Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - grief, pt. whatever

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

This week, we're taking a tangent -- my dad, Mike Loftus, passed away two weeks ago, and this episode is twenty minutes about that. I've needed some extra time to get our upcoming episodes together, but I've wanted to share more about him and the last two weeks. I really miss him. We'll be back to regular episodes next week. As promised, the links: Obituary: https://www.waittfuneralhome.com/obituary/MichaelP-Loftus  Patriot Ledger writer Eric McHugh wrote this really comprehensive, thoughtful piece about him: https://www.patriotledger.com/story/sports/2024/07/24/family-hockey-were-ledger-bruins-writer-mike-loftus-twin-passions/74518399007/  My dad's good friend Mick Colageo, another hockey writer, remembers him here: https://bostonhockeynow.com/2024/07/21/colageo-boston-bruins-reporter-mike-loftus-a-pros-pro/ And the podcast I pulled a clip from is from Pucks with Haggs with Joe Haggerty, featuring Mick and fellow hockey writer Steve Conroy from The Boston Herald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimCsyfw3Hk&t=590sSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

Answer, a new podcast called Wisecrack, where a comedian finds himself at the center of a chilling true crime story. Does anyone know what show they've come to see? It's a story. It's about the scariest night of my life. This is Wisecrack, available now. Listen to Wisecrack on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoolZone Media. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, but I can't be perfect all the time. Don't like me a star, let's take it to a far, then give me one moment. Sixteen minutes of fame

Sixteen minute in a face Sixteen minute in a face One more minute in a pain I'm not so bad when you're saving your mind by Hi, this is technically an episode of 16th minute, a podcast where I would and will continue to analyze and interview the internet's main characters and what their moment in the spotlight meant for you, for me, and for them. But this week, for our 13th episode, we are interrupted. And if there were an episode number to be interrupted at, why not this one? so if you follow me online you're possibly aware my dad passed away two weeks ago his name was mike loftus and he was 65 years old so if your dad's older than that it should have been him

fuck your dad in fact the entire time this series has been in production dad was either really sick or more recently really dead when the show first released on may 7th i carefully composed an Instagram post while in a hospital room. And I'm a clinically obsessive, compulsive person so I can tell you with precision, the different locations this show has been recorded. Most interviews and dialogue so far and a few episodes that haven't come out yet were recorded in a hospital bathroom, a hospital break room, in a study room at a public library near a hospital on my mom's sofa in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, or in this really depressing twin-sized bed I bought for my brother and I to sleep at our childhood home while dad was in the hospital. So, you know, if you,

if you ever thought there was anyone but me writing these, here's your confirmation that there's not. If I can't get an episode out, it doesn't happen. And I really appreciate my producer Sophie and producer slash editor Ian for bearing with me here. This episode isn't a memorial or an obituary. This is an episode about the last two weeks. And all of the notes that I've taken during the last two weeks. And it's not because I don't want to honor my dad in a public way. I very much do and will continue to. I feel this kind of probably delusional urgency to put something down and to try and say something about these two weeks. So this is an attempt at that. Pretty sure that I will not feel a lot of the things that I'm recording here in a matter of weeks or days or maybe a

in an hour. But I'm going to put it here anyways. And if you want the normal show, oh, also, if you happen to be interested in my dad's obituary, you can check out some links below. My family and I and my dad's colleagues have written a lot about him. And you'll notice the same repeated things in all of them, that he was great at his job as a hockey writer. He was really funny, and then he loved his family. And those are the three sentences that I've seen the most. And they're all true. So it's not that I don't want to say those things. I do, but I don't know. I mean, how soon after someone is gone do you start to reduce them to three or so sentences? Because those three sentences can be factual, but they don't, to me, really feel adequate. They don't

feel complete. Anyways, I've been grieving, which is annoying. And the only way to express that grief after a funeral is over and you've already had to explain to TSA, that those are your father's ashes and not a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of cocaine is by talking about it on the internet, which isn't insincere, but it can feel that way. And granted, I'm super lucky. I can't imagine going through this without a job that has given me the freedom to record everything in and around hospitals instead of wondering what was happening from 3,000 miles away. But the actual feelings are just so consuming. One thing I've realized is that I hate having a universal experience because every universal experience has already been done by people way hotter and

smarter than you millions of times. And so what's the point? But you have to. So I'm having the universal grief experience and I'm letting my hair turn into a solid and I'm walking around for hours at a time listening to Rainbow Connection, even though I know my dad's thought that song was stupid, which it's not. In the past two weeks, I also can't seem to get anything done. Having OCD often means for me that I can hyper-focus on work instead of thinking about other things, but I've lost that ability. And my brain is really latched on to what my real obsession has been in the past year or so, which is a habit of documenting everything I possibly could about the last year of my dad's life. I'm talking hundreds of notes, thousands of blurry,

badly composed pictures of depressing spaces, hundreds of hours of illegally recorded conversations with my dad and his doctors, and let's say for legal purposes, nobody else. It's just this big box full of stuff that I've compiled that isn't my dad's final year of life, but it is a version of it. And for the last two weeks, it's this stuff that has really been kind of eating my brain alive. The notes habit is nothing new. For me or for you, I've always taken a lot of notes. And it's a pretty catching habit when you're the kid of a newspaper reporter, even if I didn't have really any interest in what my dad was reporting on.

