All There Is with Anderson Cooper - A Son’s Struggle, A Father’s Grief

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Charlie Shelin was an exceptionally bright child who worked hard for years to keep the dark thoughts in his head from consuming him. In this moving conversation, his dad, Randy, talks with Anderson about Charlie’s mental health struggles and the layers of grief their family has lived with for years.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of junior chicken, McDouble, or chicken snack wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. Welcome to All There Is. This will be the second to last episode this season. I'll likely do another season down the road, but I'm going to be taking a break for a bit. I've already started to listen to some of the many voicemails that you've left, and they're incredibly moving. And I'm really grateful for all of you who've taken the time to call and leave such thoughtful and personal messages. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think might help others, feel free to call and leave a message about it.

I can't promise I'll use it in next week's episode, but I do promise I will listen to all of your messages eventually. The number you can call is 917-727-6818. That's 917-727-6818. I'll leave it again at the end of the podcast. When I was listening to your messages, I kept thinking that I wish I could put all of you who are listening in touch with one another. Because hearing your messages, it really became so clear to me that all of us are part of a community. A community of grievers, a community of people who know and feel loss. It's a community, though, that's too often hidden, but it's actually all around us. I've talked about this before, but I've felt so alone in my grief for so long, but hearing

all of your voices, it's just a reminder to me yet again that none of us is alone in our grief. In today's episode, you're going to hear from Randy Shaleen. He's a radiologist who spent much of his career as a flight surgeon in the Navy. I met Randy several years ago by chance. It's actually kind of a funny story. Randy looks a lot like me, so much so that he often gets mistaken for me. Randy lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Jill, and daughter, Chelsea. Randy's son Charlie died in August 2022. He was 18 years old. Charlie struggled with mental health issues for a long time and it took a big toll on Randy and the whole family. In this interview you're going to hear some recordings of Charlie as well and there are mentions of suicide. If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available. In the U.S.,

you can call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. We'll be right back with the son's struggles of father's grief. Brought to you by RBC Student Banking. Here's an RBC student offer that turns a feel-good moment into a feel-great moment. Students, get $100 when you open a no-monthly-fee RBC Advantage Banking account. And we'll give another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more, only at RBC. Visit rbc.com slash get 100, give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025.

Complete offer eligibility criteria by March 31st, 2025. Choose one of five eligible charities. Up to $500,000 in total contributions. This episode is brought to you by Canon Canada. From street interviews to vlogging or filmmaking, great content gets even better when you're shooting with great gear. That's what Canon's Level Up sales event is all about. With awesome deals on their range of cameras and lenses, you can grab everything you need for that shot or scene you've been dreaming of for less. Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots,

Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level Up sales event today at canon.ca. Welcome back. Charlie Shaleen made this recording on August 26, 2018, when he was 14 years old. His father, Randy, didn't find it until several months ago. This is Charlie. Starting tonight, I am setting a challenge for myself for one week. Getting all your homework done, studying, showers every day, brushing my teeth, hygiene, exercise. If I am unable to complete the challenge, then I must pretty much confess everything to my parents. I just need to have control of my life and what I'm doing.

I don't want to go down the rabbit hole. What do you think when you hear that now? Well, now I know and understand the pain he was going through back then. Because at the time, frankly, I had no idea. We didn't realize how serious things were getting at that point. Everything that he communicated to us was, everything's okay. I've got it under control. I'm doing what I need to do to get things done. Tell me about Charlie. Charlie, he was just a great kid. You couldn't ask for a better child. He was very bright. He

was getting all he's in school. He was doing well in the Boy Scouts. He didn't talk back to us. He didn't yell at his parents or cuss at us, which probably made it more difficult for us to understand how challenged he was. Going into elementary school, he was having trouble just trying to stay focused, getting homework done, projects, et cetera. He did test positive for ADHD. In the past, I've been somewhat skeptical of that diagnosis of ADHD, but having Charlie, I'm not a skeptic anymore. We found a good medication that helped tremendously until we got to middle school. And that's where things went a bit sideways. There's something called twice exceptional. Twice exceptional.

