Posted by After NBC news legend Tim Russert passed away unexpectedly in 2008, his son Luke did his best to stay strong for his mom and the millions of TV viewers who mourned his father. Luke soon followed in his dad’s footsteps by becoming an accomplished journalist himself at NBC News. But after eight years – and with a wake-up call from an unexpected source – he realized he had never fully processed and grieved his father’s loss. So he set out on numerous physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys to find himself and his place in the world.
Luke shares his travels and revelations in the memoir, “Look For Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself,” and we discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
Tim Russert was not just admired for his interviewing skills, but for the person he was off camera. That stems, Luke believes, from the way he was raised.
Tim’s dad – Big Russ, as he was called – was a churchgoing World War II veteran with a “servant’s heart” and an optimistic attitude. His jobs included driving a truck and working for the Sanitation Department in South Buffalo, New York, for 40 years. Luke recalled that one of his grandfather’s favorite phrases was, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
All those experiences had an impact on Tim. Luke noted, “He really tried to make sure that no matter how famous he became…that he kept up a connection with where he came from, which was the small Irish Catholic community of South Buffalo…But one of the things he used to say to me…was, if you want people to understand you, you have to speak their language. Oftentimes, we see a lot of folks [who] get into television, they think they have to use SAT words or highfalutin language all the time, or give off this sort of grandiosity. That’s not authentic. So talk how you talk, act how you act, and be respectful.”
Two days before Tim’s death, he was on vacation at the Vatican with his wife, writer Maureen Orth, and Luke. They attended a prayer service with Pope Benedict XVI before Tim returned to the U.S. for work, while Maureen and Luke remained in Rome. That’s where they received the tragic news about Tim’s fatal cardiac arrest.
Because Tim was a public person, Luke had the eyes of the country on him as he experienced his own grief. That had its positives and negatives.
For instance, as Luke and Maureen drove to Tim’s wake in Washington, D.C.,, they saw a long line of thousands of people. At first, Luke thought there might be an event at the National Cathedral that day, but he soon learned they were all there to pay their respects to Tim.
“It had the full ensemble of the American quilt,” Luke said, “meaning President Bush stopped by, as well as the short order cook who is an immigrant from Sierra Leone from the diner near NBC. So it was really a beautiful thing to witness and see all these people come through.”
The man running the public wake suggested that Luke stay for a half hour to greet people, then leave. It played out differently, however. Luke explained, “I ended up staying for nine hours and shaking everyone’s hand because I felt a sense that I was helping, I was bringing comfort to people. But then I was also getting some strength from people as they walked through.”
Looking back on that period, Luke realizes he was being strong for others, but he never processed his own feelings of grief. He took a job with NBC News shortly thereafter, partially because it helped him stay connected to his father. And though he demonstrated both a hard work ethic and natural talent in being an on-air correspondent, there was an element of Luke’s career that remained grounded in pleasing his father. It wasn’t until Luke had an encounter with an unexpected source acting like an Old Testament prophet that he reconsidered what he was doing.
One day, Luke got called in to meet with the Jesuit-educated Speaker of the House, John Boehner. Luke thought he was going to get chewed out for some negative coverage, but instead Boehner asked him what he was doing there.
“You’re doing a great job,” Boehner continued, “but you could do this job in your sleep. I’ve seen people that are here 20, 30, 40 years in the cycle that is American politics. It is Capitol Hill. There’s always the next election, there’s always a bill that has to be done, there’s always banquets to attend…Time is a flat surface here. It’s very transactional. You might benefit from having some time to learn a new skill or get out of Washington to see how the rest of the country lives, the rest of the world lives. Just do something that affirms that you actually want to be here for the long term and [that this] is the right decision for you.”
Boehner’s observations became a major eye opener for Luke, who said, “I believe that God has messengers out there. And I think in that case, [Speaker Boehner] was somebody who had a very similar upbringing to my father: working-class Catholic family from the Rust Belt. Both of them paid their way through college by working odd jobs. And it was somebody who was second in line for the presidency…who saw the view of the valley below and was sort of saying, ‘Hey, I’m up here. I can just tell you it’s not it’s all cracked up to be.’…It was worthwhile advice, and it ended up being a catalyst for me to do some self-evaluation and decide that maybe I needed to take a step away to figure out, who am I independent of all this and what am I about?”
Luke is well aware that he is privileged beyond most to be able to travel around the world on his voyage of self-discovery and processing grief. Though his mom Maureen joined him for a few trips, he mostly ventured to foreign lands alone. Why?
“I believe in something called the power of aloneness,” Luke explained. “I want to preface that by saying I am very much into community. We cannot do things on our lonesome. We need the help of our brothers and sisters…We are better together. But I do think there is a time for aloneness, where you block out the rest of the world. This is why we see so many retreats in our own Catholic faith, especially silent retreats. Or Jesus, 40 days and 40 nights…There is something to be said about taking a moment for yourself, whether it’s meditative or just being off of social media, being out of the range of a phone – and being perceptive, thinking about what the Jesuit Examen [says]: What did I do well today? What did I do bad today? What did I learn today? Where do I see myself fitting in today?”
“For me,” continued Luke, “I realized that traveling was going to open up some of that by the environment being new and me being curious and away from the comforts of home. I’ve been in places [where] I don’t know the language, where I’m going to have to figure things out along the way, become more comfortable in uncertainty…And it was greatly beneficial because the more comfortable I got in uncertainty, the more self-aware I became…That says something important that I would often hear when I would be sitting in the pews. You often hear the priest talk about, ‘Notice things during the day, notice how the good Lord is working.’ I think a lot of times we don’t. We miss out on these obvious signs…And it’s important. Put your antennas up.”
