The Moth Radio Hour: Love, Serve, and Protect

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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Meg Bowles.

I always love stories that take the listener behind the scenes, show you the inner workings, bring you to places you might otherwise never have a chance to experience.

In this hour, we have three stories that do just that.

From inside a helicopter on a rescue mission, to a courtroom where justice is questioned, to a recording studio for a glimpse into the creation of a hit song.

We produced a main stage in Traverse City, Michigan, and while I was researching the area, looking for local people who might be interested in sharing a story with 700 friends and neighbors, I read about the Cherry Festival and the amazing number of microbreweries, and how, because of the close proximity to Lake Michigan, water plays a big part in the life of this town.

So I decided to call up the local Coast Guard, and that's how I was introduced to our next storyteller, Rob Simpson.

Rob is a helicopter rescue swimmer with the U.S.

Coast Guard stationed in Traverse City.

And when I arrived in Michigan, the first thing I saw getting off the plane was a huge sign welcoming you to a Coast Guard city.

So I was not surprised when the audience at the City Opera House gave Rob a hometown welcome.

Here's Rob Simpson, live at the mall.

Hi, Rob.

This is my first time, so it might be awkward and weird.

I've never said that before.

When I got my orders to Sitka, Alaska, I felt like I had been drafted into the NFL.

In my line of work, to get a chance to go and do the job in Alaska, it's like getting called up to the big leagues.

So my current day job, I serve as a helicopter rescue swimmer in the U.S.

Coast Guard.

It's a pretty tough job to get.

It's one of the harder training curriculums in the U.S.

Armed Forces.

It's not a well-known fact.

There's anywhere between a 60 to 80%

attrition rate.

One of the guys I work with, he started a class with 25 and they graduated three.

So it's a tough job to get, tough job to keep.

But for me,

once I earned it, I really wanted to go up to Alaska and do it.

So getting those orders, man, I was soaked.

My first call was to my girlfriend.

We'd been living together, very much in sin.

depending on where you go to church for about four years.

And I felt I owed it to her to give her a little bit of lead time to either find a new roommate

or wrap her head around picking everything up and moving to Alaska.

And she told me I needed to wrap my head around becoming a married dude.

I think her exact words were, shit, or get off the pot.

My second call was to my mom.

And I called her, and I was so excited.

And she didn't reciprocate that excitement.

She

has been married to my dad.

He's a Navy man.

He did 27 years in the military.

And I figured she just knew what the move involved, and I was going to be far away.

So I told her, hey, we'll be back.

Don't worry, you'll see us.

It's going to be okay.

So she's very supporting.

She's very loving.

But there was this somber tone when I told her we'd be leaving to go up to Alaska.

So

we got married and packed up all our things and moved across country.

We honeymooned in Banff.

which is incredible if anybody's ever been up there.

It was beautiful and it really kind of set the stage to what we were getting ourselves into.

The only way to get to Sitka

is by boat or by plane.

So we drove to a little port town in BC

and

got on a ferry and off we were.

We were going to Sitka.

A couple days later, at around 11 o'clock at night, the sun was still up.

It was just starting to go down.

We pull in to the ferry terminal at Sitka and there's a mountain and trees and it's one one of the most beautiful things we've ever seen.

We pull into the ferry terminal and all the guys in the rescue swimmer shop were there on the pier to greet us.

And it was a warm welcome and it really set the stage for our whole tour up there.

It was really incredible.

And the job itself,

man,

I checked all the boxes.

So anything that I would want to do as a rescue swimmer, I got to do up there.

I got to pull a mariner out of a life raft, which is something you train for all the time in school and you never think it's going to happen.

So I was super stoked to get a chance to do that.

I pulled a 19-year-old kid out of a rubber-made fish tote.

His boat sank in the middle of the night

off Sitka Sound, and he spent 26 hours by himself.

in the water singing row, row, row your boat to keep himself in the game.

And it was incredible to swim up to him and tell him, hey, it's nice and warm in the helicopter, you're going to be okay.

And it was an awesome moment.

I got to pull people off knife edge mountain ridges, which you think Rescue Swimmer

responds to motor vehicle accidents, gunshot wounds.

We did lots of medevacs up there.

So it was a very rewarding experience.

And then one day my wife sits me down

and she starts telling me symptoms.

