C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

03/03/2024 • 5:16 PM 5

What To Do When Your Dad Dies

My dad died this week. Naturally, my thoughts have turned to longevity and morbidity. Due to the sedentary and solitary nature of writing, as a group, writers can be especially vulnerable to the wages of Time. I have some thoughts about getting healthier, happier, and staying that way. This is a smorgasbord. Take what you tastes right for you.

Get up from your desk at least once an hour, preferably twice. Move more. Walk more, even if you, like me, would prefer nature to be paved. Despite all the gross bugs, the tree huggers and grass touchers are on to something.
Wear sunscreen, even if it’s cloudy. If traveling by plane, follow the example of your flight attendants and wear more sunscreen. Radiation is higher up there.
Cook at home more. The dirty dishes are worth the trouble. I’ve recently become obsessed with the Mediterranean diet. It’s not just about calorie deficits, looking good, or losing weight. It’s good for your brain, too. Consider the MIND diet and the Dash diets. Healthy food doesn’t have to taste like shit.
For your muscles and your bones, lift weights.
Work on your balance. Falls kill.
Strengthen your core because that helps immensely with #5.
Work on your VO2 Max because breathing is good. Google kettlebell ladders and VO2 Max and you’ll get the details.
Eat fewer processed foods and cut down on sugar. In the past, we focused too much on low-fat, high carb diets. That didn’t work. Managing insulin and glucose blood levels is key.
Get regular medical checkups. Be your most charming with your doctors so they put the care in healthcare.
Join a community or build one. Could be a book club. Could be all about collecting something or other. Doesn’t matter as long as you interact with others. We are social animals. (This one is the most difficult for me, especially since the pandemic.)
Ask for help. Allow others to help you instead of being embarrassed. You’re frustrating your helpers.
Offer help. It feels good.
Take the risk of loving someone and being loved. I have often turned away from love because it meant trusting another person. That gives them power, sure, but it’s worth the risk.
Don’t live so damn small! Live bigger in any way you can. Take that hike in the woods. Enjoy that nap. Feel the dawn’s sunlight on your face. Take in the view. Kiss. Do cool shit. Make fun memories.
Stay in the moment, and savor the good ones. I’d tell you to forgive and forget, too, but I don’t know how to do that.
Hope, even when it’s stupid.
Be kinder to yourself, especially in the ways you talk to yourself.
Don’t waste your time and breath on those determined to be shitty to you. It’s not your job to fix anybody else. That’s their responsibility.
Have somewhere to be that’s good and safe. Humans need nests, too.
Unclutter your life and space. Free yourself of the things that own you.
Value experiences over stuff you have to dust.
Keep learning cool things. Don’t focus on things you’re not good at. Bad at math? Who cares? You would have been a miserable accountant or astrophysicist, anyway.
Don’t be too attached to your ideas. That should keep you out of cults.
Consider advice, but your experience is your own. Heeding advice is up to you.
You will need more than second chances. That is expected. It’s okay. We all need more chances.
Hate those who deserve it, but don’t make hating someone your entire personality.
If you’re going to be mean, be funny. It’s more effective.
Laugh more. It’s going to help you get through a lot, even the worst things.
Stop trying so fucking hard to be perfect. Settle for attempting excellence.
Take breaks. Keeping your accelerator to the floor all the time makes your engine explode.
Indulge your curiosity. Dare to have conversations with interesting people.
Take deep abdominal breaths to remind your nervous system you are (probably) not running from a bear. You’re just sitting at a red light freaking out.
Leave earlier and you won’t have road rage. Stop rushing to the scene of your next accident.
You’re worried about the wrong things, so you may as well stop that shit now, right?
Take the prescribed medication. Stop trying to heal your crippling anxiety with kale and vibes alone.
There are things you are going to have to accept. Accept that. May as well.
Cry as necessary. It’s a pressure release valve. No shame in that, and releasing that pressure might save your life (or your enemy’s life).
Complain less to the public.
Have at least one confidant to whom you can complain as much as you need.
Time is much more important than money.
Givers and people pleasers beware: Don’t set yourself on fire so some asshole can feel warm.
Stop apologizing for existing. You’re alive, so take up space.
Choose the lesser of two evils. It’s literally the moral imperative.
Protect your peace.
Don’t shame yourself for treating yourself. What’s being alive for if you can’t enjoy it?
Be open to the possibility of fun. (I have a hard time with this, but I know it’s a good idea.)
Dance.
Listen for nuance.
Watch videos of babies laughing. It will lift your spirits and help you remember what you were like before you worried about paying taxes.
Sex. (This should have been much higher in this list.)

