The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: Guiding Lights
Episode Date: November 1, 2022In this episode, stories of the voices that inspire us, comfort us, and help us navigate the world--sometimes in defiance of science or logic. This episode is hosted by Moth Artistic Director..., Catherine Burns. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Hosted by: Catherine Burns Storytellers: André De Shields is inspired by his sister and muse, Iris. Bud Trillin and a Chinatown chicken play tic-tac-toe. In the wake of an unfathomable loss, Francine Lobis Wheeler must navigate grieving in the public eye.Â
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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. This time we have three stories
about guiding lights, powerful voices and forces that shape us, even when they can't be explained by
science or logic. We're going to hear about a magical bird who played humans and
often beat them at Tiktok Toe, and the story of a young murdered boy who appeared
to his grieving mother in the series of dreams not long after his death. But
first, those voices that, if we listen carefully, guide us in our decisions.
Scientists are now finding that the nerves in our digestive system are so in tune with
us that they act almost as a second brain. There's a reason we call it having a gut feeling.
Mr. Andre DeShields is a Tony award-winning actor. He told his story when our friends
at the Broadway show Hades Town lends us their stage for the night and celebration of the Moth's 25th anniversary.
Andre originated the role of the Wizard of Oz and the groundbreaking 1975 Broadway production of the Wiz.
As we rehearsed his story, he realized that his biggest number from that show
was thematically in line with the Moth story he was telling. And so, in the Moth first,
we let him end his story in the song.
Here's Andre De Shields live at the Curth Theatre.
It's the month of January, colder than a
witch's tit in a brass bris here. The circumstances portend something momentous is about to happen.
When?
Boom!
I was evicted from my mother's womb.
A prodigious 12 pounds at birth.
I would later learn that the weight of the 12 pounds was the weight of dreams deferred. My parents brought 11 crumb snatchers into this world.
Six boys, Sylvester William, John, George, Jeffrey, Andre, five girls, Desney, Edwina, Mary, Carmen, Iris.
When I was old enough to have an adult conversation with my parents, I asked my mother, Mom, why
did you have so many children?
She answered, well, Andre child, I told your father that if he ever put anything on it,
he wasn't getting in here. Mom!
Is that really what you wanted to do?
Have so many children that you couldn't take care of them?
She says, no child, I wanted to be a chorus girl.
That's the term she used. She didn't say
dancer. She said, I wanted to be a chorus girl. Well what happened? Well my
mother, your grandmother said to me, ain't no decent colored daughter of mine gonna
shuffle her way through life.
We barely shuffled our way off the plantation.
My mother being born around the turn of the 20th century.
I had a similar conversation with my father
who wanted to be a singer.
I had a beautiful ten of us
and he sang in community choirs and in church.
His father said to him, how are you going to be a responsible father and husband pursuing
an irresponsible career as a singer? My father deferred his dreams.
I thought that somewhere in that mix of 11 children, the ex and why chromosomes of the deferred dreams of my parents, with
commingle, with coordinate, with collaborate, with consummate finally, in the
conception of one of the children who would manifest those differed dreams.
I'm lucky number nine.
My muse was my sister Iris.
I asked my mother, why did you name her Iris?
It's such a beautiful name.
Do you know what it means?
She says, no child, I just like the name.
Well now we know that Iris is an ancient Greek name identifying the goddess of the rainbow. Now, Iris was the first person in the family to
see me. I mean, really see me. She recognized my kingly potential as I recognized her warrior goddess attitude.
Iris was my protection.
When the bullies would come after me, after school,
Iris would say, uh-uh, leave my brother alone, or I will tear your head off your neck and
shove it up your ass.
Now you have to appreciate that the 12 pounds I weighed at birth grew into a kind of jiggly belly.
Not because I was obese, but because I was malnourished.
And you know if you're not getting the right nutrition,
if you're eating one-to-bread and sugar all the time,
your belly is going to swell.
And I would walk down the street and it would move.
So they nicknamed me jelly belly.
Immediately after that, they shortened it to jelly.
Now, why jelly?
Because jammed on shake like that.
I would go to school with my books on my hips, just, you know, jelly and all over the place. And of course, the guys who thought it was cool to be dumb
would come after me.
And Iris came to me one day and she said,
you know what, I can help you.
Take those books off your Tootsie Roll hips. Put them in a belt, throw it over your shoulder,
and everything's gonna be all right.
