Kelsey Chittick, SECOND HALF
Comedian, inspirational speaker, and author of The Second Half Kelsey Chittick joins Zibby to discuss her book and how she has rediscovered joy in life following the immense grief of losing her husband. Kelsey recounts the heartbreaking story of how she learned her husband had passed, why she decided to include a section discussing the hopelessness she felt in the immediate aftermath of her loss, and what conversations she wants this book to help start. The two also talk about the importance of staying healthy and why it might be smart to prevent kids from playing collision-based sports too soon.
Transcript:
Zibby Owens: Welcome, Kelsey. Thanks for coming on “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” This is my first in-person podcast in I cannot tell you how long, seriously.
Kelsey Chittick: It’s an honor. I can’t believe it worked out.
Zibby: I can’t either. It’s meant to be.
Kelsey: I wanted to meet you. I was like, maybe one day, I’ll go visit my friends in New York and I’ll say, we should get coffee, after we did the podcast. Then it was just the craziest thing when you said, wait, are you going to be in LA? Life works out.
Zibby: I know. I started your book, and I was like, I need to read every word of this book. I have to sit down and take my time. I need to know your whole story. I’m so glad because — first of all, as a book, this is one of the best grief-related books. If you want to know what it’s like to have the most devastating loss ever and survive, this is the book. This is the book for anybody who thinks they can’t move forward and doesn’t know how they’re going to do it. You did it. You’re here. You’re talking about it. It’s amazing.
Kelsey: Thank you. That means a lot. It really does.
Zibby: Also, some people don’t realize how hard it is to write a book like this that makes it sound like you’re just talking to a friend. It’s really hard to pull this off and make it also a cohesive narrative that’s propulsive and everything. Those are my book things. As a book itself, it’s amazing. Now it makes you fall in love with you as a person. Let me back up. Tell everybody what your book’s about. Talk about what happened with Nate if you don’t mind.
Kelsey: Sure. I’ll go back to the beginning. I had a really good, easy life for a long time. Really, really lucky to have a lot of love and resources growing up. Fast-forward. Swam in high school, ended up getting a scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill and met this big, large, beefy football player from Allentown, Pennsylvania, that was not at all on my list of who I thought I would marry. We fell in love my sophomore year. He ended up playing football in the NFL. He played for about six years on different teams. He won a Super Bowl. Then at some point, we moved out to El Segundo, California, because of one of our good friends lived in Manhattan Beach. We started what I thought was a pretty perfect life. We had two kids. We had a boy and a girl. He was a social worker for a while. He comes from a service family. I worked. We just built this life out here. We loved it. A couple years starting to maybe
Zibby: — By the way, not to interrupt, but the part about the vasectomy, I have to say —
Kelsey: — Murder him.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh. You had the two kids. You were so funny. This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard about women’s retribution. Really? This is what I went through having kids. You’re going to complain for two seconds that you’re going to have a vasectomy? No, no, no. I was like, this is such a badass woman. I love this chapter.
Kelsey: The vasectomy, he was a baby. I think guys are in general. I think the bigger you are, the more you can be a baby because people don’t question it. He really went for it. We had a great life. Around 2015, and I know every mom is overwhelmed and stressed, but I had this feeling of, something’s off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had anxiety, like I think every woman does. You just don’t want anything to happen to your kids. You’ve got too much going on. I was going back and forth to the East Coast for work. I wasn’t right. Everyone’s like, you have everything you want. My kids were six and eight. We had a really good life, but something was telling me, you need to dig into the spiritual side of your life. You need to buckle down and get some tools because you aren’t well. I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming for him. I just was like, am I unraveling? Am I that thirty-eight-year-old weirdo that’s going to have to be put away for a bit? I went on a spiritual journey for about two years reading a lot of Buddhist books and just putting together a meditation practice. At some point, we went to New York for a fortieth birthday party of one of my girlfriends. I had this massive panic attack that was the scariest thing I’ve ever had. I remember I had read this book called Code of the Extraordinary Mind. Through a thousand different things, I got invited to this trip in Jamaica. My friend was able to get us to go. We were going to go on this spiritual retreat and just dig into life and who we wanted to be and what we needed to release. This panic attack was all around that. I didn’t want to leave my family.
