225: What if you stared into the abyss?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. People who are grieving a serious loss and you're staring into the abyss, they understand intimately the loss that we are all going to face, what we all will see. And I felt like the abyss was staring at me. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 225, What If You Stared Into The Abyss?

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To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership. I was born in the 50s.

My parents were together from a very young age because they met on my mother's farm. My mother had 10 siblings and they lived on a little bitty farm in the middle of the Depression. My dad went off to World War II, came back, married my mom, and they had a really typical 50s thing. Early 60s, when I was about seven years old, my dad suddenly got leukemia.

And he would show me his fingernails and his fingernails would be really pale. And he said, you know, I'm getting some blood. I'm going to feel better. And then one morning I got up in the morning, there was all these chairs gathered around and there was all these relatives there. And my uncle came up, Uncle Spike, and he told me, boy, you're now the man of the house. Your dad's passed away.

My mom was sedated in the back room. And I went from just a normal kid to suddenly I was supposed to be the man of the house. So it was a big shock. So it took me from my secure childhood into a place of just being knocked off my feet. We were living in around Dallas at the time.

Before my father died, it was a fun place where we would go fishing and camping and hunting and he would play baseball. And all of that just stopped when he died. And my mom just, she went into this weird depressive funk and she started drinking and drinking a lot. We would have to get up in the morning, get my sister ready. I'd go with her to school, bring her back home at the end of the day. And my mom would be just laying around

She went from being like a super engaged mom to not engaged at all. At about the age of eight, I learned how to write checks in a checkbook and I learned how to pay bills. Every Friday night, we would go to this bar in Dallas and I would go in and get a case of beer and a large handle of CC whiskey. And that's what she would drink. And she would just drink and smoke a lot.

That went on all through elementary school, middle school, and high school. She didn't get any kind of job. We were living on Social Security, had very little money. I had one pair of clothes that I would wear all week long. We had hardly any Christmas. My mom just couldn't do Christmas because my dad died right at Christmas. And she would not show up to the school plays. She wouldn't go to any of the events you had. And she just was completely absent.

One thing that really helped me was that the teachers I had knew we had a bad situation and stepped in and helped out a lot. My neighbors would help us a lot, but no one helped my mom, really. She just kind of wallowed in her grief and didn't quite snap out of it.

I became very unsure of everything in the world. I mean, because as a kid, you're dependent on your parents for everything and you think they're going to be there forever and they're going to take care of you. All of a sudden, there was no one taking care of us. I didn't have friends come over to the house because the house was filthy all the time. I had to wash my own clothes and dry them.

As a kid, I learned to shut down any emotion around her because if I got mad at her, she'd get really mad back at me. So she'd have these mercurial emotions that she would just lash out sometimes. She never hit us or anything, but she would yell at us a lot. I got the big talk all the time about, I need you to take care of your sister, help take care of the house. I need you to be the man of the family. That's your job.

I did not realize it until years later that made me close off all my emotions. I mean, I really became so stoic that I could hardly feel a thing. And then at about age of 15, she started coughing really bad. And it turned out she had lung cancer that then spread to her brain rather quickly. And then she started getting very sick, started having trouble breathing,

And I went to work because I was like, I've got to go to work. I've got things I've got to go do. And I came back home and my uncle said, well, we took her to the hospital. She's in really bad shape. So I go to the hospital. We watch her die. Two days later, I went back to work because I had stuff I had to do. She'd been so absent that when she died, it was almost a sense of relief. It's like, oh, good, that's done. Now I can go do what I've got to go do.

I was also very angry about her leaving us. You've now done the ultimate abandonment. Now you're not taking care of us at all. And I was mad at her about that. I was mad that she left. And I just felt like she'd kind of wasted her life. I felt very much alone and isolated and kind of like, why is the world shitting on me? What did I do to make all this happen to me?

And I was being the usual kind of teenager who's kind of rebellious. Plus the grief, plus the loss, plus the years of taking care of myself just made me be a little horse's ass to people. You know, I was very self-centered. I became an emancipated minor at the age of 17, got my own apartment and finished up high school. So I had kind of a weird childhood and a great one.

One of my jobs, oddly enough, was a Whataburger. Okay, that's a local Texas hamburger place. And one of my friends at the Whataburger said that he had a girl he wanted to set me up with that he thought I would like. I met this girl and her name was Ann. And right off the bat, we hit it off really well. She was really smart and she saw something in me.

