Grief, Fatherhood, and Breaking the Silence Around Death with Matt Fogelson

Death doula and funeral celebrant Jill McClennen speaks with Matt Fogelson about growing up in 1980s Manhattan, then losing his workaholic father to lung cancer when Matt was 19 and his father was 46. Matt describes carrying unspoken grief for decades, using pain to stay connected, and how family silence around dying robbed them of meaningful end-of-life conversations.

He shares how music and playing guitar became a private outlet for depression and rage, and later a bridge to his own son, helping him heal and avoid repeating emotional absence. The conversation also explores conscious living, legacy, and end-of-life planning, including the regret of devoting life to work over relationships. Matt discusses his Substack “Fine Tuning,” leaving law, and his memoir, “Fatherhood in a Different Key.”

00:00 Facing Mortality

00:16 Meet the Host and Guest

01:19 Growing Up 80s Manhattan

03:05 Life After New York

04:09 His Father’s Diagnosis

06:43 Decades of Hidden Grief

11:29 Music as a Lifeline

13:31 Denial and No Goodbye

14:57 Why We Avoid Death Talk

19:47 Childhood Grief and First Funeral

22:46 Shiva and Grief Advice

24:12 Music as Emotional Outlet

26:06 Soundgarden and Screaming

28:40 Safe Ways to Let It Out

31:07 From Lawyer to Memoirist

33:30 Cats in the Cradle Reflections

35:44 Writing in the Basement

37:03 Quitting Law and Launching

37:51 Regrets of the Dying

39:39 Family Cycles and Workaholism

43:41 Where to Find Matt

44:34 End-of-Life Planning CTA

https://www.mattfogelson.com/

https://mattfogelson.substack.com/

Restrung Fatherhood in a Different Key

Transcript

Matt: [00:00:00] Now think about it. God forbid I were in that situation with my son now, who's the age I was when my dad died. Like the idea that I wouldn't sit him down and say, Hey, I hope to beat this. Might not happen, doesn't look great, and just want you to know you're gonna be fine. And I love you and I have the utmost confidence in you.

Jill: Welcome back to seeing Death clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and funeral celebrant. Here on the show, I have conversations that explore death, dying grief, and life itself, and I invite you to question what you think you already know. In this episode, I talk with Matt Fogelson about growing up in 1980s Manhattan, losing his father to lung cancer at just 19, and what it meant to carry that grief for decades.

He shares how he held onto pain as a way to stay connected to his father. And how becoming a parent shifted something, allowing him to finally begin letting go. We talk about the silence around death and families and how that silence can take away the chance for real connection at the end of life. Matt also [00:01:00] shares how music and playing guitar became an outlet for his grief and a bridge to his own son.

It's an honest, thoughtful conversation about loss identity and what it means to move forward. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Matt to the podcast. Thank you for coming on today. I wanna know more about you, about who you are. I know you're from New York, right? Like from like New York City itself, or a little bit outside the city?

Matt: Manhattan, right 

Jill: there. Oh, you said you grew up in the eighties and I know that was an interesting time in New York City. 

Matt: It was. That's funny. As I talked to people, uh, particularly when I went to college in North Carolina, I felt like an exotic bird or something people would ask me. Did you live in one of those skyscrapers?

You mean an apartment building? Yes. I routinely got mugged. People seem to find that interesting. Different times. Someone came up to me with a crowbar at the park for my, my baseball glove. Different time. 

Jill: Yeah. My aunt and uncle actually used to live at the 79th Street Boat Basin. They still live on a boat, but now they're on in [00:02:00] Jersey.

'cause the boat basin's getting renovated. But I remember going there when I was a kid in the eighties, and we would go and we would visit them on the boat and then we would walk through the city and it was like, woo. And then when I went to college in upstate New York, I spent a lot of time in the city with them on their boat, wandering around.

I love New York City so much, and now I'm. In South Jersey, so I'm not too far. We get up there about once a year, but I'm sure growing up there must have been a whole different world than what most of us grew up in. 

Matt: It's funny, growing up there, I didn't think of it being odd in any way to grow up there. I didn't know any different.

It was really only after I went to college, as I say in North Carolina, that I started to see things. For example, on a beautiful day, there's no sunlight because you're in constant shadow. 'cause of the tall buildings and I noticed how there's garbage piled up on the streets everywhere. That's unusual and how people are just like pushing past you.

So I started to notice these things that seemingly on offensive parts of the urban tapestry, [00:03:00] that to me just became like things that I had trouble reengaging with when I came home. So now I'm in California, I've been here for. 25 years out in Oakland. Very different. Although here it's interesting, as a driver, I have to get used to pedestrians just walking out in the middle of the street expecting you to stop.

