Sorry for your loss: comedian Michael Cruz Kayne

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It felt like of the utmost importance that I not
sell out how much I love my son and how
painful it was to try and get a laugh. So
that's like always part of the calculus is like I
can get a laugh here. I know how to put
a joke here that will make these people laugh. Do

(00:21):
I want that laugh?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, comedian
Michael cruz Kane on what happens when you turn a
devastating loss into a stand up comedy show and why
telling the truth about grief is such a powerful thing
for yourself and sometimes for the world. Settle in everybody.

(00:45):
All of that and a lot more coming up right
after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note.
While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in
our time, yere together. This show is not a substitute
for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or

(01:06):
for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, So,
like many people, I first learned of comedian Michael Cruz
Kane back in twenty nineteen when he posted what became
a viral thread on Twitter he wrote, quote, this isn't
really what twitter is for. But ten years ago today,

(01:26):
my son died and I basically never talk about it
with anyone other than my wife. It's taken me ten
years to realize that I want to talk about it
all the time. End quote. What followed after he posted
that tweet was an outpouring of both support and storytelling,
with thousands of people sharing their own stories of grief,
many of them for the very first time. Michael hears

(01:49):
a lot of grief stories now, almost as many as
I do. He hears them via social media, but also
from the audiences of his one man show Sorry for
Your Loss, and from guests on his award winning podcast,
A Good Cry. It turns out that people actually like
talking about grief when it's a conversation between real human
beings and not like some weird rewarmed collection of condolence

(02:13):
card one liners. Michael krus Kane is an Emmy nominated
and Peabody Award winning writer for The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert. He's been an actor and a stand up
comedian for years, with numerous shows to his credit. But
here's the thing a lot of writers and actors pull
from their personal lives to influence their work, and we've
had a lot of them on the show, people like

(02:34):
Timbay Locke with her Netflix show From Scratch and the
poet Maggie Smith with her book You Could Make This
Place Beautiful. Pulling from your personal life to feed your
creative professional life totally a thing that people do all
the time. But Michael krus Kane is a comedian. How
do you take a devastating personal loss and turn that

(02:57):
into comedy? This week on the show, so we get
into the complexity of making theater out of personal tragedy.
We also talk about how to break devastating news, usually
right before somebody goes on stage for their own set,
and we talk about why Michael cruz Kane is fine
with being thought of as the grief boy professionally speaking,

(03:19):
if it means that more people get comfortable talking openly
about grief. So let's get to it. I am so
glad to have you here with me today. We were
talking before we got ruling about being sort of internet
social media ships that pass in the night, So I'm
glad to like actually finally get to face to FACEY.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yes, absolutely, we're like secret but public secret admirers of
each other. Ooh, I am you.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, I love the public. I feel like that should
be a T shirt or a band name public secret admirers,
or or an or an expos or something. Oh my gosh, okay,
keeping to I was gonna say keeping two funny people
on track, but then I don't know how funny I
actually am. But anyway, all right, So there are so
many There are so many places we could go, including
whether or not I'm funny, but that's not the topic

(04:11):
of the show. That's a separate podcast to dissect my
sense of humor. Anyway, So I feel like I I'm
trying to do a new thing here. Normally, I like
jump into what people are up to and what you've
learned about life so far and all of these things,
and I feel like it skips over the reason we're here.

(04:36):
So I would love to start with Fisher, if you're
open to that. Can you tell us about him? Introduce him?
To introduce us to him?

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Yeah, So, what is a version of this that is
under a thousand hours? My wife and I. My wife
got pregnant with twins in two thousand and nine. The
pregnancy was very complicated all the way through and our
sons were born at thirty two weeks identical twin boys,

(05:08):
Truman and Fisher, And there had been at least one
point during the pregnancy where we thought we would lose one,
if not both, of them. And they had something called
twin to twin transfusion syndrome, which means that one of
them gets an excess of nutrients and one of them
gets a deficit, and it's really bad for both of them.
And we had a laser ablation procedure done during the

(05:31):
pregnancy that seemed to like correct all of that, but
it was still like very touch and go the whole way,
And we had a stretch in the NICKU, the neonatal
intensive care unit, where we felt pretty confident that they
were both going to leave the hospital with us. I mean,
like after the laser ablazing surgery. We assumed incorrectly that

(05:51):
we would at some point in the near future be
at home raising two sons on his while a thirty
third day we got a call from the hospital we
would go and visit them every day and spend hours
and hours at the hospital holding them, et cetera. On
the thirty third day, before we got there, one of
the doctors called us to say that something was happening
with Fisher and we needed to come right away, And

(06:12):
by the time we got there, everything was so bad,
and he had developed something called evolvulus, which means that
his intestines had detached from the wall of his abdomen
and twisted around and there wasn't really any coming back
from that. He developed something called sepsis. And you know,
from the phone call to when he died actually was

(06:34):
a very short amount of time. It happened insanely fast.
That's the story of his sort of existence as a
regular person in the world. In addition to that, there's
you know, all the thinking that you keep doing in
all the ways in which he continues to live, and
that my wife and I and are living children try

(06:55):
or so say, try to keep them alive, or without trying,
he remains alive. And so.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
We're going to get into how that relationship continues over
the course of our time together. But thank you for
sharing your family.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
With us, Thank you for asking.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Absolutely there's something in there about the abruptness of all
of it. Right, Like I was reading the Ted interview
that you did, and you shared the story and you
said I'm sorry if that news felt abrupt and blunt,
but that's how it was abrupt and blunt.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, I mean it was really shocking just to go
from every part of it, but to go from like,
you know, having one vision of your life to trying
in vain to erase that so quickly and like, actually,
it's going to be something very different from that. And

