dear colin campbell,

grief is a one man sh*tshow, thank you and yes, there are indeed words...

I am on the train back home after sitting up close and personal to the one man show that is your story. Thank you for sharing the unthinkable deaths and remarkable lives of your beloved Ruby and Hart. Thank you for holding up your flashlight and brilliant story telling, in what I am sure is a continuous dark night of the soul. With brilliant sparks of well-placed humor and well directed prose.

Your monologue about the very moment in time you lost both of your children to a drunk and high driver to the very moment in the theater where you honor us all and your children by asking us to share in saying their names aloud - I am rapt. I try to hold your gaze. It is all I can do to take in what you stand alone to share. This will forever hold a place deep in my memory.

Please, please if you are reading this — please say the name of loved ones lost. Ask friends who say, I lost my mom, dad, daughter, son, husband, wife… what is their name? Ask about their lives, hobbies, truths…bare witness. Sit in the moment with them as they recount these precious memories. It is for them, the beauty of what remains.

From my side of your story, I witness many nodding heads as you perform. I hope you do too. I wonder for a moment, what is your grief there, dear fellow audience member? What made you buy this ticket on a fine Easter Sunday? The woman in the grey cardigan with shiny black hair wipes a tear when the rendition of the moving Bowie tune fills the steely silence. The green baseball cap, row 2, with the red ponytail lowers her head when you relay the “grief Olympics” that ensue (in your minds eye) in child loss support groups. A fragile and masked elder reaches to hold the hand of his seat mate when you espouse the solvency and support you find in your sweet wife Gail.

The out of order death of a child, and in your case two, makes no damn sense. Making sense of Greek tragedies on a three show day, somehow made good common sense as you schooled us in the early history of grief circles.

Knee deep in that pile of grief support books, I spy some of the grief relief I too have found in Making Meaning with David Kessler, and Grief is Love with Marisa Renee Lee. Searching for answers, hope, understanding in the depths of the great unknown is often all we have to hold on to. Writing ourselves back together makes great sense to me. How else are we to know we are not alone or worse, gone crazy?

Thank you for your transparency, illumination and the absolute fuckery of the DSM-5. "Prolonged grief disorder”? After all, doesn’t losing this love take a lifetime to grieve?

As you sat in Ruby’s fierce seat of advocacy and Comicon commitment, alongside Hart’s beloved rap heroes and brave woodlands romp, I was honored to know them. I was proud to look you in the eye at show’s end and thank you and hope somewhere it is deeply cathartic for you to share your story by way of sold out runs.

Your monologue gave me hope that we can find a better place for grief in modern day society. I also hope that my Mom Ellen gets to hang with Ruby and Hart, because I have no idea where they all go either. My wish is that if they are in the somewhere of my imagining, they are indeed together.

If you are in the NY area, the show has been extended with performances through 4/23.