537 | Jerome

0:20Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it Yes, the minimalists man today's been a difficult week So I think we'll go this will be a bit different than the normal Where do you want to start?

0:58I think we start where we always have with a call from one of our listeners Yeah, we had some people write in Dustin wrote this in he said um is it better to confront loss with replacement or acceptance and TK I got to be honest with you here I'm still struggling with the with the acceptance piece of it which is really strange for me man yeah I'm usually pretty good at accepting things and so I've sort of been going through the the five stages of grief I'm pretty good at cycling through those those first four right I wrote this essay about it but um it kind of starts with denial um I got the phone call the day that it happened it was Ryan who called me Nicodemus and a friend had called him another friend had called that friend and then Jerome's wife had called that friend and so it was like this game of of tag and a lot of people apparently were trying to get a hold of me and they didn't have my new number and uh sarah couldn't get in jerome's phone so she didn't have access to my phone number either and um when you received this call from ryan where are you sitting at my desk at home in ohi and ryan calls me i could just hear in his voice immediately like something was off and he said hey man i don't know how to tell you this pause right here you heard it in his voice this is a guy you've known your entire life you know something's wrong what do you think it is i i didn't know yeah we i didn't know if he was going through something i didn't know if he was uh you know in jail and need me to bail him out or something um if you could have asked me like what are the 17 things you think are going on right now yeah this would not have been the answer i asked that because we've done this exercise so many times we've done that hypothetical like if you have one call to make and and you're in jail or something like that who's that guy and you know we talked about you being that dude and i know you're that guy for ryan and so this might be the call yeah yeah the the peruvian prison experiment right is like if you are in a prison in another country and you have one phone call you can call one person and they'll do what whatever's in their power to get you out who do you call and um strangely i i recognize that i'm that person for certain people and even though i am that person i don't want to necessarily be that person i want to be the the type of person but when the rubber meets the road it's a lot more difficult so i get this call and ryan's like i don't know how to tell you this your brother's dead and i didn't it's not that i didn't believe it i couldn't comprehend the words that he was speaking and i just it's like it was a foreign language even though i understood and he didn't even need to say the words like i could hear it i've known ryan forever like i've known jerome forever and me and him and and and uh ryan and we had a whole friend group that hung out and this would be the last person i would think would go and he just died in his sleep heart failure no suspected health issues at all and then he was just gone and it's been really sad obviously right but the thing i wrote in the essay i wrote this essay called jerome was a simple man and it made me reflect back on this is a line that didn't make it in the essay but like he never needed minimalism to be a minimalist like he was just sort of by default just simple didn't have didn't pine for all of the the more the status he looked at those things like they were silly pursuits he was a real man and he was ever ever since we were little kids i remember him being a man it was um as a 10-year-old he seemed like a man now we had been through a lot and finally i felt like at age 45 which is when he died he was at the other side of going through a lot he had finally moved to this idyllic college town oxford ohio and um he had three kids one from a previous relationship his oldest daughter's 25 her name's keela and she's amazing and i got to spend some time with her and uh while it's back in ohio and then he has two young kids with his wife Sarah he's been with Sarah for 20 years but they have two kids eight and one his son just turned one and so I think a lot of my tears over the last week or so have been for those kids because I know what it's like to grow up without a dad and Jerome knows what it's like to grow up without a dad and then you have these kids and it's like it's that prison break experiment it's like oh well it's not as sexy as breaking someone out of prison but it's making sure these kids are taken care of now that he's gone at a certain level it's kind of the same thing yeah yeah yeah and so this question that dustin asked i thought was appropriate because i don't know the answer to it how would you answer dustin's question here is it better to confront loss with replacement or acceptance and i don't know that it's either or either maybe it's a little bit of both or neither yeah i favor the the latter more than the former but i i might use a different word just because sometimes acceptance can raise resistance for people acceptance can sound like endorsement right accept it okay i accept it i i'm happy with it i endorse it i celebrate it right and so i i would maybe use a word like engagement you know sometimes replacement i i had a a very good friend who whose cat died and um someone who tried to make her happy showed up with a a new cat you know and i'm talking about the next day best of intentions best of intentions but it's it's not like that you you can't you can't do that you you can't replace you can't replace