And I think she was appealing to the medic in me

because at the end of the conversation I asked, is there any chance you might be pregnant?

And she said, yes.

There you go.

And I think she did that so it would warm me up to the idea because I just wrapped my head around being a husband

and now I'm wrapping my head around being a father.

So it didn't work.

I was still freaked out.

So here we are living on this island

and now I'm going to be a father and we find out I'm going to have a baby girl.

So you can imagine and it got really heavy really quick for me.

But it was amazing.

I was very happy, overjoyed.

So I would call my mom, and every time I talked to her, I'd tell her, hey, everything's great, the family's great, the job is great.

And she was always very loving and very supportive, very excited, but there was always a somber tone.

And I figured it was because she missed me, and I missed my mom.

So I understood, I thought.

One night we got a call up to Skagway, which is a little over an hour north of where we were stationed.

The call was for a 60-year-old man with congestive heart failure.

He'd been pulled off a cruise ship, and he was intubated and sedated medically.

So we chose to take our flight surgeon with us, who's a full medical doctor.

to provide a higher level of care because I'm a medic, but at a certain level it's nice to have somebody who really knows what they're doing in the back.

And that night it was a blizzard.

The pilots did an incredible job of getting us up there.

If you can imagine climbing into a helicopter in the middle of the night, it's pitch black outside and it's snowing sideways.

And you get in there and there's two pilots who are like, we got this, no problem.

And we fly up and they had these routes that we would fly that were very safe.

We knew they were in the middle of these little slivers of water, but there was mountainous terrain on either side.

And I'd sit in the back and watch the snow hit the windscreen like a 90s Windows screensaver.

It was interesting to see and to see how calm.

and professional they were.

So we land

in Skagway.

The flight surgeon surgeon and I get out of the plane.

We pick up the patient.

He's being ventilated with a bag valve mask, which is commonplace.

The dock gets passed down from the lead medic, and I start working with the other ambulance crew members to package the patient up and

put him under the turning rotor blades of the helicopter, transfer him over.

And as we all work together to orchestrate this, I was working the bag valve mask, and it came off in my hand, which isn't,

that happens, they're designed to pop off.

But I looked at it, put it back on, and it wouldn't fit back on to the endotracheal tube, which is a breathing tube.

It goes down into the patient's mouth, into the lungs, and it's a way you can ventilate someone who can't breathe very well for themselves.

But the ET tube had sheared.

And there was no way to connect this bag back onto the tube.

And we're under the rotor blades of the helicopter, so there's no way for me to directly communicate, hey, like we need to do.

It was basically, we were watching this patient suffocate in front of us.

So

at that moment, I went mouth to ET tube, which is

kind of a no-no in medicine for lots of different reasons.

But at that moment, it seemed like the right thing to do is the only option we had had in that moment.

And the flight surgeon realized what was going on, and he and I worked real closely together to

change out the bad ET tube while ventilating, mouth to straw, and put in a new ET tube.

So once we were able to do that,

we took off, flew to Juneau.

and the patient's vital signs actually improved under our care.

And the flight surgeon and I had never seen anything like that.

He'd never seen anything.

I've never seen anything like that and by the time we delivered the patient to Juno

he went on that evening to go to Seattle and he survived and we couldn't we couldn't believe it

so we fly back to Sitka

the next day and I drive home

and I pull into the driveway and my knuckles are white around the steering wheel.

I couldn't turn the car off.

I was terrified.

I was petrified that by exposing myself on that case, that I would pass something to my wife.

Or, you know, she's, I was like six months pregnant at the time.

And

it was the first time in my career that I realized that the decisions I make on the job don't just affect me.

They affect my family now.

Like, I'm a family man.

It was

a paralyzing moment.

And

I live this job.

The motto of the helicopter rescue swimmer is so others may live.

I have it tattooed on my leg.

I live this.

I don't make sense at the bank.

I make sense cold and

and stuffed into the back of a helicopter.

That's where I exist.

And I,

in that moment,

was a little lost.

So I called my dad.

He's a trauma surgeon and I trust his advice more than anybody.

And he picked up the phone and he said to me,

I'm proud of what you do.

And

there's a very small chance that you contracted anything.

So, get checked, follow your protocols.

But you need to go in that house and you need to be a husband

and you need to be brave for your wife.

And so, I did.