(07:51):
you know, there's compounding the grief that would exist if
my wife and our twin boys at that time were
the only people in the entire world, that would have
been an immense amount of grief. And then there's also
a lot of other people that are alive in the world,
and so there's like a re griefing every time someone says,

(08:12):
oh my god, how are the twins, And you have
to be like, dude, I mean this sucks for you
and for me, but I know you just like wanted
me to say great, but one of them died and
having to do that over and over again was brutal
and not anybody's fault, just people trying to be nice.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, being the bearer of bad news over and over
and over. Like I remember that that cost benefit analysis
of what do I say right? Is now the right time,
and I can't not, like it's such bizarre math.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, And also being a comedian, a lot of the
times that I would get that sort of innocuous question,
it would be like at a like right before someone's
going on stage at a comedy show and they're like,
you know, they're about to do fifteen minutes about how
spending time at the barber is is so silly, and
just before they go on stage, I'm like, oh, and
my son died, And it's like, well, I've just ruined

(09:10):
your entire evening, if not your month by telling you
that at this time.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, And there's like there's no good time for that, right,
But it's like the what are the options that are
available to you? Because if somebody asks, you can't lie.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
That's very true. And also you asked about the abruptness
that was the origin of this part of the conversation.
One of the things that helps the abruptness for other
people was like social media was telling people on Twitter
or Instagram or Tumblr or blog spot or whatever that
this had happened, so that they could deal with their

(09:48):
reaction to it over a long period of time. Yeah,
Like they could hear it on a Monday on our
blog and then not see me for two weeks, and
I've sort of processed a lot of whatever they were
going to feel in the interim, so it didn't feel
like it was because it's I use the word traumatic,
but it's a lot for someone to hear that information

(10:10):
and feel like they have to respond to it in
the moment. It's very scary for a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Absolutely, And it's interesting too because like you and your
wife didn't get that grace period, You didn't get the
time to absorb the information before needing to make a response. Yeah,
but we kind of in a way get to get
is the is not the best word here, but like

(10:34):
we get to offer that to others in some ways,
like a cushioning for the news that for which we
had no cushion.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, and you want that for them, but also you
want it for you because one of the things that
can happen in situations where you're sharing something traumatic that
happened to you is you know it's it's two months
later and you have processed it in some way. It's
still brutal, but you found a way to manage it.
But this person's never heard it before, so when they

(11:03):
hear it, they're ten times more sad in this moment
than you are. And now it's like, oh shit, I
got to make you feel better about this thing that
happened to me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
It's such a burden on the person at the center
right to have to suddenly shift into that position of
caretaking in some ways minimizing, right, like it'll be okay,
like we did you find did you find yourself? Sometimes
saying things that you knew were absolute garbage, but they
just like leapt out of your mouth.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Anyway, I'm sure I did. I mean, so much of
that time is hazy. Yeah, so I don't remember exactly
the kind of stuff that I said. I would say
it was more frequently people saying stuff to me that
was meaningless and trying to be like, thank you so much,
thank you so much, the blessed, the bless your heart,

(11:53):
the bless your heart.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
They're like, oh that thanks, yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Gotta go, And no one ever saying that made me
mad or that was like distressing. It was just like,
sorry for your loss is something that the first ten
times you hear it, you're like, that's very sweet. The
fiftieth time you hear it, you're like right, I think
there are a lot of different worlds in which people
have like that thought process of like I don't understand
why they were upset by what I said, or they

(12:19):
were disappointed or didn't move them in the way I
thought it would, And it's like, well, they've heard it
a billion times, Yeah, so it means something different to
them the billionth time.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yes, that is one of a zillion different reasons why
people don't tend to talk about their grief openly or
casually or really get into it with a lot of people.
And that was kind of true for you too, rite
like in the tweet that launched the world here, like
you had said that for ten years or so, you

(12:48):
really only talked about your family's loss with your wife.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Yeah. I mean I think unless somebody asked me about it,
which was pretty rare. Not that people were unfeeling, there
were more just like there was sort of like one
you'd have one sentence or two sentences about it, and
then it's like, Okay, what do you guys want to
order or whatever? Yeah, so I think most of those
conversations happened between me and my wife and then Yeah,
on the tenth anniversary of his death. I tweeted about it,

(13:15):
and that changed my perception of what it is to
have to feel grief because so many people responded to
it with stories that were all dissimilar to mine in
many ways, but at the core I was able to
relate to them very strongly, and they were able to
relate to one another.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
I think, like that tweet about Fisher's death that you
wrote on the tenth anniversary, that was probably the first
time I met you, Like full disclosure, I'm quite sure
I didn't know you before then. Power of social media,
but I kind of want to know two things. For
people who haven't seen it, tell us what it was about.
But what I'm more curious about is what changed for you.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Every year on the anniversary of his death, I would
write something and put it on whatever social media thing
I was using at the time, and on across all
platforms I was, I guess I wouldn't say unpopular, but
not popular. So I was tweeting and thinking, you know
that this is I hope Anderson Cooper sees this. It

(14:22):
was really like, okay, well, the people who follow me
on any of these platforms are a few of my
friends and my family, and it was just a way
for me to connect with them about this thing that
had happened, and to talk about the progress of Truman,
our son who survived, and to talk about later on
talk about Willa, our daughter. And on the tenth anniversary,
I tweeted this thing about Fisher and about how I

(14:45):
felt about grief and how the way that I felt
that it was portrayed or that I was able to
express it in conversation felt so flat and one dimensional.
And what I wanted to share was that grief is
multi dimensional. It's infinite, it's ongoing, and you, as a

