August 8, 2024 • 25 mins
This week, we're taking a tangent -- my dad, Mike Loftus, passed away two weeks ago, and this episode is twenty minutes about that. I've needed some extra time to get our upcoming episodes together, but I've wanted to share more about him and the last two weeks. I really miss him. We'll be back to regular episodes next week.
As promised, the links:
Obituary: https://www.waittfuneralhome.com/obituary/MichaelP-Loftus
Patriot Ledger writer Eric McHugh wrote this really comprehensive, thoughtful piece about him: https://www.patriotledger.com/story/sports/2024/07/24/family-hockey-were-ledger-bruins-writer-mike-loftus-twin-passions/74518399007/
My dad's good friend Mick Colageo, another hockey writer, remembers him here: https://bostonhockeynow.com/2024/07/21/colageo-boston-bruins-reporter-mike-loftus-a-pros-pro/
And the podcast I pulled a clip from is from Pucks with Haggs with Joe Haggerty, featuring Mick and fellow hockey writer Steve Conroy from The Boston Herald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimCsyfw3Hk&t=590s
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media sixteen.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Sixteen. Hi, this is technically an episode of sixteenth Minute,
(00:58):
a podcast where I would and we'll continue to analyze
and interview the Internet's main characters and what their moment
in the spotlight meant for you, for me, and for them.
But this week, for our thirteenth episode, we are interrupted.
And if there were an episode number to be interrupted at,
why not this one. So if you followed me online
(01:19):
you're possibly aware. My dad passed away two weeks ago.
His name was Mike Loftis and he was sixty five
years old, So if your dad's older than that, it
should have been him. Fuck your dad. In fact, the
entire time this series has been in production, dad was
either really sick or more recently, really dead. When the
(01:40):
show first released on May seventh, I carefully composed an
Instagram post while in a hospital room, and I'm a
clinically obsessive, compulsive person, so I can tell you with
precision the different locations this show has been recorded. Most
interviews and dialogue so far, and a few episodes that
haven't come out yet, were recorded in a hospittle bathroom,
(02:00):
a hospital breakroom, in a study room at a public
library near a hospital, on my mom's sofa, in a
Duncan Donuts parking lot, or in this really depressing twin
sized bed I bought for my brother and I to
sleep at our childhood home while dad was in the hospital.
So if you ever thought there was anyone but me
writing these, here's your confirmation that there's not. If I
(02:21):
can't get an episode out, it doesn't happen. And I
really appreciate my producer Sophie and producer slash editor Ian
for bearing with me here. This episode isn't a memorial
or an obituary. This is an episode about the last
two weeks and all of the notes that I've taken
during the last two weeks. And it's not because I
(02:44):
don't want to honor my dad in a public way.
I very much do and will continue to. I feel
this kind of probably delusional urgency to put something down
and to try and say something about these two weeks. Oh,
this is an attempt at that. Pretty sure that I
(03:04):
will not feel a lot of the things that I'm
recording here in a matter of weeks or days or
maybe even an hour, but I'm gonna put it here anyways.
And if you want the normal show. Oh Also, if
you happen to be interested in my dad's obituary, you
can check out some links below. My family and I
and my dad's colleagues have written a lot about him,
(03:25):
and you'll notice the same repeated things in all of them.
That he was great at his job as a hockey writer,
he was really funny, and then he loved his family.
And those are the three sentences that I've seen the most,
and they're all true. So it's not that I don't
want to say those things. I do, but I don't know.
(03:45):
I mean, how soon after someone is gone do you
start to reduce them to three or so sentences? Because
those three sentences can be factual, but they don't to me,
really feel adequate. They don't feel complete. Anyways, I've been grieving,
which is annoying. And the only way to express that
(04:06):
grief after a funeral is over and you've already had
to explain to TSA that those are your father's ashes
and not a gallon sized ziploc bag of cocaine, is
by talking about it on the internet, which isn't insincere,
but it can feel that way. And granted I'm super lucky,
I can't imagine going through this without a job that
(04:27):
has given me the freedom to record everything in and
around hospitals instead of wondering what was happening from three
thousand miles away, But the actual feelings are just so consuming.
One thing I've realized is that I hate having a
universal experience because every universal experience has already been done
(04:47):
by people way hotter and smarter than you, millions of times,
and so what's the point. But you have to So
I'm having the universal grief experience, and I'm letting my
hair turn into a solid and I'm walking around for
hours at a time listening to Rainbow Connection, even though
I know my dad thought that song was stupid, which
(05:08):
it's not. In the past two weeks, I also can't
seem to get anything done. Having OCD often means for
me that I can hyper focus on work instead of
thinking about other things. But I've lost that ability, and
my brain has really latched onto what my real obsession
has been in the past year or so, which is
(05:31):
a habit of documenting everything I possibly could about the
last year of my dad's life. I'm talking hundreds of notes,
thousands of blurry, badly composed pictures, of depressing spaces, hundreds
of hours of illegally recorded conversations with my dad and
his doctors, and let's say for legal purposes, nobody else.
