of that structure, or at least of what I got from the book. Not only do you share your story, but then at the end of every chapter, you go over action steps for the reader, some takeaways, and then journaling prompts as well. So it's this handout,
00:09:29
Speaker
kind of workbook and at the same time your story in it. And it's beautifully done. So just want to say that this is the first book. I know you're a writer and screenwriter. Is this the first book you write?
00:09:44
Speaker
Yes, yes, it is. So I've written plays and screenplays. This is the first book. How different was it writing a book and a very personal book than what it's been for you with the process of writing screenplays?
Coping with Grief
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a great question.
00:10:04
Speaker
very different in that here I was speaking to an audience in a very personal and direct way. I wasn't trying to create something to entertain somebody. I was really prompted to help. Yeah. And like you said, my book is full of actions to take. And that's really what I was struck by in my early grief, which is what am I supposed to do? You know, what do I do with this grief? What do I actually do? What does it mean to mourn?
00:10:33
Speaker
And so taking action was really important to me. And I guess it's a lesson I learned from screenwriting, which is the idea that a passive protagonist versus an active protagonist. And passive protagonists allow the life to just happen to them.
00:10:47
Speaker
And they're generally quite boring on the screen. And you mentioned it in it that you shared in a class, right? You were also a professor, so that you were telling that to your students regarding the screenwriting. So yeah, I studied theater. So as I was reading, that was my major is theater. So as I'm reading this, of course, I'm also intrigued by your life as
00:11:11
Speaker
as an actor, screenwriter, all these things. So I love that analogy. So then in that active protagonist, what do they do? So an active protagonist is more engaged with their life. They're making decisions. They're making choices.
00:11:26
Speaker
And I was reading up on trauma, and I was struck by the insight that I got from these books on trauma, which is that people who are able to take action suffer a lot less PTSD. And in fact, a lot of trauma results from a feeling of helplessness, that you are just helpless in the face of a traumatic experience.
00:11:52
Speaker
But if you're able to take action, it helps you to process that and work through it. And so this idea of taking action seemed really important to me in my early grief for sure.
Community Support in Grief
00:12:04
Speaker
I saw a lot of that throughout your book, a lot of action in your own life, starting off of course with the rituals that were part of the religion that you raised your children in and that your wife and now yourself, but that in itself, we're going to, I'm going to be talking about that by the way, of spirituality and your beliefs as well. So let's talk about Shiva and how that
00:12:33
Speaker
that week was so important in your grief. And that meant action because that meant hosting people every night, whether you wanted it or not. So share a little about how it was for you to experience Shabbat. Yes. So I'm not Jewish.
00:12:52
Speaker
I was raised by two white Anglo-Saxon Protestant parents who were raised by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant parents, and they rebelled against their parents. They raised their families atheists. I love being raised as an atheist.
00:13:11
Speaker
it doesn't come with a lot of cultural rituals and cultural practices. And so when I married Gail, she's Jewish and her Judaism meant a lot to her. And so we raised our children, Ruby and Hart as Jews. So they were bar and bat mitzvahd, which means they are, well, it's a lot, it's a big process that they have to go through to become
00:13:36
Speaker
essentially adults in the Jewish community. And I really helped them with that process. You know, we learned how to read Hebrew together. And it was very meaningful to me to see, to be part of this community. So I actually really enjoyed being part of a temple, even as a non-believer. And our temple, which is called Ikar in Los Angeles, it's a beautiful temple. And they welcomed me as a atheist non-Jewish member.
00:14:03
Speaker
I really felt welcome there. And that was very beautiful. And then when Ruby and Hart were killed, my temple community really came to support us in a huge way. And so I didn't know how to mourn. I really didn't know anything about grieving other than that it was terrifying. And so I really leaned into the Jewish practices. And for those of you who don't know, sitting shiva is what Jewish people do when they lose a loved one. And what it means is for a week,
00:14:33
Speaker
every night, your community comes and literally sits with you in your home, hence sitting Shiva. And some prayers are said and people bring food. And it was shocking to me to experience it on the inside because
00:14:51
Speaker
Being struck with such monumental, terrifying grief, the last thing I wanted was to have a bunch of people come to my home. It seemed like, no, that's a terrible idea. I want to be left alone. But then something happened, which is I discovered that I really wanted to talk to all these loved ones. I wanted to talk about Ruby and Heart.