(15:06):
human being, are finite, even though it feels like this
feeling is, you know, from the center of the universe
and the beginning of time. And what changed after I
tweeted it was that thousands and thousands of people responded
with kindness and support, but also with brutally sad stories

(15:31):
of their own. And it made me aware of the
fact that there were many many people out there who
had had something brutal happen to them and didn't feel
like they had any place to talk about it. And
one of the things that social media could be good
for is that you could be anonymous if you wanted to,

(15:52):
but Bandit six nine sixty nine could tell you on
Twitter about the saddest moment in his life, and if
he was ashamed of the sadness, you would never have
to know that it was him. And so all kinds
of people poured out these beautiful and distressing stories of
their sadness, and it changed the way that I felt

(16:15):
really about the world.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
There's something really powerful in that about like the anonymity
if you so choose it, the space to be allowed
to tell the truth about something that you've been carrying.
I kind of have two minds about this. One is
like if somebody asks you how you're doing, and you
start telling the truth about that and sharing it and
they come in with, like, my goldfish died when I

(16:38):
was seven, I know just how you feel Like that's
grief hijacking, right, Like that's that's not cool, But it
sounds like you had the good side of the experience
of people sharing was to feel like so many of
us are carrying central grief, central sadness, like these formative
experiences maybe, and they're like the silent foundational background that's

(17:05):
sort of always running, but we never get a chance
to talk about, right until there are these like little
portals that open up. One of the things that's always
bugged me about sort of grief memes and flowery grief
language is the whole like you're not alone thing. I
think the way that we use that is like, see,

(17:25):
other people have suffered too, so don't feel so bad
because there are other people with you. But that's not
what you took from that, right, You didn't take like
other people are also suffering, so I can not be
so sad or something.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, I mean it didn't minimize the suffering. To me,
it connected it. I see what you're talking about there,
And I think it's a fine line because I do
think there is some comfort in knowing that you are
not alone, because I think part of what's distressing about
grief is it feels so isolate. It feels like my
son died and I walk outside and people are going

(18:02):
to seven eleven, Like what are they doing? Yeah, And
so to realize that like even those people in there,
the one ordering this, like the slurpy or whatever, something
fucked up probably happened to her and to the guy
who drives you in the cab. And to know all
these people when you look on the subway. If you

(18:23):
could somehow tap into their inner lives, you would find
that eighty percent of them have had something horrific happened
to them, but they're not wearing it. So you think
you have a special sadness that no one else has
ever experienced. It doesn't take away from the sadness to
know that other people have felt it. I love the sadness.

(18:47):
I like it's part of what sustains me. I don't
know if that's a perverse thing to say or not.
But knowing that there are other people out there who
speak it's like you speak a language, but you don't
think anybody else speaks it, so there's no you can't talk.
But finding out that actually everyone speaks it, we're all
we all secretly speak it is a very comforting thing.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yes, I love this because this is sort of foundational
for me. Here is that so many people are carrying
around things that they think they're not allowed to talk about,
or they've tried to talk about and they've had it
minimized or dismissed or hijacked, so they just stopped speaking.
When you stop speaking, it doesn't mean you don't have
anything to say, right, So There's something so powerful in

(19:31):
being allowed to tell the truth of your own experience
and knowing that that's going to be heard and reflected. Like,
I love that. This is sort of like the the
cure for the loneliness inherent in grief is being allowed
to tell the truth about how bad this is or
how hard this is.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, I remember when I first started to do this
work and I would go to media outlets or when
I was shopping my book around the first time, and
people would be like, this is great. We so much
need a different way to talk about grief in this culture,
but nobody wants to talk about grief, so we pass.
And I'm like, you know why nobody wants to talk
about grief. It's because the ways that we talk about
it are reductive and it'll make you stronger and grow

(20:13):
through what you go through and all of that stuff.
And when you when you put parameters around the conversation
like that, nobody wants to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Because those platitudes, when the people who want to talk
about grief hear them, I don't like. My gut response
with all love is fuck off. Yes, you know what
I mean? Like, yes, Like you know, he's in a
better place or whatever, which those aren't even things people
ever said directly to me, but I see them. I
see them like you know, when you walk through the

(20:41):
condolences section of the card store, you see stuff and
I'm like, man, I am so lucky not to have
anyone in my life who sent me some of this bullshit.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
It's so weird, like otherwise intelligent people with good relational
skills will say and send the most stupid stuff. And
I like, so, I know that people have good intentions
and they're awkward and they like they don't know what
to say. But I think one of the reasons that

(21:14):
it's so important to have these conversations is to talk
about what really helps and what really doesn't. Because we
want that relatedness, right, Like, we want to be able
to support each other, but the platitudes and the language
that we have is never going to get us there
to that kind of connection.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
Yeah, and you want to feel like you're talking to
a person, Yes, So when you hear someone say something
to you that clearly has been cribbed from you know,
a workbook about grief that they got from their grandmother's
church that they went to once, you're like I'm oh,
we're not having a conversation. You are reciting to me

(21:51):
something that you said, and you're doing it with love.
You're you're doing what you have been taught to do
to like try and boost me up. So I did
a show in the city about fish Sure, and after
the show, a woman came up to me and we
talked about the show, and she mentioned that she had kids,
and I was like, Oh, how are your kids and
she said, well, I mean, you know, at least they're alive,

(22:12):
thank god. And I was like, oh fuck, that's a
brutal way to respond to this. But at the same time,
I was like, oh, you're a person, like you're telling
me what this made you think. But my thing made
you think is oh shit, I'm so glad my kids
are not dead. And that felt so real to me
that it was like, Oh, I'm so happy to talk
to you, because so many people would never tell me