(05:54):
It's just this big box full of stuff that I've
compiled that isn't my dad's final year of life, but
it is a version of it. And for the last
two weeks, it's this stuff that has really been kind
of eating my brain alive. The notes habit is nothing
new for me or for you. I've always taken a
lot of notes, and it's a pretty catching habit when
(06:16):
you're the kid of a newspaper reporter. Even if I
didn't have really any interest in what my dad was
reporting on, could have really taken or left hockey. But
I loved watching writers. My dad's career spanned from when
he was in college in the late seventies until a
couple of years ago, and he worked at the same
local newspaper that whole time. So much of my childhood
(06:39):
was consumed by his industries collapsing entirely. But when I
was little, the newspaper still existed in a very real way,
and I remember going to the sports department and getting
a reporter's notebook which is a small white and blue
spiral notebook identical to the ones that my dad would
write in at the hockey games. He'd bring us to
(06:59):
the press box in once a year, and I didn't
understand what he was writing in the notebooks, really, but
he wrote down everything it seemed, whether that was about
hockey or notes on just the daily beats of his
own life. And he kept a lot of these notes
all the way up until he died, in these boxes
that are now in our house. He kind of had
(07:20):
a hard time parting with things that he saw as
meaningful or even saw potential meaning in, and these could
be his own notes or they could be mine. For
the last few years of his life, Dad sorted this
stuff in boxes in the house we'd grown up in.
I know that because he wrote down how he had
done it, where in our house he'd been organizing things
(07:41):
on a certain date, how far he got, how he
felt about the process, and like any parent, he'd remind
us to come home and check it out. And even
when I actually did, the work never seemed to be
fully done. Around the time he retired in late twenty twenty,
the same time as the pandemic and his cans her diagnosis.
He asked my permission to sort through stacks of my
(08:04):
old notebooks and art projects from when I was a kid,
and I said yes because I knew it would drive
him up a wall if they were just sitting there,
And honestly, I didn't think he'd find anything that would
really surprise him. We were friends. It was stuff I
felt he probably knew he composed these boxes of old
compulsive writing. I'd done, fuzzy notebooks full of chicken scratch
(08:26):
describing what everyone in the room I was sitting in
was wearing and what was hanging on the walls, because
in the early two thousands, no one clocked this behavior
as a child with severe OCD. It was that Jamie
wanted to be a writer, and that's why she was
getting bullied by the children who took the notebooks and
looked at the terrifying shorthand she'd developed about their clothes.
(08:49):
But also the idea that I wanted to be a
writer was true. Writing things down released the anxiety. It
gave me something to do, and I was afraid to
talk to people. It produced something that I hoped might
turn into something else. The way that I'd watched my
dad's notes and interview cassettes and handwritten transcripts turn into
something in the newspaper all the time, So we didn't
(09:11):
know that there was an unhealthy element to this obsessive documentation,
and in the case of me and my dad, it
could often be tremendously helpful in our work. Here's one
of my dad's colleagues talking about how carefully he would
observe things and how it was sometimes frustrating to him
to realize that other people weren't paying as close attention.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Mike was one of those guys more than anybody else
that like, he would ask a question of the coach
and you'd be like, shit, I didn't notice. I wish
I had noticed that, Like you wouldn't you know? You
would always you would learn stuff or be like damn,
how did I miss that? Based on the questions that
Mike asked consistently, this would happen a lot where you'd
(09:55):
be like, wow, he really noticed that. That's he's really
studied what he's watching. He just has a knack for
it too, where he just picks up on things really
quickly like that, like all those things with the Bruins,
you would learn very quickly that he would ask questions
that nobody else was sort of thinking or going in
a whole different direction than other people were thinking, and
(10:16):
he was kind of watching on a different level a
lot of times, and like oftentimes too, like other people
would would jump on and like, you know, take something
from him or share it with him, where I think
he would get a little aggravated because it'd be like
I did all the work, I came up with this,
and now all of a sudden it started into everybody's
notebook lead like yeah, yeah, he was like so good
(10:37):
and so brilliant, like that he had a brilliant hockey mind.
He really did.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It is really weird and cool to listen to the
hockey community talk about my dad like this, because everything
they're saying is true. And you did apply the same
approach to how he did just about anything that was
important to him, whether that was as a parent or
a friend, or in my case, quite often an unpaid editor.
He noticed as much as it was in his capacity
(11:03):
to notice, and I learned how to process the world
by watching how he did it. And weirdly, it seemed
that one of his regrets was that he hadn't documented
even more. My dad lost his dad to the same
illness at about the same age, something I'm sure didn't
bother him at all. But anytime we talk about my grandfather,
who I don't have any memories of, he expressed his
(11:25):
regret at not asking more questions and not writing more
things down, his feeling that he was missing something. And
I thought about that, and so when in the same position,
I did what I often do, which is overcorrect to
the point of excess and in some cases breaking the law.
