in which I'm 3 glasses of wine in and over-identifying with LFO's Brad Fischetti
Couldn’t have guessed I’d be slapping a CW on one of these so soon, but hey y’all, Boys in the Band is taking a quick detour to some grief/death shit so, you know…take care of yourselves.
My birthday memory strikes again: this week I’ve been thinking about Devin Lima, former member of LFO, who died in 2018 and whose birthday was this past Friday, March 18th.
Kind of a strange number of former boy band members have died super young, but the ones I think about most often are the two members of LFO: Rich (of “when I met you I said my name was Rich” fame), who died in 2010 of complications from leukemia and other conditions, and Devin Lima, who died in 2018 of cancer, leaving Brad Fischetti the sole living member of LFO.
I would say I’m in the top 1% in terms of the frequency with which I think about Brad Fischetti. When Apple puts chips in our brains and can track these kinds of metrics, I guarantee you my Spotify Wrapped will say, “You are in the top 1% of people who think about Brad Fischetti.”
I think about him a lot because he’s a strange reminder that when people die, they take entire worlds with them. Even as a quasi-one hit wonder boy band, the experiences these three had together during their heyday were formative and undoubtedly special. Being the sole keeper of those memories seems heavy. And lonely. So, so lonely.
I’ve been wrestling with this a lot recently because the last few months have found me in a strange transitional phase of grief.
My mom’s two younger sisters, both died suddenly and tragically, my Aunt Mary in 2012 at age 45, and my Aunt Jen in 2014 at age 37. I was close with both of them, especially Jen, who helped raise me when my mom was sick on and off during my childhood and who, just 13 years older than me, felt more like an older sister than an aunt.
The first granddaughter on my mom’s side, my mom the oldest of four children, I was doted on, every achievement gushed about. I knew Jen and Mary loved me, but only with the peripheral awareness of a child fortunate enough to have been so loved it was rendered invisible. Their love was a beautiful coat I didn’t know I was wearing.
I adored them from the time I was a toddler, but as I grew up, I found out more and more about how special my aunts truly were. Brilliant and wild and deeply, deeply funny, they always treated me like I was a grown up, despite the fact that as a teenager I was - and I say this with love toward my younger self - profoundly a shithead. I was 21 and 24 when they died and felt like I was just beginning to grow into my relationship with them.
Now that I’m emerging from the pandemic solidly in my 30s, I’m certain I’m a fundamentally different person than I was when I lost them, so in addition to missing them, I have this new sense of feeling robbed of knowing them now.
I find myself grieving the relationship I could have had with Jen and Mary now that I’m actually grown up. I wish I could know them as an adult, and I wish they could know me. I’m just now capable of truly understanding and returning the love they gave me, and it seems unfathomably cruel that I don’t get to show them that.
Both their birthdays just passed, Jen’s on February 18th, Mary’s on March 4th, and these few weeks of the year usually find me in a hole. While the joy of the first Mardi Gras and my first show since the pandemic kept me happily sedated for much of that time, grief seeped in at the edges and I found myself full volume sobbing in the parking lot of the grocery store in an episode that’s familiar to anyone who’s lost someone: grief, anything but linear, floods you in the most inexplicably mundane moments.
I look at this picture and I think, “I’m the only one in this picture who’s still alive.” I’m the only one who was in the room when we were readying ourselves for this hairbrush karaoke performance of “I Am…I Said” by Neil Diamond, comparing our limited vacation wardrobes to see what we all had that could match. Nothing extraordinary happened. We were just laughing a lot and practicing our song, though we could hardly get through a chorus without busting out laughing from our signature tag line; after Neil belts, "…and no one heard at all, not even the chair,” we’d roar, “BECAUSE THE CHAIR IS AN INANIMATE OBJECT.”
Anyone who knew them could have picked out their laughs from a crowd of thousands, Mary’s a throaty guffaw against Jen’s bursting, staccato cackle. But no one is here to remember what their laughs sounded like in that room on that night…except me.
The insignificance of that fact, that moment, is kind of my point. It feels heavy just to look at a picture in which you’re the only one who remains. I try to imagine being Brad Fischetti: your LFO years are the most exciting and formative experiences of your life, getting famous, making music, and traveling the world with your two best friends - not to mention enduring the same shared trauma from your band manager, infamous con man Lou Pearlman, who molested and defrauded nearly every group he worked with, a fact Rich corroborated in a 2009 interview with Howard Stern.
