GRIEVER'S DIGEST: Brian Moritz (Vol. 1)
GRIEVER'S DIGEST: Brian Moritz (Vol. 1)
In where I turn the keys over to someone else. The first Griever's Digest is by one of the ten smartest people I know.
Ed. note: I made artwork and everything.12
The community of people experiencing grief is vast and wide. I’ve heard from a number of you over the past few weeks that you’ve related to what I’m doing. So, I want to tap into you to take the stage and get vulnerable in front of tens of readers each week.
Interested? I’ll send a series of questions. Maybe you’re grieving a parent. Maybe you’re grieving a pet. Maybe you’re grieving John F. Kennedy. Your feelings are valid.
Did you write a poem or essay about someone you’re grieving? That’s cool too. This is a community space and the more people share, the more everyone will relate. I promise, it’s a good thing. All you have to do is email me at jaredpaventi at gmail dot com.
Be sure to share this post using the link and, if you’re new to Dirt Nap, go ahead and subscribe.
Griever’s Digest: Brian Moritz
I’ve known Dr. Brian P. Moritz, Ph.D. since he was merely Brian Moritz and we were full-of-ourselves journalism majors at St. Bonaventure University3. He was one of the best men at my wedding and I go on vacation with him every year. Brian gets the honor of writing the first Griever’s Digest because he was the first person to raise their hand and volunteer.
Brian Moritz4 is an associate professor and director of the online graduate programs in sports journalism and digital journalism at our alma mater. He writes about sports media from the academic perspective at his own Substack5 and has a podcast called The Other 51.
Who is the subject of your grief, and when and how did they die?
My mom, Kathy Moritz. She died Feb. 16, 2020 from lung cancer, which she had had on and off for several years.
How old were you when they died and what stage of life were you at?
I was 42 when I joined the society. I guess I was at the stage I am now — relatively settled. Married for double-digit years. Stable job, stable family. Comfortably middle age, the stage of life where Jason Isbell songs make a lot of sense.
What is your favorite memory of them?
Cupcake cones. Back when my sister and I were in elementary school, my mom always made cupcake cones for us to bring to school on our birthdays (this was the 80s, back before schools knew or cared about food allergies). She’d make cake batter, pour them into regular ice cream cones, bake them and frost them. A few years ago, this became a trendy thing for Pinterest moms to do, and my sister and I were overjoyed to see our mom decades ahead of the curve.
So many of my favorite memories of my mom revolve around sports. She would call me at the end of every Bills game — win or lose — and say “How ‘bout them Bills?” with the amount of sarcasm in her voice reflecting how the team did. For a long time, there was A LOT of sarcasm. My mom was also a college basketball savant. She loved going to games and watching games late into the night.
One memory — the two of us went to the old Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo in 1994 to see Canisius play Wake Forest. This was the Wake squad with Randolph Childress, who that March would go on his epic run in the ACC tournament. But sitting in our seats behind the basket, my mom could not stop raving about Wake’s sophomore big man.
And that’s how my mom was one of the first people I knew of who knew Tim Duncan would be a star.
What is your most immediate and stark memory from when you learned of their death?
My mom spent the last month or so of her life in the hospital. She moved from Roswell Park to a hospice facility on a Monday night. On Friday afternoon, I was getting ready to teach my media law class at SUNY Oswego, when I saw a missed call and a “call me back” from my older sister. So, I knew, right? “It’s hours or days,” my sister said. I remember walking out of my office, seeing my then-department chair walking up the hall and saying “I … I need to cancel my class.” She knew what was going on, so she understood. I packed up my office, drove from Oswego to Fairport to quickly pack an overnight bag, then drove to Tonawanda to be with her.
We spent all day Saturday in her room, our entire extended family coming to see her. At around 7:30 p.m., my dad was ready to go home. He kissed her hand, told her he loved her, and I took him home.
My sister called me at 3:38 a.m. to tell me. I handed my phone to my dad, so he could hear the news.
That weekend, one of the hospice nurses told us that women will often wait until their children are out of the room and gone before letting go. And I 100 percent believe that to be true with my mom.
What was the most difficult part about their funeral?
The funeral and the wake themselves weren’t that hard. But it was afterward that was the hardest. The first few days were busy with logistics, coordination, scheduling, driving home and back, all of the things you have to do when a family member dies. But once the funeral was done, that was it. There was really nothing left to do but live life without my mom.
Conversely, what was something that stood out from it that made the greatest impact on you?
My dad’s grace that entire week. He has always been a calm, quiet, kind, almost stoic person. But watching him that week, saying goodbye to the love of his life, with the grace and peace that he did, moves me to this day.
It was also very funny, in a poignant way, to see him walking out of the funeral (behind his wife’s casket, mind you), nodding to people whispering “How you doin’? Thanks for comin’.”
If I inherit a tenth of his grace, I’ll have exceeded my wildest expectations as a human.
But it’s less sadness now, and more just ‘I wish mom could see this. She’d have loved this.’