(11:45):
So I started writing notes within about ten minutes of
kissing my dad on the forehead one last time. The
first note says this dad died at about five in
the morning, not that he'd know, but dying on day
two of my period is really fucked up. Tim Greg
Murder on the Orient Express slash the Wizard of Oz.
(12:09):
I can untangle this note. The first part is obvious,
the second part is an excellent joke under duress. I think.
The third part are names of a crematorium guy and
a funeral home guy. And the fourth part is the
last book and movie I consumed while my dad was alive.
And this was an obsessive thought pattern I'd been having
(12:31):
for months the idea that at some point you have
a library loan that will outlive your father and you
don't know it yet, or at some point your entire
life will change in the space of a bottle of
gummy vitamins, but you have to keep taking them. Stuff
like that. My notes from the next couple of days
were pretty lean. They were notes from the last episode
(12:51):
of sixteenth Minute on Naomi h which I insisted on
releasing the day after my dad died like a fucking weirdo.
There's a note from the day before dad funeral that
says car clothes, ben babies, dinner, upload pictures, finished, playlist,
USB drive. There's the note I made for his eulogy
(13:12):
that says, hat yes not using Twitter, bio, Hallmark movie
effortlessness versus effort. Come on, Eileen, dream about walking down
the stairs. I feel that all this stuff is important,
but there's no real reason to keep staring at it
or anything from the last year, because there's nothing I
(13:33):
can really do with it. You know, a lot of
it is illegally recorded conversations with a dead guy, and
even if I could use them, I wouldn't want to.
So as I've been going through these boxes, of stuff
that Dad left behind because he thought they might mean
something to someone. I'm realizing that I've accidentally spent a
year creating another box for someone else. Two weeks ago
(13:57):
from when I'm writing this, I am exactly three thousand
and one miles away and asleep on that twin bed
I was telling you about two weeks ago minus an
hour and a half. My mom and brother are at
the side of that twin bed telling me that Dad
has gone two weeks ago plus an hour and a half.
I'm giving my dad syringes of all these things and
keeping a careful record and kissing him on the forehead
(14:20):
for what I don't realize is the last time. I
can't keep thinking about all these numbers. They're true as
I'm writing this, but they'll be different by the time
I record it, and different by the time you hear it,
and on and on, and it'll only just get further away.
The day where Dad tells us his cancer is back
is further away. The night before we go to the
(14:41):
hospital and watch Pewe's big adventure is further away. The
days I don't remember but have been obsessively documented by
him and me grow further away. In these two weeks,
I've found myself kind of chafing at every googleable element
of grief, all of the aphorisms and step and what
(15:01):
seems to be a multi million dollar industry around people
telling you you're doing great and that your loved one
is joined the rest of the faceless souls in the
great mayonnaise jar of bygone humanity. I understand why it works,
and I don't begrudge anyone who gets anything out of it,
but it doesn't work for me. It lacks specificity. It
(15:21):
feels like the goal is to arrive at a place
where someone you love who taught you to look at
everything you possibly could, is better suited in three sentences
because it might make you feel better. Last week, I
went to the beach, which I don't usually do, but
while I was there, I kind of deluted myself into
(15:42):
thinking that I was convening with his spirit. My dad
hated the beach on a conceptual level, I kind of
hate the beach. It just felt like a place to
manufacture this kind of moment, and I tried to do
that a lot in the first week. Last week, my
(16:03):
brother and I convinced ourselves he was a rabbit the
morning that dad died, because I don't know. He liked
a rabbit and there was a rabbit nearby. But something
that worries me about losing someone this important is that
it's so tempting to turn them into someone in your
mind who tells you that everything is fine, and on
(16:25):
a long enough timeline, they turn into a framed photo
in your apartment and three sentences and a voice in
your head that occasionally tells you you're doing great. And
I keep worrying that in a year, will I even
be carefully considering what my dad might actually think, or
will I just be talking to somebody who I've made up.
(16:48):
Here's a part of a note I wrote on the
beach whatever stupid Etsy jar or credit card bill and
paying off so we could be with you. I have
the real pieces, and someday I'll look at them again
and you'll be right there. I tell you what stage
of grief this is. But Google doesn't work here, just
the word to be borrowed, cash to get over easy eggs.
(17:14):
I have it all for some day when I need
to have it straight, I promise. So when I go
over these notes, I want to know what my dad
would think. Because he's an interesting person. And I guess
I've always thought that because when I was in middle school,
I made this convoluted chart of things that I thought
(17:35):
were interesting, revealing that I have been either remarkably consistent
or deeply incurious. In the almost twenty years that have
passed since I made it, I still regularly talk about
Lemony Snicket books, the book Lolita, and as I dedicated
an entire category of my interests the life in times
of Mike Loftus. And the reason that I know I
(17:57):
said this is because my dad put it in a
box for me to see, and that means he knew
I wrote that down too. We would text about this
stuff intermittently. He'd send me something he thought was funny,
or occasionally something that made him sad, because he didn't
always realize the points when I was a kid where
I was lonely or obsessive in a way that was
(18:17):
more harmful than we thought. He really looked through all
of these boxes, and now his boxes are back with me,
what he'd left us of his own obsessive observations of
his life, and the boxes that he'd made of my own.