And she kept telling me, like, you need to go take the SAT. You need to go to college. And I was talking about going to the Army or something because I had no plan. And she said, you need to do something with your life. You're smart enough to do that. None of my family had gone to college. None of my family had done any education stuff. I start going to college and I do like it a lot. I like the discourse and I found some financial aid and didn't get great grades because I was still working a lot of jobs trying to make my way through.

sophomore year of college, and graduates from high school. And she and I go on this date. And this date is seeing a local band. The band's name was called Brave Combo. They play punk polka. And we went to a punk polka Halloween show. And we go there, and she's dressed up like a clown. She made this clown outfit. It looked great.

We're walking along in the parking lot of the Student Union building, and she's talking to me about Siddhartha and Buddhism and Jesus and philosophy. And she says, look, you know, I like you a lot. I think you're a good person, but you're going to have to get with this stuff. You're going to have to read this stuff. You're going to have to think about this stuff. And you're going to have to become a little bit more of a person if you're going to be with me.

And then we go to this dance and she's out there on the floor doing the polka dressed up like a clown. And I thought, my gosh, that's somebody I think I love. And that's when we moved in and we lived together for a few years in school and then got married right after I graduated from college.

She gave me all the books. We would go get a bottle of really cheap wine. We'd take a picnic out to the graveyard and sit in the graveyard and discuss big ideas. She was always smarter than me. She was always quicker than me, but I could at least try to keep up some. I was really anti-gay. Did not understand it. Called them all kinds of bad names.

And one day I was saying something about that. She goes, you know, Bob and John, you know, these guys that are next door to us. I said, yeah, because we go over there all the time. We have dinner with them. I said, yeah, they're nice guys. We have dinner with them. She goes, you do know they're gay. I was like, well, no, I didn't. She goes, they're normal people. So you need to treat all gay people like being normal people. So she had that kind of influence on me.

Kind of taking my old prejudices and kind of tearing them down and making me see things in a new way. Made me a better person. She made me a much better person. She had a not great family, too.

Her mother and dad were really distant. Her mom was especially distant, not very engaging, and she did not have a good family. So you know how patterns repeat themselves in families. I mean, alcoholics begat other alcoholics and abusers begat abusers. And we decided we were going to be purposeful about our family and do it the right way.

I think I can categorize our marriage into three parts. We had the first 10 years where we had a lot of fun. We didn't have kids on purpose. We both had jobs. We had income. And we went on big vacations. We went all around the world. And we had just a blast. And then after about year nine, year 10, Ann said, it's time to get serious. I think we should have kids. And we have our daughter. And then we have another kid, our son.

For 10 years, she becomes the supermom. She still worked, and she was a computer engineer, so she was working a lot on that. But we'd go to every play, every concert. We'd go to everything. We would always have dinner at home. Ann was very deliberate on being a parent. Then the last 10 years, Ann really was sure about her career. She was an electrical engineer working on weapons of mass destruction.

She decided to change careers. She had kind of a crisis of faith. And she decided to switch careers completely and become a speech therapist to follow what she felt was the right thing to do. We were heavily involved in a church at the time. I was a board member of the church. My wife taught Sunday school and I taught Sunday school. We led four mission trips. I, at the time, was an HR business partner at a community hospital. I was an active runner. I was doing a half marathon every month.

Every other day, I would go out and run three miles. I was doing all kinds of volunteer work. The kid got a dog named Spud, and he was a corgi, and corgis are big dogs with short legs, and he was a lot of fun too. So we had this dog. We lived this life that was a complete opposite of our childhoods because we wanted our kids to have what we didn't have, and that was a family they could fall back on. And that's what you want for your kids. You want them to have a better life than you had.

And it was just a great life. Ann was working as a speech therapist at a local elementary school. August 2012, she went in for a mammogram and they said they found something. So we went to a high-level cancer treatment center. They redid the test and they redid the scans. And we go in to meet with the doctor. She says, okay, let me look at the reports. Let me look at the things. And she starts looking at them and her face kind of falls.

She turns to us and she says, well, this is much worse than we thought. This is spread through your liver, through your lungs. It's all over one breast. And it is a very fast-spreading malignant cancer that's difficult to control. Stage four malignancy is like a slow-motion horror show. And you think, oh, good, you know, this treatment's working better. And then the treatment stops working and it gets much worse. And every up and down gets lower and lower and

As Ann got sicker, my spirituality started waning because you can pray and hope all you want, but sometimes things just keep getting worse and worse. The God that I was praying to was either really cruel to me and my family or didn't care at all. My focus became taking care of my family. And as she got sicker too, I had to stop going to church so much. I had to stop teaching Sunday school because I had to take care of my wife.