a soul you can't replace a person you know you can't replace a human being and you can fill voids with new things you can you can deal with your emptiness in a lot of ways you can process your loss in a lot of ways but you can't replace it and even if even if a new friend comes along you know you can say well you know god sent me this person you know because i lost that person but that's still not a replacement but what you can do is you can engage the emptiness you know you can you can take a look at the sorrow and the suffering and and you can be present to it and not necessarily for the purpose of philosophizing about it but you have to be present to that suffering in order in order to in order to move through it you know um i think it's it's it's like in a in a much less dramatic way it's like if you go outside without an umbrella and you're not dressed for the rain because you have a good reason to think that this is going to be a nice weather day and then as you're out there and you're too far away from your car too far away from shelter and it just starts to rain you know um you don't have to celebrate that you don't have to be like this is awesome and this is amazing you know this is tough like oh my gosh i wish i were better prepared for this or i wish this didn't happen but it's also where you are you know and and you've got to find the best way that you can to move through it you know yeah and i figured out that it doesn't help to complain about the rain right it i wrote another essay about jerome it was about it was called no complaints because the very last text message i got from him we were actually planning on meeting up so here's the weird thing about about what happened is he died on friday april 10th and we're recording this maybe 10 days later or something and um it was my mom's birthday you know she passed 17 years ago and so the date already had a significance to it now it has a bookended significance to it but we've been planning for the last few months because i haven't seen him in a couple years and i haven't met his one-year-old son yet well i have now but as of me communicating with him i hadn't been back in ohio and it's impossible to get him on an airplane he was the strongest toughest person i knew but he was afraid of two things airplanes and dogs and and so they were planning a trip to come out to california but they were going to take amtrak to get out here and um so i knew it was on me to to get back there and uh miami university in oxford ohio reached out and one of the reasons i said yes to going and giving a talk there is jerome had moved to oxford he just bought a really modest house there like an 800 square foot really nice house in this idyllic college town and and he was working as a chef for the university and so it was like oh yeah we get to reunite he gets to come to our talk and then we're going to do the screening down in dayton and he's going to come to that we get to spend the day together he had called off work or he had planned a day off work so we could spend some time together with his family and we were all looking forward to that and we were communicating back and forth on the phone and and via text and the very last text message i got from him was everything going great here no complaints and the thing i wrote in in this essay was about how jerome had a life that most people would feel right about complaining about feel totally fine it would make sense to complain about the life that he lived especially the childhood that that we had and yet i never heard him complain not once in 45 like not a single time ever he never now i can't say that for other people but with my experience with him i never saw him complain once when we had you know childhood poverty made us sleep on the floor he didn't express annoyance or dissatisfaction it just it is what it is right and um our electricity got shut off quite a bit you know we'd get eviction notices and like if the electricity would get turned off we would just kind of light candles and laugh in the dark he had no complaints about that yeah either and um i remember during the pandemic he was working in a factory at the time and building cabinets and the factory shuttered because of the pandemic the lockdowns right yeah and he didn't complain about that either he just he took a different job that paid less and the work was more grueling it was third shift at a meat packing plant and didn't complain about it just moved on because he had a a family to to take care of and a life to live and he recognized that the complaints were going to do much weren't going to do much for him and and i think some people might see that one way but like he didn't avoid those grievances because he was weak he was strong enough not to carry them he didn't need them as a crutch he just kind of recognized they would get in the way and i think that's why he seemed so contented not like over the top happy and and and outgoing if you got to know him really well he was super silly and goofy beneath a really tough exterior like the goofiest person that that i know and um and i was just reminded of how much he didn't complain but that last that very last text message i got from him was just hey everything's going great here even though he had a bunch of things to complain about for sure you know sometimes the bills were hard to pay right inflation was was difficult right or oh my car is breaking down or my lawnmower is just it i need a new lawn all of these things that we complain about every day he never did everything's going great here no complaints and then i look at myself in the mirror and i'm like oh i find myself complaining all the time right it's and not always allowed but like there's a voice in my head that's like oh