I don't know if this is healthy I suspect it
isn't because in terms of raw material, it's too much.
(18:42):
A lot of it is useless. You know, if you've
ever lost someone and had to go through your house,
you can relate this like sinking, feeling that no matter
how careful you look, you're going to miss something, and
of course you are. I mean, it's really painful to
see boxes full of someone who isn't there, and it's exhausting.
And I know my dad felt the same way, because
(19:02):
the boxes his mom left behind when she died had
started to mildo in our basement. But I have this
fear that if I let myself reach the bottom of
these boxes, a part of him disappears. I'm voluntarily tossing
him into the man astar and somehow surrendering to the
idea that three sentences could be good enough. I don't
(19:24):
think my dad would want me to be cycling on
these thoughts this much. He probably knew I would do it,
but I don't think it's what he would really want
for me. And now there are his boxes and my boxes,
and I have to decide what's important to me. And
I'll give money to mediums and buy crystal bracelets until
I die. That's how I was raised. But I can't
see my dad in a rabbit or a sunset right now,
(19:48):
not in these two weeks. I can't see him in
three sentences. The closest I've gotten are two things that
I've found in a thousand boxes. The first it is
a letter written inside of a Valentine's Stake card from
my dad to me from who knows when. Part of
it says, I know you'll be a good girl and
(20:09):
we'll take care of mom, Ben, Reese and Bug, but
please don't forget to take care of yourself too. Get
enough sleep and make sure you have some breakfast before school.
I'll call you before you go to sleep tonight. Don't worry.
I won't be gone too long. I love you, Love Dad.
And even though this was probably written when I was ten,
I think that this is a little closer to what
(20:32):
he would want for me. But I don't know if
it's something I can give to myself. I think I'm
always going to wonder if I had asked another question
or arranged another box, if things would not feel this bad.
The second thing is a cassette tape I don't remember
ever having existed. It's almost exactly twenty five years old,
(20:53):
and it was recorded on a road trip that my
dad and I took together, the only one we ever
took alone, Brackton, Massachusetts to a family reunion in South Carolina.
At the time, I'm almost six, and I remember this
trip in my memory. We listened to a mixtape we'd
made that had one of Dad's songs and the one
of mine. There was a time we heard the song
(21:16):
Somewhere out There from an American Tale, and I started
crying because I'd never been that far away from my
mom before. I remember him teaching me how to swim
in a motel pool and drinking the most amazing hot
chocolate I'd ever had at a diner in Maryland. I
remember almost nothing of the actual reunion. It was the
trip and these little memories of being excited that I
(21:40):
was spending time with just my dad and he wasn't
at work and we could be silly and listen to
music and see new things. And the tape Okay, it's.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
Still in line. July twenty ninth, we have driven forty
two point six miles and it's eleven forty one.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
It's my dad making a document for I don't know
if he knows who me someday maybe, But there's so
much random stuff on it that you almost get the
idea that it's also for him.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
Were eleven o'clock this evening, And the interesting thing is
is that here, at eleven forty two point six miles
into the trip and nineteen minutes before midnight, we're stuck
in construction traffic on Route ninety five, getting a little bored,
a little hot. But I don't want to turn the
air conditioning on. I just don't know what I want.
(22:35):
By a few rain drops, does it mean more? Does
it mean less? You know? Are we driving into a storm?
Or is it just that just a few rain drops?
I don't know, And then there's no way to know
unless we keep going.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I almost didn't find this tape. It wasn't really organized
into anything but a shallow box of otherwise empty tapes,
But everything I remembered was there, crying about my mom,
and we.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Both just got a little bit sad because we heard
a song that reminded us of home. But we think
that maybe after Jamie gets a little sleep in a
few hours, when we stop and grab something to eat,
that we'll start to have a little bit more fun.
Then it's tough for my little daughter. Let's see if
she wants to say anything.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Hey, Main Marney the hot chocolate in Maryland.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
It's nine thirty in the morning now, and Jamie and
I just went and had our breakfast. It was called
the Barnside Diner and it's in Temple Hills, Maryland, and
we took our time and Jamie had like two awesome
hot chocolates, even though it's going to be ninety degrees today,
and all.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Of these things that I didn't know that my dad
thought or worried about. It was all there.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
And then we'll see how it goes from there. But
it's gone great now. She just my Jamie Loftus just
went back to sleep after listening to her Backstreet Boys.