I turned the car off, opened the door,

and I went inside, told my wife I loved her,

and we did not talk about blood-borne pathogens over dinner.

A couple months later,

my first daughter is born.

The nurse hands me

this pink bundle, pink hat,

pink blanket,

and I look down and I hold my daughter.

And I'm overcome by all these emotions I've never felt before.

And then they all turn into this one giant new emotion that I've never felt before.

I couldn't hold her tight enough.

I couldn't tell her I loved her enough.

And I couldn't protect her enough all at the same time.

And then I understood my mom's somber tone.

You know, to her, I'm not

6'4,

210-pound rescue swimmer.

I'm her baby boy.

And I didn't realize that until that moment.

So that night,

we slept together for the first time as a family in the hospital.

And in the morning, I called my mom

and I apologized to her.

So now,

when my daughter, who's five now,

tells me, Dad,

I'm going to go across the street to the neighbors and play,

I'll grit my teeth

and in a somber tone,

I'll say, okay.

Thank you guys so much.

That was Rob Simpson.

Rob is an incredibly humble person, and he insisted that I remind you that he is in no way special or unique.

Rescue swimmers all do the same job every day, and the flight mechanics and pilots in Coast Guard aviation are the best in the world at what they do.

But personally, I think it takes a unique and special person to dedicate their career to saving lives while putting their own at risk.

So others may live is a pretty intense motto to commit yourself to.

Rob also wants me to mention that the Coast Guard needs more rescue swimmers.

They're looking for good candidates who can make it all the way through the rigorous training.

So if you think you have what it takes, if cold water, long days and longer nights, and jumping out of helicopters make sense to you, then maybe you should consider looking into the Coast Guard.

Coming up, a woman loses her cool on the job, all in the name of justice, when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Meg Bowles.

Our next storyteller, Sheila Calloway, grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, in a family that she says always stressed the importance of education and giving back to the community.

Sheila attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and after graduating, she got a job working at the Metropolitan Public Defender's Office.

She told about her experiences working there at an evening we produced at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville.

Here's Sheila Calloway.

So there I was standing at the podium with my client.

I was the public defender and I was representing him when he had been charged with burglary.

He had broke, they claimed he had broken into a store, they claimed he had broken into a store and taken some money out of the register.

Now the video they had wasn't really clear and they had his fingerprints, but he used to work at that store.

So there was a good reason that his fingerprints were on the scene.

And so I really thought I had a winnable case.

I could probably come out good on this one.

But I was practicing in front of Judge Johns at the time.

And Judge Johns had this long list of rules that you had to follow in her courtroom.

And if you didn't follow, if you missed one single rule, that could be the difference between freedom and jail.

And so I had sat with my client, Mr.

Coleman, and we we had gone over these rules.

I mean, I literally gave him a copy of the rules and I read them out to him.

You must use the title of anybody you're referring to.

Mr.

Jones, Miss Smith, you must wear professional clothes.

You must have a job each time you come to court.

And you must always answer questions, yes, ma'am, or yes, your honor.

These were the rules you had to follow.

So when I first saw Mr.

Coleman come into court that day, and he had on a polo shirt and khaki pants,

I got a little nervous, but I said, we're going to be all right.

Not what I told him, but not too shabby.

But then when the judge asked him where he was working, he said, well, I don't have a job.

I felt

the ground open up just a little.

and then she went on to ask him well why don't you have a job and then he said well sheila referring to me

told me i should get a job but i thought i should just wait until the case was done there it was the ground completely opened up and sure enough he was carted off to jail he was revoked on his bond because he didn't follow those arbitrary rules and that was what they called justice.

He ended up spending about six months in jail, ended up pleading guilty to get out for two years on probation.

I started feeling really bad about what the justice system was.

Was this really justice?

I mean, it seemed like if you didn't follow the rules, arbitrary rules, then you could lose your freedom.

And that just doesn't seem like justice.

And so I got a little disappointed in our justice system.

But then my supervisor, my boss, came to me one day and said, we're going to switch you.

We're going to put you in Judge Thomas Shriver's courtroom.

And I had heard about Judge Shriver, and, you know, he seemed pretty fair.

But when I went into the courtroom, it just felt different.

There was never this long list of rules that you had to follow.

There was absolutely no dress code.

It felt calm and relaxing.

People felt okay in that courtroom.