00:15:16
Speaker
and I wanted to talk about my grief. I'd been sitting marinating all by myself, well, Gayle and I together by ourselves, marinating in this awful pain and just feeling like we were the recipients of it. It was just hitting us. And then here's a chance to actually express ourselves to other people.
00:15:37
Speaker
And it was so empowering. And I saw amongst my circle of friends and Ruby and Heart's friends, they talked also at Shiba each night. And to see these kids share their love of Ruby and Heart was so powerful. I was like, wow, this is necessary. And it was an eye opener for me because it taught me so many lessons about grieving. It was like, oh, we have to talk about our grief.
00:16:04
Speaker
We have to share stories about Ruby and Heart. That's what grieving is. It's not about sitting all by ourselves and just feeling sad until we miraculously feel better, which is what I thought grieving was. So that was really an amazing eye opener for me.
00:16:19
Speaker
There were several instances in the stories that you shared in the chapter of talking about Shiva and one of them being how your brother wasn't able yet to share a story and how you kind of helped him guide a little anecdote of something. So if you can share that anecdote because
00:16:42
Speaker
in that anecdote says a lot about the type of personalities you all have. You share that humor and dark humor were really big in your family and in your kids. So sharing a story that could be a little silly or dark. I think you guys were trying to scare the kids, right?
00:17:05
Speaker
Yeah, so it's sort of one of my favorite Ruby and Heart stories. And it's a little perhaps off color in a grief podcast, but I'll share it for sure, which is we would always go every summer to Maine where my mom has this house by this lake.
Communicating Grief Needs
00:17:22
Speaker
And it's a beautiful, beautiful place. But down the road, about a full mile down a dirt road is an old cemetery, an old family cemetery. And some of the tombstones are literally from the 1700s.
00:17:35
Speaker
And they've, they're covered in moss and many of them have fallen over. Like it's a, it's a, it's, if you could imagine like a terrifying small family cemetery, this is it. It's perfect. Right.
00:17:46
Speaker
And to get there, you have to walk a mile through the woods, like, wow. And these are, these are woods, woods without trees, sorry, without trees, without homes. And so it's a, it's a scary walk. And for fun, I said to Ruby and Heart when they were young, when Ruby was maybe 12 and Heart was nine, I said, Hey guys, here's a fun idea. How about the two of you just go for a walk to the cemetery at night and get a grave rubbing?
00:18:15
Speaker
Which means you take a piece of paper and a crayon and you rub it on a tombstone and get the image and bring it home. And they were terrified. But they were super psyched. It was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be a real like brother sister adventure, right? They're gonna get flashlights and Ruby made like this sharp stick to fight off vampires and werewolves and she had a special potion. And yeah, it was gonna be a real brother sister adventure. And I was like, great, let's go. I'll pay you 20 bucks each. And they went for it.
00:18:46
Speaker
And then they headed out and my brother and I were like, we gotta up the stakes for these kids. So we, we snuck out after them. Also, first we were also scared. Like they were gone for a while. Of course it takes a long time to get there, right? So sometimes I was like, wait, maybe this is a terrible idea. What if they got lost in the woods or I don't know what. Uh, so, so we decided we'd go out and see if we could find them.
00:19:09
Speaker
And we walked down the road, my brother and I, and then we saw their lights coming towards us. They had little flashlights. And so we hid in the trees. And then he and I both were like, oh, that scared them. So I started howling like a wolf. And that didn't really scare them either. We could hear them talking and they were just like, oh, what's that? What's that? And they kept on walking, chatting with each other. It was really beautiful. And then we raced back to the woods. My brother and I took shortcuts through the woods. So we get back to the home. We're covered in like brambles and sweat.
00:19:34
Speaker
But tried to pretend you've been sitting by the fireplace all day. Just chilling. And they come in, and it's so obvious that we were just, we just ran through the woods, but they didn't even notice. They were so excited that they got these grave robins. They were just chattering away how proud they were and how great it was, the adventure. They didn't even notice that we had, you know, obviously been running through the woods.