like a perpetual sort of groan about things going on and stupid things right my coffee's too hot or oh my knee hurts right um or it's raining again damn it i can't believe it's it's raining right and so there's an acceptance piece to all of this that has been difficult and maybe it's difficult because those stages of grief that i wrote about in that simple man essay if you want to read the whole thing it's over at theminalists.com slash jerome i don't think i could get through reading the whole thing right now but sort of vacillating or oscillating between the the first four stages of grief and they don't all happen in uh sequence necessarily but denial like when i got that call from ryan this can't be happening right and then anger like oh he should have gone to the doctor what he should have known no one knew every the day before he was totally fine and then there's the the bargaining like oh you got to take me instead right and then like there's just this despair like what am i supposed to do there's nothing to do why why why why you could have told me hey josh i want you to make a list of 100 people that might die this year he wouldn't have been on the list it just didn't make any sense at all and so i think i ended finding it difficult to to get to that acceptance that dustin is talking about but also like sometimes distraction helps for a period of time it doesn't get you closer to acceptance but if it's if it's overwhelming there's like sitting with it might be too painful and so i'm interested in that that balance i'm still trying to to find it right now is like i don't want to numb myself out completely and you know just watch television or whatever but sometimes there's a place for that like oh man this feels like too much i will say it is important to make a distinction between processing and complaining you know let's say i'm driving my car i'm on a road trip and um my car starts to make a funny noise and then kaput kaput kaput kaput kaput and it stops and i try to get it going and i do all the little things that a person who's not a mechanic knows how to do you know hit the hood two times turn it off turn it on you know and can't get it going and you know i look at my phone i see there's a mechanic that's like two mile walk and it's a really hot day right and i gotta walk to the and i was like oh man can't believe this thing happened at this time and i get to the to the mechanic and i say hey look i'm on this road trip driving from here to there my car just stopped i don't really know what's going on you know but i i need to get going and my car won't go is that complaining it depends on your disposition right let's say my disposition is such that i'm really frustrated that this has happened right now i'm also truly worried that i might not make it on time because it is now probable that i won't make it on time and i've got some concerns in my head about what am i going to say to those i'm going to see and how will they respond to it and there's a little fear and nervousness there and when i tell the mechanic even though i'm being respectful to him um i'm pretty worried and i'm pretty anxious and he hasn't told me if he can help me yet i don't know anything about cars this might not be fixable this might be easy this might be difficult i might have to leave this thing overnight i might be out of here in two hours don't know and i'm telling him i'm not saying hey everything's going great i'm good it's good to see you thanks for the service you provide to the world i'm saying hey man like i really need your help like my car just broke down i don't know what's going on yeah i think i can the way i can answer that is by saying how i would probably handle that and how derome would have handled it tell me both so i probably would have complained like oh i can't believe that i got to walk to the mechanic and it's two miles away this is ridiculous that's a complaint i mean there's no no question about it i'm not saying it's wrong or bad right i think that's how most people react in that scenario even if they handle it really well it's like oh this stupid car why wouldn't this happen now right yeah i think jerome would have said okay where's the closest mechanic yeah okay well y'all wait here with the kids i'll i'll go figure it out and he would get there and i think he would have told him about this how's it going he said oh no complaints yeah my car's broken down a couple miles down the road you think you could help me out with that and i bring that up because i aspire to be that but i think you got to be willing to do that so this is the basis for my question i get that on the way to the mechanic you complain and jerome wouldn't but what both of you have in common is when you got to the mechanic you would look the mechanic in the eye and you would honestly articulate even if there's a smile on your face even if you're doing it professionally even if you're doing it with a faith-filled heart my car is not working you know i'm i'm in a i'm in a tough spot and i i can't get through this on my own i don't i don't know what i'm doing i i i don't know how to fix this yes can can you help me can you take a look at my situation can you can you walk me through something you know and i think that is a part of how we move through things and what we can say about the car can also be said about our complaining whatever it is that's not working whatever it is that's creating some inconvenience for us whatever it is that's a source of frustration for us whether it's the car my habits of complaining or anything else my knee that's hurting the untimely weather we can talk about it and we can talk about it to someone who might be able to offer us something that can give us a little bit of perspective and even