My husband, at the time, was like, “Listen, you have been crazy for a couple years. I don’t know what you’re so worried about. Everything is okay. It will always be okay. You have to go to Jamaica. You need to be courageous. You can’t just sit here and try to keep everything together.” On November 8th, I headed to this spiritual retreat. First time I’d ever left the country. Never left my kids and my husband, for sure. I had the most amazing three days of my life. I remember when I landed, it was like something shifted. My whole world shifted. I was present. All the anxiety had gone away. I learned from great speakers and did great exercises, did Wim Hof and Steven Kotler, just amazing things. Then the last day — I always cry at this part. The last day, I got a call. We were about to go on this last venture out on a boat. One of my friends called and say, “Hey, listen, don’t worry about it, Nate took the kids to Sky Zone,” which is a trampoline park. I was like, who the hell takes their kids to Sky Zone if there’s not a birthday party? It’s like Chuck E. Cheese. They’re like, “He fell. We don’t really know what’s wrong, but they’ve taken him to UCLA.” In that moment, I was like, he’s dead. My friends were like, “There’s nothing wrong. He’s fine. Just go on the boat.” I was like, “No way.” Long story short, I ended up getting on the last plane in the last seat back to the United States. On the cab ride from the hotel to the airport, my mom called. She handed the ER doctor her cell phone. He said, “I’m so sorry. We tried for fifty minutes to bring your husband back, but he just didn’t make it.” He was forty-two. He had jumped. He just jumped twice and died in front of my kids, which is super dramatic, but I try to laugh about it because it’s so ridiculously awful. I did stand-up comedy for a long time. I do feel like Nate left me with a lot of punch lines just to be kind because it’s so ridiculous.
Zibby: It’s so ridiculous. It’s so awful. The way you wrote about it, too, the way that the day unraveled for you, and you and your friends with your wet bathing suits in the cab, on the plane, and finding out and then having to take the flight and even how you talk about how your memory has blocked out so much of that day —
Kelsey: — It was awful.
Zibby: People weren’t helping you. You were vomiting.
Kelsey: It’s funny, I think of myself as a helpful person, but I know many times I’ve walked past people that look upset or something. Now I never do because I don’t think we realize that we can help strangers more than we think. We always think, oh, I won’t get involved. When I was on the plane and I knew he was gone — it was a long flight back.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh, to California from Jamaica. You had to go through Texas or something.
Kelsey: I had a layover. It was the most surreal experience for me of my life, that entire plane ride. It was weird. I got these nine hours to really go through horrible trauma, horrible shock. You read the story about the woman on the plane.
Zibby: Yeah, the angel.
Kelsey: I had this beautiful woman at some point — nobody was helping me. I get it because I think sometimes people just act a fool on a plane, or they’re drunk. Nobody wants to help them. They’re just like, lord, please let this crazy person sitting next to me calm down or pass out. This beautiful Jamaican woman stood up when the seat belt sign went off. She put her hand on my shoulder and her hand on my forehead. She said, “Baby girl, I don’t know what you’re going through or what awaits you on the other side of this plane, but so many of us are praying for you. So many people are thinking about you. God is with you. I need you to slow your breathing down, baby girl. I need you to figure out what you’re going to do when this plane lands.” Then the last thing she said is, “You’re stronger than you think.” If that isn’t an angel… The plane ride was this almost cocoon phase of, wait a minute, did this just happen? I was going to tell my kids. They knew that he had fallen, but they had moved them out of the room pretty quickly. They kept FaceTiming me when I was in Texas. “Mom, Dad’s okay, right?” What are you going to say? I said, “He’s not doing great, but we’ll figure it out when I get there. I’m so sorry I’m not there.” That was the worst day ever.
Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I’m so soy. I know we were just talking about how “I’m so sorry” is such a pathetic thing.
Kelsey: Until we find something better, we’ll use it.
Zibby: In the book, you not only write about — you have, first of all, the play-by-play of everything that happens next and who came in to help. How did you remember? You weren’t writing it at the time?
Kelsey: Yeah.
Zibby: You were writing it?