Jill: Definitely different 'cause yeah. Again, growing up in Jersey, I moved down to Virginia for college and everybody there was like, why do you do everything so fast? You walk fast, you talk fast. Like everything you did was fast and I was. I don't know. It's just what we do. And then you have people just like walking in front of your car.

I was like, what are they doing? Stop doing this to me. And actually I got married in Oakland. Actually it was the Berkeley Hills, right at a state park there. I think it was called Tilton. Tilton State Park. Park, yeah. 

Matt: Til Tilton. 

Jill: Yeah. In that little like cabin thing they have up there. Yeah. We lived in San Francisco for a couple years.

I love it there, but I came home to take care of my grandmother at the end of her life. So that is how I got into the work that I do [00:04:00] now. Caring for my grandmother, but I do love California and it is a very different place than the East Coast. We're just different, 

Matt: that's for sure. 

Jill: And so your story starts.

About your father, but it's also about having a child yourself. So can you just tell me a little bit about your father first and then we'll get into the whole story. 

Matt: My father was an attorney in New York, like a corporate attorney type. Classic workaholic, rarely seen, even weekends would be going to the office or have papers delivered literally like FedExed to our apartment, or I guess it was private messenger back in those days, which was even more bizarre.

He was diagnosed with cancer, lung cancer. My sophomore year of college, so I was 19, he was 46, and his prognosis that I remember him saying was five years on the high end, and he ended up only lasting about a year and a half. The book is a memoir, kind of about coming to grips with that [00:05:00] loss and the feeling that I didn't really know who he was and not wanting to pass down that emotional absence that I felt with him, and I think is to some extent endemic to father-son relationships onto my own son.

And hopefully solving for that in part by sharing with him my passion for music so he knows what makes his dad tick, which is something I never really knew about my own dad. 

Jill: How old is your son now? 

Matt: Now he's 20. Almost 21. So he is junior in college now. 

Jill: Lovely. Yeah. My kids are 15 and 12 and it is crazy, like when people say it flies by, it really does fly by.

Matt: That's really remarkable. 

Jill: And I think one of the things that I found so interesting about your story when I first got the email and I was reading about you and your story, is there's this grief that we don't often talk about in society of. Having parents, but having them not be there. So we feel [00:06:00] this weird mix of like desire and wanting to have this relationship with them and wanting to spend the time with 'em while also not having that and grieving that.

And now that your father has passed away, there's that. Now we never have the opportunity. So there's so many different losses that you experience there. And that you need to properly grieve in order to be able to parent well. And it sounds like you did that and you went through that whole, I don't know if it's a circle or whatever direction that would be.

You worked through all of that yourself. How did that go for you? Was there tools that you used? What was the things that helped you work through those things? 

Matt: It took a long time. I would say. I feel like. Maybe even from when he gave me his diagnosis or prognosis, there was this dark cloud hanging over me, which lasted for decades.

Really. It wasn't. It's not like I was curled up in the fetal position on the couch or something. I had a [00:07:00] normal life. I had friends and I think one of my friends who's read the book was shocked to learn that I was. Probably clinically depressed. So it took a long time to work through that. And I think part of it was I had this weird notion that to keep him close, I needed to feel the pain of his absence like that if I was sad or angry or whatever, that was my way of holding onto him.

I'd sort of recount in the book that. He had this very small closet where he kept all his suits and stuff, and I remember after he died, going in there and being like, I could smell him. It just smelled like him. And then I would close that door shut to try and preserve it. And over time, of course. That smell disappeared and it was the end, the last physical vestige of him.

And what I learned was that if I wanted to feel him, it was through pain and sadness and grief. And so for a long time, that's [00:08:00] how I kept him in my life, which of course is a terrible strategy and not something he would've wanted for me if we had ever spoken about it, which we never did. We never. He never really acknowledged that he was gonna die or thought he was gonna die.

That probably didn't set me up for success either, but it really, it was just a process of a lot of time and I think having my own son finally started to help. Break that psychic log jam. I think it was painful for a period because I, again, I had this dark cloud where even in these moments of unbridled joy as a parent that you have, they're always met with a little bit of sadness, missing my father, wishing he could meet my son, wishing he could see me as a father, but then ultimately recognizing that I needed to live my own life.

I needed to let him go in a sense and let that pain go. Just try and find joy and happiness on my own and not necessarily just through my [00:09:00] son, which was also a tool I guess I used for a while. But of course that can't rely on others for that. 

Jill: I like that you pointed out that your friend that read the book this high had no idea because we're all going through things, we're all suffering, we're all holding onto pain and grief, and we just learn to mask it, right?

We learn to put on that face so that when we show up. The rest of the world, the people around us don't see that pain and that suffering. We don't feel safe to open up to people, and it's not necessarily because they are doing anything wrong, it's just our culture. I think we're just not an openly.