if the news is disappointing like hey unfortunately this is a really expensive problem and i can't get you out on the road on the same day and i know that's not what you want to hear right now but even that is better no it's better you're better off knowing that and and and even if we can give you a sense of direction and say here's what you have to look forward to here's here's how we're going to begin to deal with this that can be helpful but you got to be willing to talk about that and make a distinction between talking about that and complaining and make sure you don't say to talk to talk about it is the same as complaining and i can't do it yeah i would say often it's the opposite right being able to show up and talk about the things that are worth complaining about without a complaint is one of the most difficult things because you can if you can divorce the the complaint from the the problem the challenge whatever's going on in front of you it makes it appreciably easier to tackle it may not be enjoyable to tackle but like we often think that like our complaints express our unhappiness but i think they just prolong it in a way or they amplify it and they point toward our clinging clinging toward expectations um also they point toward the things i'm unwilling to accept right now or unable to accept usually it's the unwilling to accept i'm unwilling to accept that my car broke down i have to walk these two miles or my expectation is you know what i need to be there on time right my expectation is the car is going to work today sure i get that but now i have to have i have to recalibrate my expectations and if i'm being completely honest about this often when i complain it's it's looking for pity for my suffering it's interesting that you that you describe jerome as a man very early on and you say you've always remembered him as a man because when i when i when i think about like what's going on with complaining where you say i'm i'm looking for pity or something like that think about humanity in our most native state think about before we learn to walk before we learn to talk before we have any autonomy to fix problem our problems ourselves we're babies right yes and when something goes wrong we're scared we're hungry we need something what do we do we cry right but that's our whole vocabulary well it could mean i'm hungry it could mean i'm hurting it could mean i'm lonely i could mean it could mean i'm scared it could be i don't want this dude right here holding me anymore it could mean a lot of things right and and when we cry it's it's like a there's a hope that someone will hear us and pity us and and that meets a fundamental need right we need to feel seen we need to feel heard to be pitied is a remarkable thing because it's another human being saying i can hear the cry of your heart i see you as you are i hear you as you are and i do not despise you i do not condemn you and so there's a there's a real need that's met there when we are pitied and later on in life we learn to be insulted by by being pitied right um i don't need your pity you know but we measure our autonomy by that and and then we hope for a second thing that someone will do something someone will give us food someone will pat us on the back someone will pick us up out of that person's arms someone will take us to the bathroom and clean us up someone will lie us down and put us to sleep sing us a song rock us and even though our body knows we need all those things but we don't know how to articulate it our mind doesn't understand the theory of it all and so we cry and that's the first skill we come into this world with the ability to cry to get someone's attention so they can look at me so that they can hear me and maybe do something about this thing that i don't know how to do and i think as we get older we learn very early on that we've got to develop the skill to be able to articulate to be able to get specific about what we need because in the adult world it happens to us very fast you know you can be nine 10 and and what would they say use your words use your words you can't go mad you got to say okay let me think what am i feeling what would i like mom can i have a glass of water mom can i go outside and play um you know mom can i watch a little tv can i go to bed right now can i use the bathroom can you hurry up in there right and we learn how to state what we need so that we can solicit human cooperation but we still come across situations as adults where we don't know what to do and and we don't really know exactly what we're feeling and we fall back into that native state that first skill that we learn we cry about it and and and the adult form of crying about it is complaining i'm not i'm not doing anything that's going to fix it really i'm not being you know i'm not putting it in the form of a request i'm just crying about it i'm complaining about it and there's a hope there that maybe i will be seen yes maybe i will be heard and there will be some healing in that and perhaps someone will help me do something about it but jerome you describe him as someone that's always been a man he seems to have always been the kind of person who when he has a problem he can identify this is what i need and he can identify this is what i need to say or this is what i need to do in order to take care of it and he just focuses on that he's able to speak through his words and through his actions what he needs and we we see the absence of complaining from him i imagine not because he condemned it in others not because he was some kind of self-righteous guy that's like how could people complain but because he was just so tuned in and what he needed to do about it it seemed unnecessary the same way that violence seems unnecessary