Dealing With My Grief With Darwyn Dave

Darwyn Dave has been dealing with his grief since the age of 10, when his father was shot and killed in the convenience store that he owned and ran. Grief has given Darwyn lots of lenses on life enabling him to see many, many sides to topics like technology, family history, and gun violence.

Today we're talking about how grief gives us perspective... and keeps giving us perspective for the rest of our lives.

Transcript

And Darwin,

I'm so excited to have you on the show.

We have had a,

I would say like a long distance grief podcaster relationship for a little while now,

Which is cool.

I appeared on your show earlier in 2018,

Which is pretty phenomenal.

I'm so excited to have you here.

And I will tell all of our listeners who haven't checked it out yet that Darwin's podcast dealing with my grief was instrumental in not only helping me start this show,

But helping me continue to come back from the loss of my mom.

So Darwin,

Thanks for being here.

And as with all of our guests here on coming back,

I would love if you could start us off with your lost story.

Sure.

Back in April of 1978,

April 24th,

1978 to be exact,

When I was just 10 years old,

My parents owned a convenience store in a suburb of Missouri called Kinloch.

Most people know where Ferguson is,

Ferguson,

Missouri is.

Kinloch is essentially the neighborhood that is adjacent to Ferguson.

Matter of fact,

If I walked out my house and cross the street,

I'd be in Ferguson.

But on the night of April 24th,

1978,

About 20 minutes after my mother and I had just finished taking my father his dinner for the evening,

The alarm at our store went off.

And consequently,

We had an alarm at the house that also went off.

And my mother picked up the phone to call my father to figure out what was going on and she got in a response.

So she hung up the phone,

Called her back again,

Still got in a response.

So we got clothes on very quickly and walked over to the store and found my father lying in a pool of blood,

Face down,

Lifeless,

Not moving.

And when the paramedics got there,

They basically had told us that he had expired,

He had passed.

So it was discovered that he had died of two gunshot wounds,

One in the chest and one in the neck.

And that's essentially where my world turned upside down.

That sounds like,

I mean,

I'm thinking back to what my world was like when I was 10 and what that would have done to my view of the world,

To my spirit.

This sounds really traumatizing.

It was.

Well,

It was and it wasn't.

It was almost like I was having an out-of-body experience because initially walking in and seeing him,

My mother was screaming his name because I think she had known what was going on and what had happened.

But the only thing I could do was hug her and all I could say,

Mom,

It's going to be okay.

Mom,

It's going to be okay.

Mom,

He's going to be all right.

And I can remember vividly saying that in an infinite loop until the ambulance got there.

Wow.

Wow.

That's incredible because I never,

From all the times that you've told this story on your podcast,

I've never had that picture of the two of you in the immediate discovery because you never really know what happens in that blink instant when everything changes.

That's really incredible at 10.

Did you believe what you were saying?

Actually,

I did because at that time,

I didn't know that the situation was as dire as it was.

And growing up when I did again as a kid in the late 70s,

It wasn't like you have the violence that you have on TV now.

So it's not like it's,

It wasn't like I'd been even exposed to on television of seeing blood,

Gore,

Or things of that nature.

This was like a first time,

First person experience of seeing anything like this.

Wow.

So tell me about the days,

Months,

Weeks that followed.

Like what was a funeral service like for you?

Was there crime involved with this?

Like what kind of panned out over the next bit of time?

Okay,

Well,

For the,

That was a Monday,

He died on a Monday.

And his funeral was on that Friday.

And that entire week was one of those things where I wasn't allowed to be really more than about a sidewalk away from my front door.

My friends,

They would come up and they would visit me.

Again,

I could sit outside,

Sit on the front porch,

Whatever,

And talk to them,

But I wasn't really allowed to go anywhere.

And that was pretty much because up until what the Thursday before his funeral,

The three individuals that are responsible for this crime are still at large.

So they were arrested on that Thursday.

And my father's funeral was on Friday.

It was the very next day on Friday.

And that was when I guess it really hit me that this was going to be something that was final.

My mother,

Both of my grandmothers were there.

My mother's,

My father's mother was extremely distraught.

