Never My Love with Adam Levy

I don't feel like there was any surprise to his death as tragic as it was. It was something that we lived with almost like a, a terminal illness of sorts. You know, we watched his disintegration over a few years. We were hopeful. We were engaged. We felt that he was doing as much as he could to kind of cope and to be hopeful as well. And so those ebbs and flows just became kind of a normal part of life. And in his last year, things got really bad. His diagnosis was Bipolar.

But we suspect because of a number of psychotic episodes that it's possible he was dealing with something more akin to Schizophrenia, some sort of Schizophrenic Affective Disorder, but it was frightening. It was frightening watching a child pull away, become really, uh, changed altered person almost as though it was a, a spirit possession of sorts, you know, he became so, so different in so many ways.

It was like we lost him and we were holding onto a balloon that was gradually slipping away from us without us really being able to do anything about it. I'm trying to think what else. He was an amazing artist and he channeled his suffering through his art. I don't know if we can get people a link to that so they can actually see this as they're, as they're listening or after. His art was pretty remarkable. And at 21, I think it was just kind of coming into his own.

It was a world, his art was a world of ghouls and monsters and, um, kind of tortured individuals. And as a parent, you know, watching that art unfold, there's a part of you that's just like, Oh my God, this is just you know, can you just, can you paint some things that are a little more contemplative and peaceful, you know, landscapes maybe. But this was his internal world. This is what he was experiencing.

And art became a, a conversation for him, a way of processing outside of medications and therapy, what he was seeing. And so whether it was like a literal representation of this inner turmoil or whether it was a more symbolic discussion he was having, it was his way of really processing what he was going through and it was dark. But one thing I will say is as dark as that art, that he was, it also felt there was a level of empathy. I felt there was a level of empathy in the art.

I never worried about my son going and killing anyone else. I did, I always worried about him self-harming. But because there was such an intense connection to other people's pain in his art, in our conversations. I knew I felt bad for him that he was such a hypersensitive kid, like his dad and like his mom. But I, I never really worried that he was going to be one of those kids that would go out and shoot somebody else.

So, you know, I can go on and on here about, you know, bearing witness to his pain, it was obviously an incredibly horrible life altering experience, losing a child. I never would have imagined there's no words. There's no words in our language that the name, a parent that loses a child. It's like, it's one of those things. That's just so horrific and almost taboo that we don't have a way of really discussing it.

And so there's a lot of shame and guilt around losing a child to suicide because as a parent, you're of course always wanting to help your child and your responsibility with your children is making sure they survive and they're happy, right? And so losing a child to suicide is in some ways, a condemnation of you as a parent that you had, you know, you failed your job. And so I've spent a lot of time processing those feelings just as well as the massive loss that you have.

I remember at his bar mitzvah, we've got pictures and he was just so happy. And as he went into becoming a teenager, you just sort of saw the happiness. Like get dimmer. It wasn't gone, but it got dimmer, you saw the pictures before smiling happy, funny. And then you saw the pictures afterwards, not so much.

And he dealt with chronic depression and he also was diagnosed with bipolar, but with him, he was hilarious and we always thought that humor was going to be his saving grace because he just was, I mean, really, really funny, but he was super smart also. Like Daniel, he was very artistic in the sense that he was a, he wanted to be a movie director and he actually moved to California. And the last three years of his life were the happiest years of his life.

And I think because he was so intelligent, The protocols that medical technology had to treat him didn't work and you knew they didn't work. You know, there's been medical studies now showing that MRI brain scans of people with suicidal ideation are anatomically different than those who don't have suicidal ideation. And whenever this anatomical brain disease that both of our sons had called suicide, I don't think medical technology has an answer for it.

So he went to multiple doctors, supposedly the best in the area and best in the country was on multiple medication. And he the last few years of his life, he told us, he goes, I'm done this dulls me. I don't like feeling like this. I'm not going to take this anymore. And we were so scared and we're saying, this is the worst thing he could possibly do. We were wrong. He was right. The last three years of his life. He didn't take any medication at all. He was the happiest of his life and.