Kelsey: I journaled every day. I journaled every day because I had to get it out, but it was sloppy. I’d wake up, first thing, and I would just be like, I hate my life. I cannot believe this. This is what happened. Thank god this girl arrived today. Thank god this happened. I’m going to do this. I don’t want to go to the morgue. I don’t understand what’s happening. I pretty much wrote every day most of the time.
Zibby: I’m so glad you did because you’re in it with you. There’s no way you would remember any of this.
Kelsey: No way. You would revise it in your mind. It would either look too shiny or not — I spent my whole life trying to be successful and liked and approved of. This was the first time in my life I didn’t give a shit what people thought. I was like, this book is for me to remember what we made it through and for my kids and my grandkids to know the story of us. I always say it’s the first authentic thing I’ve ever done. It wasn’t underneath the guise of wanting approval. What happens with this book is it’s really just me telling the story without any worry about how it’s perceived, which was refreshing.
Zibby: Some of the stuff that you talk about, too, I feel like it’s stuff that people might want to edit out, but so important for other people to hear because people think it anyway. When you were in your nights where you were all howling and not sure you’d get through the nights, oh, my god, the way you even wrote about it. When you got to a point where you were like, you know what, I think I’m going to just kill myself and my kids, you’re like, well, how much Motrin can they drink? They’re not going to want to finish that. I could just hear it. I could see myself making the same things. I don’t really like guns. That’s not going to work. Shoot, no, I’m not going to drive off a cliff.
Kelsey: Too aggressive.
Zibby: Too much.
Kelsey: Every mother has those thoughts. This isn’t going to work. How are we going to do this? I remember when I started to put the suicide chapter together. One of my good friend’s father had just killed himself. She said, “Are you going to get in trouble for this? Can you get in trouble for this?” I’m like, “No, no, no. We have trouble because we’re not allowed to talk about it.” I don’t know that I really wanted to kill myself or my children. I didn’t.
Zibby: No, I know. It was hopelessness.
Kelsey: It’s a hopelessness that we all feel. If we could talk about it, we might be able to feel less embarrassed about how awful it is at the moment without also locking people away right away. I was just like, hey, listen, this isn’t working for us. We need to get to Nate. That was my feeling. Life doesn’t work without him. I was a baby when I married him. I met him when I was nineteen. I had no idea how to do it without him. I was just lost. The kids were too. Then a couple weeks later, Jack was like, “If I had a gun, I would kill myself.” I was so glad that we had talked about it in a light way. We use humor a lot in our family to lighten. I think joy and pain are right on the edge of each other. Humor, for me, is one of the best ways to talk about things that are hard. I feel like comedians are the last people that can really say the awful things that we need to discuss in our society. We do a lot of, I can’t believe Dad just jumped and died. It’s a nice way to be able to bring him up and hold it lightly and then laugh and then cry.
Zibby: You also have the trajectory of his entire career, both as you went through it with him from the early years through the end, through the aftermath of being in the NFL, through the physical manifestations, and even his mother not wanting him to play and not being able to watch. You have all the investigative stuff. I don’t want to give stuff away. I don’t know what you like to talk about or not from the ending of the book, but how exactly football damaged him, and even things that people don’t realize, like the fact that your heart might get stronger and bigger and can’t pump effectively and what you should be on the lookout — it would’ve been so easy — I was literally saying this to Kyle. I was like, “Maybe you should get this thing, this echocardiogram.”
Kelsey: A hundred percent.
Zibby: They give you EKGs on a physical, but they don’t give you the echocardiogram. I’m like, “Maybe you should just get that every year. What if your ventricles — how hard is that?” Why doesn’t every athlete? There’s all this stuff that makes you want to make systemic changes in sports to protect all these men, particularly men.
Kelsey: Guys don’t realize — a lot of guys just carry weight. They’re bigger. They’re like, oh, it’s okay. The problem is, the bigger you are, the harder your heart has to work. What we just have to do is continue to talk about the different medical tests that we can do. I think what happens is, in our society, we have a lot of parameters, so nobody tested Nate. No one did an echo because he was forty-two. You don’t do an echo until you’re forty-five. There’s all these rules. With football players — I was just talking to your husband about this. I am torn because — the Super Bowl was so fun just now. Obviously, Nate won with the Rams in ’99. It was a very emotional, cool day. There’s a really big price that people are playing for the joy of this sport. Maybe that’s just how life is. Maybe there are trade-offs. I would never let my kid play, ever. I’m not going to say that I don’t think there should be football because I do see so much joy. I’ve met so many amazing people. It’s been my whole life.
