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Hey, my listeners, I'm Sarah Austin Janez from The Moth reminding you that Election Day is November 3rd. So send in your mail in ballot as soon as possible or get out to the polls. Do you have a voting plan? Head to the morgue dog. For more information on all of your options for the 2020 election, make your voice heard this November. From practice, this is the Moth Radio Hour. You might think that the best mothe stories are about overcoming steep odds to find triumph for the radiant light or something, but I don't I don't really trust those stories.

I think those tales are best left to Hollywood. I'm the founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green. And the stories I find myself drawn to are the ones about darkness, how we face up to darkness. Life often hurts, death always hurts, seems pointless to deny it, but you don't have to resign yourself to it either.

In the shadow of suffering in the shadow of death. You can learn to love and flourish. Edna St. Vincent Millay put it this way into the darkness. They go the wise and the lovely crowned with lilies and with Laurel. They go, but I am not resigned. In this hour, three moth stories about facing the dark. Our first story is from Kate Braestrup, who told it at a moth in Portland, Maine, where we partner with NPB.

And here's Kate. So Nina's mother came up to me and she said, I have a problem. Nina, my daughter, wants to visit her cousin, Andy. Well, I looked over at Nina. Nina was hanging by her knees from the swing in her backyard. Her hair was kind of sweeping the ground. How old is Nina again? Said five.

So. I should probably mention that Andy was dead. Which isn't unusual.

I have been the chaplain to the Maine warden service for 12 years now, and in addition to enforcing fish and wildlife law, Maine's game wardens respond to a variety of outdoor calamities, including search and rescue operations, snowmobile accidents, all terrain, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, drownings.

And when it's a fatal, the chaplain goes with them.

When I teach the game wardens the new baby game wardens at the academy, the art of managing death.

The example I usually use is my own. I want to illustrate for them that when a family member says they want to see the body of their loved one, you can trust that. You really can. So I tell them about when my husband Drew died. He died in 1996. He was a police officer and he was killed instantly when his cruiser was t boned by a truck. And as soon as I heard the news, I wanted to see his body.

I wanted to take care of him and bathe and dress him.

And I said as much to the funeral director when he showed up at the house and the funeral director used that special voice that they learn in funeral parlor school. Yes, he said I said yes.

And then he went back to the funeral parlor, went into his office and called the state police and said, I thought you should know that Trooper's widow wants to bathe and dress the body herself.

And basically the state police freakout. So phone calls were going ricocheting back and forth across the state of Maine all night long from the state police command staff to the funeral parlor, to Tom, the trooper who had been assigned specifically to manage me. And in the morning, Tom arrived at my house with the news that the state police upon consideration had decided that they would allow me to do this thing.

But you have to take me with you, he said. And I'll go to said my mom, good ol mom. And you have to take Sergeant Cunningham and Sergeant Drake as well, because. They aren't sure about this, and you're going to have to trust us, Kate, because if we don't like what we see, we are going to take you out. So I pictured all three police officers taking out their sidearms right there on the funeral parlor.

I don't think that will be necessary. I said. She grew up on a farm so that my mom, she's used to dad things. What were they afraid of? Well, the they were afraid that seeing the body would make it hurt more, they were trying to protect me. So I had to feign absolute confidence and I took my mother's hand and she and I, flanked by law enforcement professionals, did a weird kind of perp walk up the street to the funeral parlor where Mr.

Mohs, the funeral director, let us in.

And they all kind of kept their eyeballs peeled watching me walk into the cool room where Drew's body lay. And he was there and he was dead. But that's all he was just that. And he was wearing the Halloween novelty boxer shorts my our nine year old had chosen for him and they were covered with little bats.

They were saying trick or treat, I'm OK.

I said. So the troopers and my mom and the funeral director all went out and I had about 20 minutes by myself and then they came back and together we got Drew bathed and dressed in his classes, his dress uniform. I can't say it was easy. I mean, if you've ever tried to put someone in a class uniform who's not cooperating, you know what I mean?

But we made them look spiffy and it was better than fine. It was better than OK.

It was terrible and beautiful and funny and sad. And it was fine. So after that, that's the story that I use occasionally they'll be a warden who needs a biblical reference.

So I'll point out to him that back in Bible times, there were no state troopers or funeral directors to get in the way of things, and Mary Magdalene did not have to justify herself to the disciples, did not have to overcome their protective skepticism when she wanted to go to Jesus's tomb to anoint his body.