And I think it was her reaction to the whole thing that really made me realize that this is real.

And looking at him in a casket,

He's not coming back.

And I don't know what the future holds,

But it's just going to be real strange and real weird.

And I have no idea what to expect.

But the one person that really began to help me,

Or at least tried to help me make sense of it all was my mother.

She told me in no uncertain terms that no matter what people told me,

I wasn't expected to be at least in her eyes,

The quote unquote,

Man of the house.

I was still a child.

And my only responsibilities in life were to go to school,

Get good grades,

And to come home and do my chores and that she would take care of the rest.

And that sort of helped until it didn't.

I say that because there was just no getting around walking into my house,

Where for all of my life,

There had been three people sitting around the dinner table,

Three people sitting in front of a television.

It was just weird to be living in a space where he wasn't.

And that I just never quite got used to.

There's another podcast called What's Your Grief?

They have a project called The Empty Seat at the Table,

And just this feeling of absence.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I'm kind of curious because I know a lot of the focus of your show and even of our conversation here on Coming Back is about the death of your dad.

But I want to know a little bit more about his life and who he was to you leading up to this loss as well,

Who he was to your mom,

And maybe some of that background,

Like what your relationship was like.

Well,

My father to me was Superman.

Oh,

I love it.

We would always hang out.

As I mentioned before,

He had a convenience store,

And maybe about half the stuff that we had in the store,

Vendors would actually come and deliver in person.

A lot of it,

The rest of it,

We would have to go get.

So we would go and get things like all the candy that was in the store.

We'd have to go and get soda or wherever you are within the continental United States of the world,

Pop or Coke,

Whatever you want to call it.

We'd have to go pick that up.

He would always play a game with me.

When he was leaving,

He would always drive slowly down the street,

Just slow enough for me and all of my friends to see that he was leaving.

So regardless of what I was doing,

I would always leave my friends to go hang out with him because it was just cool to see him go all the places he was going.

One of my favorite places was a place called Marcus Candy.

If you can imagine a hanger-sized warehouse with every candy possible in the universe,

This place was it.

The only thing that was missing was Willy Wonka.

It literally had everything you could possibly imagine.

Just to go and see walls and walls and walls of candy from the floor to the ceiling,

To me,

Was just amazing.

But wherever he was,

I wanted to be.

Anything that he was doing,

I wanted to be doing.

That's just how close we were.

My mother,

Before all this happened,

And I tell her this all the time,

She literally to me was the person who was responsible for putting food on the table.

She was really the disciplinarian in the house.

She was the one who would tell me that I can't go certain places.

She was the one who would tell me that I can't go certain places.

I can't do certain things.

She was just the person that lived with me and my dad.

Not to say I didn't love her and I didn't respect her,

But I worshipped to the ground that he walked on.

She was like the third wheel.

The third wheel to your father-son relationship.

I love it.

I've never heard this kind of that way,

But it sounds like he was more of the buddy character.

She was kind of like Mother Hen or Mother Bear.

Don't do that.

Flip that down.

That'll hurt you.

Don't touch it.

That's exactly what it was.

That's exactly what it was.

But yeah,

We'd have good times.

It was always wherever he was,

I was going.

The bank,

Going to see different vendors.

Like I said,

We were always together.

It hurt even more so because that was a huge part of my life.

Huge,

Huge part of my life.

Deist- And that routine and that time together changes so drastically.

In grief,

We don't get the luxury of tapering off.

It just stops.

These interactions,

These physical relationships,

These casual appointments that we hold with each other.

We're going to go to the banker,

We're going to go to Marcus Candy,

Or all these things.

They cease to exist anymore.

It's like having whiplash.

I'm going to jump back to the funeral memorial,

The days,

Months,

Weeks after your dad's loss.

You said that your grandmother was the first reaction that you really felt looking at her.

You're like,

Okay,

This is a permanent thing.

I'm curious to know if anybody in your family or even outside your family ever approached you and told you exactly what was going on or that this was a permanent thing or if this is all stuff you kind of had to absorb from your environment and from the people around you.

Because I know grief with kids is a tricky thing.