Vulnerable culture where we're gonna feel safe showing up and being like, yeah, man, this sucks. I feel terrible. And I think a lot of us walk around. I've had people where I went through a period when I was in like high school, early twenties, where I definitely had. Real depression, like looking back [00:10:00] on it.

Mm-hmm. And so many people are so surprised by it. They're like, really? Like you were always so friendly and smiling and all these things. And I'm like, yeah. And like inside I was not feeling that way. And even now I notice how I can turn all on the smile. I can turn on that energy when I feel like I need to, even if I'm having a bad day.

It's just we, that's what we do. It's. Really neat that you were able to write that down and then have your friends read it and be able to share that story so that other people can be encouraged maybe to talk about these things. And I, being a parent, I really always love when I hear somebody say that they worked through whatever it is.

Because they didn't wanna pass it on to their children. They didn't wanna put that burden on their children. And unfortunately, I think a lot of us, I assume you're probably around my age, I think a lot of us did end up getting the [00:11:00] burden of our parents because they just didn't know better. They didn't know what to do.

I don't know, I'm not sure, but I was determined as well to. Heal myself as best as I could because I refused to pass it on to my children. The pain and all the things that came from the people before me, it came from me, from my experiences. Have you talked with your son? About some of the things that happened when you were younger, why you went down this path.

Matt: We've spoken a little bit about it and it's funny, it has come up through our discussions around music because there's a lot of this in the book. One of my main tools was responsive to your earlier question was music and particular albums, particular songs where I felt like I created this safe space.

Where, to your point about not being outwardly, showing your grief or whatever. I'm remembering a, an op-ed piece that Anna Quinlan wrote in the New York Times, like shortly after my dad died. So it was probably like [00:12:00] early to mid nineties where she talks about how people don't talk about death, but they also don't talk about grief.

And she was talking about how her sister-in-law, it was an obituary for her sister-in-law, died very young of cancer, had two very young daughters and. The daughters were out shopping with their aunt or something, and like the salesperson said to the daughters, you, your mother must have beautiful hair or something like this.

Mm. And their response was, yes, she does. And so they, her point was these teenagers, they knew from a very young age. That's what you're supposed, that's how you're supposed to respond. You're not supposed to discomfort somebody by saying, actually she's, she died a week ago. We just are trained in that way to, to do that.

But so getting back to my son, so we've talked about it a little bit through music. Really, and there's a particular album that I used to listen to all the time. I've played that for him, and explained how that was, it just gave perfect expression to my [00:13:00] self-loathing and like this, this terrible cycle that I was in at that time and, and in some way brought me back to life through this music.

It was, I felt like somebody understood me and had my back, even if their motives were pure malevolence and I would. Come out of these listening sessions where I would just have my headphones on, super loud. I would feel restored, and now I can go back to class. This was in law school. What I'm thinking of specifically now, I think he's taken that in stride.

He's old enough. But again, it's one of those things, and I think my dad suffered from this, you wanna present as strong and stable for your kids. You don't want them to think that the foundation's a little swampy. And I think that was my dad's thing. He just was like. Nothing to see here. I'm gonna beat it.

And in fact, I think I took that on because I remember once my mother said to me, it's probably a year into the diagnosis, he was pretty sick. She said, I think we need to start preparing for the possibility that he's gonna [00:14:00] die. Cut her off. I'm like, I think he's doing all right. I think he's tolerating the treatments.

Well, I, it was, like I say in the book, it was like my mother was falling and I couldn't hold out my arms to catch her. I think I had just adopted his approach to that. Which was not helpful to anybody. 

Jill: Did you genuinely believe that the treatments were working, or did you say that just because that's what you thought you should say?

Matt: Yeah, the latter. Yeah. In fact, I remember my dad sitting me down at some point and telling me that the cancer had spread to his brain, but it wasn't a big deal because it wasn't in an area that controlled speech or, and the next chemotherapy was gonna target that. And then he said that treatment is supposed to be last week, but my blood counts haven't come back up fast enough.

But the doctor says that's a good thing. It shows the treatments are working. And I remember sitting there thinking. That doesn't sound right. It turned out he was in really bad shape. 

Jill: I think it's very common in [00:15:00] our culture for there to be that response of, no, everything's fine though. Everything's fine.

We're fighting it. We're working through, we're doing all this stuff. And from my side, my experience as a death doula, as somebody that really encourages folks to talk about what's important to them at the end of life. Talk about what they would want. It's robbing people of having any quality of life in a situation where the doctors are probably, honestly, this isn't really working.

The person itself that's getting the treatment is, I don't think this is really working. The family members are like, I don't think this is really working, but everybody's still full speed ahead. We doing this thing. 

Matt: Yeah, 

Jill: and then unfortunately. The person ends up dying anyway, and there's no opportunity left in there to have some conversations, to maybe spend some time together to really connect because people feel that [00:16:00] there's this idea that if we're not trying to be stoic and acting like everything's working and we're just gonna keep doing the thing, but then they're giving up where we could still do the treatments, we could still try all the things.