And she did not feel called upon to justify her distress when she arrived and found the body gone. Nowadays, we are led to believe that it's the presence of the body, not its absence, that is most distressing.

But in my experience and I have a lot of experience by now. It is far, far more common for the bereaved to wish they had seen their loved one's body. Then for them to regret having done so. So at the main Morton service, we are very proactive, as they say. How about making space about empowering and enabling and encouraging families and about getting the strangers out of the way at some point in our operation?

So that the moms and the dads and the lovers and the friends and the siblings. Can take care of their own. And let me tell you, the mourners are magnificent. Even even when the body is smelly or skeletal or ugly, they're magnificent, they are tender and brave. A mother will smooth the wet hair back from her drowned son's face. The dad will hold his hand. The spouse will lay a flower on his breast and murmur endearments. I love you, they say, and goodbye.

Is this what Nina had in mind? Little Nina when she wanted to visit Cousin Andy? I don't know. I don't think she knew because she'd never seen a dead person before. She didn't even leave it live on a farm.

Right. I mean, maybe there was like a dead goldfish in her past, but she's five.

That's not a lot of pasta work with. What if it hurts more? Her mom said. What if it hurts more? She's five years old and Cousin Andy was four. Suffers a little children to come on to me. That line kept going through my head, although has the wardens told me. The one good thing you could say about Andy's death was that he didn't suffer, he didn't have time, he was killed instantly when an ATV, an all terrain vehicle driven by a neighbor rolled over on him.

And when we'd finished processing the scene, the body was taken directly to the funeral home, and that's where Pnina wanted to go, that she wanted to go and visit his body.

I had Zina's body. I can't say it was easy. But she's so sure. Her mom said. She's five years old, her dad said. Finally, I said, you know, I think it would be OK. I don't believe it would make it worse. She's your child, you know her, you know what's best for her. But I think it would be OK. Well, we're going to have to think about it, said the dad.

A few days later, I went back because the family had asked me to preside over the service, so I arrived at the church early and Nina's mom was up at the altar table arranging photographs and pictures and flowers and Tonka trucks and stuff.

She said, I have to remember to leave room for the box containing Andy's ashes. But it's a small box. I said, so what did you decide about Nina? What did Nina do? And she looked at me and her eyes went big with the persistent astonishment of someone who's seen a miracle or is a pop. And she goes, Let me tell you.

Let me tell you, it was amazing. Little Nina, they drive her to the funeral home, she pops out of the car, she's out across the parking lot with such confidence that they have to scramble to keep up.

And they get to the door of the cool room where Andy's body is, and they stop her and they say, Nina, you know you know, Andy is not going to be able to talk to you, Yap says Nina. And you know that he isn't going to be able to stand up or walk or move or even open his eyes. Yes, yes.

As Nina as he opens the door and she goes and she walks right up to the dais where Andy's little body lay covered with his quilt, his mom had made him when he was a baby.

And she walks all the way around the dais, touching him, making sure he's all there. And then she takes his hand and she puts her head down on his chest and she talks to him. Well, after about 10 minutes of this, her mother, who's awash in tears, says, OK, Nina, are you ready to go?

No, says Nina, but I'll tell you when I am. So she smoothed the hair back from his brow. She sings to him, she puts his Fisher-Price telescope in his hand so that he can see anything he wants to see from heaven. And then she said, I'm ready to go now, I'm ready to go, but he's not going to be getting up, so I have to tuck him in.

So she walks around the dais again, tucking him in very carefully, and then she says, I love you, andI Dandi. Goodbye. You can trust a human being with grief, even a small human being. I tell the wardens, walk fearlessly into the house of mourning. For grief is only love that has come up against its oldest challenge, and after all these mortal years, love knows how to handle it. I don't need to have confidence, I certainly don't need to have to feign confidence anymore in that.

Because I have Nina and with her parents permission. So do you. Thank you. That was Kate Braestrup, I talked to Kate recently about her work, which really is about facing the dark. I asked her how folks would generally react to the news that their loved ones were dead. And she said that after the initial shock of the news had faded a little, folks usually had a question for her.

And the question is almost always, where is he? Where's the body? Every now and then you get somebody who says, I don't want to see the body. I'm you know, that's not him anymore or whatever, which is fine. But almost all the time they want to see the body and they do. I mean, it's actually kind of an amazing thing to be part of the way they do it. They go at most of the time.