I've done a couple podcasts on how kids understand grief in different developmental stages and had some people on who have lost people at a very young age and what kids absorb about grief is really fascinating.

How did people treat you,

Approach you,

Speak to you,

Or not speak to you after his loss as a 10-year-old?

Well,

There are two sides to that.

During that entire week,

And I'll say the week of and the week after his passing,

A lot of my friends just simply had a morbid curiosity of exactly what happened.

What did I see?

What did I know?

Did they know who did it?

Just common things that you would think that children would ask their friends.

I was asked all that stuff and that to me wasn't necessarily so strange or so weird.

That whole week during,

Nobody really said much to me.

Just to put this out there,

My father wasn't really the first person that I had lost.

About six months earlier,

His father,

His stepfather,

Passed away and that was the first funeral that I can remember attending.

So I had a sense or a feeling of exactly what was going to go on during the funeral but nobody really ever sat down and talked to me to explain to me what was going to happen after.

And it's one of those things,

I don't know how many people out there have the same type of experience,

But really it was,

We're going to have this funeral,

People are going to cry,

We're going to go bury him,

We'll get together for a repass,

People will sit down have some food and essentially the next day we're going to go on with our lives.

That's pretty much the way it happened.

I remember getting home late at night on a Friday,

I woke up Monday morning and it was basically school as normal and we just got to get back to it.

Talking to my mother,

Who I interviewed on my show,

I asked her why didn't she sit down and talk to me more about that or try to get in tune with what she thought I was going to be going through.

Her whole perspective was she just thought it was going to be best for me if I sat down,

Got it out that day or the next couple of days and then we just move on with life.

Because to her death was just a part of life,

So she didn't want me to focus on it,

Have it fester.

She thought that if she let me just get it out that day,

That weekend,

That week,

That Monday we just begin the process of moving forward.

Is that true for you?

Did that resonate with you?

Because that's something that when that came up in the interview I really bristled at.

I was like,

How dare you think we can possibly get it all out on a weekend?

That doesn't make any sense.

But then conversely,

Having this picture of her in this mother hen,

Mother bear,

This protective role,

At the end of the day with grief we really don't have any choice but to pick up and carry on.

I guess,

How true is this for you?

How true is what she said for you?

Well,

And again I'm going to put this in context or perspective.

For those of you that don't know,

I'm 50 years old now,

So in the 70s I grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons.

And for those that don't know,

Those cartoons really weren't written for children.

So you sit down and you do things because you are supposed to do them,

But you have no idea why.

So the physical comedy,

Yeah,

Was funny,

But some of the jokes that they were telling I would laugh because other people were laughing,

But I never really got the joke.

And it's sort of the same thing with what she said.

She said one thing,

But I never really understood what her perspective was.

And not being 10,

But as a 20 or 22 year old,

I finally got it.

And that was,

My mother is a product of the segregation age or era in America.

So she spent her teens and early 20s in a segregated America.

My grandfather was born in Mississippi in 1916.

So to put perspective on what they thought about life,

Life to them was,

Everything in life was complicated.

So I couldn't walk down the street without,

I couldn't look somebody in the face or the eye.

I would have to step off the sidewalk if certain people came down,

Sitting in the back of the bus using separate facilities,

Not being able to go to certain places.

So life to them was complicated.

So when it comes to death,

That was just one of the things that they had to deal with on top of all the other things that they had to deal with in daily life.

So that's what I got from that when I was older.

In that moment,

I couldn't understand it.

I just went with the flow.

But it wasn't as if they were being insensitive or if they didn't get it.

I guess another way to put it outside of the cartoons is that a lot of times adults like to deal with children and children related problems from an adult perspective.

You can't use an adult's mind all the time to really help or solve a child's problem.

But that's what I got from that.

But it took me many,

Many years to come to that particular perspective on what she was telling me.

Kind of a principle that I've talked about here on this show before of grief and recovery from grief,

Especially when people say things like,

Time heals all.

It's like,

Yeah,

But not in the way that you think it does.

Because when people are like,

Oh,

Time heals all,

It's like just wait it out and your heart will fix itself.

That is not even a realistic mentality to have with grief.

But the gift that time gives us across grief is more space of our lives to reflect back on and incorporate grief into.