What I will stand behind firmly is, kids do not need to be in helmets. They just don’t. They can play flag football all the way through until at least they’re sixteen, seventeen. We have this culture of people putting little people who don’t even know how to do math, and we’re banging their brains. They’re doing Pop Warner. They’re out there. Anything that has head-to-head collisions, I just don’t know that we need to do that. I think moms should stand up and go, hey guys, you can play in college if you sign off. The sign-off would be, let us let you meet some people that have CTE. Let us let you meet some people that are really sick after playing football. You don’t see them. You only see the guys that are on TV and the guys that have a lot of money. There’s a lot of people that played four, five, six years that aren’t well. I know because I talk to them all the time. I don’t have an answer. Some of the best men I know played football. Some of the men that are hurting the most played football. I don’t have an answer, but I do say, try to keep your kids out of helmets.
Zibby: My son actually plays three sports, all of which require helmets.
Kelsey: But it’s not head-to-head. It’s lacrosse? Hockey?
Zibby: He’s playing lacrosse and hockey and football. I debate it too. I know. People look at me like, what? You’re letting your son play football?
Kelsey: They love it. I know.
Zibby: I feel like his position’s okay. I don’t know. I make all these excuses.
Kelsey: Here’s the thing too. There are a lot of men that play —
Zibby: — He’s also not going to college. He’s not going to the NFL.
Kelsey: A hundred percent. Everything in life has costs and benefits. Nate played a long time. He played a position that is — what’s your son? Defensive tackle?
Zibby: No.
Kelsey: Again, I’m nothing, everybody. I don’t know. I’m just saying personally, I don’t want people on the line that are doing this all day. Nate played twenty years ago. They would do the drills where you drop down, bang each other like gladiators. None of that is allowed anymore. They have changed things. People are very aware. The Concussion Legacy Foundation is trying to get — even football players, John Elway, they’re saying, look at me, I’m not well. Keep these kids out of helmets as long as they can. How old’s your son?
Zibby: He’s fourteen and a half, almost fifteen. He’s almost fifteen.
Kelsey: Okay, so he’s not eight.
Zibby: No, he’s not eight.
Kelsey: Fourteen, ninth grade?
Zibby: He’ll play a couple years.
Kelsey: Don’t worry. Listen, I’m torn too. My son just said no, but I think, partly, my son didn’t even want to.
Zibby: Well, you have a lot of —
Kelsey: — It’s loaded for us.
Zibby: Back to some of the other stuff in the book too, is the power of your friends and your family, your girlfriends, your friend Michelle, all these people who showed up for you, not just in the beginning, but over and over again, your aunt, your support system, and how you were just like, yes, I need it. Yes, I’m taking this help. I’m in it. Tell me about that and how you feel about it now, even from the people in your community, in your neighborhood who were like, do you feel safe sleeping here? Come on over.
Kelsey: A lot of that, it was my husband. He was the kindest, most present human being I’ve ever met. He was different. Sometimes I think those people go early. He was not a typical football player. He was not a typical man, father, or husband. He had a whole dark side, too, when he was in college. He was crazy and a partier. Once he had kids, he really had this desire to just listen to people. Whoever was in front of him was the most important thing in the world. When you were around him, you felt so seen and so loved and so valued. He was an encourager of everyone from the garbage man to the dry cleaner to the mayor. He had time for everybody. It was so cool. I was so proud to be his wife because I’m not like that. I’m selfish. I’m self-consumed. I like to relax. I get annoyed with people. He just is love. When he died, the outpouring of support for us was enormous. A lot of that was just the goodness of his heart. Then I, luckily — we just talked about this. I grew up on the East Coast where friendships are long and deep.