I've talked to so many suicide survivors. Who've told me, gee, I wish my loved one did that because he stayed on medication and it didn't make any difference. Anyways, they ended up dying . It's not like, Oh, if he stayed on the medication this wouldn't happen. I've had literally hundreds of people tell me, I wish the medication would have stopped because at least the last part of my loved ones, life would have been much happier.

And with Matt, I think that we didn't know at the time, but he told his younger brother, David, that he was not gonna live a long time. And I think he just felt I'm going to make every single day, the best day I can for as long as I can. And I'm going to fight this until the day that I can't. The last time I saw him, I drove him back to the airport, top on the plane to go to San Diego, knowing you'd have to come back. He had to do some work.

He had to come back from where my mother, when my mother passed. So we was waiting for my mother, passed to come back. And I just told him how proud I was of him, because he'd absolutely taken his life and done a 180. He was living with some friends from Orlando, a married couple of another friend house, looking over Pacific Ocean, Oceanside, California. He went to film school. He was working on projects with people there. He was doing YouTube original content.

He actually met one of his heroes, Oliver Stone about doing a movie. And I told him that, as a parent, this is like what you want to see. And he told me that he goes, life doesn't care what you're going through. Life's going to do, what's going to do. It all depends how you handle, how you cope with it. And I go, Matt, that is so wonderful for parents to hear. That you're able to cope with whatever life has to throw up, throw out at you. So we hugged each other.

I said, see you soon when he comes back after my mother passed, I never saw him again. He was gone less than two weeks later after was that I thought was a Hollywood ending. So my question to you is I think Matt went out on top and I think he was fine with it. What's your interpretation about how Daniel's last years were?

I buy into that idea that there's a physiological difference in brains of people who who do suicide and I've, you know, I've kinda been watching a lot of the science around that. I think there's a Miami University or somewhere in Florida there's a scientist who is doing research on the Amygdala, which is the Frank, the fear, one of the low cut, low side of fear in our brains.

They talk about the Amygdala being this part of the brain, that processes fear, and that there are differences in the Amygdala of people who suicide. That there's a lack of fear that most of us have that kind of keep us in check. And that for some reason, there's this pattern with a lot of folks that commit suicide. And the suicide, I should say. So I, you know, as much as I tried to discourage Daniel and, you know, that's your worst fear is your child suicide.

And I think Daniel made a real conscious decision whether or not there were a physiological difference in his brain. In other words, I feel like he being able to get around his computer for the last few days before his death, and sort of see the process of what he was watching, where he was going. He was kind of negotiating in his brain. Do I want to do this? Does this make sense? He got ahold of a person in Finland for the suicide technique, which was, um, a nitrogen process.

That's you know, it's, it's hard to find out how to do it, but Daniel did the research so that he could have a painless death and that he could preserve organs for other folks. And so, as angry as I was at him for a little bit about leaving us, I understand the choice that he made, even though it's not the one that I wanted to make. The pain was so blinding for him.

There was nothing that was going to alleviate that at least in his mind, in his experience, everything presented to him, added up to a life of continuing agony. And that's one of the worst things to watch a child in that kind of pain where there's no resolution, no hope. So for Daniel, that's where he was at and I wish that there would have been other things that we could have leaned on.

I know there's a ketamine treatment that's been talked about and I've spoken with some people who use this ketamine as they were sort of Guinea pigs in some of the tests that at Yale and there have been huge differences. A woman I talked to said after six months of the treatment, she, she no longer has any suicidal thoughts and she'd suffered with them for years and years. And now they were completely gone after six months of that treatment.

And I spoke with her and she was still doing really well. So, you know, I think there are people that are really working on this now. But I feel that the information that Daniel had, the experience that he was under and the sort of the psychophysiology of his brain didn't really leave any other choices but that final one,

So from my standpoint, I viewed this as something that Matt battled with for as long as he could, like, I, I know my younger son, David at the eulogy mentioned that the two boys, they were very close they love each other, but entirely different. Matt was artistic and completely open with every part of his life like an open book. David was very athletic and he was a very good tennis player in the paper all the time. And people think, Oh, you're a good athlete, your really tough.