00:19:57
Speaker
And so that became actually a fun tradition. So each year we would do a bigger and bigger challenge for them to go through the woods and get a more specific grave running. You know, get to find one, you know, from the year 1880 to 1890. And so it would make it more difficult for them. So yeah, so it was a fun tradition we did each year. And the reason why I asked my brother to share the story with me at Shiva
00:20:22
Speaker
was that it was coming, Shiva was coming to an end. It was like the last night of Shiva, and he hadn't spoken at all. And I knew that he had said in the past that he had a hard time talking about
00:20:35
Speaker
his feelings of grief and with Ruby and Heart was so overwhelming. It was just too big. He didn't want to say anything. And they're the only grandkids on both sides, correct? Right. Oh, no, no, on my side. Oh, on your side only? Okay, on your side. Okay. I knew that that way. Okay. On your side. Yeah. So I have a brother and sister and both of them don't have any kids. So for my side of the family, it was just Ruby and Heart. So I had seen how, I had experienced how powerful it was to share
00:21:05
Speaker
just anything, a story, a thought about Ruby and Hart. And I just, I wanted my brother to participate in it. And so I said to him, can we, can we tell a story together? And he agreed to that. And I thought.
00:21:17
Speaker
You know, I'm from a theater background and I'll take the lead, obviously, and he'll just chime in a little bit, but it'll feel like we both did it together and how beautiful that is. But when it came time to it, he really led the story. And I just chimed in a little tiny bit. And afterwards he said, you know, he realized that if he let me, I would take over all the best parts. So he had to step up his game. So that was sweet.
00:21:42
Speaker
So yeah, sharing memories and saying their names is so important. And that's something that you guys made sure to tell your friends. And I want to talk about that. Something that I saw and that I witnessed in that and that you shared was how
00:22:04
Speaker
How do you say it? Forward, you were. And straightforward. Straightforward, you guys are both. I don't know if you guys are both like that in general or if your grief just kind of made you guys be more straightforward. But with sharing what it is you need it,
00:22:20
Speaker
and from your support team, from your family, as well as, I love the letter writing component, Gail, before going to work, making sure this is a great tip for anybody when you read that chapter, just writing to your coworkers of what's happened.
00:22:38
Speaker
and how you'd like your grief to be either respected or that you want to be asked questions about your children, all these different things. But let's talk about that part of how you guys express to your friends and how you communicated what you needed from them in terms of your grief experience. Well, I think we are, I've always been straightforward people, but for me personally, not about grief. I was not comfortable with grief.
00:23:08
Speaker
other people's grief, other people's pain. As I said, I had no experience with that. So in the past, if somebody else had a loss, I think I would generally have stepped back and like, you know, quote unquote, waited for them to reach out to me, right? Which is a classic thing that we experience as grievers, people holding back and not wanting to bother us. Meanwhile, we're left alone and feeling abandoned. And so,
00:23:36
Speaker
So I learned this very valuable lesson from Shiva that I needed to talk about Ruby and Heart and my grief. And it gave me so much solace. And it's all that I was thinking about.
00:23:46
Speaker
But then when people came to visit me, I could see them walk through the front gate to our house and they looked stricken and didn't know what to say. They literally wouldn't know even to say, hello, how are you? Because it was too terrifying. What if that was going to upset me? What do you mean, how am I doing? How do you think I'm doing? I don't know what they're imagining.
00:24:09
Speaker
here I was needing to have conversations with my family and friends and then being greeted with this sense of being terrified of saying the wrong thing. And it just seems so clear that we had to lay down some kind of guidelines to help them so we could have conversations.
00:24:25
Speaker
And so I developed, again, I developed what we call our grief spiel, which is we pull the person in. Can I say that I had no clue that the word spiel was a Yiddish word until I read your book. It was my first time knowing. So I'm like, oh, it's a Yiddish. So I learned something new too. So yeah. So your grief spiel, your work spiel, your all this. So your grief spiel.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, the grief spiel was just basically giving my friends permission to talk about Ruby and Heart and my grief, letting them know that they couldn't trigger me. So many people were scared of triggering me, right? What if they said, Ruby, and I just fell apart? So they wouldn't say Ruby and Heart's names. But I was desperate to hear Ruby and Heart's names. What, they're supposed to be erased from my life now that they're gone? No, I need to talk about them. And so I told my friends that, I said,
00:25:18
Speaker
You can't trigger me. I'm triggered all the way. My children were just buried. I just buried my children a week ago. That's all I want to talk about. You can't accept me more than I'm already upset. And it was a real eye opener to my friends. And they were so grateful because they're desperate to help, but they don't know how. And again, they're terrified to say the wrong thing.
00:25:45
Speaker
And so I told them that there really is no wrong thing. Or if they did say a wrong thing, I would correct them. I'm not shy. Not correct them, but I would let them know. That phrase actually is hurtful. For example, people would say, would refer to the car crash as an accident, which makes a lot of sense. Only your kids were killed in an accident. And actually, I'd say it wasn't an accident because she was drunk and high when she hit us, and she didn't accidentally get into her car drunk and high. That was a choice she made.