But being honest with ourselves and with our families and the people around us and saying, Hey, why don't we have some conversations? Why don't we spend some time together? Why don't we take a vacation and go and be together when we can? But I also encourage people to do all that stuff now because none of us ever know, right?

Any of us could die tomorrow. So why are we gonna wait anyway until we have a diagnosis to have these conversations? I think we should all be having them now. Mm-hmm. And that's part of why I do this, so that yeah, people can hear us talking about it and go, maybe I can have that conversation with my family.

Maybe I can ask them what's important to them? What do you love about life? Especially now with all of us with these little annoying devices that we stare at, we're not having the level of conversation that I think [00:17:00] even probably again, when we grow up. Like, sure, we had tv, we had video games, but you weren't glued to it.

Everybody individually, right? Like I see my kids now, and even me and my husband, even sometimes over with friends, we're all looking at our own thing. So we're not having conversations during commercials, we're not doing other things. We're just staring at this little box in our own world. And I do fear that we are losing memories almost.

Right? What are we all gonna remember when we look back? I don't know. 'cause I don't even remember what I watched on my phone an hour ago. Yeah. But yet I could have spent that time with my kids. But I am being more intentional now. That is my thing. Over the last few years I've been really stopping. You said you use music.

Do you play music? Do you mainly just listen to music? Like how do you use music? To help you have a conversation with your son and work through your own emotions. 

Matt: I do play guitar, not well, but I picked it up. 

Jill: That's 

Matt: okay. I started [00:18:00] in high school and yeah, that, that was something I would sit and play the same chord over and over again like a.

Freaking metronome or something and with the more darker periods. And so my son has taken up guitar and in three years he's way better than I ever was. That's a way to talk through music as we sometimes play together. Not so much now 'cause he's at college, but when he's home, that's one way we've able to spend a little bit of time together.

Thinking about your earlier point about we just put up this wall and don't make room for a conversation. I think to be charitable to my father, I was in college, right? And I think he didn't wanna bum me out or something. Like he wanted me to go have a college experience and somehow in his head he thought if he acknowledged what was happening and we talked about it, I'd go to pieces or something, or.

He just wanted me to. So I think it came from a place of love, I think. And so I, I wanna acknowledge that, but I agree that it's, it's a little [00:19:00] unnatural. I think about it. God forbid, I'm in that situation with my son now, who's the age I was when my dad died. Like the idea that I wouldn't sit him down and say, Hey, I'm, I'm gonna, um, hope to beat this.

Might not happen, doesn't look great, and just want you to know you're gonna be fine. And I love you and I have the utmost confidence in you and you don't. Live your life mourning me and grieving me. I'm fine. I can't feel you. I'll feel no pain. And don't get yourself wrapped around the axle. It's natural.

It's gonna happen. And I can't imagine just pretending like it's not happening, but different time perhaps. 

Jill: Yeah. Yeah. And most of us really do it with the best of intentions. 'cause you're right, we don't wanna stress people out. We don't wanna feel like a burden. We don't wanna upset them. And it's just all that we know.

It's what we've learned. It's not even a conscious decision, it's just we're going through the motions and growing up, I know at least for me, south Jersey, it wasn't anything anybody talked about When I was a kid, like my grandfather [00:20:00] got sick, he actually had lung cancer that spread to his brain as well.

My grandfather got sick. He was there one day. He went to the hospital. He never came back, and that was the end of the conversation. I have some memories of it. I was young, but I have some memories of it. I knew he was really sick, but I never remember anybody talking to me about it. I wasn't allowed to go to his funeral, and so it really sets us up for being uncomfortable when it comes to talking about death or grief or thinking about it even.

And I realized. When I started doing this work as a death doula and I started learning more about grief and about how many of us carry unprocessed grief from childhood potentially, and I realized I was grieving him and I was carrying this because I was never given a safe space. I was never given permission even to fully feel it.

Beep was I die or geez, he died. Not I, I, he died when I [00:21:00] was. Four, and I was probably about 44 when I finally really worked through it. So for 40 years I carried this grief around and didn't even realize it, but it's, again, it's just part of our culture. So there's definitely no shame for anybody, but it's just unfortunate.

And like when you were a kid, did your family ever talk to you about death or anybody dying near you that there was ever a conversation? 

Matt: No. Nope. Death, like all my grandparents were still alive when he died. Oh wow. So maybe there wasn't a lot of occasion. My best friend from growing up, his father died when we were in high school, maybe 10th grade.

And so I went to that funeral. That was definitely my first experience with death. And I don't know how old you're in 10th grade, 16 or something. 

Jill: Yeah, 

Matt: I 

Jill: think about 16. 