(22:34):
that thought that they had, And of course it makes
sense that you would think that, And of course everyone
who comes to see this show who has a child
that hasn't died, I'm sure they think that, and it's
nice to have someone say this thought that I know
people have had to me, that's a great relief. I
can't speak for everyone, so I don't want to encourage
you necessarily to parade the non death of your living

(22:57):
children in front of other people. But for me, it
felt like a relief.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, there's an honesty in that and a realness that
is absolutely missing from the sort of rehearsed script book
that we've inherited around what to say to a grieving person,
right like, go off book. People like this, this is
nuts and it's it's a big stretch. I mean, one
of the one of the things that I hear you
say or have read you have read that you've said, gosh,

(23:25):
my my language skills speaking of language skills are kind
of atrocious today. What is up with that? But that,
like being awkward, is actually the best move.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
Right, Yeah, well, I think just for me, and again,
I want to speak for everybody. I like a real response.
I like someone saying the thing that it made them feel,
because I don't know how to everyone else is boring
and I don't need to hear the platitudes. There's no
there's no point for you or for me in that

(23:54):
part of the conversation. And I should also say I'm
over a decade out from him dying. Yeah, I might
not have felt this way the day after he died.
I think my feelings have evolved. Maybe I needed Maybe
the platitudes would have been all I could have handled.
I truly barely remember anything anyone said to me for
months after that, so I don't know.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, you and I have the same grief timeline. So
my partner died in two thousand and nine, so we're
at the same weird marking of time of before and after.
And like, I feel that like there are things that
I remember because I'm a writer and because I wrote
them down and because I started talking about them. But

(24:36):
so much of those early days is such a fog
and such a haze. And I think that that's just
part of being human, is that the edges get dulled.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
I think that's a big question about cataclysmic grief or
just something of this force that when it happens, the
thought of surviving it can actually be kind of offensive.
Do you remember that part? Do you remember that part
of feeling like I don't want to have anything to
do with this.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
I think I'm sure not unique, but a rare situation
that we found ourselves in was that we had another
son who was not in any way at that time
moved by what had happened, you know what I mean,
Like he's just been born, he needs to be fed,
he needs to be changed, you know, he needs the

(25:31):
support of parents, and so we had no choice. But
like it was automatic to keep going in spite of,
you know, the parallel grieving that we were doing. So
I think it helped us stay in motion, which we
desperately needed. And maybe, you know, in other ways it

(25:51):
postponed our dealing with some of the feelings that we
needed to deal with. I'm not even sure. I'm just
speculating that that almost must have happened. There wasn't any
reckoning with what should I do now. It was like, well,
this and life just got here, and we love him
very much, and so we need to deal with that.

(26:12):
And truly, if Truman had not lived, I don't know
how we would have splintered off from the path that
we are on right now. But I don't know that
we would have survived that.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, there's something about the immediacy of action needs to
be taken that I think is really really helpful in
early grief. For a lot of people. Whatever that looks like, right,
like that shortened horizon line, and certainly with the newborn,
like the horizon line is like just a few minutes ahead.
There's like, yeah, feeding and changing and trying to get

(26:46):
sleep and trying to remember to feed yourself and all
of that stuff. There's something about the mechanics of life
that can be really stabilizing when something completely destabilizing happens.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, that's exactly exactly right. I think there is comfort
in the things that have to be done. And having
spoken to a lot of people over the last few
years about grief, one of the things that almost everyone
has advised for people who are going through something like
in the middle of the trauma now is to just

(27:20):
give yourself something to move forward, Not like you know,
you have to write a play or anything, but like
just literally if it's just today, I'm going to shower,
Like even that it can be enough to change your
whole outlook on the world.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah, and it really is shortening the horizon line, but
also lowering your expectations of yourself, right, Like, Yes, what
was a great successful day that you felt good about
before this happened. You cannot compare now to then right
like now, in those early days, it's like you took
a shower. That is a fucking way fail ent, that

(27:57):
was amazing, right, and like that exactly like woo, that
is a hard one and there's something there's something about
Like I feel like a lot of people ask me
questions about later grief and what that looks like and
how did you get from the early days to where
you are where where there is a bit of buffer
between that and like everybody that I talked to and

(28:19):
thinking about myself, I'm like, honestly, I don't even remember,
Like I don't know, I don't know, I don't know
how we survived from that moment to this moment, but
that it was made up of much shorter chunks of time.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yes, absolutely, I think it's.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Really hard to think about, you know, from those early days,
how am I gonna get to ten years from now,
fifteen years from now, and you just can't possibly know that.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
I think that's absolutely right, And I think that the
thing you said about lowering the standard is so right.
Just like give yourself permission to do any fucking thing
at all, Yeah, and that will be that's what you did.
What did you do? You ate a cookie, dude. That's it. Yep,
you die today that the day is done.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
The day is done. And a thing after a thing
after a thing after a thing makes life.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
So I want to talk about your show. You mentioned
your show. Now you've got two shows. So you've got
your podcast, which is a good cry, which you open
with all of your guests. You open with what your
relationship to grief? Which is such an amazing question. I
have occasionally swiped it from my own show, but also
your live show, which is not currently running. You close that,
but I want to talk about that for a minute.