And I started to think, well, maybe, maybe there might be some justice in this courtroom.

So I had a client, Mr.

Blacksmith, and he wasn't charging very much.

He was an older gentleman, and it was minor charges, and he had never been to court, and he just was nervous about being in that courtroom.

And when he showed up,

He smelled like a distillery.

I mean, I thought he had bathed in a bath full of beer.

It was just terrible, and I didn't know what to do.

I was hiding him.

I felt dread.

I just didn't know how to handle it.

I was giving him every mint I could find.

I was spraying him with perfume, whatever I could do, because he was going to jail because he smelled like a distillery.

So finally, they called him into the courtroom.

And immediately the prosecutor stood up and said, Your honor, I want his bond revoked.

He's been drinking.

Judge Striver looked at us and he must have sensed that fear and that dread.

And he said to me, I asked my client if he had been drinking.

And my client was very honest with him.

He said, yeah, yeah, I've been drinking a little.

And he said, well,

what you been drinking?

And he said, well, I had a beer.

Well, how much beer did you have?

Well, I only had one beer, but it was a 40 ounce.

I knew it.

The floor started opening up.

We were done.

We were done.

But then I heard Judge Shriver snickering.

Actually, he was really laughing.

The judge was actually laughing.

And he said to Mr.

Blacksmith, now Mr.

Blacksmith, next time you come, don't drink before you get here.

You can go.

Now, Judge Shriver wasn't being lenient on him.

He was being fair.

He recognized that this gentleman made a mistake and he recognized that he deserved a second chance.

And we were able to resolve his case.

Mr.

Blacksmith was ever to do good, get back on the right track, and never come back again.

And that was justice.

And so I started getting that hope back of justice and started now learning so much from Judge Triver.

I had the opportunity to work in his courtroom for over three years and just learning.

And not only was he a good mentor, he was like a father figure to me.

He was someone that always treated everybody with respect and with fairness while holding them accountable for the actions that they did.

True justice.

But one Saturday morning, I was at home sitting there watching TV and my supervisor calls me and she says, are you sitting down?

And I was like, well, I can sit down.

What's going on?

then she told me that the night before, Judge Shriver had died

in his office.

At first, I was dumb.

I just didn't know what she was saying.

It didn't make sense to me.

And she made sure I was still on the phone, and she repeated what she had said.

And it just broke my heart.

I heard what she said.

And Judge Shriver's death was like me losing a piece me.

It was one of the hardest things I had to deal with.

His courtroom was closed for several weeks.

But then when they opened it back up,

they had to get an interim judge until they could find someone to take his place permanently.

And would you know it, that interim judge just happened to be the retired Judge Johns.

I said, oh, not again.

So we were going back to that system of arbitrary rules and just unfairness, which was not justice.

And as I kept practicing in there and the struggle kept going, I just kept getting frustrated with the system.

And one time I had a young kid, he was about 19 years old at the time, and he had made a pretty serious mistake.

He was at the ATM machine.

He found a card.

He was like, ooh, and he took the card with him and he started using it.

He went and bought some gas.

he bought some pizza, he went and got a DVD player, he was starting on some other stuff, and got some little stuff to go with it.

And then all of a sudden, it clicked to him, ooh,

this is not right.

I shouldn't be doing this.

And so he backtracked.

He actually backtracked, went back to the stores where he had been selling stuff, turned everything that he turned in, except for of course the pizza and the gas.

He couldn't turn those in anymore.

But he recognized the wrong that he did, and he was trying to make it right.

And so, in that type of case, I was asking the district attorney in the courtroom if he would consider giving him what we call expungible probation.

It's like if you do everything you're supposed to do, you admit you're guilty, you know you're wrong, you do the conditions that you're supposed to do, and by the end, this is a felony charge.

This felony charge gets erased from your record.

And in this case, it was so important for this felony charge to be erased from this kid's record because if he had a felony, he couldn't get a good job.

If he had a felony, he couldn't go to college.

If he had a felony, he couldn't get good housing.

And these were all things that he wanted to do.

He admitted it.

He knew that he made a mistake.

And all he wanted was a second chance.

And so if a DA doesn't agree to expungeable probation, every once in a while, you get an opportunity to ask the judge if they would consider overruling the DA's decision.

And if Judge Shriver had been here in this case, there was absolutely no doubt he would have overruled it.