I could have really take it or left hockey, but I loved watching writers. My dad's career spanned from when he was in college in the late 70s until, a couple years ago, and he worked at the same local newspaper that whole time. So much of my childhood was consumed by his industries collapsing entirely. But when I was little, the newspaper still existed in a very real way. And I remember going to the sports department and getting a reporter's notebook, which is a small white and blue spiral notebook identical to the ones that my dad would write in at the hockey games. He'd bring us to the press box in once a year. And I didn't understand what he was writing in the notebooks really, but he wrote down everything, it seemed, whether that was

about hockey or notes on just the daily beats of his own life. And he kept a lot of these notes all the way up until he died in these boxes that are now in our house. He kind of had a hard time parting with things that he saw as meaningful or even saw potential meaning in. And these could be his own notes or they could be mine. For the last few years of his life, dad sorted this stuff in boxes in the house we'd grown up in. I know that because he wrote down how he had done it. Where in our house, he'd been organizing things on a certain date, how far he got, how he felt about the process. And like any parent, he'd remind us to come home and check it out. And even when I actually did, the work never seemed to be fully done. Around the time he retired in late 2020, the same time

as the pandemic and his cancer diagnosis, he asked my permission to sort through stacks of my old notebooks and art projects from when I was a kid. And I said yes, because I knew it would drive him up a wall if they were just sitting there. And honestly, I didn't think he'd find anything that would really surprise him. We were friends. It was stuff I felt he probably knew. He composed these boxes of old compulsive writing I'd done, fuzzy notebooks full of chicken scratch describing what everyone in the room I was sitting in was wearing and what was hanging on the walls. Because in the early 2000s, no one clocked this behavior as a child with severe OCD. It was that Jamie wanted to be a writer.

And that's why she was getting bullied by the children who took the notebooks and looked at the terrifying shorthand she developed about their clothes. But also, the idea that I wanted to be a writer was true. Writing things down, released the anxiety. It gave me something to do and I was afraid to talk to people. It produced something that I hoped might turn into something else. The way that I'd watched my dad's notes and interview cassettes and handwritten transcripts turn into something in the newspaper all the time. So we didn't know that there was an unhealthy element to this obsessive documentation.

And in the case of me and my dad, it could often be tremendously helpful in our work. Here's one of my dad's colleagues talking about how careful. carefully he would observe things and how it was sometimes frustrating to him to realize that other people weren't paying as close attention. Mike was one of those guys more than anybody else that like he would ask a question of the coach and you'd be like, shit, I didn't notice. I wish I had noticed that. Like you would, you know, you would always, you would learn stuff or be like, damn, how did I miss that? Based on the questions that Mike asked consistently. This would happen a lot.

where you'd be like, wow, he really noticed that. He's really studying what he's watching. He just has a knack for it, too, where he just picks up on things really quickly like that, like all those things with the Bruins. You would learn very quickly that he would ask questions that nobody else was sort of thinking or going in a whole different direction

than other people were thinking. And he was kind of watching on a different level a lot of times. And oftentimes, too, like, other people would jump on and like, you know, take something from him. or share it with him where I think he would get a little aggravated because he'd be like, I did all the work, I came up with this, and now all of a sudden it started into everybody's notebook leave, like what that. Yeah, yeah, it's true. He was like so good and so brilliant like that. He had a brilliant hockey mind. He really did. It is really weird and cool to listen to the

hockey community talk about my dad like this because everything they're saying is true and you could apply the same approach to how he did just about anything that was important to him, whether that was as a parent or a friend, or in my case quite often, an unpaid editor. He noticed as much as it was in his capacity to notice, and I learned how to process the world by watching how he did it. And weirdly, it seemed that one of his regrets was that he hadn't documented even more. My dad lost his dad to the same illness at about the same age, something I'm sure didn't bother him at all. But anytime we talk about my grandfather, who I don't have any memories of, He expressed this regret at not asking more questions and not writing more things down,

this feeling that he was missing something. And I thought about that. And so when in the same position, I did what I often do, which is overcorrect to the point of excess and, in some cases, breaking the law. So I started writing notes within about 10 minutes of kissing my dad on the forehead one last time. The first note says this. Dad died at about five in the morning. Not that he'd know, but dying on day two of my period is really fucked up. Tim, Greg,

murder on the Orient Express slash the Wizard of Oz. I can untangle this note. The first part is obvious. The second part is an excellent joke under duress, I think. The third part are names of a crematorium guy and a funeral home guy. And the fourth part is the last book and movie I consumed while my dad was alive. And this was an obsessive thought pattern I'd been having for months, the idea that at some point you have a library loan that will outlive your father and you don't know it yet. Or at some point, your entire life will change in the space of a bottle of gummy vitamins, but you have to keep taking them, stuff like that.