What do you remember about your grief and mourning at that time? How did you manage and handle it?
So, if you caught the date at the start of this Q&A, you’ll notice that my mom died just about a month before the COVID-19 shutdown. Yeah. 2020 was a fun year.
I will say this: If there is a saving grace to my mom’s death, it’s that she died so quickly after entering hospice care. If she had lingered a few more weeks, she would have been in a nursing home when then-NYS governor Andrew Cuomo shut down visitations to nursing homes. So that meaningful last day we all had with mom? Wouldn’t have happened. My dad would have had to say goodbye to his wife of 47-years through a computer screen. Which is unfathomably sad, and it’s horrible to think so many had to do that.
As far as grief, the shutdown came one month after my mom died. So while acutely grieving my mom’s death, I was also juggling remote school for my daughter, remote school for my students, remote work for me and my wife, as well as the fear we all felt that first month or two of the pandemic, when the world was literally shut down and we didn’t know what would happen. So while I was processing all of that, I’m also working through my own personal grief. I wrote about this at the time:
For the first month, grieving for mom’s death felt impossibly large — bigger than anything else going on in the world. For the past two weeks, my personal grief for my mom has felt so impossibly small that indulging in it feels almost selfish.
It was more than just the emotional aspects that were altered. We all agreed that we were going to make a point to visit my dad regularly after my mom died. Help him out with the logistical stuff, make sure he was doing as well as could be imagined, just be a family together. That didn’t happen, except for a through-the-door porch visit and weekly FaceTime sessions. We managed as best we could.
How did I manage and handle it? An incredibly supportive wife and group of friends. Talks with my sister. And just keep living, you know?
How do you feel you handle the grief today? Where are you in your grief journey?
I’ve struggled to answer this question, and I think that’s because I’m at a settled place with my grief journey. It’s been more than three years, so I’m firmly at acceptance. What you wrote about anticipatory grief struck a chord, because that was me. In the year after my mom died, I realized that I had been mourning her for a long time. She was so sick at the end. In a lot of ways, I feel like I lost my mom months before Kathy Moritz died.6 So I had grieved her loss long before she was gone.
There are still tough days. Holidays aren’t easy, especially ones we used to celebrate with my family (Easter was a big day in our extended family). It’s usually the quiet moments that are the hardest. A lull before dinner. That quiet time late morning before heading to my in-laws. The end of the day. But one thing I’ve learned in therapy is to let those moments come, feel them fully, and not try to hide from those feelings. They come, they go.
There are still moments when I wanted to call my mom. When I was lucky enough to get elected to our local school board (especially the night we had our “Meet the Candidates” night online. She would have had thoughts). When I got tenure. When I got hired at our alma mater, St. Bonaventure. But it’s less sadness now, and more just “I wish mom could see this. She’d have loved this.”
Earlier this summer, my dad bought a new car, replacing the one he and my mom had for 10 years. I helped him clean the old car out, and we found a bag in the center console that had all of the VIP gameplay cards my mom had accumulated from Western New York area casinos (she loved responsibly playing the slots). Something that might have been sad a few years ago was kinda funny now. We’re thinking about a tribute trip to the casino in her honor.
Looking back, is there something you wished someone had said or done in the days around their passing and services to ease your grief?
Since I can’t think of anything, I’m gonna turn this question on its head and give the best thing that I heard in the days around her passing. Two come to mind. One came from a close mutual friend of ours, who was also a member of the society, who said “I’m not gonna ask you how you’re doing, because you don’t know yet.” And man, that hit me hard and perfectly. It was like permission to just be how I was, you know? I didn’t have to be a mess, I didn’t have to have it together, I didn’t know how I was doing. As I get older, I’ve learned just how much power there is in ambiguity and in accepting it.
The second came from mutual friend Sean Kirst, who sent me a column he wrote for The Buffalo News with what he called the best advice on grief he had ever heard. And it was (words to the effect of) when you lose a parent, it is a singular loss. No one else will experience it the way you do, even your sibling. And that is profoundly true. Again, it kind of gave me permission to just feel what I felt, and be where I was, without trying to force anything one way or the other.
On the flipside, what's the dumbest thing someone could have said to you? (I always thought "They're in a better place now" was a sort of back-handed comforting statement.)
I think the closest thing would be some variation of “I didn’t know she was sick,” or “I didn’t realize how bad it was.” Because, why does that matter, you know?
Kind of related, but I find it really awkward when I tell people now that my mom died and they respond with “I’m sorry.” Mainly because I don’t know how I should respond, you know? My instinct is to shrug it off (Nah, it’s fine …) but that feels too dismissive of someone’s genuine response. It’s just weird.
Were there books or music or movies from that time that you embraced for comfort during that time? What about today?
The day we found out my mom was going into hospice care, the finale of The Good Place aired. It was already one of my favorite shows, but this episode floored me. One of the main characters, Chidi (played by William Jackson Harper) gives a speech to Eleanore (played by Kristin Bell) about death:
Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave. And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone.