She slept two hours and I think she was up
another two. I'll have to go back and check. But
she just she's just a little wonder. I love this
(24:08):
girl to death, you know, not really to death. I
just love her so much. She's very peaceful, and I
hope she gets a good sleep.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
And there's no person I can make up in my
head or seeing a rabbit or whose memory could be
a blessing or three sentences that captures the feeling of
finding this and putting it in a boombox and knowing
that all that time ago he was taking notes and
hoping someone would find them at some point. But down
(24:39):
the line with my kids asked me what was special
about my dad. I'm lucky that I will be able
to open a box and show them.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Let's see. I just wanted to say. Now, I've been
turning this on every now and then so we can
keep a record, right, Yes, well, anyway, I just want
to say before I forget that.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Sixteenth minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. Lea
nasy Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen and Pet. Shout
outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and
(25:29):
Casper and by Pet Rockbert who will outlive us all Bye.
Al Zone Media sixteen.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Sixteen. Hi, this is technically an episode of sixteenth Minute,
(00:58):
a podcast where I would and we'll continue to analyze
and interview the Internet's main characters and what their moment
in the spotlight meant for you, for me, and for them.
But this week, for our thirteenth episode, we are interrupted.
And if there were an episode number to be interrupted at,
why not this one. So if you followed me online
(01:19):
you're possibly aware. My dad passed away two weeks ago.
His name was Mike Loftis and he was sixty five
years old, So if your dad's older than that, it
should have been him. Fuck your dad. In fact, the
entire time this series has been in production, dad was
either really sick or more recently, really dead. When the
(01:40):
show first released on May seventh, I carefully composed an
Instagram post while in a hospital room, and I'm a
clinically obsessive, compulsive person, so I can tell you with
precision the different locations this show has been recorded. Most
interviews and dialogue so far, and a few episodes that
haven't come out yet, were recorded in a hospittle bathroom,
(02:00):
a hospital breakroom, in a study room at a public
library near a hospital, on my mom's sofa, in a
Duncan Donuts parking lot, or in this really depressing twin
sized bed I bought for my brother and I to
sleep at our childhood home while dad was in the hospital.
So if you ever thought there was anyone but me
writing these, here's your confirmation that there's not. If I
(02:21):
can't get an episode out, it doesn't happen. And I
really appreciate my producer Sophie and producer slash editor Ian
for bearing with me here. This episode isn't a memorial
or an obituary. This is an episode about the last
two weeks and all of the notes that I've taken
during the last two weeks. And it's not because I
(02:44):
don't want to honor my dad in a public way.
I very much do and will continue to. I feel
this kind of probably delusional urgency to put something down
and to try and say something about these two weeks. Oh,
this is an attempt at that. Pretty sure that I
(03:04):
will not feel a lot of the things that I'm
recording here in a matter of weeks or days or
maybe even an hour, but I'm gonna put it here anyways.
And if you want the normal show. Oh Also, if
you happen to be interested in my dad's obituary, you
can check out some links below. My family and I
and my dad's colleagues have written a lot about him,
(03:25):
and you'll notice the same repeated things in all of them.
That he was great at his job as a hockey writer,
he was really funny, and then he loved his family.
And those are the three sentences that I've seen the most,
and they're all true. So it's not that I don't
want to say those things. I do, but I don't know.
(03:45):
I mean, how soon after someone is gone do you
start to reduce them to three or so sentences? Because
those three sentences can be factual, but they don't to me,
really feel adequate. They don't feel complete. Anyways, I've been grieving,
which is annoying. And the only way to express that
(04:06):
grief after a funeral is over and you've already had
to explain to TSA that those are your father's ashes
and not a gallon sized ziploc bag of cocaine, is
by talking about it on the internet, which isn't insincere,
but it can feel that way. And granted I'm super lucky,
I can't imagine going through this without a job that
(04:27):
has given me the freedom to record everything in and
around hospitals instead of wondering what was happening from three
thousand miles away, But the actual feelings are just so consuming.
One thing I've realized is that I hate having a
universal experience because every universal experience has already been done
(04:47):
by people way hotter and smarter than you, millions of times,
and so what's the point. But you have to So
I'm having the universal grief experience, and I'm letting my
hair turn into a solid and I'm walking around for
hours at a time listening to Rainbow Connection, even though
I know my dad thought that song was stupid, which
(05:08):
it's not. In the past two weeks, I also can't
seem to get anything done. Having OCD often means for
me that I can hyper focus on work instead of
thinking about other things. But I've lost that ability, and
my brain has really latched onto what my real obsession
has been in the past year or so, which is
(05:31):
a habit of documenting everything I possibly could about the
last year of my dad's life. I'm talking hundreds of notes,
thousands of blurry, badly composed pictures, of depressing spaces, hundreds
of hours of illegally recorded conversations with my dad and
his doctors, and let's say for legal purposes, nobody else.