00:26:13
Speaker
And an accident sounds like, uh, too friendly to me. And other people might feel very differently, but the point was by sharing what, how I felt, my friends knew that, and then they could, they could, could use the language that helped me. And they wanted to do that. They wanted to use the language that would help me. So yeah. And then my grief spiel changed too, as I, as my grief changed. So in the early days, I really, I didn't want to talk about anything else. I couldn't talk about the weather or politics, right?
00:26:43
Speaker
So I told my friends that. I said, basically, no, I don't want to talk about anything else. Or I can for like a minute or two, but then we have to talk back about Ruby and Heart and my grief, because I'm in acute pain right now. But that feeling of acute grief changes. I'm no longer in acute grief. And I can certainly talk about other subjects now. And I'm happy to talk about other people's grief, other people's losses, other people's struggles.
00:27:10
Speaker
But in acute grief, I really wasn't. So yes, my grief spiel changed as my grief changed and my needs changed. And it was very helpful. Can you talk about as your... There's two things right now that came to mind as you were talking. Let's talk about the part of survival guilt that you talk about in the survivor's guilt that you talk about in the book. And when you kind of had to switch it
00:27:40
Speaker
to keep moving forward in life. What guilt also meant, because guilt also meant still remembering them. Talk about that slightly. Again, I don't want to give away your whole book, but just some insights, please. Yeah. Well, my therapist had a really helpful insight about guilt, which was that it was a form of denial that
00:28:06
Speaker
here I am reliving the moment of being in the car and making the turn before she hit us and and being feeling trapped in that moment the what ifs right I think I think many of us in in grief are plagued by the what ifs you know what what if we've done something differently and they could still be alive and it's such a painful place to be and it's such an unhelpful place to be because it's not really
00:28:34
Speaker
I think the pain of grief is so necessary, important and helpful. We have to feel that pain because that comes from love. You can't shortcut it. You can't compartmentalize it or skip over it. But the suffering that comes from being trapped in guilt or replaying those what ifs are so unhelpful.
Identity After Loss
00:28:56
Speaker
Because I'm not really in that moment honoring Ruby and hard or thinking about my love or our life together.
00:29:03
Speaker
I'm just stuck in a very ugly place. And so when my therapist said that it was a form of denial, it was kind of an eye-opener because if I'm just thinking about the what-ifs the moment before the crash, then I'm stuck in that past where they're still alive. And in a way, part of my brain wants to be there because they're still alive, right? If I'm in that car before the crash, I'm with my living children,
00:29:32
Speaker
And there's a, even though it's horribly painful, there is a certain, there's a certain desire or temptation to be there. But, but being there is in denial because I didn't make that turn and we were hit and they're, and they're gone now. And that was helpful to me to realize, right. Denial is not my friend because denial means that I'm living in the past and here I am in the present.
00:29:59
Speaker
I'd rather be in the present where I can mourn my children and live and live in a way that honors them and makes them proud rather than being trapped in a fantasy past.
00:30:11
Speaker
and their personalities and some of the things that you even share throughout the book of, was it Hartz, Bar Mitzvah, the things he said, you even share the speech he did there. Those also helped, so they kept guiding you and teaching you even how to grieve with things they had said even in the past, how you would just switch a few words and it already made sense even in your own grief of something, your own,
00:30:38
Speaker
children had said or how they behaved in their life. So it's so beautiful. Let's talk about the element of identity because again, these were your two only children, you and Gail's children. So let's talk about the identity and the secondary losses that come with that aspect of no longer having your two children living now and what that means.
00:31:07
Speaker
in the secondary losses of future. Yeah, if you don't mind touching on that. I get emotional even asking that question, but I know it's important to talk about too. Yeah, it is. I think anybody struggling with grief, a big part of that is because it touches their identity. It's who they are. So if you lost your best friend,
00:31:33
Speaker
part of who you are is you're the best friend of this person who is now deceased. You're the spouse of this person or the sibling or the child or the parent. And so we lose a real key element of who we are. And that's part of why we're in such profound grief and so much pain. And for me, I was a dad. I was Ruben Hart's dad. That's who I was.