Matt: So yeah, I just remember walking into the funeral home and seeing my friend's stepmom, and she saw me. She [00:22:00] just started crying. And hugging me and crying, and I was, I didn't know how to react to that.

I might do better now as a 50 plus, certainly at 16 I didn't have the words or I didn't know how to react to that. Yeah. So 

Jill: yeah, even people now, we don't have the words. We don't know how to react to somebody dying. In our forties, fifties, sixties, it doesn't really seem to matter how old you are. People still do get so uncomfortable and then they just say the cliche things or they say They're really, to me, crappy ones of, they're in a better place.

Uhhuh. 

Jill: Are you? Yeah. Really? Okay, sure. 

Matt: That's funny. My aunt actually said that to me. 

Jill: Yeah. How'd you feel about that when she 

Matt: said it? Oh man. I write about this in the book. She actually was a very pivotal. Person. It turned out I only figured that out later in life, how important she was to me and her passion for music, living her life on her own terms.

But in that [00:23:00] moment, I remember it was after the funeral and we were sitting Shiva at our apartment and she was in the kitchen and I walk in and she just said, she started crying and saying, I think he's in a better place. He was always working so hard. Maybe now he's at peace. And I remember thinking, did she just say that my dad being dead was a good thing?

I think she did. And again, I know that she meant well. But yeah, that was a little strange to hear. 

Jill: I get where it's coming from, but also, yes, that is a strange one to hear. 

Matt: Yeah. As you're saying, we put up this facade of being okay when everything's okay. And I remember she really did encourage me. At that same time to really feel the pain and to acknowledge it and to let it in.

And at the time, I didn't know what she was talking about. In fact, she wrote me a letter shortly after that. It's like she predicted exactly what was gonna happen. There's gonna be times when you're gonna beat yourself up. And you should know [00:24:00] that you've had this traumatic experience and that your perspective isn't right.

You should hopefully always see yourself the way I see you, which is yeah, a bunch of nice accolades. But I didn't internalize that. I didn't know what she was talking about. I remember I went and played guitar i's like whatever, and when people would ask me how I'm doing, I always said I'm fine. And but music for me, that's where.

I could feel those things that she was talking about, like the, just the despair and the anger and the sadness. And I didn't have to tell people I was okay when I was listening to the music, like I could be my truest self in a way. And so I really came to rely on that, those listening sessions as a crutch to process all that.

And then it was very restorative. I think 

Jill: music is interesting in that way where it does. Make us feel things. And I guess some of that is literally the vibration of the music. Like you said, you would put the headphones on, you would turn it up as loud as you could. And actually, what were you listening to?

Matt: I was referring [00:25:00] there to Sound Garden and they're super unknown record. 

Jill: Okay. I know Sound Garden. I don't know if I know that record. I would probably know some of the songs. Yeah. And that's so you put those things on and it physically is gonna vibrate you when you're listening to it. And like you said, the lyrics when it feels like they're.

Saying the things that you are feeling, but they're artists. They have a way of saying it in a way that I could never physically say. It. Just they, I couldn't get that out of my mouth if I wanted to Uhhuh. Uh, and that is part of why I think we've always loved music as humans, right? Why music has always played such a big part in.

Us and our storytelling and our way of connecting with the world around us. And we are really lucky now that we can carry it around literally in our pockets. 'cause again, you're old enough to remember the giant CD like books. That thing would weigh like a hundred pounds. And now we, I know I still sometimes take it for granted.

That I have Spotify [00:26:00] on my phone and I just hit play and I could walk around the house and listen to music while I do whatever I wanna do. A great way to incorporate processing emotions is through listening to music 

Matt: and in particular that band for me. I think one of the things that it did was the lead singer, Chris Cornell, his vocals, they were just like so searing and he had this tremendous range and he would scream.

On some of these songs and these were screams that like I'd never heard in music before. Obviously it won't get fooled again. Roger Daltry. He's got that iconic scream, but that's a scream of like joy and exultation. Chris Cornell screams on this record were like self rage. The one of the songs that I would play on repeats the day I tried to live and there's a line.

The lives we make never seem to get us anywhere but dead. And, and there would be these screams, and he would literally, I think he literally screamed for me, I needed to scream, I needed to off gas this toxicity, but I didn't know how to do it. I was in [00:27:00] law school. I had a roommate. I couldn't, he's a very studious guy, so I, I didn't know.

How to do. And so I think hearing Chris Cornell scream and directing this rage inward, which was the cycle that I was in, was just, it was perfect. It was, and even now, many years later, when I hear that record, I immediately go back. To those dark days in law school. But in a way I feel like that record was such a gift even now, it allows me to connect with that kid and that's part of who I am and will always be.

And it's that music just opens the window into that wide open. 