to a person who's trained in brazilian jiu-jitsu their whole lives like they're ready for it if if they need but it's not a requirement there are other people who will you talked about the desire for pity is really a i don't know if you said these words exactly but it's a it's expressing a need for connection with others that's right i want to be seen right and it can feel like a shortcut to being seen violence i think can be similar i don't think it's the best way to get connected to someone but you're really connected really quickly if you start a fight on the street with someone all of a sudden you see me right now or if i get aggressive with someone on the street they they see me immediately we're connected also i'm really significant i'm like the most important person in the world to them right now right and so it apes the form of connection the way that pity apes the form of connection and and what i think is that there is likely much better ways to i think this is what jerome understood there are better ways to achieve connection outside of the need for complaining it's a way to connect it's most likely not the best way to connect and if we don't have the other tools to connect then we might default to that the same way a baby defaults to to crying to get what they need because they don't have the vocabulary to to ask for it yeah speaking of asking i'd love to ask you some questions about jerome your relationship with him your thoughts about him and so on is that cool sounds good yeah i'm gonna start with the big one first i'm gonna go back in time but i want to start with a big one first and that is what if this was reversed you are the one who's dead right now and i'm here with jerome do you think he complains if yes what is that if not what do you think he says no i don't think he complains at all i think he i think he tries to figure out what do we need to do to get beyond this right who needs to be taken care of i'll tell you that's the one thing that the biggest surprise to me after going back to oh because i was already going to be there for the talks we were doing and i ended up spending the time there with a lot of people from his family and at his house and in oxford and man i got to see because he would have never bragged about any of this stuff he wouldn't even talk about this stuff but the thing i wrote in the essay was about him being a good neighbor he never asked for anything but he was always there when someone needed him if you needed a place to stay after being evicted he had you covered there were people in the neighborhood that just lived with him for a month or other family members who had you know strung out parents or whatever and they would just come stay with jerome and sarah and he would welcome them in no fanfare let's take care of them while they need it and so the family sort of lost this this hub this strong person who was there to take care of all the people in the community this is what we look for when we talk about community he would have never used that word my community right he would have maybe even scoffed at it it would have felt like a buzzword to him right because it wasn't about the the language it was about the actions and so when his adult daughter needed somewhere to stay while she was trying to get through nursing school she went up and lived with him for a while and when his cousins or nephews needed a place to stay he either helped them find a house locally i couldn't tell how many people moved to oxford ohio from middletown and in lebanon and cincinnati because he was there and he was the hub for all of it and he took care of them not necessarily monetarily but in ways that mattered so much more than than money right he was there to to take care of them and so i think that's where he would be right now is like okay who needs what and how do we help them get that right yeah just like practically where do how do we get from point a to point b let's figure this out together yeah and we got this we'll carry it yeah it seems like he he embodied the kind of generosity that it that didn't come from excess you know how sometimes when when people do big things like hey i'm gonna pay for this person's hospital bill i'm gonna donate to this charity we kind of dismiss that like oh well anybody could do that if they just had an excess of money but it seems like jerome had every right to really guard his time and his resources and not share and he's just shared anyway yeah yeah yeah he he was very generous with the most precious resources his time and attention and you know i remember him being present when we were kids but i think as kids you're often very present anyway right like kids are the most present when you have little kids you realize like oh i'm gonna learn more from from this little two-year-old than he's gonna learn from me right i know that was true when with ella you know when ella was two and three i learned so much more from her than she learned from me and so he was present as a kid but then i'm hearing from his adult daughter keela she's 25 and like her best memories like he was just always she told me he was so he never took anything too seriously which you wouldn't know from his demeanor because he seemed serious but once you got past it he was the silliest goofiest uh he just he it was he didn't require the the sort of tough demeanor to show you that he was you know above anything he uh he was silly and goofy even if he didn't show that right away but she talked about how present he was even when because he wasn't with her mother long term but um yeah they would just the weekends that they would spend together when he had her every other week and it's like i just remember like him always just being there with me like actually being