You're like,

Oh,

I see that because of XYZ,

Or I see that because I had this experience when I was 15,

Or this experience when I was 20,

Or they told me they had that experience when they were 20,

Which was a totally different type of world.

So what time gives you is not necessarily healing,

Quote unquote,

It's perspective.

And if you kind of sit with perspective,

And make some meaning of it for yourself,

Yeah,

You get this,

I don't want to say like a softer lens,

But you get to understand more of why people did what they did,

The circumstances in which they were raised,

And then why you got the information that you got.

It's very much a different and more like a researched version of they did the best they could with the tools they had at the time,

Which is a another really hard,

A phrase that I have a hard time hearing,

Because I'm like,

Well,

They should have known better,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

But yeah,

Especially looking back at my own grief and stuff,

I'm like,

People are,

They're doing the best they can with the tools they've got.

And it's not always great.

And it doesn't always turn out the best for everyone,

Which is why we still carry these griefs and these pains and these resentments with us.

But being able to,

To look back and incorporate our histories and their histories with the information that we're given is a gift that that time can give us.

Well,

But the other part of that,

Too,

Is,

I think you've got to be open to either receiving or understanding that.

I know a lot of people in my own personal circle,

Who have lost people,

And it has made them bitter.

And it's almost as if their heart is closed to anything that you either want to say or do for them.

Because they're stuck in a place where,

I hate to say to get past their loss,

But they don't want to do anything outside of thinking about their loss,

It might be a better a better way of putting it.

So if for me,

I couldn't live as somebody who was bitter,

Upset,

Angry,

Or moping all the time,

It was one of those things where I had to make a conscious decision that despite everything that had happened to me,

I've got to do whatever I can do in this life to at least be happy,

Or at least try to be happy.

And that was the ultimate goal.

Despite everything that I've been through,

I could be a citizen or the same things that everybody else around me was doing.

But you've got to come to that decision.

I think everybody's got to come to that particular decision on their own.

And it's not at the same time.

It's not at a week,

It's not at two weeks,

It's not at a month.

It could be a year down the road.

But I think everybody has that bridge they have to cross for themselves.

Do you remember when you made that decision for yourself?

Yeah.

That's actually a two parter.

Ah,

Tell us.

From the time my father died,

Until I was 14 years old,

I will tell you,

I was just basically walking through life.

I was listening to,

You need to move on,

You need to do these things.

But I didn't exactly know how to move on,

How to get over,

Just go on with everyday life.

So yeah,

I was going to school,

Grades were decent and everything was fine.

But one day when I was 14,

I remember this was yesterday,

I couldn't find any of my friends to play with.

They were all either doing chores,

They were off shopping with parents,

Whatever.

And it was like the one and only time I found myself alone in that four years after he passed away.

So I went to the park that I normally go to and I just sat down with my football and I just started crying.

It was everything that had been bottled up that I'd been trying to deal with and I just couldn't find answers for.

At that point,

I just couldn't deal with anymore.

So I sat down for about 45 minutes to an hour.

I think Maliki starts it,

Nobody showed up at the park that day,

I had a lot of explaining to do.

But it was just one of those things where I just sat down and I cried and I said,

Okay,

Well,

I've got to figure out a way to deal with this.

I'm not exactly sure how,

But I got to figure out a way.

And that way really didn't come for me really until I was 20 years old.

And I had run out of money to go to school.

I was a student at Harvard University here in DC.

And just like,

Okay,

Well,

My mother has busted her butt,

Bent over backwards to do everything for me to make sure that I could have everything that I would need,

But it's time for me to make my own way.

And it was when I made a conscious decision,

To truly make a break from being under her wing and to truly leave the nest that I had a realization that it's time for me to not only necessarily be an adult,

But to try to figure out ways to deal with everything that adults go through.

So that's paying bills,

Dealing with relationships,

Doing whatever I had to do to be on my own,

But then to try to figure out exactly what I needed to do for myself to make those different things work for me.

Wow.

And that's two very big moments in your life,

This feeling of being truly alone.

It's just me here.

I'm all by myself.

And that in those spaces,

Those pockets of being alone is when these feelings can have room to come up.