I live in LA now. It’s such a different vibe. I love it out here so much, but there is something about growing up — actually, in my town, we have that because it’s a little enclave that feels a little bit East Coast-y. Those girls have been with me since I was three or four. We grew up together. We know everybody’s dirty secrets. We know everyone’s family drama. They just showed up. They showed up. My neighborhood, all the women that I raised my babies with showed up. I think everyone was in shock, too, because Nate was the strong Super Bowl champion. They started being like, whoa. It reverberated because he was the one telling everyone to stay healthy. He was the one that’s telling everyone, be a better person. We felt like we kind of lost the keeper of joy. Still to this day, people have showed up for me and continue to do so. Now I’m just trying to return the favor for other people. I’m just trying to be more like Nate, which is hard
Zibby: The way you talked about having to parent through grief too, you’re like, I didn’t get to just pick up and go to a retreat for two months.
Kelsey: Eat Pray Love.
Zibby: What did you say?
Kelsey: I want to go have sex with a stranger.
Zibby: You’re like, that would be nice.
Kelsey: When do I get to have sex with a stranger?
Zibby: You’re like, it’s not Eat Pray Love. It’s cook, go to school.
Kelsey: Cook, cry, carpool.
Zibby: Yeah, cook, cry, carpool. Did you think about naming the book that?
Kelsey: I did, but then I was like, I don’t want it to just be that. I do love that idea that — here’s the good part about grief with the children. You have to keep going. The bad part about grief with children is you have to keep going. It is so physical. Sudden death, for me, was so physically — I don’t even know the word. I was so tired physically. The kids were little still, nine and twelve. They felt little still. There’s some grief books that are — they’re hard to read. For me, it was either, you can be in your grief forever — I’m like, who has time for that? I want to have a happy life. I want my kids to have a joyful life. I don’t want this to define us. Every person that I talked to that lost a parent in the fifties or a generation before us, every one of them was like, I just wish the parent that stayed alive had been joyful. I didn’t just lose my dad. I lost my mom too. I didn’t just lose my mom, but my dad couldn’t function. I was, very early on, committed to being like, oh, no, no, no, we are going to have a joyful life. I have no clue how. I’m going to be happy. We’re all going to thrive. Nate’s going to come back in our life in some way. I haven’t found him yet. We are going to do this for him. He worked too hard, he was too good, he’s too amazing for us to just fall apart.
I worked on that. Then I did every type of therapy possible. That’s only because you have resources. I think everybody deserves resources when they’re going through grief because it makes a difference. If you try to muscle through grief, forget about it. You won’t make it. You have to be strategic about your healing. You have to have practices. It’s not just a wish and a prayer. You have to be like, this is what I’m going to do every day to get better. For me, meditation and writing was it. It’s not a choice. You don’t get to be like, I don’t know if I want to meditate today. It’s like, sit down. For a while, I would just sit almost maybe an hour a day. Again, that’s a luxury. I would do twenty minutes, or in the car, just watching your brain tell stories about how you got screwed. This isn’t fair. Why did it happen? You have to be like, nope, nope. Come back to this moment right now. We’re okay. The kids are okay. We’re at school. We’re alive. Do I feel sad? Yes. Is life sad completely? No. Don’t tell a story. I spend a lot more time in quiet now, a lot more time just being. Instead of, when I get anxious, cleaning everything like I like to do and just wiping down counters, I try to sit down and be like, calm yourself. I don’t really have much anxiety anymore, but I do a lot less. I don’t read fifteen books a week.
Zibby: Oh, stop.
Kelsey: I’m going to start. That’s a lot, though.
Zibby: I don’t read fifteen books every week. How do you feel with it being a book? Do you feel terrified at all? No?
Kelsey: No. I feel so relieved that the story’s there and that I told it truthfully. I self-published, so I didn’t have anybody’s input, which I was really concerned about. At first when I shipped it out a little bit, they were like, let’s do it like this. I was like, oh, wait, this is a really personal story. It was really nice to just know that this is the truth. My kids haven’t read it. They don’t want to read it.
Zibby: I wish I had published it. It’s already out now, though, right? Yeah, Launch Pad. Oh, you’re with — Launch Pad is —
Kelsey: — Anna David.
Zibby: Anna David, yeah. She was just on my podcast.
Kelsey: Oh, really?
Zibby: Yeah.