Jill: And now I'm gonna have to listen to that album. 'cause I don't think I've ever listened to that album itself. 

Matt: It's a little bit of a dark journey, but worth it. 

Jill: And I don't mind dark journeys. I think I've always been one of those people that the darkness does not scare me.

And so I don't mind going there. And I know we're talking about darkness. Like to me, my worst nightmare is something happening to one of my [00:28:00] children. I know I've talked to people on my podcast and out in the real world that have had children die, and one of the things that I've found really interesting.

Is more than one person has said, the scream that came out of their body was not human. Mm-hmm. It was something else when they, and it like, it makes me wanna cry just thinking about it. And so there is something in us, like you said, like os gassing that just needs to let out that energy and it's not appropriate in our society under most circumstances.

To scream or yell even with kids, right? How often do we hear people telling their kids, stop yelling, stop making so much noise, right? So music is one of those few places where you can scream and it's, have you ever heard of Screamo Music? Not my favorite genre of music, but when I used to own a bakery, one of my employees was like, oh, my favorite is Screamo.

And I was like, what is Screamo? And we listened to it and it literally [00:29:00] is the person singing. The entire song just screaming every single word. I was like, oh, that's a thing. Okay, not for me. But also I could see how four people that have this buildup of like anger and pain and suffering. There is a version of me, maybe in a multi universe that screamo would've been my thing, because I can totally understand how it just would feel good getting it out in that manner.

But yeah, you're right. When you got roommates and you got people around you, and I know some people, they will go out into the woods and scream, sure, if you need to go out into that safe space and get it out. Or I guess even now I've seen on TikTok, I think it was Seattle. They do these things where the people all went out to like the waterfront and they all stood in a line and at the same time they just yelled [00:30:00] like just as loud as they could.

And it was really interesting to see because there's definitely times when I feel the need to scream and I don't. What I do though is. I hum sometimes to myself, or I'll put music on really loud and I'll sing really loud, but you don't wanna hear me sing. I'm not a singer. So I guess there is ways for us to imitate that without actually screaming and scaring everybody around.

Matt: Yeah. Oh, I love that image of everyone lined up in Seattle. That sounds great. The always you can scream, but it wasn't available to me. It was in the car, and I have done that. I can recall a couple of occasions since I've moved to California, or, but yeah, in, in, in New York City, I, I didn't have a car. And yeah, the music was a good surrogate.

Jill: Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you definitely don't wanna scare people by going outside and screaming and having your neighbors think, of course, in New York City, who knows? People would probably be like, oh no, [00:31:00] whatever. 

Matt: If there's anywhere you could do it. Without drawing a glance, it probably would've been New York City, but yeah, 

Jill: probably.

I know you have your Substack and your book. What inspired you to start writing? Were you always a writer? Did you always enjoy writing? How did you end up on that path? 

Matt: Yeah, I'm a recovering lawyer. I practiced for almost 30 years, but I started a music blog about 12 years ago, fine tuning, which is now migrated to Substack, and that was initially my effort to nudge classic rock fans stuck in the seventies into the 21st century.

But it morphed over time into some more narrative essays around the confluence of music and parenting. I had some of those published and had a critical mass of those essays, and I thought about trying to publish them as an essay collection, but I got advice from someone in the business who said, unless you're David Sedaris, no one reads essay collections.

But what she told me was, you have a memoir here, [00:32:00] although you need to stop jumping from stone to stone and. Dive in is what she said. And so that kind of put the idea in my head of a memoir, but it really was something that spoke to me because I felt like I'd been walking around with this cloud over my head and I felt there was a lot of emotional veins to mine there.

Found it to be pretty cathartic and hopefully. Conveyed in a way that's relatable to others who went through or going through the early death of a parent, or in my case too, feeling like I was living a life of constrain self-imposed constraints. We all live with constraints, right? Financial health, whatever.

But sometimes we also put these other constraints on ourselves and for me it was I think, continuing to remain a lawyer when if I stopped and thought critically about it, I didn't really enjoy it that much. I feel like I did it again, keep my dad close. I [00:33:00] literally wore his suits to work, reached this point where I was like, okay, I've been doing this for so long, I don't really enjoy it.

It took me a little while to figure all that out. So hopefully the book also might encourage 'em to check in on themselves and make sure that they're doing what they wanna be doing. And certainly if there's like fathers and sons, they're having trouble to break through that emotional divide to try and encourage that.

So the writing, it started as a music. Thing and over time morphed into this other thing and eventually resulted in this memoir. 

Jill: I read your Substack before we got on, and I read through a couple different ones, but I really liked the one where you talked about the song Cats and the Cradle with Your Father and how like you played it loud, hoping that he would hear it and actually listened to what it was saying.