In fact, they go right up to the body bag, unzip the body bag. They want to see them. They want to touch them. And it doesn't actually even depend on the condition of the body that I've had people, you know, say they want to see a body that's been underwater for five months. And they see the body and they take care of the body in some symbolic way by some kind of symbolic grooming. So wiping the mud off or something.

And when they're done, they're done. And just like Nina, they say goodbye and they're ready to go. I mean, it's it's a miracle, George, really. I mean, I. I don't know how they do it, but they do it.

And, you know, it's sort of interesting because this is what you do as a chaplain. You spend a lot of time dealing with grief. And you're also such a powerful storyteller.

I mean, one of the odd things about being a chaplain is that I don't talk that much. And that is the part that really surprises my family members because usually I talk quite a lot and tell stories and all of that. But just in terms of the sheer, you know, pure loss, like here is this one person who has lost someone else or here's a family who's lost someone that they can't bear to lose. I mean, that's that and that.

And the moment that we are presiding over is by definition, a hinge moment in that family's life. So it will be remembered vividly. I mean, the life tends to divide into before we lost that era and after we lost that or before the baby died and after the baby died. I mean, we do that. And so I sometimes think about how when that moment is remembered and that story is told by this family. You know, they were that eloquent, vaguely recall that the game wardens were kind to them and that there may be there was this nice lady who helped or whatever, but what I really hope they remember and tell and their story is that they were powerful, that they were loving, that they did a good job, that the story really gets to be theirs and that they are.

Heroes of. In addition to her work as chaplain for the Maine warden service, Kate Braestrup is also the author of some penetratingly beautiful books. I suggest starting with here. If you need me, you can find a link at the moth dog. This story appears in the book, All These Wonders, True Stories about facing the Unknown from The Moth, which is available now on. In a moment, a young woman distressed by her father's memories of the Holocaust becomes a neuroscientist driven to study the fountain of dark memories, the hippocampus and the actor John Turturro on the strangest of family outings when the Moth Radio Hour continues.

Hey, most listeners, I'm Catherine Burns from The Moth, reminding you that Election Day is November 3rd. So send in your mail in ballot as soon as possible or get out to the polls. Head to the mosig for more information on all your options for the 2020 election. Make your voice heard this November. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange PUREX Doug. This is the Moth Radio Hour from NPR X.

I'm George Dos Green. In this hour, stories about facing the dark. Here's the neuroscientist Daniela Schiller telling her story at New York City's Webster Hall.

It's 10 a.m., a siren is heard across the country, everybody stops everything and stands in attention, the whole country is pausing for one minute of silence.

It's a major violation of social rules if you don't. So everybody does it. Men, women, children, everybody except my dad.

It just sits there, continues to read the newspaper and sips his morning coffee. He doesn't even try to tone down.

Then he says, That's how I know Memorial Day before the Holocaust started. This happens once a year and it fell right on my yearly visit to Israel. The day before I take a walk in our industrial neighborhood, I see the corner where I had this horrible accident with my skateboard, but I didn't cry.

I figured if my dad went through the Holocaust, surely I can handle a little pain. One summer, my parents travel and they sent me up north to a kibbutz to stay until they were back there.

I met a group of Germans who came to volunteer. It's the first time I see German people.

The neighborhood kids used to beat me up for looking like a German and indeed I blend right in. The leader of the group is. Every night we hang out together after work with eight grade level English. I tell him about my hometown rationalisation and he tells me about Berlin. One evening, John brings a book of poems. I think he's about to kiss me, but I keep my cool and say, Cool, go ahead and read.

Suddenly I hear this flood of words in German fundi.

Levon's took it. It was a poem by Friedrich Schiller, who has my surname. That was a surprise. Johann goes on and on. These German words are pouring out of his mouth. I never heard it so closely before. It's terrifying.

I start to see images of Nazis pushing Jews into trailers, skeletal humans behind barbed wires, smoke coming out of gas chambers until they scream, stop and I push on off me.

You sits there all flustered. What am I going to say that my entire life, the only times I heard German was in Holocaust movies, that the Germans did something to my dad, but I don't know what because he never talks about it somehow.

It doesn't feel like our after work conversation.

So I just say it hurts. And he and I point to his food that he's stepping on my toes after this.

I think there's something wrong with my memory. It's not my memory.