Kelsey: Weird. I had an amazing editor and an amazing project manager. It was just the two of us. We just wrote. I wrote it in Google Docs. We went back and forth. It was very organic. We put the chapters together. They helped me do things like put it chronologically. I’ve always done stand-up. I’ve always written stuff, but I didn’t know how to write a book and how to chronologically go back and forth in between present and our relationship. I had an amazing editor who helped me. She’d be like, “Nope, that doesn’t work. Nobody wants to hear that. That was long-winded.” It was a wonderful experience, actually. I know my kids are going to hate parts of it. I just told them, “Then you can write your own book because we all had our own experiences.” I know some of these things, my daughter’s going to be like, I did not do that. They have their truth too. For me, that’s how it felt those first three years.
Zibby: What are you most wishing will happen with this book? Do you want to hear from people who have gone through it and said, now this is easier for me? What are some of your wish-list things? Or maybe just the fact that you got it out is…
Kelsey: Oh, god, no. No, I have big dreams. I remember wanting a book that I could laugh and cry about. I just wanted it not to be so heavy, but I wanted it to be real. So many of the books either had some type of religious bend or some sad bend. Death, I think it’s ridiculous. Having someone here and they’re just gone, it’s just ridiculous. Most of the widows or people that I talk to are like, yeah, it’s mind-blowing. It’s even more crazy than it is sad sometimes. You’re like, did that just happen? How did this all happen? Then how are people still out standing? Who are the people that are fighting for joy? You can see, terrible things have happened, what are they doing? We have a society where we encourage a lot of emotion. I used to be that way. Now there’s also, it’s okay to be like, nope. I feel this. I’m going to make a spot, and then I’m going to keep going. We all only have this one life. I grieve all the time. I cry all the time, but I weave it in and out of my regular life because I have a life. I don’t want this to be my only story. I hope the book — I would love to talk about it. I love to talk to people about it. Everyone’s lost someone. Especially the last two years with COVID, grief is a topic at hand. We are realizing we don’t really know how to do that in this country.
Our generation didn’t really lose that many people. The other generations had wars. People got sick. Now we’ve had this fifty years of a lot of us not having personal grief or sudden death, whereas I think our grandparents probably had horrible experiences. I would love to talk about it. I’d love to write a book called Overtime or something about being forty and then starting having sex with strangers. No, I’m just kidding, not have sex with strangers. What does it look like when your life completely changes at forty when what you planned is totally different? What are the gifts that come from that you never expected? What are the hard parts? I would love to just talk about that because I think a lot of people get divorced, which feels hugely like loss, very similar. A lot of people, their life doesn’t look the way they thought it would when they get to that point. Motherhood ends, and you’re like, what am I doing with my life? I want to talk about that andep having honest conversations but with joy and humor and grief all mixed in.
Zibby: What advice would you give to somebody who’s trying to write a book?
Kelsey: Oh, god. Just write. I hate when people say that. Don’t try to do it for anybody else. I know that’s really hard. If you’re an author and that’s your business, I guess you have to try to write a good book, but I feel like trying to write a good book is the problem. Just write the book. I also think what I learned is, the editing process is the most beautiful thing. Just get it down. I’m going to tell a terrible secret. A lot of this — I walked a lot after he died. I would dictate it into my phone and then copy it into Google Docs. Then I would have the story down without having to type it. Then I could go back and start to really take out the words. I didn’t have to sit at the computer and just come up with something. I do better when I’m moving. Part of being a writer, it’s hard because you’re stationary. How do we get our bodies moving? With iPhones now, it’s really easy to dictate in whole ideas. Comics do this all the time. Write your chapter on a walk. Then you’ll look at it and be like, eighty percent of that is garbage, but that right there, I’m going to build on that. Then you have your work for the week.
Zibby: I love that. That’s great. Amazing. Any books that you feel like helped you through so much?
Kelsey: Untethered Soul, When Things Fall Apart, Home with God. I went on a spiritual, religious journey. I wanted to know what every different — I just think there’s so many different things you can pull from and create whatever works best for you. I’m trying to think what else. There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. I still go back to those.
Zibby: People who now, hopefully, have all fallen in love with you also hearing this story and want to support you and elp or do whatever, where can they find you? What would be most useful to you?
Kelsey: My website is www.secondhalfbook.com. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it on Barnes & Noble. You can buy it at Pages in Manhattan Beach.
Zibby: Amazing. Thank you so much.
Kelsey: Thank you for having me. What an honor. So great.
Zibby: Thanks for doing this in person. So great.