But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.
It floored me then, and it floors me today. It is the single most comforting thing I’ve heard or read about death, and it came to me at the time I needed it the most. Michael Schur is a genius writer, and this is one of the reasons why.
Also, Dream a Little Dream of Me by the Mamas and the Papas was the song we danced to at my wedding, and it’ll forever be our song.
Smell is supposedly one of our strongest memory triggers. Have you ever encountered a smell that immediately made you think of them?
So, this is not going to be the happy memory you may have been intending with this question. But for me, it’s cigarette smoke. My mom smoked for most of my life. Winston Lights. She quit somewhere around 2014, when she had her first health scare (COPD and lymphoma). But that lifetime of smoking caught up to her, of course. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, went into remission, but the cancer came back in May 2019 with a vengeance.
It’s not as common a scent as it was when we were younger, but when I do get a whiff of smoke, I always think of my mom. It is not a warm memory of the 1980s. It smells like death and poison.
Don’t smoke, kids. Seriously.
One came from a close mutual friend of ours…who said, “I’m not gonna ask you how you’re doing, because you don’t know yet.” And man, that hit me hard and perfectly. It was like permission to just be how I was, you know? I didn’t have to be a mess, I didn’t have to have it together, I didn’t know how I was doing. As I get older, I’ve learned just how much power there is in ambiguity and in accepting it.
Humans are pretty ritualistic, whether it's spiritual, religious or out of general habit. Have you developed any tradition or routine in grieving them?
I’ve lost touch with my Catholic faith over the years for a number of reasons that aren’t relevant here. But I will say, the ritual of the funeral Mass is very comforting to me.
As far as a tradition, my wife, daughter and I get ice cream for dinner on her birthday every year (Feb. 1). My mom loved ice cream. She and my dad made a point to go to every local ice cream place the day it opened, and she always had ice cream on hand at her house. Now, to be fair, we don’t need a reason or an excuse to get ice cream for dinner (“it’s Tuesday” is usually a good enough reason), but we do it with intentionality every year on Feb. 1.
There is a school of thought that our grief never leaves us and that our life grows around it. Do you think that is true or do you believe you have found or will find closure in their passing?
I think grief is a part of life, a part of the human experience, so I don’t think it’s something that life grows around. I don’t think grief ever really goes away, but like the water in the wave, it changes shapes.
Years ago, the comedian Craig Ferguson wrote a piece for Men’s Health about the death of his father. He wrote:
“Life is full of joy and sadness, but the death of my father was no tragedy. That I carried his coffin that day was a blessing. Fathers should die before their sons, and when I go, I want my son to carry me. God forbid it should ever be the other way.”
I think about this a lot. Because as hard as it was to lose my mom, this is the way things are supposed to go, you know? This year, we had close family friends lose a 6-year-old to cancer, and that’s unfathomable. To compare their journey to mine because it is both grief feels inadequate because they’re not the same. Losing my mom when I was 42 is a lot different than you losing yours when you were 20.
I guess my point is, you can’t look at grief as one thing because it is a million different things, a million different feelings all at once.
What's something you wish you could say or share with them if you had the chance? If you had one more day, in the present or back then, what would you do?
If we could have one more day where my mom was alive, right now, I would cede my time with her to my daughter. My mom LOVED her first granddaughter more than anything, and I like to think she’d be so proud of the young woman she is becoming. I like to think they’d get into some real shenanigans together.
Final Thoughts on Finality
But within this hopeful word an idea hides in plain sight: For something to be reborn, it must have first died.
One afternoon in August, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, meets me at an old seafood market reimagined after the storm as a high-end culinary destination. He tries to explain how 10 years passes like a day.
“For those of us who were here, it was a deeply emotional, deeply personal, painful experience,” he says. “I mean, it was hard. But we were in a near-death environment, so we didn't really have time to process it. We literally had to get out of harm's way so that we could stay alive. Then we immediately had to start rebuilding. And I'm not sure that a lot of us have had a chance to process it.”
“Have you grieved?”
The question catches him off guard, and for just a moment he drops his smooth politician's front, closing his eyes, looking away.
“I really don't know the answer to that question,” he says. “Probably not fully. You know, I find myself really getting choked up.”
— Wright Thompson, Beyond The Breach (ESPN.com)
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning.
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My attempt at adapting the Reader’s Digest logo is close; I wasn’t going to drop $400 on the correct font family, so I used something close that was available from Adobe for free.
Yeah, I’m ripping off the name of Reader’s Digest, a venerable publication spanning 101 years and once the official bathroom reading material at aunts’ and uncles’ homes across this great land. Those abridged stories were short enough to entertain and intrigue while taking care of important business.
We were all full of ourselves.
He has never been Brian. Maybe once or twice I’ve called him by his first name. My youngest has called him Moritz since she figured out how to pronounce the letter z a couple years ago.
You really should subscribe.
Oh, trust me when I say we’ll tackle this topic in the near future.