He would have said, Oh, yeah, this is a kid that's made a mistake, recognizes a mistake that he's made, and he's ready to make it right.

He can have expungible probation.

But Judge Shriver was dead.

And I had a different judge.

And I knew in my heart of hearts that this judge would never,

would never give this kid expungible probation.

And the frustration just grew in me.

And the more I talked to the DA about it, the more smug he seemed to be and just would answer me.

Well, he did the crime.

He's got to do the time.

And kept saying that over and over and over to me.

And it just built inside of me.

The anger was so deep that all of a sudden I snapped and I immediately put down my files and I pointed my finger in his face and I said, you don't know what justice is.

You are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Bleep, blink, bleep, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, mind you,

this was a courtroom full of people.

There were attorneys, my supervisor, my poor clients,

all watching this.

But at that moment, I I didn't care who was watching.

All I cared about was: if Judge Shriver had been here, this would have been fair.

This is not right.

This is not fair.

And so my supervisor came quickly over to try and calm me down.

She got in front of me so that I couldn't see what was going on behind me.

And she said, you got to calm down.

You got to calm down.

You can't act like this in court.

You got to calm down.

And so me and my ultimate upsetness, having my out-of-body experience, I kind of looked around to her side and I saw the DAs talking together about what I had just said.

And I saw that they were trying to be a little smug about it.

And it looked like they were trying to make fun of what I had just done.

And so I said, I'm sorry.

I need to go handle some more business.

And so I proceeded to go around

and then I started telling them: if you got any questions about what I just told him,

I tell you the same thing.

Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.

And boy

did I feel good.

Now my client didn't get the expungeable probation.

And at that moment, I knew that it was time for me to do something different.

I could not,

could not

practice law in a place that I didn't feel was fair or just.

In a place that was just controlled by someone's random arbitrary rules.

I had to do something different.

And so I struggled a little in that court for a little while longer, about two months, and then all of a sudden one of the attorneys, one of the public defenders that worked in the juvenile division was leaving and they needed someone to take his place.

And so I quickly volunteered.

And the first day I went to juvenile court,

it felt like Judge Shriver's home all over again.

It felt like people really trying to work with our youth and trying to make a difference in their lives.

It felt like people who knew that our youth were going to make mistakes and they just needed a second chance.

And I felt like we had some justice all over again.

And so, 20 years later, almost 20 years later, I stand before you as the juvenile court judge.

And every day.

And every day.

Every day as that juvenile court judge, I think about that lesson that I had learned from Judge Pfeiffer, that people make mistakes,

that people are unique, that people are going to make some errors, but it's up to us to build them up and to give them a second chance.

I had an opportunity one time, one of the attorneys that used to practice in front of Judge Shriver had a case in front of me.

And after she finished her case,

she came to me and she said,

practicing in front of you made me feel like practice in front of my favorite judge all over again.

It was the biggest compliment I've ever had and something that I will always, always try to live up to.

Thank you.

That was Judge Sheila Calloway.

I told Judge Calloway that I find it really inspiring to hear from someone actually making a change in a system, not just pointing out the failures.

And she said, yes, but if everyone in the community took responsibility for standing up for injustices, we could all make a difference together.

She really wants people to understand that they can bring change to their community.

They might not be a judge, but there are other ways.

She says, elections matter.

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Coming up, a songwriter battles a creative block on her way to writing seven number one hits when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX.

I'm Meg Bulls, and our last story comes from singer and songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman.

Beth calls herself a geographical mutt.

Her father was an Air Force major, and her mother was a registered nurse.

She grew up all over the place until her family moved from Munich, Germany, to Montgomery, Alabama.

In that move across the ocean, Beth brought with her a German-made guitar called a Framus that had originally been a Father's Day gift for her dad, but somehow ended up in her room where she discovered a love of songwriting.

That first guitar set her on a path to writing a string of hit songs, but the success didn't always come easy.

And along the way, she encountered a few bumps in the road.

Here's Beth Nielsen Chapman live at the Moth.

Well, I was newly married and living in Alabama when my first record came out.

And my husband, Ernest, and I were really excited about this.

And I'd been planning on this since since I was like 11.

Unfortunately, its debut

coincided with

the dawn of the disco era and

I wasn't a disco artist at all.

So it was a total flop and I had lovely reviews, but basically they said, too bad she didn't put this out like five years ago.