And then again,

Taking this initiative of being like,

All right,

I guess I'm in charge of my own life.

That realization of no one else is going to come fix this for me.

No one else is going to pay for this.

No one else is going to feed me.

Like that whole adult taking responsibility.

Those are really important revelations to have.

And even more cool to me again,

Is that looking at time thing is that we can continue to have these light bulb moments as we continue to live our lives.

I fear on the show sometimes with my interviewees that there's this perception of grief happened,

And then I saw the light,

And then my life has improved since then.

But I'm like,

No,

It's still this.

I know I kind of laugh about it too.

But it's this continual process of waking up to things.

And they're not always big,

But sometimes they are.

Sometimes they're,

I am all alone in the world and I've got to pull myself up.

I'm responsible for my own life,

My own decisions.

And they can come at any time,

Any age,

Any circumstance within any relationship.

Yeah.

So just being open to that.

I'm going to shift gears really dramatically from your story.

And I actually have two questions for you.

And they're totally unrelated to each other.

But the first one is related to technology because you're in technology right now for a career,

Right?

Yes.

Yeah.

So I'm interested because I have grown up with grief in a digital age when things like memorializing Facebook pages is a thing,

Or even being able to go back and read my mom's obituary on the internet or like being able to,

You know,

And I was thinking while you were telling your story about the convenience store and actually pointing out locations like Marcus Candy and like,

Oh man,

I wonder if we could Google Maps that,

Like that was my first thing is like,

Oh,

Geographically,

Where is that?

And then of course,

My first thought was to put it into the internet.

And then finding resources on grief,

You find a lot of things online.

A lot of people found this through the internet,

Through Spotify,

Through iTunes,

Things like that,

Which is all connected to the World Wide Web.

So without this technology,

Or maybe with this emergence of technology,

While you've grown up and lived in the world,

Like how has that morphed and changed your grief?

Do you regret that certain things aren't on the internet for you to look back at them?

There's a lot of questions here.

Like how do you memorialize your losses in your life?

Do you use the computer or the internet at all?

Is there anything you wish could be on the internet for you to find?

And how do you feel about grief on the internet now?

Man.

It's a lot.

It's a really big question,

But I just kept writing down internet,

Internet,

Internet.

I've got to ask about it.

Cause I'm like,

This is probably one of the,

Like,

I don't want to say the oldest loss,

But it's,

It's a loss that's relatively far back in just time.

Well,

Believe it or not,

It's not as far back as you think.

Just,

Just a couple of weeks ago,

I was doing a web search,

Not only on my father,

But also the man that was convicted of his murder.

And he is scheduled for a parole hearing,

His first parole hearing in April of 2013.

So our 2023,

I'm sorry,

April of 2023.

So the first thing that I made sure that I did was to contact through the internet,

The state of Missouri department of corrections,

To make sure that I would be notified when that parole hearing would be,

Because I would at least like to make a statement,

If not an appearance,

And they will allow me to do so.

And just in that,

Not only just in searching for his name to find out who I needed to contact,

But believe it or not,

There is a lot of the case law and a lot of the information related to my father's case that is,

In fact,

On the internet where it's been used either in other cases that are referenced,

Dead cases that it has referenced,

Just a whole lot of stuff.

And it's basically due to the fact that once the death penalty in Missouri was reinstated in the 70s,

The person who was convicted of killing my father was actually the first person who was sentenced to death under the new statute.

So there was a series of appeals.

And ultimately,

His sentence was commuted to life in prison.

But to just go in and know that all that stuff is available on the internet,

And when you look at certain transcripts,

Certain things that my mother said,

Certain things that are facts in the case,

Certain evidence that they had,

It's almost like reliving that over and over again.

So I don't necessarily think that that is a bad thing.

I think that the internet in terms of Facebook and all those other places,

Any way that you have the ability to express yourself is,

I think,

A great thing.

Because while family gives you what they can,

They may not always give you exactly what you need.

So I think that anybody that's able to reach you through whatever medium or media that they have,

It's not necessarily a bad thing.

I like that perspective.