It's my dad's actually, it's not even his because he never mentioned any of his memories.

Still, I have these vivid images of horrific pain and I feel intimate with death, which is very unfortunate as I would much rather be intimate with Johan.

I need to do something about it, plan a heart-To-Heart conversation with my dad. I ask him, Dad, what happened? Why don't you ever stand in attention during the siren? He says nothing and leaves the room. Plan B go to college here.

I take some classes about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud.

I think my dad would be interested, especially because his name is also Zygmunt. He listens quietly as I explain. And when I'm done, he says psychology is a serious load of crap.

So I decided to major in psychology.

However, people talking about their emotions could be time consuming, so I decided to focus on a simpler form of human behavior myself.

I like them. They never talk about emotions, just like my dad, only small and furry.

Every day I watch their behavior. When they sense the smell of a predator, they freeze in the corner. When they hear the sound of a bell, they freeze in the other corner. I try to change their behavior, but they never forget what they're afraid of. In 2004, a new movies out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The main character wants to erase Clementine, his ex-girlfriend, from his memories. He goes to a doctor who has this innovative technique to erase memories. The state of the art technology is the helmet you put on your head with some wires.

The helmet technology inspires me.

I discover that the movie is based on a true experiment. There's a real lab at NYU that did the actual experiment.

I managed to get some government funding, pack my bags and moved to New York.

I show up at the very lab that did the experiment and ask for a job.

These NYU scientists, they found a way to change memories. They say that just the act of remembering makes the memory vulnerable. So you take your memory out of storage. It's floating there a defense. That's where they hit it with a drug. So now you can't put it back in storage.

It's blocked by the drug. So it looks like there's one way memory lane, which I think is just the only problem, is that the only indication that this is true is in the form of a free mouse that stuck freezing in the corner.

So they give me a job.

My mission is to show that this actually works in real human beings. The way to do it is simple.

I invite people to the lab and give them electric shocks.

Before each show, I show them a blue square after a few times, I don't need to give the shocks anymore.

They're really afraid of the blue squares.

The next phase is to give the drug and get rid of the fear. One problem is I don't actually have the drug experiments in humans are complicated more than mice because of federal laws.

So they're really strict about giving drugs to people, but pretty lenient about giving them electric shocks.

So I can only do half the experiment.

Consequently, until this day, there is a subset of the population was really afraid of blue squares as they tried to overcome this minor setback.

Something happens.

A bunch of mice in a nearby lab is doing something different by mistake. They were doing something nice while relieving their bad memory.

I think these mice are onto something. Maybe there's a way to rewrite the memory without the drug.

The idea is you take the memory out of storage and you link it with something nice, like the good feelings you have when you win a prize, then you put it back in storage. But it's different.

It has this new information. Your memory is only as good as your last retrieval of it. With this idea in mind, I tested on people and it works at least as far as blue squares go.

I can rewrite their memory and there are not afraid of them anymore. So now I'm back in Israel for my yearly visit. It's 10 a.m. and the siren goes on to mark the openings of the Holocaust Memorial Day.

Everybody stops and stands still to reminisce about the horrors of World War Two. My dad sits there with his newspaper sipping his morning coffee. I think I finally understand what's going on. The siren is this blue square, he's doing something pleasant. Well, his memory is vulnerable.

So I pour myself a cup, borrow a section of his paper and sit next to him. Daniela, Schillers, telling of that story at the mall, triggered an extraordinary cascade of events for her, leading to her return to Tel Aviv and to the inspiring, harrowing moment when her father began to revisit his Holocaust memories. That story is told by the journalist Michael Specter in an article in The New Yorker magazine, a beautiful piece called Partial Recall come to The Moth Dawg for links and for a picture of Daniela and her father.

By the way, the music you're listening to is from a band of neuroscientists called the Amygdaloids, Daniela Schiller plays the drums, the. That keeps me alive. In a moment, the actor John Turturro, his mother and his volatile brother goes searching the borough of Queens for an open restaurant when the Moth Radio Hour continues. Hello, moth listeners. I'm Jay Allison from The Moth reminding you that Election Day is November 3rd. So send in your mail in ballot as soon as possible or get out to the polls.

Head to the moth dog for more information on all your options for the 2020 election. Make your voice heard this November.

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

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PUREX. I'm George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth. Our final story about facing the dark comes from the actor John Turturro, who told it at the Cooper Union in New York City.

My story begins.