00:32:02
Speaker
above everything else, even above my wife's husband or my mom's kid. I was Ruben Hart's dad, that's who I was. And so without them, I was pretty lost. Who am I now? And I realized that it touches on everything. Them not being here, it affects my relationship to everybody because so many of my friends
00:32:32
Speaker
our relationship was somehow connected to Ruby and Heart in some way. Like many of my friends, I met them because their children were friends of Ruby and Heart's. And even my own family, you know, part of who I was in the family was Ruby and Heart's dad. I brought Ruby and Heart home for Christmas, you know what I mean? And so our relationships just have to change because of this death.
00:32:59
Speaker
And I have to sort of redefine myself. And each time it hurts because you don't want to. You don't want to be defining yourself. I want to be Ruby and Heart's dad, first and foremost. Of course, I am still Ruby and Heart's dad. I was going to say that. I was going to say it still.
Honoring Ruby and Hart
00:33:19
Speaker
But of course, it's that aspect of not that. Yeah.
00:33:22
Speaker
Go ahead. I'm not the dad of living children. You're not driving them to school, taking them to sports, all those kinds of things that also were part of your day to day that now the Uber driver that, like you said, you were the one to take them to the family celebrations that you also then had to modify a little bit. You were that person that brought them there. You were the person that took them to school that did this. Now that role is gone as well.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah, and redefining who we are. And what's painful is, you know, first, I didn't want to be the father of dead children. I wanted to be Ruby and Heart's dad and they're alive. And I gradually had to accept that I was the father of dead children. And then just when I'm getting sort of adjusted to that identity,
00:34:17
Speaker
That further shifts because now when I meet somebody, I don't immediately introduce myself as hi, I'm Colin. I'm the father of two dead children because life continues and that's painful. That's hard to adjust to. It's not the headline in my life. It is in my heart, but not in my daily life. And so now when I meet people, well, I'm fostering to adopt two kids. That sort of comes first in a way.
00:34:47
Speaker
And I think that's true for all of us in grief. As life goes on, it's hard to adjust to that, that we're no longer in acute pain. It seems like it's great. I don't want to be in acute pain. I don't want to be in acute grief. I want to be in life grieving still, but in life. But even that has a special emotional challenge.
00:35:10
Speaker
I know it's hard, but sometimes those things, those hit me really hard. Secondary losses, I feel sometimes are the ones that end up coming up more in our day to day, that bring up the grief a lot of times, right? More than the actual instant itself. Like these other things that are constant reminders of the, could have, could have been, or the, you know, those, those things. I,
00:35:40
Speaker
want to talk about your birthday because you had your 50th birthday and you guys had already planned something big for this birthday, but it was just a few months after. It was a few months, correct? A couple months. Two months after the crash. After they were killed. And you already had a plan. You guys kind of shifted and changed it.
00:36:10
Speaker
It is such a beautiful, beautiful honoring thing that you did. Would you please share how you shifted in honor to honor Ruby and heart?
Finding Comfort in Rituals
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So.
00:36:27
Speaker
Every year I would throw for my birthday this huge beach party. I called it my beach birthday bash and I would invite my friends and Ruby and hearts friends, Gail's friends. And it really felt like such a family friendly, fun day at the beach.
00:36:43
Speaker
And I, I, I never wanted presents and I always just wanted to buy everybody their own individual sandwich. For some reason that was important to me. I don't know where I got the idea, but like, so I would tell everybody, you have to tell me what you want on your sandwich. I'm going to order it. You'll have a delicious sandwich there at the beach with me. And that's how I want to sell them at my birthday. And, and then, uh, and then everyone would gather at the beach and be very chill because it's just the beach, but I'd have games. So it would often we'd play, um, dodgeball.
00:37:14
Speaker
So it was a big giant game of dodgeball or a couple of years we did volleyball. We did beach bingo a couple of years and everyone would jump in the ocean. And that was my, and we stay all day. So we stay until the sunset and the four of us loved it. And in fact, every year the four of us would at some point kind of just sneak away from all the guests and the four of us would swim out past the breakers. I taught Ruby and Hart very early on how to swim in the ocean safely.
00:37:42
Speaker
And we loved the big waves and diving under the waves and suddenly being out, you know, past the breakers in this beautiful calm moment, just the four of us. And so three months now after the crash, it's my birthday, my 50th birthday. And I didn't want to celebrate. I didn't want to have a party, right? What a terrible, terrible idea. I was in so much pain. And then I realized, well, here's another chance. You have another chance to gather my community.