Yes. Or 2E. And that's where a child is highly intelligent, but they also have a learning disability. And because those two together can be a very difficult combination. Their brain tends to function in a different way that can be very challenging for them and they have difficulty socializing. So what was happening for Charlie is that he could learn the material very quickly, but because of his ADHD, he couldn't actually complete assignments and get things done and what he started entering was a pattern of procrastination and avoidance he'd be so frustrated that he'd say well I'm just going to

put my homework off until the last minute and then literally at the 11th hour sometimes late at night he would just do this amazing amount of work and get all A's we recognized that he was becoming more withdrawn and we found a therapist for him in middle school who was frankly not particularly helpful, but at least

we're doing all the things we can because it's also difficult to find effective therapies for kids. I mean, right now we're having a mental health really crisis in our country and there's just not a lot of resources out there. Charlie was so frustrated. He was developing, unbeknownst to us, an incredible sense of self-loathing, and it really played in his psyche. What began to change that made you think, wait a minute, there's something really seriously going on here? We didn't reach that point until he started high school, and he started taking AP classes. He's taking advanced physics and you simply can't wait until the 11th hour to get the work done. And he was doing a lot of video games, excessive video games. And we weren't really aware of how much time he was spending online cruising the

web and how much he was actually getting his work done. We could see that he just was definitely struggling. He knew what he needed to do, but he'd always fail and he couldn't get it done. It's around this time that Charlie left that voicemail we played earlier, talking about challenging himself for one week, that message that Randy didn't find until just recently. So here's where our worlds fell apart. Basically, he got to the point where he procrastinated so much that you couldn't catch up. And what happened was Charlie said, Dad, I can't face my teachers. I can't go to school.

And then as we were trying to convince him, it just got worse because we're butting heads because Charlie, you've got to go. And he just shut down. He really just fell apart. He would isolate in his bedroom. He would not interact with the family. He stopped showering. He would just spend time on the internet playing games. And he really didn't want to talk with mom and dad, and we're not sure what to do. So we got him to see a child psychiatrist. We actually found one that was highly regarded. And the day we went to go see her, Charlie's in the car and says, no, I'm not going to go in. I won't go see her.

And she's like, no, if he can't come here, I can't see him. And this is a person that was supposed to be really good. And we received nothing other than the bill. And as parents were like, time's running out. We were watching our son just disintegrate at home and we're desperate, time's running out. We're watching our son disintegrate at home, and we're desperate to find resources to help us. He was very protective about his laptop,

and one time I looked on his laptop and discovered that he had gone to a suicide chat line to try to seek some help because he was having some suicidal thoughts. And of course, that was a big wake-up call for us, clearly. And we are just beside ourselves. It's a very unique kind of grief, the grief of a parent who is struggling to figure out

how to help their child in a mental health crisis. Absolutely, but the frustration is that you don't know what to do to help them. You're trying to do all the right things, and you're afraid of making a mistake. You end up deciding to send Charlie to a wilderness therapy program. We did because at this point we just felt we couldn't keep him at home and be safe. And we also thought, well, he's spending so much time online and by himself and isolating,

how do you break this? And effectively what wilderness therapy is, and it's a very frightening thing for a parent to choose, your child is basically sent to this facility, this is in Utah, and given a backpack and some very basic essentials for being in the outdoors. And they spend the entire three months with no technology, hiking, backpacking, and doing therapy, group therapy, individual therapy, journaling, and different readings to help them. And it's harsh. I know some people have been critical of these programs, but I can say this with complete conviction that wilderness therapy is what saved our son's life. I think we've lost him to suicide at some point, if that had not taken place. He was journaling while at Wilderness

and had access to his phone and his laptop. And I found out he'd gone to all sorts of inappropriate websites, not just pornography, but also websites that actually had violent images that no 14-year-old should look at or ever see because they don't know how to process it and you can't unsee this. So he had developed a friendship or a relationship with this person on Instagram who initially was portraying themselves as a woman and Charlie discovered that he was a guy. And this person claimed to have stabbed someone to death. And Charlie maintained this relationship

and sort of embraced this person, which just emphasizes for us how he was so desperate for social connection. And he's just living this world by himself. He really lost concepts of reality and lost touch of what we consider to be anything that would be healthy. You said you read his writings. What did you learn in his writings? He was writing things that were extremely dark. One of the things that I discovered was a journal he'd been writing in.

And one of the things he wrote was, I think of all the ways I can injure or kill myself, mainly kill myself, using objects or environments around me. Sometimes, not often though, I think of objects that I can't see in the room like a game. And again, as a parent, to read something he's journaling, can you imagine reading this and discovering that this is what your child's writing?