And Dave said he goes, my brother, Matt was a thousand times tougher than I ever was because he was giving the world the 10% that we saw above the water line of the iceberg. There was this incredibly loving, funny, entertaining, caring, human being when he had a fight with those demons. The 90% below the waterline that ended up taking his life.

So my question to you is, did you, see this coming because I've talked to so many suicide survivors that lost loved ones to suicide that were even though their loved ones had taken multiple unsuccessful attempts. They were still surprised because after the multiple unsuccessful attempts, they would say, I'm never going to do this again. Thank God I'm alive. I love being alive. I want to enjoy every moment for as long as I'm here and then, they're gone.

So even though I know you said you had concerns, did you, were you surprised or were you not surprised?

I don't know when, but it really upsets me that I'm not certain that my son's not going to be here. And I kind of talk myself out of those thoughts. Like you're just really scared. It's not going to happen. The last week of my son's life. I was on the phone with him. He lived in Saratoga Springs, New York with his mom an I was on the phone with them literally every day for that week before he took his life.

And almost every day we would talk for two hours and I would try to come up with, because he was really about to check out or he'd said, I can't do it anymore. I don't want to be here. And I would say things like Daniel, imagine that. You know, like Daniel was really into Hieronymus Bosch, and a lot of these really ghoulish artists that portrayed these really surreal kind of hellish worlds.

And I said, well, what's to say that if you took your life and you left here that you wouldn't end up in a place like that, you know, like you think this is painful.

And he and I had both done a lot of reading about the show about the Holocaust and survival through that in concentration camps and death camps and Daniel there are people who've had terminal illnesses that have survived because of the will. You know, people have been through the, the horrific experiences of concentration camps and the show up, and they managed to live through that because they were hopeful.

Can you just summon a little bit of that energy and be inspired by that to hang on for a couple more years? You know, you're not going to be in this place. When you're 26, I just, I can't believe it. And he said to me, dad, the difference between the people you're talking about and me is that they wanted to live. And when your kid says that to you, there's really is nothing you can do to come back to them other than shaming them, like, well, what about us you know,?

You're gonna leave behind all these people that love you. But if the, if the, if the desire to be there, doesn't really exist any longer or it's so tenuous, you're finding a major uphill battle, and that's kind of what we knew we were dealing with. So when I got the call from his mother and I, you know, I was shocked, but there was also a sense of, Oh my God, our worst fears are being realized and we knew this was going to happen

But what happened is his friends in California that we've met a few times, again, 3000 miles away. We go out there, we meet his friends and he would tell us what they were doing. And after Matt passed, they had a service format attribute and they had like, they had to keep on trying to find a bigger venue because so many people wanted to give a eulogy and we were thinking of going, we didn't go, we got a video of it. And people had never heard of people.

I'd never met talk about, were saying how Matt affected their lives positively. But two of his very good friends, one was a male , one was a female told me that Matt had a real interesting take sort of what you said, where they said that Matt knew that we'd really miss him and he knew that his friends would really miss him. And he, we felt that if we all know, Iwhat he was going through, we would not only understand what happened.

We would, again, not accept it, but almost view it as selfishness on our part to say, we want you to continue to make us happy. We want you to make us laugh because you're so damn funny. We want you to make us feel comfortable at night that we know you're safe and sound. And what they said is they gave me a different view of it. That from his standpoint, it almost would have been selfish for us.

Like if, if he had terminal cancer that you just know is horrifically painful and they're doing chemo and surgery and radiation, and there's no chance of this not being a fatal disease. And you'll say, keep on doing that. Let them chop you off. Keep on doing whatever you need to do, no matter how painful it is, because we want you to go through this for our own selfish reasons.

Nobody would say that if it was cancer that you could see in this, there was a cancer, that's no different, but it was a cancer in his brain that we couldn't see. So hearing it from that standpoint again, I would never accept it, but it gave me a different understanding of it. Do you have any feelings like that also?

I know that I, I can remember being in the hospital and he was on life support after his suicide attempt, I call it a suicide attempt because there was at least a couple of days where we thought perhaps he was going to pull through it. And so he was, um, seizuring for the first day that he was on life support, really violently.