She was my protection.
Iris was my inspiration.
Iris introduced me to the adult life of blue lights
in the basement.
Iris taught me how to dance.
We did the chicken, we did the Lindy, we did the Watt Tussy,
we did the Birdland, we did everything,
and we did it strong.
We would pop, pop, pop, shabop, bam, boom, all night long. And we made a pact.
Let's be entertainers together. And we vowed to one another. We dance or we die. Now, we both want us to get out of Baltimore.
I got out by being the first child to go to college.
Iris could not get out of Baltimore because she couldn't get from under the strong hand of our devout Christian mother. So she married at the age
of 16 and that gave her egress out of the house. We kept in touch as I traveled and I said,
Iris, any time you want to call me, just drop a dime. That's the late 60s, early 70s.
Well, call me collect, and we'll talk.
1975, I achieved my first national attention
as the title character in the Wiz.
But more exciting than that, the Wiz did a three-city pre-Broadway tryout, and the first
city it played was Baltimore, Maryland.
So the entire family came out, and Iris came with her two children, and we sat and we talked and we talked about the vow that
we had made. And she said, Andre, I'm so proud of you. I said, thank you, Iris. She said,
but my dream, I said, don't even say it. And then we were gone to Detroit and then Philadelphia and then New York.
And then my phone rang and it was sister Iris.
And she said to me, Andre, I hear voices.
I said, so do I.
I said, what do your voices say to you?
She said, they just call my name.
Iris.
Iris.
Iris.
I said, do you ever answer?
She said, no, I said, why not?
She said, I'm afraid.
Iris, I'm gonna come and visit you as soon as I get a chance.
The chance came two years later, 1977.
I visited Iris after she had been visited by the Big C.
The Big C took her hair.
The Big C took her weight.
The Big C took her weight. The big C took her breasts. The big C took her cervix
And she said to me as I visited her in the hospital
Why me?
I said Iris don't go there. You have two children who love you
You have a husband who loves you. You have a husband who
loves you as well as he can. And when you go to heaven, you can take your dreams with
you. Remember what your name is. Iris, goddess of the rainbow, and what do we know about rainbows?
That somewhere over the rainbow, dreams do come true. If you believe within your heart you know that no one can change.
The path that you must go.
Believe what you feel. I know you're right because the time will come around It's your
Believe there's a reason to be
Believe you can make time stand still Stand still and the know from the moment you try.
If you believe I know you will. Believe in yourself right from the start.
Believe in the magic inside your heart believe all these things
Not because I told you to
But believe in yourself.
Please believe in yourself as I believe in...
...Yen... Thank you.
In a career spanning more than half a century, Andre DeShields was the triple crown winner
of the 2019 award season, garnering Tony, Outer Critic Circle, and Drama Desk Awards,
as well as a Grammy for his universally praised role as Hermes, Messenger to the Gods, and
the musical Hades town.
He's an actor, director, philanthropist, and educator who had roles in the original Broadway productions of the full
Monty, play on, ate misbehaving, and of course, the whiz.
Andre and I recently sat down to talk more about his family.
My father at the age 50 died.
I was 17.
However, that raises the stakes for me thinking
that I was going to run out of time in my own life
to become the embodiment, the manifestation
of the deferred dreams of both my parents,
that even to this moment continue to inspire me.
Although I do not believe that my parents are
in heaven looking down upon me,
I do know that they know that I have achieved
because of them.
We talked about how Andre felt he was truly seeing Iris
for the
first time when she told him about hearing voices. And what I wanted Iris to
understand was this, the voice that you hear calling your name is another
iteration of you, the you that wants to be free, the you that sees a different path, the you that sees a way to be your most authentic self.
If she would hold on to that seed of information, it would eventually make sense. It would eventually be enlightenment.
But in 1977, she died.
That was Andre de Shields. He's currently starring in the revival of Death of a Salesman
on Broadway.
Coming up, the writer Calvin Trillin and the mystery of a chicken who plays Tic Tac Toe. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
Music
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media and Woods Hole Massachusetts and presented by PRX.
This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. In this hour we're
talking about unseen forces in the world. Next up, a story recorded at the New
York Public Libraries Celeste Bartos Forum.
For repartored with live from the NYPL, here's Calvin Trillin live at the mall.
