Fucking Grief™ is a complex psychological journey.

And what is Grief?

It is the emotional process of experiencing Loss.

To have your life catastrophically implode and then to have every support system in your life suddenly vaporize or turn on you right at the worst possible moment when you are at your absolute lowest… you’re experiencing multiple traumas simultaneously.

Things I Lost:

1. career and (more specifically) my job and my family of coworkers
2. current and future education and my school family
3. my health (mental, dental, sexual, weight, cholesterol, suicide, self mutilation, etc)
4. friends
5. nuclear family
6. Hal (still hadn’t cried his death by 1997)
7. sense of safety, security, and normalcy
8. my home and neighborhood

I had massive Losses in virtually every area of my life. And I can’t remember a single therapist ever attempting to work on any of it or even considering that these were topics of merit. And these Losses are the consequences after a suicide attempt. The only thing therapists care about in the aftermath of a suicide attempt in 1993-1997 is “why did you suicide, bro?” Ya know, all the stuff that came before. Nobody cares about after.

But looking at that list now… 30 years later… damn Dave.

I feel so bad for you, dude.

Keep in mind that all the way up through 1997 I had stuck it out with the meds and the mental health system and I was so numbed out that I couldn’t feel much of anything. And so all the damage of those Losses and the myriad ways they overlap… that never got processed or dealt with in any way.

And those Losses…

many of them are still actively happening.

Some of these Losses have been going on for 30. fuck. ing. years.

When you experience a Loss your brain goes through a series of emotions that are predictable and largely understood by modern psychological scholarship.

We hear often about the Stages of Grief/Grieving:

Shock

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

Post–Loss Processing

In the immediate aftermath of the major attempt in November 1994, I was in Shock. Massive life-paralyzing Shock.

With a capital fucking SH.

I feel like that whole year from the first attempt in ’93 up through the massive attempt a year later… the whole ride as everything was falling apart was a never-ending Shock. Like the trauma just kept growing every day. And then after the massive attempt there were new traumas– the fear of going to a group home then eventually being kicked out of the home… it was a new trauma and Loss damn near every week for a solid 4 years.

And at some point the Shock morphs into a refusal to accept that this is really happening. Because the trauma overloads our brain so much that it literally can not accept the pain and information. And our brain just nopes the fuck out.

And when your brain says “NO FUCKING THANK YOU I WILL NOT ACCEPT THIS NEW REALITY” we call that portion of the Grief Show™:

DENIAL

Denial is a bastard because it lies to you like a motherfucker.

There’s a great line of dialogue that expresses the toil and effort of the aftermath of Denial through Loss better than any I ever heard and it’s stuck with me since I first saw it.

In No Country for Old Men Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is visiting his Uncle Ellis in a scene of such gorgeous linguistically sparse Cormac McCarthy West Texas philosophy dialogue…. fuck he would not approve of that many words being used… anyway… this is the greatest scene regarding Loss and chasing Denial in the confusion of God not showing up when the problems are so great…

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

That man that shot you died in prison…

Uncle Ellis

Angola. Yeah.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

What you’d done he’d’a been released?

Uncle Ellis

Oh I don’t know… nuthin. Wouldn’t be no point in it.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

Kinda surprised to hear you say that.

Uncle Ellis

Well, all the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from ya, more is going out the door. After awhile you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it…

^ that is a line spoken by someone who has lost time chasing and trying to put a Broken Mirror back together which is a product of Denial. It’s spoken from someone who knows better after a lifetime of experience. A young author could never have written that line. Bitter experience in that dialogue.

Tryin to get back what’s been took from ya.

Oof.

That’s the next years of my life.

In Denial.

In 1997 I do not perceive of myself as disabled. My mental health issues are some massive fuck up… but I keep thinking it’s something I’ll snap out of. As long as I stay out of a mental health hospital I’m fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

After the massive attempt I get kicked out of the home because it’s too great a strain on my family. I have younger siblings and an offhand comment years later would make me realize the harm I had caused them. One of my brother’s friends met me years later and after we had known each other they told me the first time they had heard my brother mention an older brother is when my brother showed up at school and told his friends his brother had tried to kill himself the night before.

Sorry, brothers. I am so sorry.