And I remember looking at his body and thinking that it was almost as though he was on a, a balloon that we were, we were holding and we were just holding that balloon so tight. He was really trying to get away from us. He wanted freedom from this pain. And I can remember a conversation with my mom. Like the second day he was in the hospital, she said, just let him go. You got to just let him go. You can't hold on to him. He was in such immense pain.

And you can't, you can't let that the guilt and shame around that keep you hanging on to him because he doesn't, he didn't want to be here. He doesn't want to be here anymore. So. I I, at some point felt like I was allowing him. I was giving him permission to leave us.

And I think there've been some really tragic consequences of it, but there's also been severely powerfu awakenings for them about the nature of mental illness and how to be proactive about it in their own life and not just to be kind of paralyzed by it, but to really deal with it and, and, and, and a sense of hope in both of their lives, that they're going to be advocates for their friends and be helpful. And talk to us about their own suffering when that happens.

But I think they realize like this is a part of who we are as a, as a race of human beings as a family. This is, this is a, a real integral part of being human. The fact that we've got these big brains and that we think a lot, and we worry a lot and we connect with others pain, and this is just par for the course. His mother has been, I'd say much more tough. And I think that's one reason why Daniel.

He was going to college here at MCAD, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design working on an art degree and decided a couple of years into the program he just wanted to go home. He didn't want to be in the art program. He wanted to be closer to his mom. His mom was really nurturing, but she was always really tough with him. And I think he really wanted somebody that was really kind of bossing him around a little bit. And his mom for awhile was just every day, get up, take a walk, get into work.

You know, she was unapologetic about her. Um, Keeping him moving and not depressed and in alum, but there wasn't anything she could do at the very end, as much as she brow beat him and berated him and encouraged him and, you know, Tried to prod them along. There was just nothing that could really be done in the end.

And so I think she is at peace with Daniel's choice to leave as painful as it was, and as close as she was, you know, a mother and a child relationship is incomparable, you know, there's just nothing like it. I felt really close to Daniel and loving, but there's something about a mother and a child that's that is beyond profound and interconnected.

So we talk, I would say every month we at least have a conversation about stuff and what she's going through, but she's really, she's a tough, tough woman,

I mean, literally every single night and before he passed, I used to have, where were the nightmares that he had passed and then I'd wake up and say, thank God. There was a nightmare. That's not reality. Now I have dreams with him. And it's our relationship now where he's sometimes he's alive and this never happened. Other times he tells me this did happen and he's wherever he is, he's contacted me like that.

And then I'll wake up and it's the flip side of that coin out saying, well, that was a dream and reality is he's not here. And I've sort of come to a realization that I get before Matt's passing, I never believed in afterlife at all, but now I absolutely do. We've had all these different sightings and light things. And like we also, we had a forensic expert go through Matt's computer and a cell phone, and we knew everything that he was doing. Before the end of his life.

And it's funny, your, with your background in music, that would love you. You know, we were huge Beatle fans and Matt loved all these different types of music, some stuff, I didn't know what the heck it was like Nine Inch Nails and all these other things. And of all the songs that he listened to the last song they listened to. On this planet was 1967. The Association Never My Love,

And I think for me, There was a woman that I think he was in love with that a year before attempted to take her life didn't succeed. She thanked everybody for all the wishes of help and support, and she was so positive that this was going to be the start of her life forward. And I think two weeks later, she passed by suicide and all of Matt's friends and California said that he never got over that and that was about 10 months before he passed. And so Never My love by Association.

Why did he listen to that? I'm trying to make this, you know, thousand piece puzzle fit to figure it out. But we've had so many times where that has popped up on random and explicable times. Like when we went to Grief Share with Steve, was this support group. The last thing we did is we went to a bonfire where everybody wrote a note to your lost, loved one, and you threw in the bonfire and smoke one up and hopefully they got it.

And Debbie wrote a note to Matt saying, Matt, we haven't had any sign from you lately. So we just threw it into the bonfire fire smoke goes up and then we're leaving. And you know, we've got Sirius satellite radio, 12 million channels, and I just happened to turn it on, right when we're leaving in a course here's 1967 Association, uh, of Never My Love. And we look at each other and we go, are you kidding me of all the songs that could possibly be played?