I wonder though,

Do you ever wish there were more positive things on the internet about your dad,

As opposed to just having case information?

I'm thinking like photos of a barbecue or like,

You know,

Mostly photos and things like that.

But I know for me,

When I miss my mom,

I go back to her Facebook page and it's like all of us on a trip together or buying chocolate or my first glass of wine with her when I was 21,

Things like that.

But just like these more,

Do you wish there was more than the case online?

Well,

See,

Shelby,

When I was your age,

We had these things called albums that we had to play a picture to put them in.

And I still have those.

I sound like such a millennial who only believes the internet is the only thing that exists.

Don't I?

That's so funny.

So yes,

I have plenty of pictures.

There are pictures.

I mean,

They're not online.

The nice thing about them being on the internet though,

Is that anything on the internet pretty much is forever as far as we've learned.

So it's just a matter now of being able to preserve whatever it is we have.

But we've got albums upon albums upon albums of different family events,

Every family event that we've ever had.

I've got pictures of my father from the 50s when he was in the military,

Pre his relationship with my mother.

So I still have lots of things,

As well as keepsakes that were given to me over the years since he's passed away,

That I do have that,

You know,

A reminder of him every day.

So that's not a problem.

So you're not starved up for keepsakes by any means?

No,

Not at all.

I guess that was the heart of the question I was getting to because sometimes,

Especially when I get on Google and approach Google with my grief,

It seems like there's never enough.

And it's different because I live far away from the scrapbooks from the albums.

My mom was actually a scrapbooker.

So why this didn't occur to me earlier that you might have albums of photos lying around is ridiculous.

But they're all at the house in North Carolina,

Where I grew up and lived and things like that.

And I guess there's this distance between me and these memories in that way.

And I kind of like it that way because I don't like to,

You know,

I'm a minimalist.

I don't like to have a lot of things in my house and things like that.

But the photos that I do have,

I maybe have three or four pictures of her here.

And that's sometimes I want more than that to hold on to.

And I guess that was the feeling I was getting at.

But yeah,

So that feels good to know that you have access to all of that,

That you feel like you have enough of it.

And that you can continue getting updated on this case through the gift of the internet,

Through the future,

Like into the present 2023.

Changing gears to my other off the wall question.

I know you've discussed this on your podcast before,

But especially with everything that's happened recently in Florida.

I'm wondering with your experience as a child,

How you feel about guns,

Gun control,

Gun violence,

Using guns in crime.

I'm sure you're so tired of like answering this question or speaking to this question because you do talk about it a bit on your show.

But how has your grief influenced your opinion on guns?

You know what,

I don't have any ill will towards anyone who desires to own a firearm.

That is your personal preference.

My own personal belief is that just because you can,

Doesn't mean that you should.

So that just simply means that maybe there's some people out there who shouldn't have access to weapons.

But when this whole thing went down,

And I'm not sure I articulated it as well on the latest version,

Or the latest episode of my podcast,

Or by the time this airs,

There'll be episode 100,

Which is already out.

I sort of tackled that.

And the one thing when these types of things happen,

The one question that we don't ask is,

Why?

And that was the whole premise behind the latest episode of my podcast,

Episode 100,

Which is,

Why are we not asking why this young man did what he did?

So when I think about my own grief story,

I'm not necessarily thinking about the guns.

I'm thinking about Nicholas Cruz.

So how does a man who essentially has watched a lot of people in his family die before the age of 19,

What type of mental state is he in?

And what type of signals did he give off that people missed,

That allowed him not only to gain access to the weaponry that he did,

But to actually put him in the state of mind to do what he did.

So,

And not to say that I'm excusing what he's done.

I think that he needs to pay whatever price the criminal justice system gives him.

I think that we need to do everything in our behalf that is humanly possible to actually begin to take care of people.

Because the problem I have with this whole thing is we're a divisive nation,

I think.

You're either black or white,

Democrat,

Republican,

Or in the case that you mentioned,

We are either pro or anti-guns.

And that once you establish that you're on one side of a particular argument,

You pretty much have closed your ears and your hearts and your eyes to anything the other side has to say.

And I think there's always a middle ground to everything that we can come to a conclusion to say,

Okay,

Well,

You can have guns,

But maybe certain types of guns you can't have.