But growing up, hearing that song, I am not close with my father. He was really never around. And I remember hearing that song when I was a kid. Hearing somebody sing about their relationship with their [00:34:00] father and them not being there. And then how, as the child aged now, the child's kind of like whatever.

And in some ways I went through an experience like that song and that now like my father's still alive, they don't really talk to him. Even when I do see him, we don't really talk like there's just, there's no. Desire on my end anymore. When I was a child, I desired it. I wanted it. And then as I got older now I'm like, I don't know.

I've got my husband, I got my kids. I have everything I want. I have everything I need. When I saw that one that particularly drew me in where I was like, Ooh, all right. Like I, I have a connection to that song too. And so I loved it. The blog morphed into the substack and became this memoir. I love memoirs.

Like personally, I've always really enjoyed memoirs 'cause I think everybody does have a story. We all think that our story is not that interesting. But we do have a story that people are [00:35:00] going to want to read. So I love that you took all of that and put it together into this memoir that now you've been able to publish, which is not easy.

That is a chore to do all the work, to do all the writing because you also have to relive some of those things as you're writing it and you have to process it, and you have to figure out a way to tell it so that you feel like you're honoring your story, but also. How much dirty laundry do we need to air?

Like we don't wanna put everything out there. Yeah. So did you find any struggle in writing some of it of maybe I don't wanna share this because I don't want this story or this version of my father being out there? Or were you able to just be like, this is it. I'm telling it all. 

Matt: I pretty much told it all.

There are a few things I held back, uh, just not to embarrass certain people, but yeah, that wasn't a constraint so much. The harder part. It just took a lot of discipline. So it's funny, like this office [00:36:00] here, this is like my new office. It's got a lot of light. This is where I started to write the book. I share this space with my wife and I found I couldn't write the book here, so I went into the basement.

Not even just like into this room in the basement, there were no windows. It was like a storage area. And I created an office space there just through a desk and a chair. And that became the place where I could actually write this book to the outside observer. It looked pretty depressing, probably space.

I put a poster up. I tried to, I see it up a little, but uh, it was pretty depressing, but it was the perfect place to commune and. Work through a lot of the stuff there. I tried to treat it as a nine to five job, go down there at nine and quit at five, but there were many days where that wasn't possible.

Just it was too much emotional energy. I had my guitars down there. I would play some guitar or listen to some music, then try and recharge a little bit. But I've spent about two and a half years in that window of spaceman office. [00:37:00] Now I've graduated back to the NICE office now that it's done. 

Jill: And what are you doing now?

Did you leave being a lawyer behind completely? Like how did that go? 

Matt: I initially quit back in 2019, so a little bit before the pandemic. I wrote the book through about 2022. Then I went back to the law in a different capacity for about two year, two and a half years or something. And then I most recently quit in May of last year.

It's 'cause I just wanted to focus on the launch and getting the substack up and in the hopes that more than my immediate family will read this book, 

Jill: because that's a whole job in and of itself promoting it. It's one thing to write it. Mm-hmm. Anything that we create as like small business owners, right?

It's one thing to create that thing, but to get people to actually know it exists and to buy it, that is a whole job in and of itself. I love that you bring up that point of reflecting back on. Do I really love this work? Is this really how I wanna [00:38:00] spend my days? Because there is a book, and it's just kind of something that it's talked about a lot in end of life is the regrets of the dying.

And one of the regrets is so many people said. When they were at the end of their life, they worked in jobs that they just, they hated. They didn't like it. They went into it because a parent wanted it. They thought they needed it for the money, they wanted the title, whatever it was. And then at the end of their life, they're like, man, I wasted so much of my life doing something.

That I really didn't enjoy. It didn't fulfill me. And that doesn't mean that we need to all quit our jobs and burn our whole life down. But it is worth reflecting and saying, is this something that is fulfilling me? Is this something that I enjoy doing? And that when I look back, am I gonna say, wow, like I really lived my life and I did work.

That felt good. That was meaningful when there is a [00:39:00] balance, right. Sometimes some of us have to work jobs we don't want to because we need to pay the bills. 

Matt: Sure. 

Jill: Just again, so many times we just go through the motions and we just do what we think we're supposed to do and we don't question it and we don't think about it.

And then we get to the end of life and we're like, damn, I just wasted that whole life. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Jill: And that is really to me. The sad part about somebody dying. It's not the death itself. I'm like, I don't know what comes after this. Who knows? Mm-hmm. Who knows where we're gonna go if nothing else, nothing. We won't know the difference, but.

Being at the end of our life and thinking, wow, I wasted my whole life. That is heartbreaking. Yeah. It's so sad. Yeah, it's 

Matt: really 

Jill: sad. 

Matt: Yeah, and that's, I remember my father saying something, and I read about this in the book. I was with him and my mom somewhere in Colorado or something, and he said if I had known, I would've done a lot of things differently and I don't remember.