Was it one out of 10,000 or whatever it is, they're playing that. And we've had all these other times that that has shown us that I think Matt is still part of our lives in a different form, but still connecting with us. So now that you're eight years out, my question, how are you doing with everything? Cause I've sort of reached a sense that my relationship with Matt is ongoing. If somebody would told me that three years ago, same story I'm saying poor soul he's hallucinating.

He just making, you know, wishes that hopefully this, that I'm a lawyer. I've got a base. You know, my, I do a lot of litigation. My practice is based on evidence. I got to present every case based on factual evidence to win the case. So I'm a very cynical, factual, empirical guy. And. I won't get too much into it, but we've had nothing but signs that I'm a hundred percent convinced Matt is still communicating with us. And my relationship with him is ongoing.

So in some sense like that, I do have some contentment and pride of what he did when he was here. And what I want to do now is make him proud of me that he's not here. So I'm interested in how you are eight years out, because I'm about a little over two years out. Well, that's a really big question and I will answer it, but I really do talk about this. Never My Love coincidence for a moment. So I play in many bands and I played cover music for 20 years and played different covers.

My newest band that I'm in is called Turn, Turn, Turn, and it started as a cover band with two women where we would do three part harmonies and do a lot of kind of Laurel Canyon Beatles. 60's 70's, country, folk stuff. And a lot of, you know, we've just done a lot of covers and we made an originals record this year. I just decided, like, I really want to use this group to record some of my original music and kind of force the two of those women to write some of their own stuff.

We put this record out and people have responded really well to it. We still will throw in one or two covers in a set. Tonight, we have a show, we are playing, we only had a half hour to play. So we had to figure out, well, what are we going to play? And so I said, well, let's just do one cover. Let's just do Never My Love in the set. Wow So tonight I will announce the show,

My, my brother, who also is not a particularly spiritual or religious person was walking in San Francisco and with his wife and they were in the mission in San Francisco. And this boy was walking towards them, a young man, and they both looked at each other and his Vista, you know, half a block away was very similar as the whole sort of, you know, walk and everything was so similar when they got, when they walked up to him, the boy looked at them and just nodded his head and smiled.

And knowing Judy just started crying because the resemblance was stunning. And he's visited me in dreams. You know, I feel like I have a living relationship with my son still. I'll talk to him. And I mean, you know, he's not always here. He's not always in my meds, but I feel as present sometimes.

But the one picture you sent yeah, me with his glasses on I'm looking at this and I'm going to, somebody sent me that, what was that picture may have taken because we get friends taking pictures of Matt. We didn't know happen. And I'm looking at that and there's just too many interconnecting pieces that to me are inexpensive. And the thing with the Never My Love now is it's just, again, how many thousands of songs have you done in your career?

And that's the one you're opening you're going to play tonight, but we have to, you know, you're doing this with us today. I, and so again, I miss Matt every single day. And some of it is selfish because I like laughing and Matt was just funny as hell his entire life. I mean, the land, again, my last conversation with him was just hilarious and I really miss that laughter.

But I sort of still get it now because I'll think about things that he, he said, you know, like, um, just you you'll appreciate this as somebody in the music business. I remember when Jerry Garcia died, The Grateful Dead, you know, and, and I was never that much in The Grateful Dead that Matt was. And, you know, that was just so funny. He said, Jerry Garcia, his diet was cigarettes and heroin.

Who thought that health nut would die, you know, at a young age, and then it just sort of like made this funny comment about Jerry Garcia's death. And he just saw things differently. I knew Jerry Garcia was a rock and roll guy. I don't know if he smoke cigarettes or heroin. It was a joke obviously, but it was just a joke that only Matt would make, he saw things differently and the way he saw the world was not how I saw the world.

And I loved the fact that he was my son because he opened my eyes and taught me things that I never would've been exposed to otherwise. And so many of his friends told me that they feel so fortunate that they were led into his world because it was just a different way of looking at things. And what was Daniel like that also? I mean, did he have a different view again, it's all how your brain works and Matt's brain was just so much of a migraine. I was really enjoying the difference.