And he's 14 when he's writing this. And he's 14. He writes other things that they're all just very dark and very frightening things of a child who's clearly struggling profoundly, having these thoughts of suicide, potential harm to mom and dad or harming others. But it was terrifying. And you just realize that this is a child who really needs help.

He'd written about harming his parents. Yes. He had said that. That's terrifying for you to read. It was beyond terrifying, but he'd read, write some of those things and they are dramatically, profoundly difficult to read as a parent and even to share. And it's so painful because you know, this is not your son. This is his illness. And we're just thinking like, how can he write this? How can he be so mad at himself and mad at the world that he feels the need to write such lines of hatred and potential violence. And over the course of three months, he actually started to significantly improve. I remember one time we were given the

opportunity to go visit him while there. He ran over and grabbed mom and lifted her off the ground. actually started to significantly improve. I remember one time we were given the opportunity to go visit him while there. He ran over and grabbed mom and lifted her off the ground. And it was just... It was just so wonderful to see him experience joy and to be happy to see us. It was a very rare moment. When Charlie's at wilderness therapy, he's 14, but you find a recording that he had made when he was 12 years old that you didn't know about.

That's correct. It was... And it had been sitting there for two years. For two years it sat there. Charlie made no mention of it. We had no idea it existed on mom's phone. And you played it. Oh, yes. It was so profound. We actually call it the revelation.

That recording was the key for us to understand what we'd been missing for the last two years of how much our son was truly suffering. But we'd found it that we maybe could have done some interventions at a much earlier time that we didn't know were necessary. Charlie made this recording on his mom's phone in her voice memos, an app she never used and never checked.

While you listen to it, remember this is a 12-year-old boy speaking to his mom's phone in their home while his sister practices piano in another room. This recording is about my thoughts and feelings in the darkness that I go into. For example, today, during tennis, from the first hit to the last, I missed balls. Almost every single one of them, I was missing the balls. And

I just started getting discouraged because my friend, he was just hitting the ball so well. And I started murmuring to myself, I'm a nothing. The entire world hates me. I hate who I am. I believe that with everything that I do, I will fail. And I couldn't get out of it, you know. And with every passing thought, I thought, make it end faster. Bring the doom to me. And I just felt, felt nothing. Blank. A nobody.

An outcast. I really was thinking about suicide. Not that I actually i actually like really wanted suicide but it's hard it's like a demon possessing you he just comes out of nowhere and starts putting the words into your mouth he starts saying into your head commit suicide commit suicide commit suicide commit suicide and really in your mind you you're just thinking, no, I don't want to. I still have a whole life. And he just keeps on going, relentless. It just takes over. It never stops.

Although we're doing a lot to try and fix this, the thing is, in my heart, I believe that I can't. Darkness is inevitable. He was 12 years old. 12. It's devastating. Yeah.

Sorry. We had no idea We had no idea And I mean you go through life And you have all the sort of The coulda woulda shouldas But Have you just slid that phone next to mom

Say hey listen to this Anything Just Something that would have Just let us know that existed but if you just slid that phone next to mom, say, hey, listen to this, anything, just something that would have just let us know that existed and to hear that recording at that age, at that time, I can't even tell you how much it hurts us as parents, because like I said, it's the revelation. It just suddenly, like someone turned on the lights

because all the struggles he had with procrastination and frustrations and the social isolation, we just had no idea how deep it went. When, you know, a 12-year-old boy has that voice in his head saying those terrible things to him, of course he's going to procrastinate on work and not be able to focus. And it's just... And of course, as us, we're thinking, okay, all the times we're like, Charlie, you've got to do this. You've got to get your homework done. You've got to, and you're just thinking to yourself, oh my God, I had no idea what he was struggling with. And I'm just, oh, and you love your child. You love your child so intensely, you don't know what to do. And you feel very alone because there's very few people you can discuss it with. It weighs very heavy on the entire family. And with these mental health issues, it's not just the patient, it's the entire family as a patient. Everyone suffers profoundly