The context of that, and I have no idea what he meant by that, but I have often wondered if he meant he might not have dedicated [00:40:00] himself completely to his job and kind of relegated his family to second class status. Mm-hmm. I've wondered about that. And in doing the work for this book, I came across a memoir of sorts that my grandfather, his father, had written.

And so it was like 40 pages, single space typed. And his dad was a lawyer. A bootstrap immigrant story like reads like a Hollywood script. Actually, I wondered if my dad, so my grandfather, that 42 pages, there's six sentences about my dad, and it's the facts. He was born on this date. He went to this school, he married and.

It's all about his professional career too. He doesn't really talk about his wife either, my grandmother, and so I wondered whether my dad became that workaholic as a way to just relate and feel love from his dad, right? Mm. Which just was this cycle that just, and whether he learned, I finally regretted that maybe, I don't know 

Jill: from the comment that he made, and again, from [00:41:00] knowing what I know about people that are nearing the end of life when they talk about their regrets.

One of the big regrets is putting everything like my job, like making the money, buying the stuff ahead of spending time with my family. That's the things that people value when they look back at their life is those moments that they spent. And again, that's what I worry about. We're losing with devices even more, but they value the times that they spend.

They'll talk about not even like the big trips, like not the things that they spend a lot of money on. But softball games or being outside for a picnic or like just doing something that is just so small, but it was really connecting with the people that they love. They also talk about not spending enough time with friends, not connecting enough with friends, that especially as we get older, we all like drift apart.

People talk about wishing they would've really taken the time to keep up those relationships with their friends. I know that's one [00:42:00] thing that I've been trying to work on myself, right? The family was always my first one. As soon as I started really getting into this work, and especially after learning about those regrets of the dying, I started thinking about how much I worked.

I was working a full-time job. I was working a part-time job. My husband was working. We would take the kids to school. They would stay after school as late as we could leave them there because we both had to be at work to get home. We'd rush through dinner time just to put them to bed, and then on the weekends we were so overwhelmed with just doing like.

Normal stuff. We gotta do all the chores, we gotta clean the house, like we gotta do all this stuff. And I was thinking about it and I was looking back at the few short years I had already had with my kids and thinking, this is not life. This is not what I want them to experience. And so when I left my job to be around more.

Thankfully they were still young enough where I think to myself, okay, like we're all gonna be able to look at this time and remember the times that we did spend together, there was [00:43:00] a lot of unlearning on my part, this feeling of that I wasn't being productive and that I still needed to be busy all the time and I need you to be working all the time.

And it's hard to unlearn that, but it is so important because really one day we are gonna die. One day we will not be here. And I wanna look back and hope that my family and I can both say that we had a really good life together, that we really enjoyed each other. 

Matt: Yeah. I 

Jill: feel like that's winning, right?

Yeah. That's the goal in life. Not having the cars, not having all this stuff, but being able to say that I can die happy. 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah, that resonates. Definitely. 

Jill: Well, we are just about the end of our time. I'll put links in the show notes, but can you just tell us where you would want people to find you? I'll put your Substack, whatever you want in there.

Matt: Yeah. I have a website, matt fogelson.com, which is the all things Matt Fogelson. So links to everything. But yeah, I'm on [00:44:00] substack. It's called Fine Tuning Instagram at Matt Fogelson. I'm on LinkedIn and. Facebook and all the things. 

Jill: All the things, like most of us were on all the things. Yeah. And your book will be available on Amazon.

Thank you. Can they purchase that through your website as well, or would you want people just to go to Amazon? 

Matt: I need to put a link on my website, but it'll probably be to Amazon. The book's fatherhood and a different key. 

Jill: Perfect. Thank you so much, Matt. This was lovely. I enjoyed chatting with you and I will for sure, make sure that everybody can find you and your book.

Matt: Likewise. Thank you so much, Joe. I loved it. 

Jill: If you've been listening to my podcast for a while and you hear me and my guests talk over and over about how important it is to create a plan for the end of life, and to have the conversations with your loved ones about what's important to you, and you're thinking, okay, maybe it's time.

Maybe I should actually sit down and figure this out instead of just hoping it all works out later. I get it. These conversations can feel overwhelming or scary. Or just like something you'll deal with another day, but you don't have to do it [00:45:00] alone. If you want help creating an end of life care plan for yourself or for someone you love, maybe it's your aging parents, a spouse, whoever it is in your life, you can book a complimentary 30 minute call with me and we'll just talk.

We'll get clear on what's going on for you and what the next right steps might be. There's no pressure, just support. The links in the show notes. Whenever you're ready, and if this episode made you think of someone, a sibling, a friend, or another caregiver, feel free to share it with them. Sometimes these conversations are easier to start when someone else opens the door.

First, thank you for being here. The fact that you're even willing to listen to this kind of conversation means a lot.