(29:35):
I want to talk about both shows because you are,
by profession, by trade a comedian, and the combination of
comedy and baby death are not exactly pairings that you
would normally make.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yes, that is true. In fact, Jason Cinnamon, who's a
writer at The Times, I wrote an article about sort
of grief in comedy and included a bunch of talked
about my show. I'm trying to think off the top
of my head. And now who else you talked about? Alyssa
in Paris? I know was one a bunch of like,
really phenomenal, smart, funny people also writing about grief, and

(30:18):
I read through the comments because I'm an idiot, and
the comments were almost completely, well, no, not completely, about
fifty to fifty half of them were reasonable human beings,
and half of them are the kind of people who
would comment on articles, And a lot of those comments

(30:38):
were things like you know, how dare you make jokes
about X Y Z. And a thing that I want
to assure people who have not seen the show is
that I don't think there's anything funny about the specifics
of what happened. I'm not trying to make jokes. It's
the saddest thing that's ever happened to me, and if

(30:58):
it's happened to anyone else, it's probably the saddest thing
that ever happened to them, And I hold that pretty sacred.
But I think around the idea of grief and the
ways in which we deal with it or try to
pretend we're not dealing with it, there's a lot of
humor there. And my hope is that for the people
who have felt it that there are at least some

(31:22):
parts of the show where they go, oh, thank god,
somebody said that, because I think that all the time. Yeah,
not to be a spoiler, about the show or anything,
even though it's closed. One of the things I explore
in the show, for example, is that I used to
do a fair amount of stand up about having two
kids when the entire time I had three kids. So

(31:46):
like trying to reconcile the thing that I was saying publicly,
which really felt I didn't feel as though I was lying,
but to listen to it back years later and go, well,
this doesn't really feel right. It doesn't feel true to
talk about only having these kids because I also have
another kid, and it feels incorrect in my heart to

(32:08):
keep saying this anyway. I know that doesn't sound funny,
but believe me, no, but it it is.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
But there's something in there, like, there's so much that
I want to pull out of that. First, there's the
how dare you right? This conflation that we have with
comedy and sarcasm or comedy and cheapening making fun of
something right like that says more about the person's definition
of comedy than it does about the content of the show.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
I think that's very true. I think there's a lot
of people who have a very specific idea of what
comedy is, and it's like, you know, take my wife please,
or airplane food taste bad, and haven't really opened their
minds to the fact that, like comedy can be a
tool to do other things. I'm not the first person

(32:57):
to do that. I'm not even close, right, There's been many,
many comedians who have done that, who use comedy as
a vehicle for social change, for to combat racism, homophobia,
et cetera, et cetera. My thing is I wanted to
talk about grief.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
I read that you that you had been looking for
a way to use comedy for more than laughter, which
is really what you just said.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Right, Yeah, I think, like I've been doing comedy for
a long time, I'm pretty good at it. If I
want to be funny, I usually can be. The things
that have resonated with me as I get older more
and more are the things that move beyond laughter, that
like I leave it changed somehow, And that's what I

(33:41):
was trying to do. So you know, I'm still doing
stand up sets here and there that are not all
profound in any way. I also have a background, Like
you know, I came up doing theater before I ever
did comedy, and I wanted to try and make something
on that scale. But really like I wanted to connect
with people. I wanted, I wanted to feel well. I
wanted like you know, I would like to say that

(34:02):
I wanted other people to feel less alone, but I
also wanted myself to feel less alone, you know. I
want I'd like to say that I wanted other people
to feel like they could keep their loved ones alive,
but I wanted to keep my son alive as well.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
There's something about using both theater and comedy as a
vehicle for connection. It's sort of the trojan horse of that, right,
Like you think you're coming to a show, but what
you're really doing is finding community or finding inroads to community,
and the both directions of that. I love that you
said I made the show for myself.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Yeah. I hope in so doing, it's more universal than
it would be if I tried to make it for
other people, If that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, I mean there's that thing where the personal is
the universal. But if you try to be universal, you're
going to lose people, right.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Because you end up back in the platitudes right where
we were talking about the beginning. You end up in
a bunch of like mishmash nonsense. Everybody's already heard. Mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
It is really in using your own lived experience and
talking about that because it's you know, that is where
the magic is. That's what people connect to. They don't
connect to the universal. They connect to some part of
themselves that they see reflected on stage where they hear
through their headphones. Intimacy is literally the way that we connect. Yes, hey,

(35:32):
before we get back to our conversation, I want to
talk with you about creative approaches to grief. I mean,
that's one of the driving forces of this whole episode, right,
exploring grief through creative outlets. Writing isn't going to cure anything,
but it can help you hear your own voice, and
that is incredibly powerful. More than ten thousand people have
taken my thirty Day Writing your Grief course, and it

(35:53):
is still one of the very best things I've ever
made for you. There are lots of writing workshops out
there with prompts like tell us about the funeral. My
Writing your Grief course is not like that at all.
The prompts are deeper, they're more nuanced. They're designed to
get you into your heart and into your own actual story.
You can read all about the Writing your grief course

(36:14):
at refuginggrief dot com backslash WYG. That's WYG for writing
your grief. You can see a sample prompt from the
course and get writing your own story in minutes. The
course is self guided, so you can start right away
refugegrief dot com backslash w why G or find the
link in the show notes. All right, back to my

(36:34):
conversation with writer and comedian Michael Cruse Kane. I want
to get into the community stuff that happens, but there's
another more intimate piece of community that I want to
talk about, in the ways that you develop your shows
and produce your shows. Something that I read in getting
ready for this conversation was that you were terrified of

(36:56):
cheapening your experience by packaging it for this age. Can
you tell me about that a little bit?