and deeply. And it's a very, very difficult, isolating journey. After discovering that recording and Charlie's writings, they decided that when the wilderness therapy program ended, Charlie needed to be in a safe environment where he could go to school and get treatment. They eventually sent him to a therapeutic boarding school called the Grove School. I guess the first thing that saved Charlie's life was wellness therapy. And the second thing that actually brought him to being healthy was the Grove School. He was there from 10th grade through graduating from high school. And in this process, slowly and incrementally, he got better. They've got advisors that are

watching over them. They have different levels of how controlled they are or how tight the container may be where the child is. And they have very intimate classroom settings. There might be four students or five students with a teacher. And for someone like Charlie, who tends to procrastinate, you can't hide. Was there a moment when he was at the school that you could breathe a sigh of relief or was it

constant? Was every day holding your breath? No, I'd say after the first year, we actually became much more confident in his path. He was doing exceptionally well in his studies and he basically was becoming healthy. He got like a, was it a 1500 on the SATs or something? 1550. 1550, but the top is a 1600. So that's, I mean, that's extraordinary. And on the ACT, which the top score is 36, he got a 35.

Unfortunately, he was rejected from a lot of schools, which was for him very disheartening, but he took responsibility for it. He says, dad, this is on me. I'm going to make the best of this. And it came down between engineering at NYU or UC Davis to study aerospace engineering. And we talked about the pros and cons, and we chose UC Davis. At his high school graduation ceremony, Charlie made an impromptu speech. For Randy, it was a sign of just how far his son had come.

This is part of Charlie's speech. About four years ago, I wasn't even sure I had a reason to live. Yet, standing here today, I think I might know my reason. It really is just to live. It's simple as that. But really, this advice extends to all of you beautiful people in the audience. Parents, faculty, students. My hope for us all is that we leave today knowing that we may have many tomorrows and that we may live life knowing that no matter what happens, we will be okay.

Love you Charlie. Love you Charlie. It's nice to hear everybody shouting out. I love you, Charlie. Yeah. Mom's a big cheerleader. What a great moment. He came home after that. Yes, after that week, he came home.

And I just was so happy for him and everything was good. Everything was good. After years of just such horrible pain and suffering and isolation, we're like, wow, okay, we're going to turn a new chapter and let's bring it on. And things weren't going to turn out that way. Because on Thursday night, this is now August 25th of 2022, I went to go up and say goodnight to him. I knocked on his door,

and the way his bedroom's configured, when I look in, his desk is around the corner, I can't see him. And I open the door and I can hear him on his computer with headphones and a microphone talking to his friends. And he's just joking around saying, oh, people, they say Nevada, but you're supposed to pronounce it Nevada. And he's just having a casual conversation with someone. So I said to myself, I'll let him talk.

We'll talk tomorrow. And I closed the door. And I didn't know that'd be the last time I'd ever hear my son speak again. The next day, he had left a note outside the door saying I was up late playing and let me sleep in, so we just go through our morning routine. His sister goes to high school, and I go to work. I'm at a medical school, and the phone rings, and it's my wife. She was just screaming his name, Charlie, and trying to explain how she found him. The sound of her voice was just pure pain and anguish.

Like her soul was being ripped in two. And immediately, before she could even say anything else, I knew. I knew. And I ran for the door. I told my colleague, I think my son is dead. And I ran to the car

and I'm to the car, and I'm just trying to get home as fast as I can, and we're on a three-way call with the 911 dispatcher. He's not responding, and as it turns out, when I was driving to our community, I was driving in with the fire truck and the ambulance. We're getting to the house at the same time, and of course, there's nothing they could do. Charlie had been gone for probably for several hours about that time. He's just lying there. And your mind is just racing. Like what happened?

How can this be? Because the past several years, you'd opened the bedroom door, you're afraid of what you'd find, but not now. Not now. I mean, Charlie made it. We all made it. After all this, it just defies belief. Your world just ends, and you just don't know how you're going to go on. You just don't know. that was august 26 2022 yes have you learned what happened well i mean for my wife jill and i we felt confident very confident this was not suicide and it took about eight weeks to get back and the coroner called me personally and said, Randy, your son died from alcohol toxicity, from just too much alcohol in his system. And also he said that he had a cardiac condition that was undiagnosed. It's a type of arrhythmia, which he said may have played a part in his passing as well.