00:38:10
Speaker
and on a Ruby and heart. And how could I, how could I pass that up? And a lot of friends were very nervous for me and family members. They thought it would be emotionally too much because here I'm going to invite Ruby and hearts friends. I'm going to see them now without Ruby and heart. I'm going to see all my friends. Um, and having a party at the beach, like this is going to be a disaster potentially. I said, I want to get everyone their sandwiches still. I want to still do the sandwich orders.
00:38:39
Speaker
And they said, you can't do that. You're in fresh grief. That's too big of a burden. It's all going to be too painful. And I said, no, I want to do it. Because every year, my wife will get mad if I don't mention this. But every year, she of course offered to do the sandwiches. She's like, I can arrange for your birthday party. Why are you doing all the work on your birthday? And it was important to me that I order the sandwiches every year. I don't know why. I'm just like, no, I'm in charge of the sandwiches. It's my birthday party.
00:39:09
Speaker
And so, so here it was again, someone wanted to take that role away from me. And I was like, no, I want to order the sandwiches for my guests. But it's not going to be my birthday. It's going to be a memorial for Ruby and Hart. It's not a birthday party and absolutely no presents. We're going to have a birthday. We're going to have a memorial for Ruby and Hart instead.
00:39:30
Speaker
And twice as many people showed up that year in honor of Ruby and Hart. So it was actually a much bigger gathering than usual. And I was overwhelmed with how many sandwich orders there were. And actually got a friend to help me because there were so many sandwiches. But still, I did them. And it was meaningful to me.
00:39:47
Speaker
But then my friend, the same friend who helped me with the sandwiches, Mark, he said, what kind of ritual do you want to do? Because he knew that I had started doing these rituals, inspired by Jewish rituals of mourning. And I said, I don't really know what I should do with this group of people on a beach. And he suggested, what if everybody bring a rock and we spell Ruby and hearts names on the beach? I thought that would be beautiful.
00:40:14
Speaker
And we put the word out, and everyone brought rocks. Everyone really spent time and chose special rocks for Ruby and Hart. And even friends on the East Coast, they shipped rocks out. They went and found special rocks and then mailed them to us to be part of the ceremony, which is really beautiful. So we had a big pile of rocks. And when the time came to spell out Ruby and Hart's names, people looked to me and said, how do we do it? How big should each letter be?
00:40:42
Speaker
And I just had this moment of realization that I didn't want to be in charge. I wanted everybody to just put a rock in the sand and just make it. I didn't want to be like, you do this and you do that. It'll be more meaningful if everybody stepped forward and placed their rock where they wanted to place it.
00:41:01
Speaker
And miraculously, it was perfect. I don't know how it worked, but everybody made the exact right size letters so that all the rocks were used, spelling Ruby, ampersand, heart, and with a heart, I think, on either side. And all the rocks were used, and it was a perfect size, and we gathered around it and held hands and cried. And then we all just screamed out Ruby and heart and jumped in the ocean.
00:41:30
Speaker
Because by then I really knew how important it was for me to hear their names out loud. And they all knew that, the crowd of people knew that. So all I had to do was say, can we all say Ruby and heart? And then we shouted out Ruby and heart. We love you. And then we all raced into the ocean and it was beautiful. And I don't know, there were a hundred and.
00:41:46
Speaker
40 people there, something like that. It was amazing. Wow. Yeah, it was a huge gathering of love. Wow. It's a lot of sandwiches. So beautiful. And then, yeah, a lot of sandwiches. The symbolic also aspect afterwards of this ocean afterwards, going to be naturally taking the rocks away.
00:42:11
Speaker
I'm a visual person. So as I'm reading this and just envisioning, just allowing nature to kind of take its course and then, you know. Yeah. And it, and it did by the end, by the end of the day, I think they were all washed away by the end of the day. Yeah. All the letters, all the rocks. Very symbolic.
Expressing Grief Through Art
00:42:32
Speaker
Okay. The next question I had is that aspect you mentioned about growing up atheist and then the part of now incorporating the rituals of Judaism into your life and particularly in your grief.
00:42:53
Speaker
In the aspect of prayer, you had a very beautiful way, because I'm always very curious. I do believe in God, and so I've always been curious as to people that don't believe in God, how that aspect of the, like you said, the afterlife, you're like, yes, it doesn't matter if you believe in afterlife, you're still in pain now, that you have to honor that.