I've had a lot of his job to me or people that I didn't know were his friends or people who knew Daniel tangentially or knew about him, but say how much of an impact that brief encounter with him or his story has had on them.

And so that has been really soul nourishing for me to hear the ripple effects, the butterfly effects of my son's life on so many people in the very end, he really isolated, and it was hard to get him to interact with any friends and they would try to get, pull him out of his shell and he just didn't want to socialize anymore. But there was a time when he was a really magnetic personality. And people loved being around him and loved hanging out with them.

And he had friends that he would do art with and he had friends that he skateboarded with. These are amazing skate skateboardist as well. There's a really great video called Dan Levy, dirty maneuver that is seven minutes of a, for a friend of his, after he died a compilation of some amazing moves that Daniel did as a skateboarder. And he was just amazing. And the first half of the video, we showed it at his funeral.

The video, the first half of the video is all just horrible spills where he's just one wreck after another. And I can remember how worried. I was about him as a parent. You know, dude, you're not wearing, wearing your helmet. You're not wearing pants, like all your worst fears, but he would just fall and spill and get back up. And he was, had horrible abrasion sometimes and probably hairline fractures. And then the second half of the video. He's in flight and he is so elegant in his movement.

And so, so different from me. I'm such a clumsy oaf, you know, to watch your child move was just, it's amazing to me just to watch that,

I was really public and people were sort of awestruck by how engaged I was about it, but it really was for me, it was therap and I talked about it. I wasn't able to make music as comfortably as I had. I sort of needed to take a break from writing music. But I did put a record out within a couple of months of his death and that was because it was sort of like in the pipeline and I had to put this record out.

But I didn't write any music about him deliberately sort of like, I didn't want to do anything that would cheapen or trivialize any of what he had been through, but as time went on and my grief was kind of moving into different stages, I started writing more about it and I drew on, I think the public conversations really helped me develop a story, a narrative about his life about our grief. It helped me make sense of it and it affected the way I started to write music.

And, you know, for me, writing music is one of the predominant ways that I process the world relationships and the kind of existential experience I have and spirituality and politics. And it all sort of like music is, is the primary way that I interact with the world around me and my internal world. So I started writing songs that felt like at first they were just about my own grief because that felt safe.

Like I could write about what I was seeing rather than trying to imagine his world, but as time went on and I kind of dive in there a little bit. I'm having a little bit of an audio interruption. I don't know if those are on my end,

You know, I don't know part of my grieving process that I needed to kind of communicate and express. And now I've sort of retreated a little bit when people ask me to play those songs, I'm hesitant, I'm reticent. And I, I, uh, I kinda need to get me to give it a break for a bit so that, you know, that's been interesting to me too.

Of grief and the processes that we go through are all so individual and there's no one gone through different stages differently than other folks that I know that have gone through this. I've had counts, which is a trauma therapy for it. I went to some grief groups briefly, but i, I think, uh, just being able to talk to people in my immediate world is really big and helpful.

I sort of view as a positive now, because you know, you look what's happening in the world with the pandemic. And so many people that never thought that grief would be knocking on their door. It has, and they're going to be dealing with this, the rest of their lives also.

I've got about a hundred of the thousand pieces fitting, which means 900, not fitting I'm down to 899 now because you gave me another piece to fit in there with Never My Love. I mean, when you, when you, when you, when you told me that I thought you were kidding, so I know the song, but the fact you're playing it tonight of all the times for us to do this podcast interview and for all the you know, musical numbers, you could be playing tonight. You're doing that.

You know, what are the odds of adding this? These odds are so infinitesimal that again, statistically, it's not a coincidence. I really believe that maybe all of our sons, Daniel, Jordan, and Matt are all laughing and all of us now saying. Don't you guys get it. You're all supposed to be meeting here, talking about us. Like you guys are slowly the uptake here. This is all sort of what you're supposed to be doing. And maybe they're all laughing at us, which I hope they are, you know?