Speaker 1 (37:02):
So what I started doing stand up, the only thing
I wanted to do was be funny, and it really
didn't matter what price I paid for that, by which
I mean I was very self deprecating, and that meant
that I would like sort of make fun of my
ethnic background. I would make fun of my family. It

(37:23):
was a lot of like putting down of myself and
the people that were related to me, And I was
doing that because it felt like it was easy for
people to watch. It was easy for them to see
someone kind of shit on himself and they would laugh
at it. But once I got to a certain level,
the more I did that, I was like, this actually
feels kind of fucked up. And once I was telling
this like deeply personal part of my story, of the

(37:45):
story of my wife, of our family, it felt like
of the utmost importance that I not sell out how
much I love my son and how painful it was
to try and get a laugh. So that's like always
part of the calculus is like I can get a
laugh here. I know how to put a joke here

(38:07):
that will make these people laugh. Do I want that laugh?
Is this a laugh that I want? And I think
going through the show and looking at every joke and
being like, I know we could get a laugh off
of this, but is it worth that. Am I trading
off some piece of integrity to get that laugh? And
in every case, my director Josh Sharp and I and

(38:30):
our producers at Audible would choose integrity, which it wasn't
a hard choice to make. It's just like sometimes naturally
in the process of writing, or a lot of this
stuff was quote unquote written by me just talking out
loud and making a joke. I would sometimes look back
at that and go, you know, I don't want that
to represent my experience, so let's just take it out.

(38:52):
So there are times in the show where deliberately it's like,
you know, here's eight minutes of quote unquote comedy show
where there are no jokes, where like, you know, you're
just gonna have to feel what it felt like for
me to go through this.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
You also talk about this with Carrie, right, because this
wasn't just your experience alone. This is your experience as
a couple, as parents, as individuals, as a family having
a conversation about consent to how much of our story
is on stage and what are you comfortable with? Like

(39:24):
these are really high level relational skills.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah. Well, I think the one of the greatest nightmares
in the world would have to be being in a
relationship with a stand up comedian, because you would always
be concerned that any little thing you do would end
up being the butt of a joke that a million
people laugh at. And I think, like, especially for something

(39:52):
like this, it was just very important to me that
everybody in my family feel good about every part of it.
And you know, there's a a lot of reasons I
did this show, but one of them I don't know
I've ever said this before. I mean I've said it
to her, but one of them is to make her proud,
Like I want her to be proud of like what
we survived and how we survived it. If any part

(40:14):
of the show made her feel bad, it would be
the worst feeling I could possibly imagine, because I certainly
don't want to re traumatize her by putting it on stage.
I wanted it to be a way for us to heal.
And like when I say us, I mean like everybody humanity,
but really us, me and her and our kids.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
I think that's part of what makes public work so powerful. Again,
coming back to that idea that the more personal, the
more intimate, the more people can see themselves in it,
and talking about that off stage process I think is
also really important because we don't survive our losses in

(40:55):
a vacuum, and there are other hearts in the room,
there are other experience in the room, and how do
we stay true to ourselves and do what we need
to do and also honor the sovereignty and the experience
of the people we love. There's no one easy answer
to that, but understanding that it is so much of

(41:18):
what you see on stage, or what you read in
a book, or what you hear in an interview. There's
a giant, invisible river around that of relationship and consent
and conversation before you even get to the stage.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
I think that is from my perspective, like hopefully true.
I think there are people who are honest and spontaneous
in a way that I think can be bad. There
are some thoughts that you want to curate before you
express them, just to make sure that you're saying something

(41:54):
that it has an underlying truth to it, as opposed
to a truth that you felt for a thing you
felt for one second. Even if you say, you know,
here's this dark thought that I had or whatever, and
say and I don't feel that way anymore. But I
just think the absolute free flow of information directly from
your mind to your mouth is not always the best

(42:17):
way to go.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
I have a version of that on a sticky above
my thing, Like the things that you're thinking don't all
need to be said out loud. But I also like
the context and the ability to go back later and say,
you know, I said this thing, it doesn't feel right.
I'm gonna check in with myself, check in with the
people that I care about, and will make a change. Right.
It's not about doing everything perfectly. It's listening to yourself, right,

(42:41):
like checking in with yourself. I said this thing that
was true in the moment, but looking back at it,
I'm not really comfortable with that, so I get to
have a do over. I think that we put a
lot of pressure on ourselves to like get the right words,
do the right things all the time, and you don't always,
and that's okay too. You can come back and do repair.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
Yeah, And you can also give yourself a moment to
think before you answer a question. I used to work
at a tutoring company, and I remember one of the
things that I really admired about my boss there, who
I admired in pretty much every way, is that when
someone asked him a question that he didn't know the
answer to, like right away, he would take a second

(43:24):
and you could see him thinking before he answered the question.
And I was like, holy shit, I never it never
even encouraged me. That was a possibility.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah, the pause. I can't remember who it was, but
there was a guest who was on earlier this season
who said, you get to pause, and the pause lets
you make a boundary. Right, Like the boundary the boundary
is in the pause. So when somebody asked you a
question or ask you to do something, you get to

(43:51):
take that beat and understand how you want to respond
if you don't know the answer, Do I want to
say this? Do I want to say that? Like, there's
there's a lot of there's a lot of power in
knowing that you can you can take a beat if
you don't know how to answer something or you're not
sure how you feel about something, like you get to
have a minute. There's a couple of more things that

(44:14):
I want to get into speaking of taking a minute,
because I've got like nine thousand different things that i
want to get into. But as a performer, as somebody
who is in some ways known for a very devastating thing, right,
And I also know that Carrie went back to school

(44:35):
after Fisher's death and became a pediatric nurse. Right, she
works in nick You does she still work in NI queue?