And it was an accident. In the bathroom next to his bedroom, there was these two cans of, like cocktails in a can. There was two of those that were empty on the counter. Our speculation is that he decided to drink and drank a lot in a very short period of time on an empty stomach that would run his blood alcohol to the point where he couldn't survive. And it was just those two drinks that you found? That's all we found. And although there's maybe like two cocktails per, that'd be four drinks, perhaps he'd gone downstairs and drank something else. I mean, we had a liquor cabinet that was

in a pantry and he may have had more there and then went upstairs. I don't know. You're still discovering things about Charlie. Is part of the grief a feeling of, did I know him or I'm just getting to know him now? Well, that was one of the profound frustrations we had because we just lost those years of having our son with us and getting to know him. And we really don't know who he is. And we're just desperate to learn about our son. And we're doing everything we can

to find these scraps of information to try to build more about who he was. And this past year, I'd avoided looking at Discord because that's where he primarily communicated with a lot of his friends because I wasn't sure what I'd find. You were worried about what he might find.

Yes. And finally, as the one-year anniversary came on us, then I said, well, I've got to do this. And I went in looking at the posts that he made and I found nothing that was disconcerting those last moments. In fact, the night he passed was just, his last posting was around 1230 in the morning on the 26th. And it was just the usual teenage banter going back and forth.

But I did come across one thing that he posted four days before. And this was actually very moving. So it was at a conversation with one of his friends online. Charlie was trying to offer words of comfort and support. And this is what he typed. Always watch the sunrise as if you're a child. As a child watches it as if it was first. A Taoist quote.

If you know everything, you don't have wonderment or curiosity. Sometimes it's just nice knowing that existence itself is beautiful. Sorry for the monologue. It's a subject I feel quite passionate about. Life, I mean. And that was four days before he died. Four days before he died. I am so proud of my son.

Charlie's taught me more about grit and inner strength of character than I learned in 20 years in the Navy. He's taught me more about compassion and the value of life than I've learned in a lifetime of practicing medicine. And for the families out there that are struggling with kids

that are having mental health challenges, I understand their isolation and their fear and their grief and their sorrow and what they're going through. And it's a very lonely, isolating journey that I want them to know that others out there have been through this and can support them and want to give them strength. I just want to encourage them to never give up. When people ask you, how do you survive, what do you say?

Well, you have to rebuild your life. You spend your life putting together this very complex puzzle that has all the pieces of your life. And this event comes along and basically the table gets kicked over and the pieces are flying. And you realize those pieces will never fit back together again the way they were. One of my colleagues had lost his child about 16 years ago in an accident. And he used this expression, you no longer get to live in the ordinary world where everyone else is living. Because once you've experienced such a profound sense of loss and grief, things that used to bother you before no longer matter. You have to sort of find new purpose in

your life and new ways to experience joy. In the week Charlie was home before he passed, he talked for a long time about, Dad, I love this Star Wars program called The Mandalorian. Please let me show you The Mandalorian. And eventually I said, okay, fine. And as we watched this, he was telling me about the characters and the backstory and how he really enjoyed this. And I thought it was okay and after

that if you ask me on my own would i go watch you know an hour of the next season of the mandalorian maybe maybe not but would i watch the mandalorian with my son on the couch next to me watching tv talking to me about the characters and how much you loved it. I would do anything on earth to be able to do that again. Just enjoy the small moments with the people you love. You think you have control in your life

and you don't. You don't know what's going to happen in any given moment. And finding joy in those everyday moments is how I get through my grief. I'm much more tolerant of listening to people in their trials and tribulations of just what's happening in their lives. Because I just appreciate the frailty of life and how fragile it is and how fleeting it is. Just, I have a new appreciation on what's important. Randy, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for sharing with us, with me. And Anderson, I want to thank you for giving Charlie a voice because you gave him the opportunity to help others. And I know that's what he wants. If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. Next week's episode will largely be made up of your voicemail messages. If there's something you've learned in your grief that might help others,

feel free to leave a message. I can't promise we'll use it, but I do promise I'll listen to all the messages. Feel free to leave your name and phone number as well, but you don't have to. The number to call is 917-727-6818. That's 917-727-6818. Wherever you are in your grief, I hope you know you're not alone. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producers are Haley Thomas and Felicia Patinkin.

Dan DeZula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Support from Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Shimrit Shetreet, Ronnie Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jameis Andres, Nicole Pesereau, and Lisa Namro. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. Hey, Prime members. Are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news.

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