I live in Greenwich Village, which I usually describe as a neighborhood where people from the suburbs come on Saturday night to test
their car alarms.
Some years ago I fell into the habit of taking out a town guest for a walk in Lormand, Hatton, which start out of my house,
go through the Italian South Village,
through Soho,
spend an awkward two or three blocks
in the machine tool district,
then little Italy,
and then Chinatown,
where after a dim sum lunch,
the guest was permitted to play Tic-tac-toe with a chicken.
This was a real chicken in an amusement arcade on Monts-Rey.
I lived in a glass cage.
The glass cage was outfitted with those backlit letters that you're familiar with
if you wasted your childhood playing pinball. On the cage were words like birds turn, your
turn. And there were buttons you could push to put your excess where you wanted them.
When you did that, the chicken would go behind what was called the thinking booth.
Peckets answers.
And if you beat the chicken, you got a large bag of fortune cookies, worth probably 35 or 40 cents, and it only
cost 50 cents to play. But the chicken was very good at tic-tac-tum. Everybody I took down there looked over the situation and said the same thing.
The chicken gets to go first.
And I would say, but he said, chicken.
You're a human being. Surely there should be some advantage to that. And then
many of them, not all of them, but a distressingly high number of them would say, the chicken The chicken plays every day. I haven't played since I was a kid.
They were wise to get their excuses in at the beginning of the game because none of them
ever beat the chicken. Ticken was very good at Tick Tack Toe.
There were different explanations to explain why this was true.
Some people thought a computer was involved.
Some people thought it was a very intelligent chicken.
In my house, it was common to refer to somebody we'd met who seemed particularly
clever by saying she's smart as a Chinatown chicken. Even before I started taking people down there, the writer Roy Blunt Jr. told me that from
what he had heard once, the chicken had been trained by former graduate students of B.F.
Skinner.
You know the legendary behavioral psychologist.
I always hoped this was true,
since it was a reputation of the false teaching.
The gradual work is of no value in the everyday role.
And it turns out that Roy had been accurately informed.
A former graduate student of B.F. Skinner
had gone with her husband to hot springs, Arkansas,
and started training animals, including chickens who could play tic-tac-toe.
In fact, it turned hot springs, Arkansas, into the small animal training capital of the
world.
It also happens to be Bill Clinton's hometown
As far as I know those facts are unrelated
But there is sort of a cottage industry of animal training in hot springs I once interviewed a man who ran a place called Educated Animals, the former IQ Zoo.
He had a Vietnamese pig who drove a Cadillac,
a parrot who roller skated,
and an act that consisted of a chicken dancing while a rabbit played the piano and a duck
played the guitar.
I said, what tune do they play?
He said their choice. And then the chicken died.
I was, of course, hard-porkin'.
I was cheered by the story about it in the New York Times, which was a beautiful story.
Obviously, somebody who had played the chicken many It was head respect for an opponent even after being beaten by the chicken that many times.
I've seen congressmen sent off with less effusive obituaries. There were still people in Hot Springs, Arkansas who trained chickens, but the chicken was
not replaced.
Another one of those electronic games came in its place.
From what I heard, the animal people had put some pressure on the arcade not to have the
chicken. They can be quite persistent.
I once wrote a column about something I had heard on CBC in Canada that a hummingbird
was as much as a quarter. That's an interesting fact.
What I made me think was, does it weigh as much as two dimes in a nickel?
But my daughters were sort of alarmed by how you'd go about weighing a hummingbird.
They always seem to be in motion.
To set their minds at rest, I said,
we've all seen those nature documentaries
where somebody shoots a stunt dart into a wildebeest
and after a while, after putting some tracer on it,
wakes up and it's as good as new.
You do the same thing with hummingbirds.
The hard part isn't even hitting them with that little
bit of dark. The hard part is slapping them on the cheeks to bring them around.
The animal people objected to that.
Once I happened to mention in a column that corgis are a breed of dog that appear to have
been assembled from parts of other breeds of dogs.
And not the parts those dogs were all that sorry about losing.
You'd be surprised how many corgi owners there are.
Well, I was my hopes for the replacement of the chicken were dash when it was obvious that
the animal people were not going to give up.
They said that a chicken playing tic-tac-toe, that was demeaning to a chicken.
I wish they could have seen the film clip that I've seen of B.F. Skinner himself playing
Tick-Tack Toe with the chicken.