Speaker 1 (44:42):
She worked in the pediatric attensive care unit for a while.
Now she works in post anesthesia care but also with children.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
Got it, So have you experienced that thing that people
say sometimes that yes, this terrible thing happened, but look
at all the people you're helping because because of it.
Has that been something that you've heard, something that Carrie's
heard that sort of look look at the gift that
you've taken from this terrible thing.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Some version of that, And I think there's like that's
sort of related to the everything happens for a reason,
Like I think it's kind of in that category. And
I weirdly think that that statement everything happens for a
reason can be true if you decide to make a
reason for it. And I think a lot of our

(45:32):
reckoning with his death is us trying to make a reason,
is like being like okay, well maybe not explicitly, but
just being like what will I what will I do
with this? How can I survive? And so you know
the way in which he lives on. I mean, there
are thousands of ways, but two of them are I

(45:55):
don't think Harry would be a pediatric nurse if Fisher
hadn't died, And I certainly wouldn't have written my show
about him dying. If he had lived, I think it'd
be a pretty weird show.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
That would be very weird show.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
So I hope that in some ways for me, he
remains alive in those ways and others, And I hope
that that's the case for other people, That other people
will hear this conversation that you and I are having
and in some way they will know that Fisher Kane
was a person.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yeah. I love that distinction between other people telling you
the meaning of your son's death versus you and Carrie
individually choosing this is a thing that happened. What might
we do with it? How might this shape the choices
that we make for ourselves given our own talents, interests, curiosities, Like,

(46:51):
there's something very qualitatively different about what somebody tells you.
The reason is what somebody tells you. The meaning is
for your own loss and the meaning or the action
that you take from it for yourself.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah, I think, which you may or may not ever
find or seek. I think, if look, if you don't
want to find meaning, do what you get, do what
you need to do.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
But I think for me and Carrie, and I don't
want to speak for her, but I think it would
be right to say that the choices we made to
honor him felt almost not like choices. It felt like,
this is the thing that I have to do. They
felt like a vocation and the purest sense of those words,

(47:34):
like you know, I'm up there doing stand up about
I don't know, pornography or whatever, and I'm like, what
the fuck am I talking about? I don't want to
be talking about this. I want to be here. I
have something that I want to talk about and I
have to talk about it. And so then I just
started doing it because there was I didn't know how
to continue doing what I was doing.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, I've heard that story so many times, and it
was my own experience too, like what else would I do?
Like this is what I'm good at, this is who
I am, this is what I do, and here is
this giant thing And what else would I do if
not this? And that isn't true for everybody. I think
there can be that pressure to find meaning, start a foundation,

(48:15):
write a book, do this thing, and if that's not
coming from inside you, then it's not yours. Right. I
feel like people feel that pressure a lot to make
something beautiful out of something devastating, and I just want
to underscore that that is not required of anybody.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
You get to choose the life that you build from
that point forward, and you don't have to do bloody anything.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
Yeah. And I think they're also I'm sure many people
who experience a loss and the loss is of a motherfucker,
and you'll have you're not inclined to celebrate or to
keep their story going on forever. I can think of
so many reasons that you wouldn't quote unquote seek meaning afterwards.

(49:05):
I can only say that for me, it's what it
has certainly helped.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah. One of the favorite lines of yours that I
read and getting ready for this show. In an interview
about your live show, Sorry for Your Loss, somebody asked
if you've ever played in that city before, and you said,
insofar as time and space are meaningless in a sense,
I have always been performing here, which I loved, which
I loved, And you were totally joking around. But there

(49:29):
is something to that, right, Like loss is constant time travel.
It's like the overlay of one timeline over another timeline.
You've written a lot about the present absence of Fisher,
and we've kind of talked about this off and on
through our whole time together, keeping Fisher alive. That he

(49:49):
you are still in relationship with him. He is your
third child, right, He's still there. So how does Fisher's
absence show up in your presence for you?

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Oh? Gosh, I mean he's there all the time. I
just mean I think about him all the time. But
I think about him often, particularly because of like the
work that I've been doing recently references him so much.
But also, I mean, we don't have enough time for
me to answer this question completely, but I'll tell you.

(50:20):
One way is that he's a twin, right, Fisher and Truman.
So one thing that is beautiful and very sad is
that my son Truman is I mean, I love him
so much, and as he grows and becomes more himself,

(50:45):
it also makes me miss his brother more because it's like,
oh fuck, they're supposed to be two. I very easily.
If you know, one thing had gone slightly different, if
a piece of food had gone down Fisher's died jestive
systems somewhat differently, he would be sitting next to you
and we would be doing this all together. And in

(51:08):
that way, his absence is very present all the time.
And the thing that I always want to say after
I talk about that is that it doesn't mean that
I love my children who are alive less or that
I didn't get enough. It's like having half of infinity,

(51:32):
which is also infinity, you know what I mean. It's
like I got more than you could ever possibly get,
and I thought I was gonna get twice this, but
twice this is this not to nerd out about infinity
too much.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
I love nerding out about infinity. That was beautiful. There's
something in that though, right, Like there is always the
ghost life of there should be two and every milestone
that Truman hits there should have been two, or they
could have been to or there might have been too.
And you know this is true for so many people

(52:05):
that I'm talking about, that overlay of timelines, right, they
are missing at every point in the future. Right. Loss
isn't just a single timeline event. It is something that
has ripples.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
Yeah, And I think for a lot of people who
lose someone older than them, a grandfather, a dad, a mom, whatever,
Now the photo album of that person is complete, and
now what you have are the memories that you've locked
into that photo album that lives in your head. When
you use a child, the album is empty. So for

(52:43):
most people it will be empty forever. For us, half
of it is full, you know. I mean, it's like, oh,
here's all these pictures here, and it's not regret, it's
not the right thing. I don't know, it's I just
I miss him, and I miss him more because his

(53:05):
brother is the best.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
I love that you are in the world having these
conversations talking about all of this stuff, because you know,
we've also the other thread, and so much of what
we're talking about is loneliness and community and connection and
that that power of telling the truth and the permission

(53:29):
that that gives for other people to tell the truth.
So I'm going to ask you a combo closing question.
Oh wow, because I think you can roll with it.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
A pizza, hot taco bell No, sorry, no.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
All right, I'm going to ask a combo question that
is much better than that presentation, thinking about not just
what you've learned about grief, but what you've learned about
community and the power or of telling the truth and
allowing other people to tell the truth, all of these things.
Taking that and combining it with my usual closing question,

(54:10):
knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what
does hope look like for you? Does it figure into
any of this?