When you're a caregiver for somebody who's really sick, one of the most important things you need to do is take care of yourself. It's that old adage about if the oxygen mask falls, put one on yourself first. So I use running as my way to get out every other day and do three miles just so I had something outside of what was going on in the house. So it was my escape. It was my way of feeling a little better.

And it cleared my mind out. It was my meditation that I had. So go through the chemo. They come back and say, good news, you know, complete clinical response. We can't find any cancer. She has a double mastectomy just to make sure. And Ann starts having these really bad headaches. So we go back. We go see the doctor. They do another scan. And they come back and they say, well, really bad news. The cancer has spread to her brain.

She has 12 plus tumors. The tumors are creating lots of pressure in her cranium. And they said the only thing we can do was whole brain radiation. So she had 20 gray units of radiation. Her headaches get better. She gets feeling better. And we see our son go off to school. We see our daughter graduate from college. That was really good. We see her get her first job.

In October, I was running a race and it was one of those mud runs. And I jumped down off of a wall. I felt my right knee pop. And I continued to run at the end and my knee swole up like a basketball, just got huge. And I had a torn meniscus and then a slight ACL tear and some other stuff. I had to have surgery on my knee. And then the doctor told me, you can't run anymore. You just can't run because your knee is not going to be able to handle it.

When Ann got diagnosed with the brain cancer, she wanted to go up and talk to her mom. Her mom was kind of distant, not very emotionally involved. And Ann wanted to just kind of set things right with her. We go up there to visit her mom and her mom just acted distant, kind of cold, didn't really want to talk. It was a very odd thing. And Ann was frustrated, but she said, you know, I've tried. I've done everything I can. I've tried. So we come back.

And then she started having other symptoms. She started having trouble walking. We did another scan and we come back that she's got more cancer. And all this occurred within about a year, 2014 to 2015. The whole time she was doing this, she was working. She's losing weight. She's definitely not looking well. She starts getting worse again. We go back and they say it's time to do a surgery, a brain surgery.

And the surgeon comes back and says, you know, the cancer is far more widespread than we thought. You don't have very long. It was Christmas time, and we had this rotating shift of people taking care of her. I kept calling her mom, saying, she's going to have this surgery. You may want to come for this. And she wouldn't come. She's going to have this treatment. You may want to come. I even called her in hospice and said, she is in hospice now. You don't have long to see her. She never came.

Right before she died, I called up her mom, and her mom said goodbye to her daughter on her iPhone, because that was about as good as she could get. We put her in inpatient hospice. She was unconscious at the time, and she never really regained consciousness, and then passes away in the inpatient hospice.

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When someone's sick with a disease like this, you know bad things are coming, but you don't know how bad they're going to be. And when she passed away, it was the oddest moment because it felt like relief. She was no longer suffering. And I felt like I had been dropped into this bottomless black pit of just despair and fear. And I was numb because I was so shocked by it all. I just couldn't take it all in. I couldn't believe it.

I just was a zombie. I remember not sleeping for a good three or four days, just couldn't sleep, just kept thinking about all that had happened. We had the funeral, and I don't to this day remember the funeral. I don't remember what we said. We wrote the service for her. We did all these things for her. I don't remember what we said.

My daughter moved back to her apartment. My son stayed with me, but he was going to go back to school. And the day he left to go back to school, I had never felt more alone in my life. I mean, I was completely alone. When you're with somebody that you've been with for a long, long time, who knows everything about you, and suddenly that person is gone, it just feels like you're cut off from a part of your life that you had and that you've now been set adrift.

Spud was like 15 years old then, and he was having a hard time keeping up. We'd go on these big walks and took him to the vet and found out that he had really bad advanced cancer. And so we had to have him put to sleep. The church there was with just kind of went silent. I didn't hear back from anybody. And I didn't realize it until months later. They just stopped communicating. And I didn't hear from anybody. I didn't hear from the minister.

And I remember one night they did a calling circle thing and they said, "How are you doing?" I said, "Well, I'm really sad, really depressed, have all these things going on. I'm not sure what I'm going to do." And they said, "Okay, well, we'll pray for you." And then they hung up. And I thought, "Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better." Before all this happened, I was deeply engaged with the church.

To have it just stop like that, it's like when you're on a moving sidewalk and suddenly you get off, you just feel this kind of weird change in momentum. And then they started calling me about my donation, like, you're up for donation time. And I realized that they were most interested in how much money I could donate or raise instead of how I was doing as a person. So I realized that my church was not what I thought it was.