Cause Matt would always, I'd make him laugh, he make me laugh. And it's just something that I know Matt would love to talk to you about music. Matt would spend hours and hours and hours and hours. So if you get a dream tonight about some kid with glasses, maybe it's Daniel and Matt talking about music together with you. Who knows if you do tell me, because maybe I'll dream about them tonight. If I do, I'll tell you, because I do believe that this is part of the story.

I'll, I'll, I'll close with this, you know, I'm I'm Jewish and Matt was bar mitzvahed, but man was very interested in eastern religion and he told me he got into Taoism, which I didn't even know what that was the Eastern religion. And I read a article, I think it was the New York times recently. It was very interesting.

They had a theological scholar talking about how Taoist view life and what they view is that the physical life we have here is the middle that you are, whatever you are before you're born., You go back to that. After your physical being here is over, this is just the middle. It's not the end, it's a continuum. And I've asked my rabbi about that and he's given me some interesting answers.

I've done some research on the Jewish philosophy and it can sort of fit, but I'm sort of coming up with my own thought process. And I so many times, man would tell me something, Oh, that doesn't make any sense to say. It sorta does. And I think it again, and I'm sort of, of the mindset now that whatever this thing is that we're here. I just believe it's part of the continuum. Are the Taoist right? Who knows.

But I believe there is a continuum here and I think we were fortunate to have our sons during that middle part, whatever you want to call it. And we're fortunate to have our relationships with them continue on however you want to just describe that after life continuation of where you were before, put a name onto it, but I believe it exists. I really do.

And I asked people to take a piece of the puzzle as they were going into the, uh, into the sanctuary to take a piece from this puzzle of Daniels. And it was basically the, the box was just puzzle pieces so nobody could see the images of what they were, but they had to grab a piece of the puzzle. So during the ceremony, I said, I want you to decide whether you want to hold on to this piece of this puzzle or whether you want to help try to put Daniel back together either way is a win for us.

We're never going to know exactly who Daniel was or why he left us, but we can at least try. If you hold on to this piece of the puzzle, it's going to remind you forever of my son's life. And if you put that puzzle piece back and that image of my son will have a slightly more complete picture of who he was. So I really like looking at a lifelong process of trying to make sense of all of this stuff and just sort of being okay with not being able to answer all the questions.

And I think when you lose a child, all of your pre-ordained notions of, well, this is the linear life that I'm going to have are just thrown out the window. And in some ways, It's sort of freeing in the sense that you know, all we've got is today. Like you mentioned, like writing a book. It's funny because before Matt died, I was thinking about writing a book about my father called the, The Jewish Bombardier. Cause he just was a funny guy, a funny book about World War II.

He told me all these incredible things. And so I might get to a Jewish Bombardier and his grandson. I might do a book about Matt and my father because they were kindred souls a lot of ways that they both taught me a lot about life. And for that I'm thankful,

My current piano teacher, his father was a, a navigator on a, B26, which was the, uh, slightly small, but I love the B24's and the B25's, and B17's. And yeah, I just, I'm still, I'm still a big history history guy, I love war history.

And he said, nobody cared. Who was an officer or enlisted. He goes, if we were going to die, we're all going to die. And my dad was just such a positive guy that he would tell me years later, he goes, you know, I really had fun during World War II. I go, dad, you're the only person, the Hughes in the history in humanity that World War II was fun. He goes, I I've met a lot of people. I went around the world. I went to Australia, New Zealand.

He knew Asia, like the back was hanged because he had to do it for bombing runs. He goes, I didn't have a scratch on me. And it was really fun. Like, go that's the way you looked at life. He always looked at the positive and even with Matt's issues, dealing with the chronic depression, that eight to fight every day, I think he was the same way. He fought it to look at the good things in life.

And I think that is something that I think all of our sons did and we've got to give them great kudos and acknowledge what they did for the time that they were here and be thankful for that. I really believe that, but I, and I can't thank you enough for being our guest today and be willing to open up. Because again, it's something that is very personal. And I learned a lot from every conversation I have with somebody that loses somebody, but also somebody lose somebody from death by suicide.

And the fact we're both fathers that both lost sons. There's obviously a synergy, we both had and I want to, again, thank you so much for opening up because I've learned a lot today.