B.F. Skinner is smiling, but if you look closely, it's a nervous smile. Being one of the giants of behavioral psychology, he knows how good that chicken is in Tic-Tac-Toe.
The chicken is looking supremely confident.
He knows he is about to beat in Tic- Toe, a distinguished professor of psychology from Harvard.
Dominic?
That chicken is stinky with self-esteem.
Thank you.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Thank you. That was Calvin Trillin.
He's a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, and also the Nation magazine's Deadline poet.
If you'd like to read more about the chicken, you can read Mr. Trillin's original New Yorker
story, which goes into more detail about the famous foul.
You can find a link at our website,
TheMoth.org.
Coming up, a murdered six-year-old begins appearing in his mother's dreams with messages.
That's when the Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,
and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour by PRX.
This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.
I'm Katherine Burns.
Our final story is one that touches on a tough topic.
It may not be right for all of our listeners.
It's told by the luminous Francine Lovis Wheeler, whose son Ben was murdered during the
shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
It's not an easy story to hear, but Francine is one
of the kindest, funniest, and most honest people
have met in all my years at the moth.
And so you're in the best of hands with this story.
Live at St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn, here
is Francine Loebis-Fueller.
and a little bit of love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love And I said, I can't sleep. I can't eat.
I can't breathe.
And he said, honey, just try to relax.
You know, go lay down.
And I said, no, I can't.
I can't.
And I was like that,
because 11 days before that, on December 14, 2012, our son Ben was murdered
in his first great classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
So that Christmas morning, I really couldn't do anything, but David, my husband, he convinced
me to go lay down so I did.
And I was so exhausted that I immediately fell asleep.
And as soon as I was asleep, I looked to the side of the bed and there was Ben. He didn't say anything. He just
opened the palm of my hand. He kissed it. He closed the palm of my hand. And I woke up and I ran to David and I said, oh my gosh, D. Ben came to me and he kissed my
hand and I know why, I know why and he said why. And I said because of the book I used
to read to him, the kissing hand, where the mother, the mother raccoon, she kisses her son
Chester's hand when he's scared to go to school.
And she says, just know that my love for you is always there.
And so that's what Ben gave me that day.
So then after that, I was asking him to come back.
Please come back.
Show me another sign.
Please come visit me.
Please, please, please, I miss you so much.
And sure enough, a couple weeks later, he did.
He came back in another dream.
And in this dream, I was standing in the second floor of an elevator,
and I went to the first floor, and then I went to the basement and the doors opened.
And there was Ben.
And he said,
Mommy, you made it.
I'm so glad.
And we hugged.
And we kissed.
And I said, I love you.
And he said, I love you.
And it was real.
And he said, but mama,
I'm happy, but we're really worried about you.
Don't let them trademark you.
Now, when Ben was alive,
he wanted to be smart like his big brother Nate,
and he would often use these very long words
to try and sound smart,
but sometimes the words didn't always match the sentence.
And so in the dream I said to him, are you sure you mean trademark?
And he said it again, don't let them trademark you, mama.
And then I woke up. And I told everybody about the dream, what do you
think he meant by trademark? Do you think he meant Sandi Hook shooting? What was it?
What did he mean? What did he mean? And in the meantime, that all this is going on,
when you lose somebody that dramatically, that violently, that suddenly, you go back
and you rethink things over and over and over again,
and I kept thinking about the last day of his life, over and over and over again in my head.
And it was an interesting morning because I was getting Nate and Ben ready for school,
and I suddenly realized that Nate had book club, and I said,
oh my gosh, guys, I forgot, we got to drop off Nate first.
All right, get your stuff together.
We got to move.
We got to move.
And I'm trying to clean up.
And I'm stacking the dishwasher.
And Benny comes over to me and he says, mama, what
is forgiveness mean?
And I was like, oh, Ben, why are you asking me this right?
Now come on, we got to go.
We got to go.
And he said, no, no, mommy.
What is forgiveness?
And I said, I don't know, Ben.
It's like when you do something wrong and the other person
forgets about it.
Now come on, we gotta go.
So I pack him up, we get in the car, we drop off Nate and I say to Ben, okay Ben, you
want to go back home and wait for the bus?
Or do you want to go to Starbucks for a treat?"
And he said, starbucks.
So we went to starbucks and he ordered a chocolate milk.