So

shortly thereafter, I lost my record deal and I got dropped from my publishing and I found out I was pregnant in the same week.

And I was thrilled.

I was like, great, like let's shelve the whole singer-songwriter thing.

Tried that, they didn't like me, going, you know, forget that.

And I went on and had this beautiful baby boy and I threw myself into motherhood and all my creativity came out sideways.

I started painting.

I started baking bread.

I was making these really cool little sculptures of these Play-Doh heads.

I was really

doing great stuff, you know.

And one night around three o'clock in the morning, he came up behind me.

I was trying to get this nose just right.

I was sitting at the kitchen table and I felt his hands on my shoulder and he leaned in and he said, honey,

it's time to start writing songs again.

And something in me just went, no, no, no, no, no.

I was totally in denial.

But a couple of days later, we went to see this movie called Coal Miner's Daughter, which is about the life of Loretta Lynn.

And I'm sitting there in the movie, and there's this scene where there's Loretta Lynn with four of her children climbing climbing all over her.

She's planting a vegetable garden, and she's making up a song that turns out to be an iconic hit song for centuries.

And I'm watching that, and I'm thinking, man, I'm just being a big baby about this songwriting thing.

I mean, I can write songs.

I can do that.

So I decided I'd get back to it just as a hobby.

So I started writing songs again.

And as I had done in the past, I bounced them off on my husband Ernest and I'd play him stuff as I was working on it.

I'd go, here's another one, honey.

And he'd be like,

yeah, you just keep on doing that.

Just keep on write more, write more, you know, and he didn't say anything bad or good.

And I was like, okay.

And anyway, he, he was very kind.

But then one day, I played him a song called Five Minutes.

And when I finished it, I looked up and he was just beaming.

He said, that's it.

You're back.

That's a hit.

That's fantastic.

And I'm like, really?

And he goes, oh, absolutely.

And by Friday, you're going to send a tape with that song on it to these three people in Nashville, Tennessee, and you're going to plug back into the music business.

And I was like, oh, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm just doing this for fun.

He goes, oh, yes, yes, you're going to do that by Friday, or I'm going to start smoking again.

So I had no choice.

But the good news is I got a great response.

And within six months, we were packing up our little then five-year-old little boy and heading on and moving to Nashville, Tennessee, which was like an amazing, terrifying, wonderful roller coaster ride of rejection and excitement and meeting people.

And finally, I started getting a little traction.

And during those early years when we were there, I would always play my songs for Ernest before I'd let them leave the house because he had great suggestions.

He wasn't a songwriter, but he was kind of a song doctor.

So one night I played him this song.

It was really just a part of a song.

It was a verse and a chorus.

And it was kind of weird.

It was an unusual kind of song for me to write at that time.

And

it referred to our honeymoon.

It was kind of like from my life, but then it wasn't because there was this couple of other lines that were very sad.

And there was one line that was,

in the hollow of your shoulder, there's a tide pool of my tears where the waves came crashing over and the shoreline disappears.

And then the chorus seemed to be talking about the immediacy of life and the preciousness of time.

And it said, we hold it all for a little while, don't we?

Kiss the dice, taste the rain like little knives upon our tongue.

He just looked at me like, wow.

And I just thought, wow, okay, good.

You know, he's liking this one.

He goes, no, no, you don't understand.

This is your defining moment as a songwriter.

This is you like way on another level as a songwriter.

Now, his favorite songwriter was Bob Dylan.

And at this point, he just looked at me and he said, Bob Dylan wishes he could write this.

And I'm like, okay, honey, that's great.

But then he started pestering me.

And he pestered me relentlessly about finishing this song for the foreseeable future.

I'd be like, here's a new song, honey.

And he'd be like, yeah, that's great.

What's going on with that Bob Dylan song?

What's happening with that?

But there was so much going on in our lives at that point.

And the following spring, I started really having some real success.

In fact, enough success that my husband could quit his job and be a full-time Mr.

Mom.

I was putting a record out with Warner Brothers and going on tour, and Willie Nelson had just had a number one hit on a song that I wrote.

And remember that song, Five Minutes?

Well, that went to number one for somebody else.

It was crazy, and the phone was ringing.

And it was like, I'd wake up every morning, and I just couldn't believe this was all happening.