00:43:18
Speaker
Oh, true. It doesn't mean that just because if by chance you do believe that there's more, not all of a sudden be like, oh, they're in a better place, all this. No, you're still in me. But let's talk about assimilating the ways that you integrated the word love. I love how you did that. Love in place of God as you would read, you assimilated with the word love.
00:43:49
Speaker
Please share that because I feel that this could be very helpful for someone else that may be struggling with that aspect of God in their grief. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many prayers in Judaism, in any religion, obviously there are prayers and they all talk about God. And that's very beautiful if you believe in God, but if you don't believe in God, it can feel a little alienating.
00:44:18
Speaker
And so, but I do believe in love. I do believe in the power of love. And it is a miracle. It is amazing, right? It is something bigger than ourselves. And so in a way, I think it is kind of akin to God in that sense. And I think a lot of people who believe in God,
00:44:40
Speaker
that told me that they also feel like, you know, God is love, right? So it makes a lot of sense to me. And so for myself sitting in synagogue all these years, I replaced God with love. And I really do believe in this, that love is sort of permeates all of us and it's this force. So it made a lot of sense to me. And then after Ruby and Hart were killed, those same prayers really
00:45:07
Speaker
really made sense to me with love, replacing God, and sometimes specifically the love I felt with Ruby in Heart. Our love. Our love is sacred. Our love is bigger than myself and mysterious and a miracle. So yeah, sometimes I would just replace God with
00:45:27
Speaker
you know, Ruby and hearts love and that helped me. It makes so much sense. And I think sometimes, you know, just as you mentioned in the book of the mystery of grief, like everybody grieves their way or that everybody, that then it also leaves it kind of be like, whoa, like that there's this mystery. Same with God, right? It is this mystery. But at the same time,
00:45:48
Speaker
If we find things like this that we associate as energy, as creative force, as something that like, oh, okay, I can sign up for that belief, you know? And that brings comfort in moments of hardship. If that brings solace, then why not? That's what I tell my son. I'm like, you know, if we then die and everything was just like, oh, oh.
00:46:15
Speaker
Well, it still made our lives feel meaningful. So attaching to love, I love that. So thank you for sharing. Let's talk about your one man show, Colin. So we will, this of course here, we talked about your book. And again, it's finding, oh my gosh, now I'm like,
00:46:38
Speaker
I have to look for the title because now all I'm thinking about is the name of Europe. Finding the words, working through profound loss with hope and purpose and how people can find it. Yes. So yeah, you can find it on any bookstore online or any bookstore in person after March 14th when it comes out. But you can also go to my website, which is collincambleauthor.com and that has links to pre-order the book right now.
00:47:06
Speaker
and then obviously order it once it comes up, March 14th, 2023. And so my one-man show, my solo show. As that process was, you started, yeah, tell us when you started, because that was before the book, right? It was. It was before the book. It was right after Shiva. I clearly still had a need to express myself, and I'm from the theater world, and so I started writing a one-man
00:47:36
Speaker
a one-person show. And in my mind, I thought it was like stand up. I don't know where I'm coming from, but I thought it was so full of dark, dark humor. And as you mentioned, my whole family, Ruby Heart, Gail and I, we loved humor and dark humor and joking around. And so it made sense that I was, it can feel so absurd.
00:47:59
Speaker
Grief so so absurd in the sense of like this is crazy What's happening and how people behave and how I feel my thoughts the thoughts are going through my mind are so crazy I just wanted to express that and so I started writing this monologue and it started off just being a couple of pages and I showed it to my wife and she said you have to keep writing. I love this and
00:48:23
Speaker
And so I kept writing and now it's a, it's a full length show and I basically finished it about five months after the crash and I was going to perform it. And I'm so grateful that I did not perform it then because it was just too close. It was too raw. I couldn't get through.
00:48:43
Speaker
uh you know just reading it out loud without crying several times and you don't really want to see some guy crying on stage you don't want that it's not necessary so uh and i kind of would have been like that but then the pandemic struck so i couldn't perform it
00:49:00
Speaker
So the whole world went into lockdown and Gail and I actually went to Joshua Tree to our home, which became our grief retreat. It's a place we feel close to Ruby and Heart because they love Joshua Tree. And so it's a little grief retreat. That's where we went to during the pandemic when the initial lockdown and I started writing the book because I couldn't do the show. And
00:49:23
Speaker
Now that theaters are open again, I started doing my show. So I did it over this past summer at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, and it went really well. I didn't know how it would be received. It's very dark. It is comedic. People laugh quite a lot, and they're surprised that they're laughing, and the humor is dark.
