If you see me describing an episode of The Distraction as "a very special episode," I am almost certainly joking. It is the nature of the podcast, it is right there in the very title of the pod, that this is mostly goofy stuff. We can and do talk about serious and sad stuff but, as a general rule, Drew and I are both sufficiently people-pleasing, so we tend to wrap those particular pills in a healthy dollop of peanut butter before offering it to you, the listener, who I guess is a dog in this scenario. However, I am not joking when I say that this week's episode is a very special episode, and unlike any other we've done.
It might not be news given that Drew wrote about his father's passing earlier today, but he and I spent this week's episode talking about his father's life, and his family's shared experience of his passing. The man had a fascinating life, and Drew tells the story very lovingly and very well. I didn't say much on the pod, and there's not a great deal for me to say about it here. I didn't know the man; I was in the same room with him just once, at a big house on a lake in Maine, and I remember a tall, quiet man sitting at a table surrounded by his family. I feel like I know him a bit better for having spent this hour listening to Drew talk about him, although knowing Drew, who jokes at one point about the extent to which his father's creaks and snores and sneezes have become his own, already told me something about the man his father was. It's a thread that runs through our weekly conversations here, and through his work—the strange work of becoming the person that you are, and the strangeness of seeing that person revealed to you from one moment to the next. It stands to reason that all of us would look a little bit like our parents.
The back half of the episode deals with Drew's father's illness and death, and how his family worked together to do what needed doing there. It's sad, of course, although I found something beautiful in it, too—in a family caring for one another, finding room for those acts of caring within their own full adult lives, and facing down the inevitable in a way that honors what needs honoring in both the living and dying. We'll be back to making the usual primate-adjacent Tim Allen noises and hooting at each other about sports next week but, for this week, I'm glad we had this conversation.
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