I wonder what it’s like to be the keeper of so many memories both joyful and painful. I wonder how the weight of it doesn’t take Brad Fischetti down every day of his life. So many times over the past ten years I’ve seen it topple my mom, who lost her two best friends, and my grandparents, who buried two daughters.
At Mary’s funeral, Jen and I gripped each other’s hands tightly, leaning our heads on each other’s shoulders. The night before, we’d stood the same way in the receiving line at the wake. Amidst the somber evening, we shared a surreptitious sort of whisper-shriek laugh as one woman, a distant family relation with a heavy Boston accent, sighed to us, “What a bummah!” before shuffling down the line.
For the next 2 and 1/2 years, we’d repeat, “What a bummah!” to any slight inconvenience or trouble, though the greater the tragedy the funnier and more medicinal it was to catch the other off guard with such a comical understatement.
We even managed to return to living room performances, usually with the Scissor Sisters’ “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” which in retrospect was apropos: a compulsively danceable song about feeling miserable.
In the face of unthinkable tragedy, laughing with Jen was a life vest: secure, buoying. Our relationship grew even stronger as we navigated life without Mary, as it so often does between people experience the same heartache. After Rich’s death, Brad became even closer with Devin and in 2017 they began plans for an LFO tour to honor Rich’s legacy - but the tour would never happen. Devin was diagnosed with cancer during the planning phase and passed away about a year later.
At Jen’s funeral, I wobbled unsteadily at the podium as hot tears blurred the lines of the reading I was supposed to deliver. As soon as I opened my mouth to begin, I felt my face crumple, drawing sympathetic gasps and sighs from the audience as I found myself unable to draw enough breath to speak. If you imagine how exaggeratedly long this moment would be if it took place in a movie, it was at least three times longer than that. It was so, so, so long and excruciating.
In this I think I understand Brad Fischetti perfectly, the shock of going through the worst thing of your life again, without the person who got you through the first time. You feel like you’ve paid your dues to the universe. It never occurs to you that it could happen again. I’m still incredulous sometimes: I can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe that happened. Holy shit. I can’t believe that happened.
In a despairing moment last week, I made an appointment with a medium.
My grandmother had gone to one after Mary’s death and had amazing things to report, insisting the woman spoke to shockingly intimate and specific things you could never, ever find out online or anywhere else. More importantly, what the medium said brought her some small comfort that her daughters are okay.
My mom remained doubtful, but after Jen died, her skepticism was eclipsed by her grief and she too made an appointment. And she too was stunned by the specificity and accuracy of what the woman told her, and counts it among the milestones in her healing process.
I’ve considered going ever since, but I’m glad I waited. If I’d gone then, I wouldn’t have been in the right mindset, searching more for a magic trick than any meaningful message or insight. Now I don’t know where the line is between my hopefulness and pragmatism, and I feel like that’s probably the right space to be in: neither some “gotcha” mentality nor some lofty expectation that this will give me all the answers I need. My most realistic hope, I think, is that its power is as a helpful lens, like tarot or astrology.
I wonder if Brad Fischetti would consider going to a medium. He’s the music director at his church, and I guess to religious people God is kind of the ultimate medium, so maybe he doesn’t need to.
I just feel ready to unlock whatever the next phase of grief is, the part where you learn to walk with it and it stops feeling like it just happened. In so many ways it feels like it just happened.
These days, the way I engage with the grief is mostly tossing back half a bottle of wine and putting on Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits to cry to. The record is worn out and skips and starts from “Holly Holy” all the way through “Song Sung Blue,” which feels like my cue to try something else.
I wonder if Brad Fischetti allows himself similar masochistic indulgences, if he ever puts on “Summer Girls” and just cries and cries. It’s undeniably a little funny to think that a song with the lyrics “There was a good man named Paul Revere / I feel much better, baby, when you’re near” is potentially someone’s most heart-wrenchingly evocative song. I wanna think Brad Fischetti wouldn’t mind me pointing that out. I feel like he must understand as well as anybody: when you’ve lost not one but two huge pieces of your heart, you take humor wherever you can get it. You don’t get to choose what package healing arrives in. You just try them all, hoping.
I don’t know how seeing a medium will make me feel, but I know I’ll feel different than I do right now, and I’m ready to feel different.
Bearing witness is a suit of armor, an honor and yet untenably heavy.