During his journeys, Luke also came to a new appreciation of his Catholic faith, experiencing elements of it like never before, especially pertaining to the communion of saints, the Catholic belief that we are still spiritually connected to our departed loved ones.
For instance, a friend suggested to Luke that he could still talk to his father, even though he isn’t physically here anymore. That sounded odd to Luke at first. “It wasn’t until I got off the hamster wheel of work,” he recalled, “and it wasn’t until I got to a place of a deep, meditative peace through prayer and understanding that I realized you can communicate with your lost loved ones. You can have these deeply spiritual, impactful meditative sessions where you can imagine conversations. You can go through the sort of things you went through in the day and imagine what they would say to that or how they would approach it…There’s a real component of that in the communion of saints, and there’s a reason why it’s so prevalent in our faith and why so many people are affected by it every single day.”
Luke’s travels did not just bring spiritual epiphanies, but ones about humanity and the world in general. Though he has mingled with the rich and powerful because of his family and broadcasting career, he seems most impressed with the ordinary people he met in his travels, strangers in strange lands who had no influence or power, but who did offer wisdom.
Luke observed, “We often tend to think of life in the confines of our room, our home, our block, our neighborhood, our city…When you start to travel…I [had] an intense curiosity of how people went about their daily life in a different place…I was picking up bits and pieces of knowledge [and] culture along the way. One of the things I write about in the book is it’s through observing Buddhists at their monastery that I begin to understand the Catholic faith a little bit better. Or going to Western Africa and Senegal, I begin to understand the severity of slavery…Ultimately those stories would all start with people.”
Another piece of wisdom Luke learned has to do with humanity in general. While it might seem Pollyanna-ish to say we are more alike than we are different, his experiences confirmed that belief.
Luke said, “I traveled to over 67 places, and I didn’t have any bad experiences. I wasn’t attacked by anybody, I wasn’t discriminated against by anybody. Most every interaction I had was decent enough. And I went to places where America, at least in their government stance, is not an ally. It’s not liked…If people feel respected and they feel like you’re actually trying to give them a fair shake, that you’re trying to be understanding of them, you’re trying to be kind to them, they’ll open up a little bit. They will try to at least put their best selves forward from the get go. You’re always going to run into mean people. You’re always going to run into some people that unfortunately are bad people. But I would say the vast majority, all they’re looking for is a semblance of respect. And if you give off respect and kindness, it’ll come back to you. I’ve lived it and I’ve seen it.”
Though “Look For Me There” was mostly inspired by the loss of his father, Luke’s mom Maureen’s influence on him, his faith, and his story also plays a major role. At the time she graduated from college, the only two real career options for women were nurse and teacher. But Maureen felt called to something different so she joined the Peace Corps and worked to build rural schools in Medellin, Columbia.
“It was a deeply impactful moment in her life that I kind of say is her origin story,” Luke explained, “because it was there where she literally was living out the gospel. She was doing God’s work, if you will. And she always saw that as the most important work she ever did. She went on to become a very accomplished writer at Newsweek, and now Vanity Fair. But she saw that helping people and trying to bring a sense of virtue to as many people as possible was why she was on Earth. I sort of described in the book that she had the passion of a fiery Jesuit priest.”
Luke admits he found his mother’s passion and purpose difficult to deal with at times growing up because she was always pushing him toward doing more and gaining a wider perspective. He realizes now that she was trying to give him the message, “You’re living in this life of comfort. You’re in this life of privilege. You’re in this bubble. You might see how Americans live, but Americans aren’t the only people in the world. There’s a huge spectrum of poverty, of suffering, of a lack of opportunity that you need to be mindful of and carry with you.”
In light of his travel experiences over the last several years, Luke does now carry that understanding with him and has gained a deeper respect for his mom as well.
He has also discovered the peace he was looking for by finally coming to terms with the loss of his father. Luke knows that Tim’s message to him would be akin to, “Don’t be angry. Do good. Live life to the best of your abilities. Be happy. Don’t be sad. And go forward living. Take the lessons we’ve given you and do the best you can with them.”
“It took me a long time to get there,” Luke noted, “because [I] felt like I had to ask permission to be my own person and not directly fall into his footsteps. But what I realized after a lot of prayer and meditation and almost an epiphany in the Holy Land was this idea [that] our lost loved ones would not want us mourning them all the time, especially now, 15 years after my father passed.”
Luke hopes that people who read “Look For Me There” find similar hope in processing their own grief or struggles. He concluded, “When I wrote it, I was just trying to help out a kid who lost a parent. There are a lot of us out there. Your grief journey is your own. There’s no perfect way to go about it…You may never move on, but you can move forward.
“I also think I learned, we reach crossroads in our lives where we’re trying to figure out, ‘What’s the best path for me? Maybe I need a minute to sit back and try to understand things.’ It’s okay to do that. Make that time for yourself, and make that time for prayer, for meditative prayer and thinking. So my goal through all of it is that if folks can read the two parallel themes of self-discovery and processing grief, they come out of it feeling a little less lost.”
(To listen to the full interview with Luke Russert, click on the podcast link):
Light One Candle - the blog of The Christophers 