I then took about four weeks off of FMLA. So I was in this job. I had four people reporting to me. I supported about 2,500 employees. I came back to work.

Two weeks after my wife's funeral, and I had taken off four weeks total. And my boss pulls me in the first day. He says, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but you've been really distracted. And you've been kind of not here. And other people have had to cover your load. So we decided to go ahead and end your employment today. When that happened, it was like, oh, fine. Fuck it. There's something else going on.

And while I was sitting there at home, the medical bills started rolling in. And she was a teacher under the Texas Teachers Program, but the medical program wasn't that good. And we figured out that once she had been diagnosed with brain cancer, they were not going to cover any chemotherapy treatments. So I ended up with almost $200,000 in medical debt rolling in.

We had built very hard to make a nice family. We had this funky Victorian house that we loved. We had a dog. We had all these things. And all of it was going away. Everything. I mean, everything I had worked for had just been blown out. That February was just a dark period. I just remember going through the motions and being able to barely function. I couldn't feel anything at all. It's like I was empty.

I couldn't watch music. TV looked asinine. People having regular conversations seemed ridiculous. People who meant well would say things that would just infuriate me, like she's in a better place or God has a plan, things like that. Those things just infuriated me.

All the loss just compounds, and that's a big thing is compound loss. You lose one thing, and it causes or has an effect on three or four or five or six other things, and you have all these things cascading down through your life.

Lost my wife, lost my friend, lost my lover, lost my history, and lost the person that made me the best person I could be. She completely changed my life, and she was gone. And my kids were gone, and I could not take care of them because I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't even hardly see straight. What was I going to be now? Who was I going to be? I did not know.

And it just felt hopeless. I felt hopeless. I felt like I was completely lost. I was scared. I was alone. I didn't know what to do. I was really at the bottom. And it was a dark night of my soul. There's something called grief fog. And I was the poster boy for grief fog. I would put my keys in the freezer. I would park my car in the parking lot and not remember where I parked it at all.

I had car accidents because I would just run into people because I just couldn't see because my eyes would be all full of stuff, like tears, but I couldn't really cry. I couldn't have the radio on. I'd turn it on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, just this weird, obsessive, compulsive thing.

I would buy groceries and leave them in the car and forget them. I would eat over the sink, whatever I would eat. I mean, could barely take care of myself. Wouldn't remember to take a shower for several days. And then I could not cry. I could not make tears. I would just think about all these things, but I couldn't. It was like I couldn't feel it. And I think you go into this weird grief fog because you're

brain is so shocked by all this it has this little protective film that comes over and you just don't feel anything for a while i couldn't sleep and i would go to bed for a little bit wake up walk around wake up go back sleep so i would walk around town in the middle of the night and get stopped by police but what are you doing out here walking around an industrial area at three in the morning

I was thinking, I'm never going to remarry. I'm going to just be a hermit. People can't live with this amount of pain. And I would have dreams about Anne coming to me and dreams about Anne saying, I want to go home. It just, these things went on and on. People who are grieving a serious loss and you're staring into the abyss, they understand intimately the loss that we are all going to face, what we all will see.

And I felt like the abyss was staring at me. It makes you different from the world around you. And you're living in this altered reality for a while that no one else seems to understand that you're in. They are changed. They are actually, I think, in kind of a special place. But it makes them really disconnected from this world. The things that people think are important are not important to someone who's lost somebody close.

There's an upside and downside of seeing things stripped away is that the banality of everyday life becomes really irritating. Making small talk and looking at what people wear or what car they drive, all that stuff just seems ridiculous and not important.

I would have these large conversations with my neighbors that kind of scared them a little bit because I would say, so what are you going to do when you die? What would you do if one of your kids died? How would you live with yourself if so-and-so happened and they were worried about me? Like, oh, are you okay? It's like, well, I'm not okay. I'm in an altered place right now.

Since I was unemployed and I'm sitting in the house, it's the house that we worked on and built. And I remember this doorframe that she sanded. And I remember this wallpaper she put up over here. And now it's a husk. It's just a reminder of all I've lost.

You are in a black pit and there is no brightness anywhere. And for me, night became synonymous with how I felt. So I would stay up and sit on the porch late at night because it was dark and it was cold and I felt cold and I felt dark and I felt empty. And it was the most bleak blackness I have ever felt.