Never even occurred to me that it would hurt anyone. That’s how fucked in the head delusional I was. Never thought anyone would care. I still have a hard time understanding that anyone cares about my life on any level. Because so many people that claimed to love me absolutely turned their back, and so you just assume it’s better if….

The end result of a failed suicide attempt is that you at some point have to go back to your family who now lives in a state of constant fear and suspicion that you are about to kill yourself at any moment– and so you are constantly being watched all the time.

Making yourself a peanut butter sandwich and can’t find a bread knife to cut the loaf and so you grab the large scary knife right as a family member walks into the kitchen? Guess what their first thought is…. that you’re feeding yourself?

Or ThAt DaVe Is GoNnA dO sOmEtHiNg ScArY?!?

It’s natural for the family and friends and everyone on planet earth to treat you different now after the tornado has struck.

They all consider you the tornado.

There’s not any sympathy in how people treat you. This isn’t cancer where people give a shit and dote on you…

You are viewed with suspicion. Concern. Fear. You are assumed to be lying all the time whenever you say “fine” when they ask how you’re feeling.

Because you ARE lying.

You don’t feel fine.

But they don’t actually want to know how you are feeling. Otherwise, they might learn that they are partly responsible for how you feel because often it is the actions of the family that are stressing out the patient.

Remember, mental health patients are often the “tumors” of a sick family system.

And that sick family doesn’t actually want to know how and what you feel and think.

They just want you to stop feeling that way.

So they can stop worrying you’ll die and they can get back to their lives.

And as a result… you feel like a criminal all the time due to the way they watch you and try to analyze you constantly. Everything you say and do. Your family home becomes like the hospital environment full of distrust and then the patient inevitably has to hide their behaviors…

This is another Loss that you will Grieve inevitably.

But, the main thing to understand about how your family will treat you very differently for the rest of your life… is that your brain can not process this Loss.

It is too huge to lose your family right at the start of your adulthood. And so your brain moves into a state of Denial. Or at least mine did.

And this Denial in my life became incredibly performative.

I wanted so desperately to have people view me without suspicion again that I did everything I could to prove I had turned a corner. I went to college. I got jobs. I took the meds. I did the therapy appointments. Like a parolee being forced to jump through the hoops and check in with their parole officer constantly to prove to everyone that they have been rehabilitated.

In my case, rehabilitation wasn’t really the plan…. it was Denial.

Be a functioning member of Polite Society™ and then nobody will know you ever had a tube updown your nosethroat.

Hide all those Broken Mirror shards under a rug or hide them in a drawer where nobody can see them.

Wear long sleeves so nobody sees the scar tissue.

Stay busy because as long as you’re busy you’re constantly moving and that way nobody has the time to ask you how you feel….

so that you don’t have to lie to them.

Smile more.

Fake laugh.

Which is easy to do at this point because during these years I actually forgot how to laugh.

Fake laughs were all I had.

I’m not kidding.

I went YEARS without laughing.

I had to teach myself how to laugh again in my 20’s.

Bizarre.

I even attempted to get back into church again for a moment because that’s what I knew. And I will observe this trait in many, many, many people who go through traumas and Losses and Grieving events:

People raised in The Church™

flock back to The Church™

when shit hits the fan.

1997 is an interesting time in the United States of America.

And The Church™ is no different.

Purity culture has taken hold of the Fucking Evangelicals™. WWJD bracelets everywhere. The Evangelical Industry movement is at it’s peak in 90’s.

And something profound has grabbed the attention of the Fucking Evangelicals™.

In 1997… the President of the United States of America would find himself embroiled in a scandal that would infuriate every church-going, Holy-Spirit-filled, true-and-noble, Fucking Evangelical™ for the next few years.

The President of the United States of America got in trouble for lying about an affair.

And a certain hypocritical asshole named Newt Gingrich– who was also having an affair DURING THE EXACT SAME TIME decided to weaponize this event (because the 1998 midterms were happening in a year) and even though damn near every president and Senator and Congressperson this nation ever had kept mistresses including George H. W. Bush…

It would be a new hyper-polarized political strategy in the GOP married to a new form of news entertainment that would transform the national conversation:

The 24 hour news cycle

CNN and the newly minted Fox News channel– which had just started up the year prior in ’96– and the AM talk radio market was seeing market share numbers/ad sales explode as white, suburban, men in their AnchorBabyLand™ neighborhoods would drive from the cozy suburbs and listen to Rush Limbaugh– who had recently signed a massive syndication deal and was already considered to be such a powerful influence amongst right-wing voters that George H. W. Bush started courting him in ’92 the same way he had been courting Dobson back in ’88.