I am driving my silver station, Volvo, from Brooklyn to my mother's house in Rosedale, Queens, on a hot mid-afternoon August day in two thousand and three.

My mother is a widow. My father has passed away from lung cancer 15 years before in 1988, and she has not resumed dating. She has sworn off men in no uncertain terms. She has told me that I am never, ever going to wash another pair of men's underwear again.

I am finished with the species. I'm done.

She's somewhere around 80 years old, but I don't know for sure because she's never told me how old she is.

Matter of fact, on my birth certificate, you can see that she has altered her age.

I'm very close with my mother. We have a very tight relationship, we've always had this bond, this complicity, this silent love between us.

I check in with her almost every evening to make sure she's OK and to alleviate her loneliness. And one afternoon when I was editing a film and it was around twelve thirty one o'clock and I felt this strange. Feeling in my body as if somebody was tapping me, saying, you know, maybe you should check in on your mother, and I just kind of stood up and I told my editor, I have to call my mother. I called her up and she was having a heart attack.

And she said, I'm fine, don't worry. And she hung up. I called her back and I was able to get the ambulance and myself there in the nick of time.

As far as long as I can remember, I've always kind of been my mother's protector against my father and my brother and the rest of the world. And she also my I grew up in a very volatile house. My father was a World War Two veteran. He suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome, which wasn't really diagnosed in those days. My older brother, who also had problems, lived downstairs. And as my father got sick from cancer, he lost his booming voice.

And as his voice faded away, my brother's voice in the basement rose. I could tell that this was not a good sign for things to come.

You know, when we grow up, we all think we're going to get married, we're going to have our own family, and we're going to leave the other family behind, our siblings and our parents. But it doesn't actually always occur that way. It's very hard to break those ties from the first family that formed you. Anyway, we get in the car, my mother, that day, and we're going to visit my brother Ralph, who no longer lives with my mother, he now resides at the Creedmore.

Mental Health State Hospital, and he's lived there for the last seven years.

It's the psychiatric state hospital that's the one that's located in Queens of Union Turnpike.

Now, he's not too happy about living there, but that's where he's been there for the last seven years. He's been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, borderline, borderline personality. Any diagnosis that's out there, he's got it. OK, this is, you know, how it's been.

So he's also, you know, been to therapy.

He's had shock treatments. He's had every combination of antipsychotic drugs and all the side effects that go with it, the weight gain, the teeth loss, the tremors, the shaking, the stiffness, diabetes.

And this is you know, this is the situation that he's in when he's stable.

We're actually allowed to take him out on a pass.

And he loves to go out on passes because we take him shopping and you can't get something to eat because he doesn't like the food there. And he also loves to go to the hair salon. My brother Ralph's hair is very important to him. He doesn't have many teeth, but his hair has to be done just so if it's not just so, his emotional state plummets and then we have to deal with that.

So we're we're we're on the way to Creedmore. And Creedmore was a place he lives in building 40. It's 17 story building. He's in the lock facility on the 11th floor.

And Creedmore, when we were kids, we used to pass on the parkway with my father driving and it was a place where the boogie man lived. There was a place for all the crazy people lived and used to say, you know, you don't want to wind up in Creedmore.

And that was what we said to each other. And now it's my brother's home. And this is actually the first time I've ever spoken about it in public.

So we we get there.

We have to go through two sets of doors, which then you're locked into. And I walk to the elevator, I press the button because it's on the 11th floor.

Look at the Bank of Lights.

And as we're waiting for the elevator to descend in the lobby with the security personnel, the lights go out.

We don't know what happened. We're all looking around and it's two years after 9/11, everyone's a little jittery. We're thinking, hey, maybe this could be another attack or something. And lots of most people don't have cell phones. I don't have a cell phone. About ten minutes later, they say it's a blackout.

It's the blackout of 2003 which affected, I think, 50 million people, knocked out Ontario and eight states here in America. But we don't know this at the time. We know that. All I know is that my brother has a pass and he wants to go out and he's looking forward to it.

So I ask the guys, can they call upstairs and talk to the doctor? And they do. And they say, I can I can go up there. So I asked my mother, I said, listen, you wait down here, I go upstairs, I start walking up the 11:00. They're very long flights. It's kind of dark. You know, I'm thinking, you know what a roller coaster mental illness is not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved.

There's it's it's a sentence that you're given and it's a life sentence.