TLDR: I titled this “What To Do When Your Dad Dies” but obviously no one should wait for such a nasty wake-up call. Live as if your actions and inactions have consequences. You matter, goddamn it!

BONUS:

Purpose. Have one.

My father wrote a book. It gave him focus. When he was done, his days devolved. I won’t say aimlessness killed him. Cancer of the everything did that. However, I think being without purpose contributed to his spiral of depression.

Even then, jokes helped. (See #28.) He became hard to understand on the phone, but shortly before they took him out behind the barn, with sudden articulation, he told me emphatically, “I want to die!”

I calmly replied, “Shall I dispatch my assassins?”

That was the last time I made my father laugh.

~ My author website is AllThatChazz.com. I’d appreciate it if you bought my books, and you’d get a lot out of it, too.

Set in NYC at the end of the world, Endemic is a compelling story about how we change and how we don’t. This novel won the Literary Titan Award, first place in science fiction at the Hollywood and New York Book Festivals, and first place in genre from the prestigious North Street Book Prize. You’re going to love Ovid Fairweather as she rises from a lowly book nerd to become a queen in the apocalypse.

Filed under: Do Cool Shit, getting it done, robert chazz chute, Blog, coping, death, grieving, life, Love, mental health, Robert Chazz Chute, writing

07/24/2014 • 9:56 PM 5

In each chest a clock, its spring wearing

Tonight I thanked a friend and said goodbye for the last time.

It is a grim ritual, this business of the last goodbye. My friend didn’t look like the man I knew. He appeared as a sleeping wax figure, an ill-conceived doll imitating the man, the fingers too long and too thin. He was a poor approximation of the funny, vibrant, fit fellow named Wayne. He brought joy wherever he went and now he is dead at 56. Fifty-six used to seem old, but I was very young then.

I write horror that is an escape and a distraction. This is real life and it is often horrific in the end. When such good people disappear from our lives so suddenly and unexpectedly, this is the Slow Rapture of the Taken Too Soon. I’d be furious if I didn’t feel so empty.

By now you’re wondering why on Earth I’m telling you this.

Wayne was a bucket list man. Beside his open casket, there were many pictures: Wayne in marathons; Wayne playing golf, canoeing, cycling; Wayne with his loved ones on trips and fishing with his boys. He was immune to stress. He laughed easily. He made others laugh often and strangers soon became friends.

The visitation was a huge crowd as impressive and varied as the photos from his short life. I was privileged to know Wayne well. He was a positive force for good in the universe whose heart suddenly shut down without warning a couple of days ago and I am utterly devastated.

When I’m stuck for a plot point or searching for the hidden joke, I close my eyes and I wait for the right question. When I have that, the right answer will appear. So…why am I telling you this? Does this belong here? Maybe not…

But then the answers flood in:

Because I wish Wayne was a writer so I could open a book and still have his cheery voice in my head.

Because Wayne did a lot of good things with the time he had.

Because my friend knew the power of the bucket list.

Because if you’re waiting to do something, like fulfilling your dream of writing and publishing a book, I need to ask you to stop waiting. Please.

When I told Wayne I was taking a leave from my day job to dedicate all my time to writing, he smiled and said, “It’s your bucket list.” Wayne knew men in his family often didn’t make it out of their 50s. He knew the value of time.

There isn’t time to procrastinate. That’s why I’m telling you this. Do what you need to do. Your life is more important than your writer’s block. Push through. Every clock is ticking down, some fast, some slow, but there is always less time.

This is not a threat or useless fury or powerless sympathy card verse. This is me, in grief, searching for the meaning and the inspiration to move forward. Last night, I wept for the loss of my friend. I did not write. Wayne would not have approved.

Tonight, I’m back to writing my book about a guy with a time machine trying to correct the mess he’s made of his life. Sadly, it’s fiction. We can’t go back. The clock ticks in one direction. Wayne’s clock has wound down, but if he were here, he’d tell me to get on with my obsession. He’d smile again. I so wish I could see his easy smile again.

Each book we write is that time machine, taking us closer to what and when and where we need to be. That’s one place we can often make strangers smile. Through intelligence and imagination and creativity, together we’ll find the answers to all those desperate wishes, whether it’s writing stories to distract readers from pain or breaking cruel diseases’ grip on our mortality.

Today, for you, do more than the dishes. Work in the bucket list. Work on your bucket list.

Goodbye, Wayne. Thank you so much for being you. I’m changed because you came this way. I won’t forget.

My screen is a watery blur now.

And we write on.