(05:54):
It's just this big box full of stuff that I've
compiled that isn't my dad's final year of life, but
it is a version of it. And for the last
two weeks, it's this stuff that has really been kind
of eating my brain alive. The notes habit is nothing
new for me or for you. I've always taken a
lot of notes, and it's a pretty catching habit when
(06:16):
you're the kid of a newspaper reporter. Even if I
didn't have really any interest in what my dad was
reporting on, could have really taken or left hockey. But
I loved watching writers. My dad's career spanned from when
he was in college in the late seventies until a
couple of years ago, and he worked at the same
local newspaper that whole time. So much of my childhood
(06:39):
was consumed by his industries collapsing entirely. But when I
was little, the newspaper still existed in a very real way,
and I remember going to the sports department and getting
a reporter's notebook which is a small white and blue
spiral notebook identical to the ones that my dad would
write in at the hockey games. He'd bring us to
(06:59):
the press box in once a year, and I didn't
understand what he was writing in the notebooks, really, but
he wrote down everything it seemed, whether that was about
hockey or notes on just the daily beats of his
own life. And he kept a lot of these notes
all the way up until he died, in these boxes
that are now in our house. He kind of had
(07:20):
a hard time parting with things that he saw as
meaningful or even saw potential meaning in, and these could
be his own notes or they could be mine. For
the last few years of his life, Dad sorted this
stuff in boxes in the house we'd grown up in.
I know that because he wrote down how he had
done it, where in our house he'd been organizing things
(07:41):
on a certain date, how far he got, how he
felt about the process, and like any parent, he'd remind
us to come home and check it out. And even
when I actually did, the work never seemed to be
fully done. Around the time he retired in late twenty twenty,
the same time as the pandemic and his cans her diagnosis.
He asked my permission to sort through stacks of my
(08:04):
old notebooks and art projects from when I was a kid,
and I said yes because I knew it would drive
him up a wall if they were just sitting there,
And honestly, I didn't think he'd find anything that would
really surprise him. We were friends. It was stuff I
felt he probably knew he composed these boxes of old
compulsive writing. I'd done, fuzzy notebooks full of chicken scratch
(08:26):
describing what everyone in the room I was sitting in
was wearing and what was hanging on the walls, because
in the early two thousands, no one clocked this behavior
as a child with severe OCD. It was that Jamie
wanted to be a writer, and that's why she was
getting bullied by the children who took the notebooks and
looked at the terrifying shorthand she'd developed about their clothes.
(08:49):
But also the idea that I wanted to be a
writer was true. Writing things down released the anxiety. It
gave me something to do, and I was afraid to
talk to people. It produced something that I hoped might
turn into something else. The way that I'd watched my
dad's notes and interview cassettes and handwritten transcripts turn into
something in the newspaper all the time, So we didn't
(09:11):
know that there was an unhealthy element to this obsessive documentation,
and in the case of me and my dad, it
could often be tremendously helpful in our work. Here's one
of my dad's colleagues talking about how carefully he would
observe things and how it was sometimes frustrating to him
to realize that other people weren't paying as close attention.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Mike was one of those guys more than anybody else
that like, he would ask a question of the coach
and you'd be like, shit, I didn't notice. I wish
I had noticed that, Like you wouldn't you know? You
would always you would learn stuff or be like damn,
how did I miss that? Based on the questions that
Mike asked consistently, this would happen a lot where you'd
(09:55):
be like, wow, he really noticed that. That's he's really
studied what he's watching. He just has a knack for
it too, where he just picks up on things really
quickly like that, like all those things with the Bruins,
you would learn very quickly that he would ask questions
that nobody else was sort of thinking or going in
a whole different direction than other people were thinking, and
(10:16):
he was kind of watching on a different level a
lot of times, and like oftentimes too, like other people
would would jump on and like, you know, take something
from him or share it with him, where I think
he would get a little aggravated because it'd be like
I did all the work, I came up with this,
and now all of a sudden it started into everybody's
notebook lead like yeah, yeah, he was like so good
(10:37):
and so brilliant, like that he had a brilliant hockey mind.
He really did.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It is really weird and cool to listen to the
hockey community talk about my dad like this, because everything
they're saying is true. And you did apply the same
approach to how he did just about anything that was
important to him, whether that was as a parent or
a friend, or in my case, quite often an unpaid editor.
He noticed as much as it was in his capacity
(11:03):
to notice, and I learned how to process the world
by watching how he did it. And weirdly, it seemed
that one of his regrets was that he hadn't documented
even more. My dad lost his dad to the same
illness at about the same age, something I'm sure didn't
bother him at all. But anytime we talk about my grandfather,
who I don't have any memories of, he expressed his
(11:25):
regret at not asking more questions and not writing more
things down, his feeling that he was missing something. And
I thought about that, and so when in the same position,
I did what I often do, which is overcorrect to
the point of excess and in some cases breaking the law.
(11:45):
So I started writing notes within about ten minutes of
kissing my dad on the forehead one last time. The
first note says this dad died at about five in
the morning, not that he'd know, but dying on day
two of my period is really fucked up. Tim Greg
Murder on the Orient Express slash the Wizard of Oz.
(12:09):
I can untangle this note. The first part is obvious,
the second part is an excellent joke under duress. I think.
The third part are names of a crematorium guy and
a funeral home guy. And the fourth part is the
last book and movie I consumed while my dad was alive.