And it's you know, there's all the things that you have to go through the the the doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction, literally and emotionally.

The police coming to your house, the shame that you live with, it's just goes on and on.

It's not like those movies, like a beautiful mind with someone reaches out and says, all you need is love, you know?

You know, love is a given, but it's a war of attrition. It really is. It's a long, endless baseball season that never, ever ends.

It goes on and on. And really what it is, it's this grind. You have to have unbelievable patience and this emotional fortitude to survive.

And it it kills a lot of people. And that's why you see so many people out on the street, because they become their families flee and I don't blame them and they become wards of the state.

So anyway, that's what's going through my mind as I come up and knock on the door. My brother's happy to see me. I talk to the doctor and then his friend, this young, thin black man, Isaiah, who draws his life every day. He storyboards his entire existence, comes over and shows me his latest masterpiece. And I said, it's very nice, Isaiah, as I'm trying to deal with my brother and the doctor. And he whispers in my ear, Can I come to with you?

And I said, Isaiah, listen, I. I love to I love to take you, but I you know, it's a blackout and I'm going to take Ralph. OK, so the doctor says, OK, so we go downstairs, we have to go down slow because my brother can't see so well, because he had an altercation with a very huge patient who was an ex prisoner from Riker's Island. And the guy savagely beat him and now he's blind in one eye.

So I have to take him down. So I come down with my brother and my mom, who's getting older, come outside. And of course, we've brought him cigarettes. Now, I'm worried about the time because it was four ten when the blackout happened. By now it's around five o'clock. But my brother is in no hurry. I'm worried about the light anyway, so I give him a cigarette.

Can't have one cigarette. He has to have one after another and another, and he smokes them down to the very tiny bit end.

And when you give him the pack, you have to open it just so everything to according to his specifications. Otherwise he will take the cigarettes out and break them.

And that's kind of how symbolic of my relationship with him, much of the time I buy him cigarettes, he breaks them, I buy him a CD player, he rips off the cover. I renovate my mother's house, he burns it down.

We get in the car. He has to sit in the back seat over here so I can see him in the mirror because it's precarious. My mother sits here, she's never driven, so she doesn't know that much about driving.

But I want to keep my eye on him. So I'm driving. There are no stoplights. I have to make sure I keep my eye on my brother, who sometimes can punch the window out of frustration.

And I have to figure out where am I going? It's a blackout, you know, what are we going to do?

I know he's hungry. So my mother says, you know, why don't you make a left turn and I'm in the far right lane? I say, Mom, it's you know, I can't go over three lanes like that.

But she seems kind of oblivious. It's getting later. We see the diner that we normally go to. We pull in. There's no one in there, but it seems open. So we get out and the guy looks at us, we walk in.

He's this big Greek guy with a walrus mustache.

And I say, are you serving?

And he says, blackout, because the blackout's. I know it's a blackout. My brother says, looks down, he goes, I want a cheeseburger. He goes, No cheeseburger. Blackout coffee. So my mother tries to, you know, alleviate referee the situation.

She says, why the stove is going to you must have a gas stove. He says, pilot light electric.

Coffee, no cheeseburger, you know, so my brother, of course, keeps asking for the cheeseburger, then he says, what about French fries?

And the guy goes, Not, not, not so.

My mother and my brother look at him incredulously, like, look at this guy. What a weakling. There's a blackout and he falls like a cheap suit and.

Anyway, I'm looking at the clock, you know, it's getting late and, you know, I get him in the car after another cigarette, we're driving. Everything is closed. It's like a ghost town because people worry when there's a blackout. They remember in 1977, the stores are closed, the restaurants are closed, even the hair salon is closed, which is very upsetting to Ralph.

We just keep driving and driving.

I'm going, OK, you know, it's going to get darker, you know, and we don't know where we're going, you know? Plus, I have my own family back in Brooklyn, my wife and two kids.

So finally I see a little pizzeria on the corner and I pull over and I said, wow, I jumped out, looks open. I went in there and the guy has a wood burning oven, you know, and he says, yes, I'm open. He's an Italian guy.

Of course, that's good. So I get them to come out. We sit outside on a table and we order a brick oven, pizza and warm soda. And, you know, they they come. It takes a long time.

And, you know, I'm looking at my mother and thinking, wow, she's she's getting older, you know? And I'm looking at my brother thinking, you know, what's going to happen after she's gone, you know, who's who's going to take care of them?