Filed under: Books, What about Chazz?, What about you?, Writers, writing tips, breaking through, bucket list, death, friends, grief, loss, Robert Chazz Chute, writers, writing

06/11/2012 • 8:38 PM 11

Author Blog Challenge 11: How I became God

Click the pic for more.

I cried for an old friend today. My daughter asked me about how I proposed to She Who Must Be Obeyed and that meandered back to Johnny, the minister who married us. He died of colon cancer. The tears took me by surprise — again, they always do — and I turned my head and my voice almost broke. I covered up my sorrow as I told my daughter about Johnny. My stomach twisted to think about the loss of this fine man with a young family. Johnny’s presence brought us joy. His untimely, horrible death brought chaos. Johnny wouldn’t approve, but when cancer wrung his life from him, my faith died, too. I found my way back to writing for therapy. Then I cast God aside to become Him. I have more compassion and kindness.

After I dropped my daughter off at school, the headaches and the trapped feeling roared back. I am a small god in a tiny realm. I climbed into my bed to retreat into unconsciousness for a little while. Maybe that’s why there’s so much suffering in the real world. God became bitter and He went back to bed, too.

As deep as the blade went with Johnny’s death, I know I will use this. Everything that happens to you as a writer gets sorted and recycled. That moment where I looked away to cover my tears and my voice cracked just a little? That will show up in one of my books, I’m sure.

Then, tonight at my son’s soccer game, I sat beside Gillian. Our kids hold the same trophies, getting taller together in each year’s team photo. Years ago, on the school playground, she mentioned a grisly moment from her history as a personal support worker. She’d forgotten the anecdote, but I used an aspect of it in a short story, Sidewalkers, that appears in one of my collections, Sex, Death & Mind Control (for fun and profit). I won’t spoil it for you, but maggots are involved. Through fiction I transformed an awful factoid into a larger narrative, the sort of secret we file under “Not Understood” in real life.

Every challenge, met and lost, every story told to me and suffered personally…everything…everything is fodder. I cannibalize my life, my family, my enemies — especially my enemies. Fiction is a mind trick that plays with our human capacity for empathy. Through stories, we experience drama, pain and mistakes without suffering the dreary, fatal consequences. But I write not just in the service of self-expression and the market for fiction. I write to correct reality. Fiction is more neat and clean. Happy endings can happen. I can pick where to stop telling my stories so the good man doesn’t have to die, the happy seeker doesn’t become an atheist and the ugly story about maggots becomes a clever anecdote that serves a purpose. In my realm, I am a conscious god. I have more compassion than the mysterious stranger whose ways no one can know. I rewrite the world so it makes more sense.

The tears can be just as real either way. Tears that rain from Art can keep you up all night, compelled to stay awake and reading. Tears from Life send you to bed with a splitting headache and a bitterness that demands escape into softer dreams.

Related articles

Author Blog Challenge (plus a sneak peek podcast*): Outlining, pantsing, spilling & sprinting (chazzwrites.com)

Filed under: publishing, Cancer, compassion and kindness, death, fiction, loss, Online Writing, short story, tears, writing

05/20/2012 • 9:43 AM 3

I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m dead.

A man speaking on a mobile telephone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Usually I laugh at the weird stuff that pops up in my spam filter. However, this morning I seem to be inundated with crap and the spam filter isn’t catching it for some reason. It’s not that it isn’t easy to spot: Yoda-like syntax and the fourth or fifth word is always twisted around.

But this one annoyed me very much:

“You are an excellent wrietr even if I have thought your writing seems sad sometimes! I am so glad you are honest! The truth will set you free, is true! I love you and I am so blessed to be your Mom!”

Thanks for the shitty surprise reminder, spambot! My mom’s dead. Lung cancer. When I call my dad and he doesn’t answer, the voice mail kicks in. The recorded voice is my mother, saying just two words: my father’s name. After she died (and a long and terrible decline, it was) I wrote some fairly bad and very dark poetry. I mulled mortality’s cruelty and our shared helplessness. I was crying after the funeral when my wife came into my childhood bedroom. I pretended to be asleep on the bed and when she covered me with a blanket, I pretended it was my mom, covering me one last time. Later, I called to hear my mother’s voice again and again and again.

Maybe I should leave a new voice mail message: “I’m sorry I’m not here. I’m elsewhere, or maybe I’m not, but if I could get back to you, I would. If I can’t, know that I tried. I really wish I could talk to you right now. But whatever we talked about, it would all come down to the same thing: I love you.”

PS I reject helplessness to the end. Go here if you reject helplessness, too. And spread the word for Indies Unite for Joshua.