And this was an obsessive thought pattern I'd been having
(12:31):
for months the idea that at some point you have
a library loan that will outlive your father and you
don't know it yet, or at some point your entire
life will change in the space of a bottle of
gummy vitamins, but you have to keep taking them. Stuff
like that. My notes from the next couple of days
were pretty lean. They were notes from the last episode
(12:51):
of sixteenth Minute on Naomi h which I insisted on
releasing the day after my dad died like a fucking weirdo.
There's a note from the day before dad funeral that
says car clothes, ben babies, dinner, upload pictures, finished, playlist,
USB drive. There's the note I made for his eulogy
(13:12):
that says, hat yes not using Twitter, bio, Hallmark movie
effortlessness versus effort. Come on, Eileen, dream about walking down
the stairs. I feel that all this stuff is important,
but there's no real reason to keep staring at it
or anything from the last year, because there's nothing I
(13:33):
can really do with it. You know, a lot of
it is illegally recorded conversations with a dead guy, and
even if I could use them, I wouldn't want to.
So as I've been going through these boxes, of stuff
that Dad left behind because he thought they might mean
something to someone. I'm realizing that I've accidentally spent a
year creating another box for someone else. Two weeks ago
(13:57):
from when I'm writing this, I am exactly three thousand
and one miles away and asleep on that twin bed
I was telling you about two weeks ago minus an
hour and a half. My mom and brother are at
the side of that twin bed telling me that Dad
has gone two weeks ago plus an hour and a half.
I'm giving my dad syringes of all these things and
keeping a careful record and kissing him on the forehead
(14:20):
for what I don't realize is the last time. I
can't keep thinking about all these numbers. They're true as
I'm writing this, but they'll be different by the time
I record it, and different by the time you hear it,
and on and on, and it'll only just get further away.
The day where Dad tells us his cancer is back
is further away. The night before we go to the
(14:41):
hospital and watch Pewe's big adventure is further away. The
days I don't remember but have been obsessively documented by
him and me grow further away. In these two weeks,
I've found myself kind of chafing at every googleable element
of grief, all of the aphorisms and step and what
(15:01):
seems to be a multi million dollar industry around people
telling you you're doing great and that your loved one
is joined the rest of the faceless souls in the
great mayonnaise jar of bygone humanity. I understand why it works,
and I don't begrudge anyone who gets anything out of it,
but it doesn't work for me. It lacks specificity. It
(15:21):
feels like the goal is to arrive at a place
where someone you love who taught you to look at
everything you possibly could, is better suited in three sentences
because it might make you feel better. Last week, I
went to the beach, which I don't usually do, but
while I was there, I kind of deluted myself into
(15:42):
thinking that I was convening with his spirit. My dad
hated the beach on a conceptual level, I kind of
hate the beach. It just felt like a place to
manufacture this kind of moment, and I tried to do
that a lot in the first week. Last week, my
(16:03):
brother and I convinced ourselves he was a rabbit the
morning that dad died, because I don't know. He liked
a rabbit and there was a rabbit nearby. But something
that worries me about losing someone this important is that
it's so tempting to turn them into someone in your
mind who tells you that everything is fine, and on
(16:25):
a long enough timeline, they turn into a framed photo
in your apartment and three sentences and a voice in
your head that occasionally tells you you're doing great. And
I keep worrying that in a year, will I even
be carefully considering what my dad might actually think, or
will I just be talking to somebody who I've made up.
(16:48):
Here's a part of a note I wrote on the
beach whatever stupid Etsy jar or credit card bill and
paying off so we could be with you. I have
the real pieces, and someday I'll look at them again
and you'll be right there. I tell you what stage
of grief this is. But Google doesn't work here, just
the word to be borrowed, cash to get over easy eggs.
(17:14):
I have it all for some day when I need
to have it straight, I promise. So when I go
over these notes, I want to know what my dad
would think. Because he's an interesting person. And I guess
I've always thought that because when I was in middle school,
I made this convoluted chart of things that I thought
(17:35):
were interesting, revealing that I have been either remarkably consistent
or deeply incurious. In the almost twenty years that have
passed since I made it, I still regularly talk about
Lemony Snicket books, the book Lolita, and as I dedicated
an entire category of my interests the life in times
of Mike Loftus. And the reason that I know I
(17:57):
said this is because my dad put it in a
box for me to see, and that means he knew
I wrote that down too. We would text about this
stuff intermittently. He'd send me something he thought was funny,
or occasionally something that made him sad, because he didn't
always realize the points when I was a kid where
I was lonely or obsessive in a way that was
(18:17):
more harmful than we thought. He really looked through all
of these boxes, and now his boxes are back with me,
what he'd left us of his own obsessive observations of
his life, and the boxes that he'd made of my own.
I don't know if this is healthy I suspect it
isn't because in terms of raw material, it's too much.
(18:42):
A lot of it is useless. You know, if you've
ever lost someone and had to go through your house,
you can relate this like sinking, feeling that no matter
how careful you look, you're going to miss something, and
of course you are. I mean, it's really painful to
see boxes full of someone who isn't there, and it's exhausting.