My notes from the next couple of days were pretty lean. They were notes from the last episode of 16th Minute on Naomi H, which I insisted on releasing the day after my dad died like a fucking weirdo. There's a note from the day before dad's funeral that says, car, clothes, Ben, babies, dinner, upload pictures, finish playlist, USB drive. There's the note I made for his eulogy that says, hat yes, not using, Twitter bio, Hallmark movie, effortless. versus effort. Come on Eileen. Dream about walking down the stairs. I feel that all this stuff is important, but there's no real reason to keep staring at it or anything from the last year because there's nothing I can really do with it. A lot of it is illegally recorded conversations with a

dead guy, and even if I could use them, I wouldn't want to. So as I've been going through these boxes of stuff that dad left behind because he thought they might mean something to, to someone, I'm realizing that I've accidentally spent a year creating another box for someone else. Two weeks ago from when I'm writing this, I am exactly 3,001 miles away and asleep on that twin bed I was telling you about. Two weeks ago, minus an hour and a half, my mom and brother are at the side of that twin bed telling me that dad has gone. Two weeks ago, plus an hour and a half. I'm giving my dad's syringes of all these things and keeping a careful record and kissing him on the forehead for what I don't realize is the last time. I can't keep thinking about

all these numbers. They're true as I'm writing this, but they'll be different by the time I record it and different by the time you hear it and on and on and it will only just get further away. The day where dad tells us his cancer is back is further away. The night before we go to the hospital and watch peewee's big adventure is further away. The days I don't remember, but have been obsessively documented by him and me grow further away. In these two weeks, I've found myself kind of chafing at every googlable element of grief, all of the aphorisms and steps, and what seems to be a multi-million dollar industry around people telling you you're doing great and that your loved one has joined the rest of the faceless souls in the great mayonnaise jar of bygone.

humanity. I understand why it works and I don't begrudge anyone who gets anything out of it, but it doesn't work for me. It lacks specificity. It feels like the goal is to arrive at a place where someone you love who taught you to look at everything you possibly could is better suited in three sentences because it might make you feel better. Last week, I went to the beach, which I don't usually do, But while I was there, I kind of deluded myself into thinking that I was convening with his spirit. My dad hated the beach on a conceptual level. I kind of hate the beach. It just felt like a place to manufacture this kind of moment.

And I tried to do that a lot in the first week. Last week, my brother and I convinced ourselves he was a rabbit the morning that dad died because, I don't know, he liked a rabbit, and there was a rabbit nearby. But something that worries me about losing someone this important is that it's so tempting to turn them into someone in your mind who tells you that everything is fine. And on a long enough timeline, they turn into a framed photo in your apartment and three sentences and a voice in your head that occasionally tells you you're doing great. And I keep worrying that in a year, will I even be carefully considering what my dad might actually think, or will I just be talking to somebody who I've made up?

Here's a part of a note I wrote on the beach. Whatever stupid Etsy jar or credit card bill I'm paying off so we could be with you, I have the real pieces, and someday I'll look at them again, and you'll be right there. I'd tell you what stage of grief this is, but Google doesn't work here. just the word to be borrowed cash to get over easy eggs. I have it all for some day when I need to have it straight, I promise. So when I go over these notes, I want to know what my dad would think because he's an interesting person. And I guess I've always thought that because when I was in middle school, I made this convoluted chart of things that I thought were interesting, revealing that I have

been either remarkably consistent or deeply and curious in the almost 20 years that have passed since I made it. I still regularly talk about Lemony Snicket books, the book Lolita, and as I dedicated an entire category of my interests, the life and times of Mike Loftus. And the reason that I know I said this is because my dad put it in a box for me to see. And that means he knew I wrote that down too. We would text about this stuff intermittently. He'd send me something he thought was funny or occasionally something that made him sad because he didn't always realize the points when I was a kid where I was lonely or obsessive in a way that was more harmful than we thought. He really looked through all of these boxes and now his boxes are back with me. What he'd left us of his own obsessive observations