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Well, first of all, what I would say is that
we survived the immediate trauma because Truman gave us hope.
I think that was a lot for us, and in
addition to that, we gave each other hope, Like there
were definitely times. I remember one instance, for example, when

(54:42):
we found out that Fisher was going to die, my
wife asking me how it would be possible for her
to ever be happy again, And I think in that
moment I completely just lied and said I know that
you will be not lying, like telling an untruth, but

(55:03):
having no fore knowledge that that was correct. And I
think in that way, hope helped us both survive what
happened and the hope that our son could be like
he was still in the Nike you like we under
we had a sense of what the world was, and
it totally flipped it upside down. We thought that you

(55:24):
go to the hospital your kids are born, you go
home with your kids, now one of them's died, and
you're like, oh shit, maybe that's not what a hospital is.
And I think that hope is what sustained us through
that time, the belief that things could get better. And
they have gotten immeasurably better, I mean astonishingly better from
what they were. Which isn't to say that we don't

(55:46):
feel the sadness anymore. I feel it all the time.
But the hope is that you'll be able to manage
it and in some ways even love it, which I do.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
Almost every answer to every question that I've asked to
you has had connection and intimacy at its core, which
I really love.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
I don't know who I would be without those things
and those people, and.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
You're out there making space for other people to access
that and explore that and connect in that.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
I hope. So. I don't know. Maybe you are, I
think so.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
I think so. I have just spent the last two
days studying up on you and reading reviews and reading conversations,
and I can objectively say from two days of research
that I think you're I think you're nailing it right
because people so much, people are talking, and we've got
such a long standing gag order on telling the truth

(56:47):
about grief that it takes all of us being brave
enough to have these conversations in order to make things
better for everybody, Right, it really is in telling the
truth about this to ourselves, to each other, to a
wider stage. If that's something that floats your boat. But like,
the more we have these conversations, the better, the softer,

(57:11):
the more skilled the world gets around everybody's pain. And
that's that's what we're doing.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
I hope, so, I hope so too.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
All Right, I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad
you're here with me and in the world. We're not
going to link to the show because the show in
its live run has ended, but it will be out
with audible theater sometime soon, so we will link to that.
Where else should people look for you? What do you
want people to know?

Speaker 1 (57:40):
Let's see, Well you can, I guess follow me on
social media. I'm on Instagram and the thing that used
to be Twitter at Cruise Kane see r u z
k y n E and I don't know. Just like,
give people hugs and tell them that you love them.
I guess I love that.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
That's a great thing to go out on. All right, everybody,
stay tuned for your questions to carry with you. We
will be right back after this break. Each week I
leave you with some questions to carry with you until
we meet again. And you know, it really struck me

(58:20):
in this particular conversation the level of interpersonal thoughtfulness that
Michael showed. Do you know what I mean? Loss never
affects just one person in a family system. Everybody grieves differently,
and sometimes those differences create conflict over and over again.
I heard Michael say that his creative work is always
run through I mate. He didn't use these words, but

(58:43):
I think of it like an integrity meter.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
He checked in with himself both as he was creating
his show and after each performance, and he thought about
how what he said on stage would affect himself, his wife,
his kids, his whole family. None of us exist in
a vacuum. I think this is something a lot of
writers think about how what they write might be seen
or heard by the people involved in the story they're telling.

(59:10):
And sometimes we end up deciding not to write anything
or say anything out of concern for harming the people
we might write about. Sometimes we decide not to write
the whole story because honestly, like we don't want to
invite conversation about it from certain members of the people involved.
In the story. I don't know, there's no one correct

(59:32):
answer about that stuff. I just really love the through
line of respect in the ways that Michael talked about
his work. I thought that was really cool. How about you,
what stuck with you from this conversation. Everybody's going to
take something different from the show, but I do hope
you found something to hold on to. If you want

(59:53):
to tell me how today's show felt for you, or
you have thoughts on what we covered, let me know.
Tag at Refuge and Grief on all the social platform
so I can hear how this conversation affected you. You
can also leave your thoughts as a review on your
favorite podcast app. Reviews are super helpful in spreading the
word about the show and getting more conversations started. Also,
I love your reviews. I read every single one of them,

(01:00:16):
So if you've loved one.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Follow the show at It's Okay on TikTok and Refuge
and Grief everywhere else. To see video clips from the show,
use the hashtag It's Okay pod on all of the
platforms so not only I can find you, others can too.
None of us are entirely okay, and as time we
start talking about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're

(01:00:40):
not okay. You're in good company. That's it for this week. Friends.
Coming up next week, Jamila Jamil on Cancel culture and
the particular sadness of looking back on your younger self
and the choices you made. Follow the show on your
favorite platforms, everybody, so you don't miss an episode. It's

(01:01:02):
okay that You're not okay. The podcast is written and
produced by me Meghan Devine. Executive producer is Amy Brown,
co produced by Elizabeth Fazzio, with logistical and social media
support from Micah. Post production and editing by the ever
patient Houston Tilly music provided by wave Crush, and today's
background noise provided by the too many cups of coffee

(01:01:23):
I had, making me bounce around a bit too much
in a slightly squeaky chair

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Episode Transcript

Host

Megan Devine

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