And I know my dad felt the same way, because
(19:02):
the boxes his mom left behind when she died had
started to mildo in our basement. But I have this
fear that if I let myself reach the bottom of
these boxes, a part of him disappears. I'm voluntarily tossing
him into the man astar and somehow surrendering to the
idea that three sentences could be good enough. I don't
(19:24):
think my dad would want me to be cycling on
these thoughts this much. He probably knew I would do it,
but I don't think it's what he would really want
for me. And now there are his boxes and my boxes,
and I have to decide what's important to me. And
I'll give money to mediums and buy crystal bracelets until
I die. That's how I was raised. But I can't
see my dad in a rabbit or a sunset right now,
(19:48):
not in these two weeks. I can't see him in
three sentences. The closest I've gotten are two things that
I've found in a thousand boxes. The first it is
a letter written inside of a Valentine's Stake card from
my dad to me from who knows when. Part of
it says, I know you'll be a good girl and
(20:09):
we'll take care of mom, Ben, Reese and Bug, but
please don't forget to take care of yourself too. Get
enough sleep and make sure you have some breakfast before school.
I'll call you before you go to sleep tonight. Don't worry.
I won't be gone too long. I love you, Love Dad.
And even though this was probably written when I was ten,
I think that this is a little closer to what
(20:32):
he would want for me. But I don't know if
it's something I can give to myself. I think I'm
always going to wonder if I had asked another question
or arranged another box, if things would not feel this bad.
The second thing is a cassette tape I don't remember
ever having existed. It's almost exactly twenty five years old,
(20:53):
and it was recorded on a road trip that my
dad and I took together, the only one we ever
took alone, Brackton, Massachusetts to a family reunion in South Carolina.
At the time, I'm almost six, and I remember this
trip in my memory. We listened to a mixtape we'd
made that had one of Dad's songs and the one
of mine. There was a time we heard the song
(21:16):
Somewhere out There from an American Tale, and I started
crying because I'd never been that far away from my
mom before. I remember him teaching me how to swim
in a motel pool and drinking the most amazing hot
chocolate I'd ever had at a diner in Maryland. I
remember almost nothing of the actual reunion. It was the
trip and these little memories of being excited that I
(21:40):
was spending time with just my dad and he wasn't
at work and we could be silly and listen to
music and see new things. And the tape Okay, it's.
Speaker 4 (21:50):
Still in line. July twenty ninth, we have driven forty
two point six miles and it's eleven forty one.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
It's my dad making a document for I don't know
if he knows who me someday maybe, But there's so
much random stuff on it that you almost get the
idea that it's also for him.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
Were eleven o'clock this evening, And the interesting thing is
is that here, at eleven forty two point six miles
into the trip and nineteen minutes before midnight, we're stuck
in construction traffic on Route ninety five, getting a little bored,
a little hot. But I don't want to turn the
air conditioning on. I just don't know what I want.
(22:35):
By a few rain drops, does it mean more? Does
it mean less? You know? Are we driving into a storm?
Or is it just that just a few rain drops?
I don't know, And then there's no way to know
unless we keep going.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I almost didn't find this tape. It wasn't really organized
into anything but a shallow box of otherwise empty tapes,
But everything I remembered was there, crying about my mom,
and we.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Both just got a little bit sad because we heard
a song that reminded us of home. But we think
that maybe after Jamie gets a little sleep in a
few hours, when we stop and grab something to eat,
that we'll start to have a little bit more fun.
Then it's tough for my little daughter. Let's see if
she wants to say anything.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Hey, Main Marney the hot chocolate in Maryland.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
It's nine thirty in the morning now, and Jamie and
I just went and had our breakfast. It was called
the Barnside Diner and it's in Temple Hills, Maryland, and
we took our time and Jamie had like two awesome
hot chocolates, even though it's going to be ninety degrees today,
and all.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Of these things that I didn't know that my dad
thought or worried about. It was all there.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
And then we'll see how it goes from there. But
it's gone great now. She just my Jamie Loftus just
went back to sleep after listening to her Backstreet Boys.
She slept two hours and I think she was up
another two. I'll have to go back and check. But
she just she's just a little wonder. I love this
(24:08):
girl to death, you know, not really to death. I
just love her so much. She's very peaceful, and I
hope she gets a good sleep.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
And there's no person I can make up in my
head or seeing a rabbit or whose memory could be
a blessing or three sentences that captures the feeling of
finding this and putting it in a boombox and knowing
that all that time ago he was taking notes and
hoping someone would find them at some point. But down
(24:39):
the line with my kids asked me what was special
about my dad. I'm lucky that I will be able
to open a box and show them.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Let's see. I just wanted to say. Now, I've been
turning this on every now and then so we can
keep a record, right, Yes, well, anyway, I just want
to say before I forget that.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Sixteenth minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. Lea
nasy Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen and Pet. Shout
outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and
(25:29):
Casper and by Pet Rockbert who will outlive us all Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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