Maybe we need to find ways of being able to make sure that people who might have a specific condition that might predispose them to this particular type of thing,

Either go through some training or some additional evaluation.

I'm not exactly sure what the answers are.

I just know that we need to,

In my mind,

Do more to just look out for people as opposed to blaming tools for what people do.

Mm,

That was very well said.

I'm curious now as we're kind of getting close to the end of our interview time,

If you have any concrete resources or recommendations for our listeners who are going through grief right now or seeking out resources for their own journeys,

What were the things that helped you come back the most?

Well,

You know what?

In terms of resources,

Those didn't happen for me until recently after I actually started my show.

And that was basically through listening to recommendations that readers in the Facebook group or listening to you on your show and certain things that you had put out.

Those resources didn't exist for me back then.

In terms of my coming backstory and resources that I used,

Probably chess was the biggest thing for me.

Chess was the biggest life lesson.

That game taught me the biggest life lessons I could ever have.

But you didn't ask me that question.

You asked me resources.

The one book that I did read that resonates with me in terms of how deep loss could be is C.

S.

Lewis' A Grief Observed.

That's probably something I could go back to over and over again.

That book I read probably about a year and a half ago on the recommendation of one of the listeners in my Facebook group.

I love it.

Can we get into chess for a minute though?

I would love to hear more about that for you.

Yeah,

Sure.

Well,

Shortly after my father died,

A cousin of mine taught me how to play chess.

It was one of those things where in high school,

Which was a really particularly rough period of time for me because the high school I went to was an all-boys Catholic Jesuit high school.

Anything that you could do with two people,

Father and son,

They did it.

Bowling,

Golf,

Believe it or not,

My school.

We talk about gun control.

I went to a Catholic high school in the city of St.

Louis that actually had a rifle range in the school.

Unheard of in 2018.

Well,

My school had two things,

Two distinctions.

We had the largest pool hall in the state.

Basically,

It was a bomb shelter that they had converted into a rec room.

It had about 50 pool tables.

Then off one of the ends,

They had a five-lane rifle range.

For like two cents a shot,

You could go in and you could squeeze off a couple of rounds either during lunch or after school.

We actually even had our own rifle team that competed in the state tournaments.

Getting back to the game of chess,

Chess was one of those things that helped me navigate the mind field,

First of all,

Of high school.

I didn't feel comfortable bringing my grandfather or my uncle to the father-son events because I just didn't feel like I wanted to have to explain to a thousand other people why my dad wasn't there.

If you didn't grow up with me and you didn't know my story,

I didn't want to have to explain it over and over again.

I just didn't want to go there.

My escape literally was chess.

That's when I found out that chess for me was a lot like my life.

First of all,

When you play a game and when your game is over,

You're exhausted.

When you lose,

You're exhausted.

Grief for me has been an experience that at times,

At certain times in my life,

Has been completely exhausting.

It helped me to deal with the fact that sometimes I have to compartmentalize certain things just to get through what's going on in my life right now.

Win or lose,

I have to put aside whatever that outcome was to deal with the next game that I have to play.

I can worry about it later,

But if I lost five minutes ago and I've got another game to play in 10 minutes,

Somehow I've got to find a way to get through that,

Get past that,

Put it behind me,

Maybe go back and think about it later.

Right now,

I've got some other things I need to do.

That's just the way I live my life.

I know that there are certain things that I have to do and I can deal with them in a certain timeframe.

Maybe the timeframe for me to deal with things may not be now.

Maybe there might be a better time for me to actually sit down,

Reflect,

And evaluate what I've either gone through or what I'm going through.

It just helps me navigate the mind field that I call life.

I really like that.

It speaks to how games,

Which can be seen as abstract experiences or not entirely of the world experiences,

Can mirror real life for us and teach us things that maybe we wouldn't have learned just walking around as humans in the world.

That's really cool.

I love that game.

I play it every chance I get.

It really is a microcosm of life.

We'll have to play chess sometime.

I haven't played in years and years and years.

You'd kick my butt.

Take it easy on me.

You can teach me some stuff.

I love it.

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