00:49:46
Speaker
It's not light humor, but it's also rather raw because I wrote it back then. You know, I wrote it three years ago. Very fresh, acute grief. But it really struck a chord with a lot of audience members. A lot of people were grieving who came to see the show and they were very appreciative that I was talking about these things that are off in taboo. And I was bringing humor to it and maybe some, hopefully some insights, especially for people who weren't in grief. They also found it very helpful.
00:50:16
Speaker
because they understood on a deeper level or a different way, their friends grieve, people who they loved who were grieving. And I think just the whole subject is so taboo in our society. People don't like to talk about it, they're scared to talk about it. And I think that only makes it worse for everybody. It makes it more scary and more isolating. So I feel a little bit like a missionary zeal for my show because I really do think that
00:50:43
Speaker
We need to talk more openly about grief. Hence why I have this podcast. Yes, right. Exactly right. I agree. And I do not know at what point it became taboo of death, especially in certain time periods in which death was so much part of everyday life in general. You know, you watch period pieces and I mean,
00:51:06
Speaker
People would just bury, but I think a lot of times they would just carry, like I'll just do the British thing, like carry on. They would just have to kind of carry on with their lives because they just had to, right? A lot of times too at that point, I don't know, I don't see sometimes the grief shown at length in certain period pieces. Would you agree with that?
00:51:33
Speaker
I think, yeah, I think certain periods, absolutely. But I think if you go back to like the middle ages, now I'm talking about Europe. More like rich, yeah, then there's more rituals. But there's more rituals. So, and I think, I think many societies in the past were more open and did have more public mourning, public grieving. And I think, I think specifically Western grief traditions have become more and more about, you know, medicalizing death. So it's no longer in the home, it's in the hospital now. And so it's
00:52:03
Speaker
and people wanting to or feeling like it's appropriate to not talk about it, to shut it away, and it's too painful. But I think many cultures are more open. I was talking to my dad the other day of so many things that we've experienced in this Western society now recently that are these common
00:52:26
Speaker
common grief experiences that we've had, of course, the pandemic being one of those, that it's opened up this portal of this conversation more. I feel it's showing up more, and I see it, you guys being screenwriters, and I've seen some of the shows that your wife writes in too. The topic of grief is showing up more in what we're seeing as well. So, when we...
00:52:53
Speaker
When we start again, making it part of our day to day, then it allows us now to live our grief because we're seeing it in the shows we watch, in the music we hear, right? It's not as taboo, hopefully, anymore because we're making it normal. You're doing a show that's about it.
Conclusion: Grief and Gratitude
00:53:15
Speaker
So tell us how people can watch. Is it only in L.A. that you will be performing? Are you going to take it on the road? I'm taking it next to New York. So it has a three week run in New York City at Theatre Row. Theatre's called Theatre Row. And it's going to be there from March 29th till June. Sorry, March 29th till April 16th. And tickets are available at grief, a one man shit show dot com.
00:53:46
Speaker
or at Theatre Row's box office. And I hope to have it and continue to have a life. Yeah, I imagine that I'll keep performing it elsewhere.
00:53:58
Speaker
And you've already even done little pieces. I'm sure you write a screenplay about grief, because I know there was already little thing there that you had already written. Yes. You know, with characters, of course, not your name, somebody else, Charles and some, Gwen and Charles. So you're like, someday maybe that will be a show. I want to ask you, is there anything else you'd like to share with the listeners that I have not asked you?
00:54:29
Speaker
I don't think this has been so wonderful. It's just a great in-depth discussion about grief. I love it. This is so nice. Thank you, Colin. I appreciate you sharing your journey, writing this book, creating a really beautiful manual. Is that how you call it? Is that that workbook? Workbook, too, because it's a story. Well, because of the journal prompts, if somebody goes in,
00:54:57
Speaker
If they don't want to hear your story and they just need journal props, just go at the end of every chapter because there's different, you know, rage, denial, guilt, go to the end of every chapter, look at the action items, look at the journal props. If that's all your brain right now has bandwidth for during your grief, go to that section of the book and at least it kind of gets you through. Then afterwards, they can go ahead and read
00:55:20
Speaker
the story itself. That could be a way of at least getting something done and some action in somebody's grief. But I appreciate you all be sharing your links at the bottom here in the show notes. And thank you once again for being here and sending love to Gail and to Ruby and Heart, sending all that love back to you guys. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure.
00:55:51
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:56:20
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.