I used to tell the story and said, hot chocolate,
but then I found the receipt.
It was chocolate milk and we sat down and he said,
you know what mama? I'm gonna be an architect when I grow up. And I said,
wow, Ben, that's amazing. And he said, no way, wait, wait, I'm going to be an architect and
a paleontologist because Nate's going to be a paleontologist and I have to do everything Nate does.
And I said, well, you know, you're your own person, Ben, you don't have to do whatever
your brother does, and he said, oh, no, no, no, I'm always going to be with Nate.
I love Nate, and I love you, Mommy.
And I said, I love you too.
You know, it's so nice to just be here, just the two of us.
We never get that chance to do that.
And then he said, Mommy, can I have your iPhone?
So I gave him the iPhone.
Yeah.
And a couple of minutes later, I took him to school.
And half hour later, he was dead.
So I kept reliving that over and over and over. Did it happen?
Was it that special?
Did we really say I love you to one another?
What was that?
And in the meantime, that this is all happening,
new town where the school is, is just exploded,
like a bomb has gone off, and everybody is traumatized, and there are
grief counselors and trauma specialists flying in from all over the country trying to help
us make some sense of any of it.
And, and, and, wow, this is all going on, you know, we're just, we can't breathe, and
I still have to raise my other child.
So I take my son, Nate, to Lego Camp one day in the middle of all of this craziness.
And I walk in the door and I see these women and they're talking and they look at me and
they stop talking.
And then I keep walking and I could have sworn I heard one of them say,
she lost her son at Sandiok.
Another time I went to the grocery store, I still had to get groceries
and I'm shopping and I see this woman. She looks at me.
She starts to cry. She goes in the other direction.
Most of the time the goes in the other direction.
Most of the time, the conversations in the grocery store, I'd run into somebody I sort of knew and they'd say,
Hi, Fran, how are you?
Oh my God, I shouldn't have said that.
Oh, I don't know what to say and I'd say,
I don't know what to say and then they'd say,
I think about you all the time,
if there's anything you ever need,
we should get the boys together and I'd say,
I like that, that would be together. And I'd say, I like that.
That would be great.
And they wouldn't call.
And I thought, I just want people around me.
One time, I was running a 5K for my son Ben's charity.
And I'm doing the run, and I meet this other runner.
And he says, tell me about your son's charity.
And I said, well, it's in honor of my son Ben,
who died at Sandy Hook School.
And he said, oh my God, really?
And I said, yeah.
And he said, oh, I remember where I was that day on December 14.
And I thought to myself, please don't tell me
where you were that day.
I don't want to know.
I just, but he did.
He did.
And he said, oh yeah, we were going to have a Christmas party for my company.
We heard about all those kids and teachers getting shot, so we canceled the party.
We gave all that money to Sandy Hook,
and I went home and hugged my kids.
It was an awful day.
Yeah, I was so pissed at him.
I couldn't understand why he would do that.
Another time, one day, I was out, and this woman came up to me and she said,
I don't know if you know me, but I'm from Sandy Hook.
And I thought, oh God, please, don't tell me.
Don't tell me how this makes you feel.
I don't want to know. I really don't want to know.
And she said,
to know and she said, I happen to be at Starbucks on the morning of December 14th. And I said, oh, and she said, you know, I'm not really in the habit of eavesdropping, but I happen
to notice what a beautiful conversation you were having with your son that day.
And I thought maybe you'd want to know, or I could tell you that.
I said, thank you.
And I started to weep and weep. And she said, oh my God, I'm so sorry I didn't mean to upset you.
And I said, oh no, no, no, no.
You have no idea what you did.
What is forgiveness, mommy?
It's when somebody does something wrong and the other person forgets about it.
You know, I've had almost nine years without them. something wrong and the other person forgets about it.
You know, I've had almost nine years without been.
And in that time, I've often imagined what life would have been like if he had survived
the shooting.
And I bet I would have said something stupid or put my foot in my mouth or said too much or made it about me when I
talk to a victim's family. And I get it because we don't know how to grieve in
this country. We don't know how to grieve in our culture. And I'm not mad at those people anymore. I forgive them. Don't let them trademark you.
That's a little different. My husband, David and I do not have the luxury of not being trademarked by the Sannyhoek shooting because our son Ben died that day.
But nobody can trademark my kissing hand,
my beautiful conversation at Starbucks.