By the 1992 United States presidential election, Limbaugh had established himself as an influential political commentator. During the Republican Party presidential primaries, Limbaugh expressed a preference for Pat Buchanan over the incumbent George H. W. Bush, which Buchanan himself attributed to his early success in the primaries. Bush’s campaign subsequently worked to court Limbaugh, culminating with an invitation to stay overnight at the White House‘s Lincoln Bedroom. Limbaugh was also given a seat at the president’s box in the Houston Astrodome during the 1992 Republican National Convention, and both President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle appeared on Limbaugh’s program.

Wikipedia: Rush Limbaugh

Conservative politicians know that the key to white male voters is AM talk radio and the 24 hour news cycle once all those upper management dads come home and take the tie off in their AnchorBabyInfoBubbles™. Make sure their Fox News matches their Rush Limbaugh and that the whole media system is coordinated so the messaging is consistent.

This is not accidental. This was an intentional and weaponized propaganda system hiding in plain site.

And now this media bubble… in search of a new story to become obsessed about for the next 18 months until the midterm elections… this is where the Clinton/Lewinski scandal would be served up to the Outrage Porn Machine that had been created for exactly this purpose.

And white, Fucking Evangelical™, conservative-voting men couldn’t get enough of it.

In every church in America for the next 2 years the moral failings of a President– helped that he was a democrat– would be commented upon from the pulpit. Often in vague ways so as not to be overly topical, but it was not uncommon for pastors to mention “sexual immorality” and “how important the marital contract” was to god… Sometimes it was blatant but this was the era where most preachers still pretended to not be bringing politics into the church. It was in couched terms. It was with tone. It would be said in a way that every adult in the room knew you were talking about how the President got a blow job from an intern and lied about it.

If you weren’t alive during those years, it’s hard to paint the picture in a few paragraphs of how completely and entirely the attention span of the whole damn country was dominated by this scandal.

Anybody born after 1990 is too young to have fully been hit over the head with this. It affected everything. It was THE topic of conversation on every channel, every night talk show hosts making jokes, every talk radio station yelling about how we needed morality back in the White House.

It’s this issue that propels Bush Jr’s run in 2000 that he would restore dignity and integrity to the Oval Office after Clinton is impeached OVER LYING.

This was THE WEAPONIZED ISSUE that dominated the next 2-3 years of all our lives.

And every single Baby Boomer who called themselves Fucking Evangelicals™ and howled about how immoral the Clintons were… all those same mother fuckers will vote for Donald Fucking Trump 15 years later.

The. same. exact. people. who were FURIOUS that a president would cheat on his wife had absolutely no qualms about voting for a guy who cheated on ALL of his wives and lusts for his own daughter. Who fucks porn stars after his wife gave birth and is found guilty of funneling campaign funds to payoff hush money.

And all you Holy Spirit™-filled besties of Jesus don’t seem to have a problem with that and this is why I call you fuckers.

You goddamn fucking hypocrites.

I was there. I remember the 90’s. I remember your Holy posturing and outrage.

This will confuse many of us 15-20-25 years later when you show us all how phony your outrage was. How fake your pearl clutching and fainting feelings of moral disapproval is.

I remember the tsk tsking.

I remember the angry pursed lips and sad head shaking to realize an American President had LIED.

OMFG.

Thank Gawd we have all those Fucking Evangelicals™ to keep the moral guardrails of our country shined and polished.

Right ?™

Denial is an interesting subject when you think about large groups of people going through it simultaneously.

Remember… Denial is an emotional response to a traumatized brain that can’t handle Losing.

Is there a group of people– part of a system of any kind– that might be in Denial right now?

Any people that might have experienced a Loss or two?

hmmm?

1997 is also the year that will mark the 10 year anniversary of Adventures in Odyssey.

Proof that rightwing radio is doing juuuuust fiiiiiiiine.

That little show that I did Episode 002 and 003 and 004 way back in 1987 is humming along like a champ. Still going. All over the world and I still have never met anyone who listens to it. After 10 years.