of his life and the boxes that he'd made of my own. I don't know if this is healthy. I suspect it isn't because in terms of raw material, it's too much. A lot of it is useless. You know, if you've ever lost someone and had to go through their house, you can relate this like sinking feeling that no matter how carefully you look, you're going to miss something. And of course you are. I mean, it's really painful to see boxes full of someone who isn't there and it's exhausting. And I know my dad felt the same way because the boxes his mom left behind when she died had started to mildew in our basement. But I have this fear that if I let myself reach the bottom of these boxes, a part of him disappears. I'm voluntarily tossing him into the mayonnaise jar and somehow surrendering to the

idea that three sentences could be good enough. I don't think my dad would want me to be cycling on these thoughts this much. You probably knew I would do it, but I don't think it's what he would really want for me. And now there are his boxes and my boxes, and I have to decide what's important to me. And I'll give money to mediums and buy crystal bracelets until I die. That's how I was raised. But I can't see my dad in a rabbit or a sunset right now, not in these two weeks. I can't see him in three sentences. The closest I've gotten are two things that I've found in a thousand boxes. The first is a letter written inside of a Valentine's Day card from my dad to me from who knows when. Part of it says, I know you'll be a good girl and we'll take care of mom, Ben, Reese, and

bug, but please don't forget to take care of yourself too. Get enough sleep and make sure you have some breakfast before school. I'll call you before you go to sleep tonight. Don't worry. I won't be gone too long. I love you. Love dad. And even though this was probably written when I was 10, I think that this is a little closer to what he would want for me. But I don't know if it's something I can give to myself. I think I'm always going to wonder if I had asked another question or arranged another box if things would not feel this bad. The second thing is a cassette tape I don't remember ever having existed. It's almost exactly 25 years old and it was recorded on a road trip that my dad and I took together, the only one we ever took alone,

from Brockton, Massachusetts to a family reunion in South Carolina. At the time, I'm almost six, and I remember this trip. In my memory, we listened to a mixtape we'd made that had one of dad's songs, and one of mine. There was a time we heard the song somewhere out there from an American tale, and I started crying because I'd never been that far away from my mom before. I remember him teaching me how to swim in a motel pool and drinking the most amazing hot chocolate I'd ever had at a diner in Maryland. I remember almost nothing of the actual reunion. It was the trip and these little memories of being excited that I was spending time with just my dad and he wasn't at work. And we could be silly and listen to music and see new things.

And the tape. Okay, it's still July 29th. We have driven 42.6 miles, and it's 1141. It's my dad making a document for, I don't know if he knows who. Me someday, maybe, but there's so much random stuff on it that you almost get the idea that it's also for him. And the interesting thing is, is that here at 1141, 42.6 miles into the trip, and 19 minutes before midnight, we're stuck. In construction traffic on Route 95, getting a little bored, a little hot, but I don't want to turn the air conditioning on. I just don't know what I want.

By a few raindrops. Does it mean more? Does it mean less? Are we driving into a storm? Or is it just that? Just a few raindrops. I don't know. And there's no way to know unless we keep going.

I almost didn't find this tape. It wasn't really organized into anything but a shallow box of otherwise. empty tapes. But everything I remembered was there, crying about my mom. And we both just got a little bit sad because we heard a song that reminded us of home, but we think that maybe after Jamie gets a little sleep and in a few hours when we stop and grab something to eat, that we'll start to have a little bit more fun then. It's tough for my little daughter. Let's see if she wants to say anything. Hey, miss, me, mommy.

The hot chocolate in Maryland It's 9.30 in the morning now and Jamie and I just went and had our breakfast. It was called the Barnside Diner and it's in Temple Hills, Maryland. And we took our time and Jamie had like two awesome hot chocolates even though it's going to be 90 degrees today.

And all of these things that I didn't know that my dad thought or worried about. It was all there. And we'll see how it goes from there. But it's gone great now. just, my Jamie Loftus just went back to sleep after listening to her back street boys. She slept two hours, and I think she was up another two. I'll have to go back and check, but she just, she's just a little wonder.

I love this girl to death. You know, not really to death. I just love her so much. She's very peaceful, I hope she gets a good sleep. And there's no person I can make up in my head. or seeing in a rabbit or whose memory could be a blessing or three sentences that captures the feeling of finding this and putting it in a boombox and knowing that all that time ago he was taking notes and hoping someone would find them at some point. But down the line when my kids

asked me what was special about my dad, I'm lucky that I will be able to open a box and show them. Okay. All right, let's see. I just wanted to say, now, I've been turning this on every now and then so we can keep a record, right? Yes, a little bloody, bloody, bloody, black record. Yes. Well, anyway, I just want to say before I forget that. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtenen and Robert Eust. Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sat 13. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will out with us all. Bye. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. And every Tuesday, I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.

Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated.

Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.