For the six years, three months and two days that our son Ben lived, nobody can trademark
my love for him.
Thank you. Friendsine Lobis Wheeler is an actor, singer, songwriter, teacher, wife and mother to three
boys. She has performed in regional theaters and sung with swing bands and recording artists.
Friendsine is the creative director of Bins Lighthouse, a nonprofit promoting empathy and
compassion for children, and she runs
her summer camp based on her original programming puppetry and music.
Currently, Francine and her creative team are in pre-production on her teleplay Just Five
Minutes, which will be filmed in stream next year.
With the music in bulk written by Francine, Just Five Minutes is her journey through grief,
trauma, and survival.
I recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Francine.
How should people act around a grieving person whose personal loss is tied into national or international events?
Like, were there things that people did that were helpful to you at the time?
If they come up with ideas, and if all the answers are no, that's okay.
For example, if somebody were to come up to me and say,
would you like an ear?
Would you like a cup of coffee?
Would you like me to come visit?
Would you like to be left alone?
Would you like me to bring you dinner? Would you tell
me what is the best thing right now that you need and I will sit and listen? So what often
happened was let me know if you need anything or I can't imagine what you're going through
and there's nothing I can say, so you tell me.
The problem with that answer is it requires the grieving
to be active.
And I mean, just to give you an example
what the evolved do you have,
and I was in bed for a couple of days.
And I didn't even realize that's what I was doing.
But it was those people I had a friend that came in to my house
and brought me a meal and then left.
You know, and that, not that you have to cook for people,
my point is that if you are an active listener and an active
doer, even if that means you want to be left alone.
Do you want to be left alone?
Ask that brave question,
what's the worst thing that can happen?
The grieving person could yell at you,
yes, is it about you?
Nope, it's about their loss.
So don't worry about it,
just try and be courageous.
Just offer.
Offer. It's a great way to say it. Just offer.
I totally forgotten that in some version of her story,
we talked about you seeing Joni Mitchell's both sides.
That song is about Joing Reef. It's about doing both at the same time.
In one of the drafts of your story, you wrote out,
but now old friends are acting strange. They shake their heads.
They say I've changed. well, something's lost, and something's gained, and living every
day.
That makes me tear up, you know, because, you know, there are people that were pissed.
Ah, they were pissed.
They didn't, they wanted the old friend, and that friend died with Ben.
How can I erase Ben's existence? Because that's what people are asking me to do when they want me to be that friend died with Ben. How can I erase Ben's existence?
Because that's what people are asking me to do
when they want me to be that friend.
They want me to be the one, you know, that goes,
okay, we gotta move on.
You had a new child, we're all good now.
No, I'm sorry, that doesn't work like that.
Do you think there are limits to your forgiveness
or is it wide open?
I told my story to recently to middle schoolers and I talked about forgiveness and they immediately
said, do you forgive the shooter and the shooter's mother? And I say, no, no, I don't need to.
I don't need to. That's not part of my story.
They're not part of my story.
So I forgive myself for sending Ben to school.
I forgive others who don't know how to grieve
or to honor the grief.
I forgive them because it doesn't help me to move forward.
And so the forgiveness is about acceptance and acknowledgement.
But it doesn't mean I have to be friends or be happy around those people or bring them
into my world.
It just means that I can accept their actions and understand it and move on from that.
And that's where my forgiveness comes from.
That was Francine Lopez Wheeler. To see photos of Francine and Ben, go to the moth.org.
To see photos of Francine and Ben, go to themoth.org.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time.
The Moth Radio Hour
This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Katherine Burns, who
also hosted and directed the stories.
Co-producer, Vicki Merrick, Associate Producer Emily Couch.
The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Jones, Jennifer
Hicks, and Meg Bulls, Kate Teller, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cluche, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant
Inga, Gliddowski, Sarah
Jane Johnson, and Aldi Kaza. Special thanks to Ken Melamed, Molly Ringwald,
Sue Liebman, and the team at the Curr Theatre. Most stories are true as
remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the drift
other music in this hour from Chet Baker, O'Donnell Levy, and the Westaways.
We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and special thanks to the Ford
Foundation's Build Women's Leader Program for its support of the Moth Global Community Program.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts,
and presented by PRX for more about our podcast, for information on pitching this your own story and everything
else, go to our website, TheMaw.org.
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