All of these realizations I have came out on the porch because that was the one place where I could kind of quiet down. I couldn't run anymore, couldn't walk a dog anymore. So all the things I did before I couldn't do, but I could sit out on the porch for hours and hours and that's what I did. I bought a bunch of tequila and I thought I'll just drink myself silly and maybe I'll drink myself to death.

One night I got really drunk and did not help me at all. It felt much worse. And right then I understood my mom. I understood that my mom gave up because she succumbed to the blackness. It was too much for her. She couldn't take it. And she gave up. She gave up on us. I understood why it happened. I could understand why she did it. She died when my dad died. It just took her a while for it to happen.

I realized too that I did not want to be that way, that her purpose was to teach me how not to be, that I should not give up completely, that I shouldn't stop, and that I still had kids that I had to care about. Even though they were older and they moved out of the house, I was still their dad. And I realized she was my example of how not to do this.

I had to do something about it because it wasn't going to just happen for me. It was something I had to go work on and do. And I also started crying. I don't know why, but maybe I never really grieved my mom's death correctly, but I suddenly realized she was a person who tried and had failed, but she tried the best she could at the time with what was available.

And I wanted to try to. And I went back in and went to bed and I actually slept a little bit. And then that became my porch sessions from there on, sitting out in the porch in the night, trying to figure out what I could do.

And I realized that Ann, she worked up until the last six weeks before she passed away. Way longer than she probably should have. Ann was not going to give up and would not want me to give up. So even though she wasn't there anymore, she was still an influence on me. She wants you to stay alive and she wants you to do things. I was sitting on the porch one night and I realized that Ann would walk around on her chemo

and pick up trash so the drugs could get everywhere in her body. And then I realized that I needed to do the same thing. So I got a trash sack in the middle of the night, and I walked around the neighborhood picking up trash. That was a big step, just doing that little thing, just picking up the trash, because I was honoring how she had lived. And I was crying the whole time when I was doing it, but I did it.

Realizing I had taken a step, a very small step, but it was a big step at the same time. This season, Instacart has your back-to-school. As in, they've got your back-to-school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back-to-school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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And so I got a legal size tablet, a yellow tablet. I drew a line down the middle and I wrote on the left side what helped and I wrote on the right side what didn't help. And I started listing out names and people and institutions and things I was involved in and making the listing of them.

Like my neighbors were a huge help, and I didn't expect that, but they helped take care of Ann. They helped with the funeral. They helped bring me food. They would check in on me. The immediate family I had, my sisters, they were a huge help.

I realized that Ann's mother was no help at all. And I needed to let go of that hurt of her not caring about her daughter. And years later, she asked me to forgive her. And it's like, I'm not the one that forgives you. It's your daughter. You missed that chance. My job, all the time and effort I put in my job, they could care less about me as a person. If I wasn't fulfilling the role they wanted, then they didn't need me. My church and my religion didn't help.

All the volunteer activities I did, they got mad when I stopped volunteering when Ann got sick. All the things that you do in the modern world, in this modern society, a lot of that stuff really didn't help. TV doesn't work, social media, none of that junk really helps. What helps is the human connection, the people that are close, the people that care about you as a person and want to help you.

Even if the help is just sitting with you and letting you express how bad you feel. And those things that don't help, I need to just let go and not worry about so much. I still have that piece of paper with that list on there. I really did not want to go to counseling. I didn't believe in counseling. But I started going to some counseling. And I went through like four counselors.

And then I stumbled on my fourth counselor. She listened to me instead of telling me what to feel. She listened to what I was feeling and started working with me on exercises I can do and things I can do. And I suddenly got the idea that it was okay to cry. I mean, as a man or male of the 50s and 60s, you didn't cry and cry.

My daughter and I now have a list of every restaurant we both have cried in throughout the town. I kind of broke and I started crying and started being more emotional. And I started working through the grief bit by bit by bit. And then I found a program online called Writing Your Own Grief.

They send you prompts and you write the prompt back. And the people in the class read what you write and you read what they wrote. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Soul searching, gut wrenching, writing how you felt. And after I got done with that program, which was like several weeks, I felt a little different. I felt a little lighter about it.

Sometimes you have to open the wound up and directly facing the grief instead of just closing myself off emotionally and not letting it affect me. I could have chosen to gone down the easy road of drinking myself to death. I could go all the way deep into it and really explore the grief.

It's like picking at an abscessed tooth with a toothpick over and over again. I mean, it hurts like a son of a gun, but you're exploring the hurt. And that helped me a great deal. I started going through the bills, protesting each denial and talking to all those people about the bills. And I got the bills knocked way, way down.