And I'm the middle child and one of three boys and I'm the responsible one, you know, for good and for bad. And I think, well, I'm going to be alone with him one day and it's going to just be me and him and.

But rather looks at me and he's very perceptive when he's calm, he can spot a person's weakness with startling accuracy and speed like that, you know, and he looks at me and he says, you know, you got a lot of material from me, don't you?

I go, hmm, yeah, yeah, he goes, where would you be without me? Anyway, we have the pizza, of course, Ralph wants ice cream, but it's all melted by hand. So he has kind of a milkshake, ice cream sandwich, which is happy. And we will sit down gently. The sun is now setting something. We got to get back. So I finally get them in the car, go through the same ritual.

We drive slowly. There's no streetlights, there's no stoplights. It's starting to get dark. We finally make it back to this. Big 17 story for boating, ugly, big building with bars, building 40, the Creedmore Psychiatric State Hospital and pull in. He has some more cigarettes and then I come in, leave my mother in the car, and then I kind of help him in.

It's the place is not lit and it's not air conditioned anymore.

And so, you know, I really feel torn in all these directions, like is my mother, my brother, my family in Brooklyn. I go with my brother, help him up the 11 flights. And, you know, it's it's always hard to say goodbye to them.

But this day it's even stranger because here he is in this place. And he's in the dark, you know, in a dark place, and so I give him a hug, I tell him I see him, you know, soon come down. Get my mother and I drive on the parkway to our house in Rosedale, which is a long trip, so I get her in the house, the flashlights work, I check the refrigerator, the food is actually still cold.

And then she's at the door. I remember that. And with with a little flashlight and saying, be careful, drive carefully. And I get in my car and I make my way back, you know, to Brooklyn. And, you know, I'm thinking in the car thinking like, you know, we we imagine that we live in the light. We imagine we know what's going to happen. We imagine we can foresee what's going to happen. We imagine we can control everything, you know, and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that.

And the reality is, truthfully, that almost all of us are just stumbling along in the dark, searching.

Trying to reach some kind of home, you know, while we're juggling all these balls, hopefully keeping them afloat. That was John Turturro. John has performed in many films and received the Camera d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut. The film Mac. You can find out more about John and about all our storytellers at The Moth Dawg. You can also find this story in the moth book, all of these wonders. Do you have a story to tell us?

You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site or call 877 799 loss. That's 877 799 six six eight for the best. Pitches are developed for MOTHE shows all around the world.

Here's a pitch we liked even a few years after my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he was still pretty functional. But then he started to these strange things like leaving the stove on and wandering away from home. So finally my mom realized I had to put him into adult daycare at the Jewish community center and she knew that he would be really ashamed to go. And so she lied to him and she told him he had been hired to teach the other Alzheimer's patients about Judaism.

And this is how my father began believing that he was a rabbi. Now, he was never he was raised Jewish, but he was never very religious. Still, he loved being a rabbi. He wore a yarmulke every day. He refused to shave his beard or eat pork. He claimed to speak Yiddish fluently and that he worked at the village temple and he was so convincing. But some of the staff at the Jewish center didn't realize he was actually a rabbi.

And, well, this whole thing was really kind of sad. It was OK because he was so happy. And when I think back about how much I miss the man that my dad was, sometimes I. I also miss the rabbi that he was. Remember, you can pitch us at eight seven seven seven nine nine Mosse or online at The Moth Dawg, where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth archive right through our website or by using the Moth app, which is now available for iOS or Android.

We're also on Facebook and Twitter at The Moth. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. Your host this hour was George Dawes Green, the stories in the show were directed by Catherine Burns and Jennifer Hickson.

The rest of the mall's directorial staff include Sara Habermann, Sara Austin Ginés and make Bolls production support from Timothy Lewdly.

Our pitch line story in this hour came from Esther. Honing most stories are true, is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by the drift. Other music in this hour from Estelle Waggons Symphony at East Mountain s Tin Hat Trio and Gustavo Santaolalla. You can find links to all the music we use at our website.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Viki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour is produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed to building a more just verdant and peaceful world.

The Moth Radio Hour, as presented by Prick's, a reminder that the most new book, All These Wonders True Stories about Facing the Unknown, is now available.

It features 45 stories from our archive, including many of our all time favorites here on The Moth Radio Hour. For more about our podcast. For information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our Web site, The Moth, Doug.