And right in the middle of that, out of nowhere, Ernest was diagnosed with a very rare form of lymphoma, very advanced.

And the doctor,

he basically said, you have about six weeks and you need to just kind of go have some fun, you know, and I don't worry about this chemo stuff.

Just go enjoy the next six weeks, you know.

And I just remember us driving home just bewildered, like, this is definitely a bad dream.

And, you know, driving home and thank goodness our son was at a friend's house.

So we just climbed into bed and we took turns holding each other and sobbing for I don't know how many hours.

And somewhere in the late afternoon, I bolted up, sat up in bed, and I realized that that evening, like an hour from then,

I was to be singing at a huge black tie event for Warner Brothers Records.

And to make it worse, I was to be singing a song that I had written for my husband when we first met,

the story of how we met.

And it was a song called All I Have.

And I just was like, Ernest,

I have to call and cancel.

There's no way.

I mean, look at me.

I'm a mess, you know.

And he was like, oh, no, you can't cancel.

It's like in an hour and a half.

You can't cancel.

And he said, listen.

The only reason that you'd cancel now would be for something like my husband has cancer and we're not I'm just not ready for for us to make that call to tell the world that.

Why don't we just get dressed and go?

You know, we can just kind of switch gears.

Let's get all dressed up.

Let's go.

Let's walk into a world where I don't have cancer and hang out for a couple hours.

And we'll come back here and we'll deal with all this later.

And somehow he talked me into it.

And I remember this being in a sort of a surreal altered state.

And it was an amazing evening.

And I did pretty good, except like halfway through the song,

I'm looking down, and he's beaming up at me in his beautiful tuxedo and he looks so healthy and all of a sudden I'm like whoa and I realized what we were going through I don't know what words came out of my mouth there was a completely new second verse written in some language from another planet

and I just was going

and then I kind of got back on board at the chorus thank God but it was it was good that we went because I mean, what else were we going to do?

We were in shock.

And the next morning, though, we were reading the newspaper and there was an article about the event.

And it mentioned that there had been somebody in attendance who had left the event and suddenly died of a coronary.

And that was incredibly impactful to Ernest when he read that in the paper.

He looked up at me and he said, wait a minute, he said,

nobody can tell me when I'm going to die.

I'm not going to do this with an expiration date stamped on me.

You know, we're going to...

We're going to do this and we're going to do it right.

And I'm going to stay here and fight to live and be in this world as long as I can, whatever it takes.

And we're going to be positive about it.

And that's what he did.

And it was an incredible period of time.

I mean, there were people and friends and love and support and terrible days of surgeries and chemo and all the best and all the worst and an incredible constant of the present moment that we could appreciate on a level we would have never been able to.

It was amazing and wondrous, but mostly it sucked.

And the day came when the outcome was obvious that we weren't weren't going to be able to turn it around.

And so Ernest went from

using all of his energy to fight to live, and he shifted in the most beautiful, graceful way into shifting into how do I learn to die?

And he took all of his friends and loved ones with him on this journey.

It was pretty amazing.

And we came to the point where we were having those conversations, and he said, look, I want you to take my ashes to the Gulf of Mexico, which is where we used to fish on our honeymoon.

And I want you to know that when you you walk out to any body of water on earth, you'll feel me there with you.

So that's what we were planning to do.

And he finished talking about some other practical stuff.

And he said, now there's just this one more thing.

And this is really important.

And I'm like, what?

You know?

Well, it's the matter of that Dylan song.

What's going on with that song?

Did you finish it?

And I'm like, like, are you kidding me?

I can't believe you're asking me to do that.

I kind of had a bit of a fit.

And he said, you know,

I don't have that much time.

So, you know, you kind of, maybe you want to work on it this afternoon.

I mean, he was relentless about this song.

I'm like, excuse me, my husband's dying.

I'm a little busy right now, but yeah, maybe I'll get around to it.

He said, look.

And I'm like, and I just said, no, no.

And I got up and I just stomped out of the room and started to head for the other end of the house.

And he's calling down the hall, consider it my dying wish.

And somehow, by some grace of God, I get to the by the time I got to the other end of the hall, I was fuming.

I started to form this idea in my mind of what it would be.

And I just went, Fine, I got it, I got it, I got it.

And I started writing it down, and

I'll tell, I'll show that guy, you know.