I would come home and the house was empty and dark. And I thought, no, I want somebody to greet me when I come home. So I started looking for another dog and I found a corgi puppy and his name was Harvey. And that dog gave me something else to focus on rather than just my own pity, my own misery. So I got to work on that dog and the dog worked on me. I think he also helped save my life. I started looking for a job doing what I really wanted to do and

And I liked aviation a lot, so I got back into an aviation company and found a job that I really liked. I realized that work-life balance was really important. I am a lot more sympathetic to somebody when they've got something going on in their lives. And I worked up a thing with our health insurance carriers on how we can get the best coverage for the employee and not get stuck with huge drug bills and surprise costs. So I became a better boss because I was a more real person.

I started dating off and on and I'd have a bad day and have an okay date, but nothing spectacular. And I was going out to eat one night and I met this woman and she was a oncology nurse. And we started talking and then we decided to set up a date and we went to Starbucks and we closed the Starbucks down. We just talked and talked and talked and got fit right in. And this was about 18 months after Ann died. When you're dating as a widower,

you really feel like you're cheating on your wife, even though they're dead. And that was a hard feeling for me to get through. She wasn't threatened. And so we started dating exclusively and then we got really good and we moved in together. And then last year we got married.

And we moved out to a small house on a lake, retired early because working at the job I had was great. The boss I had was great. But it's not about making money in the grind, the nine to five grind.

We retired and we decided one thing we wanted to do was travel. So we would go rent sailboats in different locations and sail around for a week or two. And then we also would go on bike tours. So we would go to Europe, Greece and France and Germany, and we would bike around. We've done four of those trips and we have another one planned coming up.

I've got two dogs now. It's a whole different life that I didn't expect and know and could not have predicted. In my darkest, bleakest hour, I could never predict I would have this kind of life here, being as happy as I am.

Jenny lives and loves large, and that's big for me. I have kind of this renewed sense of adventure and awe, seeing things in nature and being out in the world and engaging the world. And you don't know how long you've got.

Anne's passing punched a hole in my bubble and made me realize that if you live all bottled up, it will not go well. And made me realize I needed to feel the emotions, I need to work through the good and the bad, and that's helped me kind of make a new life.

And I tell you, it's like if you've ever not exercised for a while and you exercise and you're really sore, if you've not emotionally felt things for a long time and you start feeling them, it kind of hurts and it's kind of surprising how strong the emotions are because you're just not used to feeling that much. It took some adjustment for the people around me because I was always kind of stoic and now suddenly I'm all emotional. I'm always hugging people.

And it's a bit uncomfortable at times for me, but it also feels like the right thing to do. Made me a more authentic person. I'm surprised how good my second part of my life is. When you're down in that hole, that bleak place where you can't feel anything and all you see is blackness, there is no way for you to imagine blackness.

a better place. I mean, you just, it just does, it's not there. And you can't jump out of the hole and be all better. It takes time and effort. It takes a willingness to feel and to listen. No matter how bad things are, how bleak things become, you start doing just one little thing at a time. That's what you got to do. Just focus on the immediate step in front of you.

And if you do that, you can improve. But you have to work at it. You have to be open to people around you who will help. And you have to be ready to feel things you didn't expect to feel. It's very hard to realize you have to save yourself. And no one's going to save you. You have to pull yourself up. It seems so overwhelming and so impossible. You have to just start with one small thing at a time.

And just going out to pick up trash that one night was my one small step forward. I've heard people that have had a fire, a house fire, that when their house burns and they've lost all their possessions, it's an oddly freeing moment. And I realize now that when my house caught on fire, figured to leave by my wife passing away, it made me examine my whole life. And it gave me a chance to redo it in the way I felt it should be done.

You never know who's going to help and who's not. And you never know what's good for you and what's not until you're knocked all the way down to where you have nothing left. And then you have to work your way back up. Then you start seeing. I started understanding I need to feel again when I thought about getting another dog. Because I thought when Spud died, I thought, that's it. I'm not going to have a dog because I don't want them to get old and I don't want them to die. And that's what will happen. And I'm not going to go through that again.

That's a bad part at the end that's going to happen, but you're going to miss a whole bunch of really good stuff in the meantime. That dog made me realize that I should love again. And to love a lot means to hurt a lot when you lose somebody, but it's better to love a lot and hurt than to not feel anything at all.

Today's episode featured Frank Vaughan. If you'd like to reach out to Frank, you can email him at f.vaughan at verizon.net. That's f.v-a-u-g-h-a-n at verizon.net. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agarne.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.