Not any fan mail.

No residuals.

Nuthin.

For. 10. years.

But, in 1997, one of the very few times I was ever granted any sort of pat on the head occurred as I was invited to a dinner that the production team had in celebration of 10 years of the show.

It was nice to see faces I hadn’t seen in a few years.

At this point I still believe these people are my family.

And like my family at home… I really want to impress them all that I’ve changed for the better.

I am a New & Improved Dave!

Because I’m in Denial that anything is wrong.

It was a lovely dinner in a cool restaurant across the street from Warner Brothers.

Nice to be invited.

At some point around that time I get the call

Focus called

They want you again

Drive down to Burbank, ah, how I’ve missed this.

Into the Marc Grau Studios

Hey, there’s another celebrity on the wall.

Into the Lounge of Legends

Get my script

Adventures in Odyssey: Episode #385 – It’s a Pokenberry Christmas Pt. 1

Adventures in Odyssey: Episode #386 – It’s a Pokenberry Christmas Pt. 2

This will be the final time I will ever see the actors who play my mother and sister ever again.

It is the final time the entire family unit recorded together.

It had been 2 years since we had recorded the Pokenberry Falls episodes where the Barclays are moved out of town.

And now we will record the final chapter of the Barclay Family.

And the storyline is that we are spoofing It’s A Wonderful Life for whom the characters in the Barclay Family were named after, remember?

This will be the final Barclay Family Christmas episode(s). Adventures in Odyssey banked on the Barclays at Christmas for a solid decade. It ends here.

What’s interesting about this is that It’s A Wonderful Life is a film were the inciting incident that kicks the entire narrative into gear is the main character is about to lose everything to the local town oligarch and hates his life so much that he stands on a bridge and contemplates…

*checks notes*…

suicide.

*Dave stares at camera*

*blinks ironically– possibly to signal for help*

For those that don’t remember the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life it’s about a man contemplating jumping from a bridge and committing suicide because his life sucks. And right before he’s about to end it all… an angel shows up and falls in the river and George has to jump into the river to save a person instead of kill himself. And after he jumps in and saves the angel his life is given the Scrooge Treatment and he’s walked through a life where he never existed.

BTW, IAWL is itself a loose spoof of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol which is a scathing indictment on greed and capitalism… interesting choice for a rightwing “christian” organization to doublespoof?

My singular memory of this episode is when Eugene and George are back at the hotel after Eugene tries to save George from jumping off the bridge and then Eugene falls in the water and George saves him and as they dry off in the hotel room we get this exchange that is burned into my brain… my final memory of being one of the Barclays:

Eugene

….You saved me from the river, but I saved you from leaping to your doom.

George

What are you talking about? I was just thinking…
Where’d ya get such a crazy idea?

Suicide is a crazy idea… ha. ha. ha.

I believe I was 20 years old?

And the team at AIO wrote an episode spoofing a film that has suicide at the heart of the entire concept. THE WHOLE FILM IS ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IF GEORGE BAILEY DIDN’T EXIST.

And here we are spoofing a film about suicide… while an actor who the entire team has known has had a suicide attempt is in the damn studio…. are we going to talk about suicide in a healthy way here? Or mock it?

The little shots they take at ya.

Pastor’s kids know what I’m talking about. The vague editorializing of things that have happened to somebody in the congregation being called out and mocked from the pulpit. Throwaway jokes and one liners.

It’s this kind of behavior from everyone around you as a mental health patient that is what drives the Denial.

Denial would happen anyway because that’s what happens when people are faced with life threatening illnesses and their brains can’t cope. But in my experience Mental Health patients experience Denial far longer. Because there is so little sympathy, so much prejudice and ignorance and hate thrust at you… little shots, shitty advice, belittling you… and so patients who go through this spend waaaaaaaay longer playing the Denial Game.

Nobody wants to be “crazy”.

Anything but that!!

In the fall of 1997, after recording these episodes, I make the decision to finally exit the mental health system and the 4 years of medicated hell I had gone through.

I go off the meds.

This terrifies everyone.

But fuck it.

Nothing is helping anyway.

I’m still every bit as miserably unhappy as I was 4 years earlier.

I’m in Denial. What could possibly go wrong?