And I walk back to and I stomp back in there and I sit down on the edge of the bed

and I got really still.

And he's like,

and I said,

So let him turn my soul

seven shades of blue.

And with the ocean's roll, baby,

I will wave to you.

And the birds will sing my laughter, and the whales will steal my song.

But I'll be happy ever after,

and the world will get along.

And he had tears in his eyes, and he said, that's perfect.

And I said, oh, thank God.

He goes, except for one word.

And I'm like, seriously?

You're going to critique my song now?

You're going to critique this?

He said, not really.

It's just this one word that's not quite accurate.

See, I don't really know that I'm going to be happy ever after,

but I'm pretty sure I can promise you that I'll be okay.

So let's say I'll be okay forever after and the world will get along.

How about that, honey?

What do you think?

And I'm like, Fine.

I was just glad to be done with it.

So the year following Ernest's death was a big blur.

I was on automatic pilot.

I was the happy, not crying, grieving widder woman whose child was very much grieving and turning 13 and too much to do to possibly do anything about this giant boulder of grief that I was carting around with me like a ball and chain.

So I would just be like, yeah, I'll get to that.

But I'm fine.

And people are like, how are you doing?

I'm fine.

I definitely wasn't falling apart enough for them.

But I just was putting one foot in front of the other.

And I finished a lot of songs and I was getting ready to go in the studio with Rodney Crowell, who's one of my heroes, a great songwriter, great artist, and a great producer, and a great friend.

He was a great friend of my husband as well.

So I was in good hands.

Go in the studio, day one,

get it behind the microphone.

Everything's great.

Start singing the song.

Which one?

The Dylan song.

That was the one, first one to get down.

And by then it was called Seven Shades of Blue.

And I started singing it, and I was fine.

And then I got to the line,

in the hollow of your shoulder, there's a tide pool of my tears, where the waves came crashing over and the shoreline disappears.

And I just sort of stopped.

And all of a sudden, the tumblers fell into place.

And I realized I wrote those lines two years ago, a year before he was diagnosed.

And the day he was diagnosed, I actually lived those lines.

I mean, when we came home from the doctor's office and we held each other, I literally cried a tide pool of tears into the hollow of his shoulder, which I had already written a year before.

I mean, it just stunned me and it cracked cracked me open in such a way.

It was like a terrible feeling of sorrow and sadness that I was holding back.

And also this feeling of grace.

Like, who does that?

Who writes for themselves ahead of time?

You know, how does that happen?

So that told me something bigger than all this is looking after this.

I don't have to worry about everything.

And I just, unfortunately, that made me start sobbing.

And I could not stop sobbing for the rest of the day with really expensive musicians, first-class musicians, standing around going, yeah, well, when she gets this performance, we'll start playing along with it.

And the studio is like $2,000 a day.

And I'm like, Rodney, we've got to just cancel.

We got to cancel.

And I'll come back in a week.

And he goes, oh, no, oh, no, no.

We're going to wait this out.

I don't care how long it takes.

Take your time.

I'm going to be here, and you're going to be here when you perform that song.

I'm going to wait for the performance that's on the other side of that wall of tears.

And that's the performance that's on the record today.

And I can hear in my voice, even now when I hear it, the sound

of the calm after the storm, the sound of somebody who has been through the worst and finds themselves in a place where they can sing,

I'll be okay forever after,

and the world will get along.

Thank you.

Beth Nielsen Chapman was inducted into the Songwriting Hall of of Fame in 2016.

She's released nine solo albums and is a two-time Grammy Award nominee.

Her songs have been recorded by Bonnie Rait, Willie Nelson, Keb Moe, Roberta Flack, Elton John, The Indigo Girls, not to mention Faith Hill's mega hit, This Kiss.

And that list goes on.

You can find this song, Seven Shades of Blue, on Beth's album, Sand and Water.

And the world will get along

We hold it all for a little while

That's it for this episode.

We hope you'll join us again next time for the Moth Radio Hour

Your host this hour was Meg Bowles.

Meg also directed the stories in the show.

The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Janess, and Jennifer Hickson.

Production support from Timothy Lou Lee.

Moth stories are true, as remembered, and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by The Drift.

Other music in this hour from Bill Frizzell, Keith Jarrett, and Beth Nielsen Chapman.

You can find links to all the music we use at our website.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX.

For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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