there not distracted and he wasn't a phone guy he wasn't a social media guy he didn't care about any of that he wasn't on social at all no no he had a facebook account i think last time he posted anything there was 20 years ago probably yeah i've got a few friends like that's like what they just forgot to delete their account yeah yeah and uh it was amazing how many people reached out to me on facebook i didn't even know you could still do that and so many people when when it happened they were all like trying to figure get a hold of me and they're calling me on facebook messenger and all of these things and um and so i went back and i looked at his account that was there i'm like oh yeah he that picture on there is 20 years old and and uh yeah he just he didn't care about those things we talk about that all the time you know being in a culture of distraction learning how to unplug simplifying the the influx of stimuli how did jerome do it what was he doing instead of scrolling maybe this is a disposition thing too but or it could just be that like the things in front of him seem so much more like infinitely more compelling than the distractions and i think for most of us myself included the distractions often seem much more compelling than the important things for you that's true i think so yeah what would be an example for each like what does your version look like and what does his look like yeah i mean it could be something as simple as like i'm going to turn a podcast on instead of meditating for another 15 minutes yeah you know that's a i don't think there's anything wrong with podcasts obviously we're speaking on one right now but um i don't generally keep social media on my phone but if i do it's easy to scroll and ignore the people in front of me the worst part of me is like hiding in the bathroom scrolling through instagram while my wife and daughter are in the kitchen preparing dinner right checking the nba scores right right or worse just checking videos that yeah they're not doing much for me and for whatever reason that was just never compelling to him and that's laudable so i don't think there's a how-to behind this like i don't know how he got there i i just see it and i say wow wow that's the best version of me it's not this air you dite guy who has all the best words no it's jerome who has the best moments if if we called jerome up and was like hey come on the podcast do an episode with us would he laugh not a chance there's you you couldn't get him to take a picture he refused all the pictures that sarah sent me of him are generally pictures where she doesn't know he's taking a picture you wouldn't get him to do a podcast with you you wouldn't get him to do a photograph with you would he just laugh at you would he walk away what would his reaction be like ah man nah i ain't got nothing to say like it would just he would think it was silly like he would think it was trivial that's awesome yeah yeah yeah and and so like i tried so hard to get him to come out here to california and like come stay with us for a while and bring the family out but he was as tough as he was he had this irrational fear of of flights you know so i remember we were little kids and like he the toughest kid i knew the strongest kid i knew as well the strongest man i knew the thing i was telling his daughter is that like i saw him get into a lot of fights where we grew up yeah i never saw him once start a fight ever he never started a fight he finished a lot of them but he never he wasn't interested in like the ego and the the status of it it was like he was a tough guy he he but he downplayed all of it uh i was talking to his daughter about this and she's like yeah he said he was like wasn't very good at basketball i'm like kilo we played basketball every day on our eighth grade team i saw him drop 40 points the first time i saw him dunk a basketball we were in seventh grade he's 12 years old dunking a basketball he was so skilled uh not super disciplined around that like didn't care about like i need some achievement or status but like he was so but he always downplayed it any anything that he did well it he he didn't like sweep it under the rug it was just like whatever i wasn't that good you know he wasn't impressed with himself there you go yeah yeah so something that some may not know is that jerome wasn't your biological brother that's right and that's that's something you never qualify we've talked about that i have a brother who isn't a biological brother and it's like he is as real of a brother as you know people that have your own flesh and blood more so in my case yeah tell me about how jerome came into your life and and and a little bit about that that bond that you guys had uh over from childhood on so i have five biological siblings from my father's side i don't know them very well um two of them uh have passed away already and um i just don't know the other ones the last time i saw any of them except for one was at my father's funeral in 1991 so it's it's been a long time right they grew up in chicago and and so i i i just didn't grow up around them and not true not true just the bulls uh funny thing so um the reason i like the utah jazz so much was in the 80s and 90s when jerome and i watched basketball and played basketball we would pretend to be john stockton and carl malone and so like it it it was just you know it was this this moment but i met jerome in i guess it was late 80s we were both young in elementary school and uh my friend jatan came came through one day and he brought this other kid up who was there from cincinnati and um i met my apartment we were living in this little roach infested duplex the one you see in less is now our last documentary um in the old neighborhood and