The Grief Hidden Inside Hamlet

What happens when grief is too large to stay silent? In this episode of the Everyone Dies podcast, we explore the death of a child and how profound loss reshapes the human heart. Inspired by the film Hamnet, author Neil Perry Gordon shares his journey of losing his son, Sam, and how grief often finds another form in art and creativity. This is a conversation about learning how love continues after death and why grief changes the imagination forever. https://bit.ly/4dLOCDV

We discuss:

• The emotional connection between Hamnet and Hamlet
• How parents survive the death of a child
• Why grief often appears indirectly through creativity
• The difference between healing and continuation
• How art can help grieving people feel less alone

A month after we started this podcast in 2020, Charlie’s son Michael was murdered. Last year at this time we published a podcast, written by Charlie, titled “When your child is murdered”. We deliberately did not say Michael died, because that implies something very different than the senselessness and harshness of murder. Michael was 23 at the time he was shot, and we mourn along with Charlie and Michael’s mother, Kim. We dedicate this second week of May podcast to Michael and his family…and to all the families grieving the untimely deaths of their children. 

In This Episode:

00:00 - Intro - Memorial Episode, 6 Years Since the Murder of Charlie's Son
00:55 - Reading by Neil Perry: "Hamnet, Hamlet and the loss of my son"
10:14 - Intro to S6E7 Rebroadcast: Grieving a Child That Was Murdered
11:58 - Road Trip, New Hampshire
13:51 - Recipe: Poutin
15:41 - Remembering Michael, Charlie's Murdered Son
23:55 - Eric Clapton: Tears in Heaven
25:48 - Outro

Related Episodes:

• S6E7: Traumatic Grief, Grieving a Child that Was Murdered
• S1E52: Coping with a Child’s Death
• S6E34: Surviving the Waves: Tips on How to Live Alongside Grief
• S1E12: Traumatic Grief
• S4E39: Traumatic Grief: What it is and How to Find a Therapist to Help Manage It
• S6E45: When Closure Isn’t Possible: How to Find a Way Forward Through Grief

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 48 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. A month after we started this podcast in 2020, Charlie's son Michael was murdered.

Last year at this time we published a podcast written by Charlie titled, When Your Child Is Murdered. We deliberately did not say Michael died because that implies something very different than the senselessness and harshness of murder. Michael was 23 at the time he was shot and we mourn along with Charlie and Michael's mother Kim.

We dedicate the second week of May podcast to Michael and his family and to all the family's grieving the untimely deaths of their children. Neil Perry Gordon is the author of the following essay excerpt in which he talks about the death of his son Sam and relates it to his feelings while watching the film Hamnet. Hamnet is a 2025 historical film which dramatizes the family life of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes Hathaway as they cope with the death of their 11 year old son Hamnet.

After watching Hamnet I found myself thinking about Shakespeare, my son Sam, and the unbearable work of turning loss into art. Not the romantic version of that idea. Not the comforting notion that suffering somehow becomes beautiful if one is gifted enough to transform it.

I do not believe that. The death of a child is not redeemed by art. It's not balanced by art.

It's not justified because something meaningful may later come from it. There is no bargain in which the loss of the son becomes acceptable and yet watching the film I understood something with painful clarity. When grief is too large to remain inside the body it looks for another form.

That is what moved me most about Hamnet. Not only the portrayal of a family shattered by the death of a child but the way that grief moved through the father. It did not announce itself neatly.

It did not explain itself. It appeared in silence, absence, distance, helplessness, and finally in creation. The movie gives us Shakespeare not as a monument but as a man wounded beyond language.

A father who cannot undo what has happened. A husband who cannot fully enter into the grief of his wife. An artist discovers, perhaps against their own will, that the wound has followed him into the theater.

For Shakespeare, at least the emotional truth of Hamnet, that chamber became the stage. The grief did not arrive as confession. It arrived disguised as drama.

It became a prince in black. It became a ghost. It became a kingdom unsettled by death.

It became the ache of a son reaching toward a father and a father reaching back through the veil. This is what great art often does. It carries a thing too painful to say directly and gives it to another body.

Not to hide it, to make it bearable. Watching the film, I thought of my son Sam. I thought of how grief changes not only the heart but the imagination.

Before such a loss, imagination can feel like possibility. Afterward, it becomes something else. It becomes a passageway, a place where the dead may appear, where time may loosen, where the soul may continue its journey beyond the visible world.

Since Sam's death, I have written seven novels and dozens of substacks. I don't say that as an achievement. It feels less like something I accomplished and more like something I survived through.

I did not sit down and decide to turn sorrow into a literary project. It was more instinctive than that. Something in me needed to keep moving.

Something in me needed to continue speaking. Something in me needed to search beyond the silence. That is why Hamnet struck me so deeply.

It did not present art as triumph. It presented art as aftermath. As the strange, almost unbearable consequence of loving someone who is no longer physically present.

Because grief does not end when the funeral ends. It keeps making claims upon the living. It enters the room at unexpected times.

It changes the meaning of ordinary things. It sits beside joy. It follows memory.

It alters the future. And if the grieving person is a writer, painter, musician, actor, or storyteller, eventually it finds its way into the work. Not always directly.

Not always by name. But it enters. It changes the weight of the sentences.

It deepens the questions. It makes the work haunted. Before grief, one may write from curiosity, ambition, discipline, or imagination.

After grief, one writes from necessity. The page becomes a place of continuation. Not closure.

Not healing in the clean, convenient way people often use that word. But continuation. A way of remaining in relationship with what has been lost.

A way of giving form to love when the person who received that love is no longer standing before you. That is what I saw in Hamlet. A father who could not save his son.

A writer who could not remain untouched by that fact. A grief that entered his art and became larger than one household, one family, one lifetime. In Hamlet, the dead father returns as a ghost.

But perhaps the deeper ghost is the lost son who hovers behind the play itself. The child who's gone, but not gone. The absence that bends the language.

The wound that gives the work its terrible depth. That is why the connection to Hamlet feels so powerful. The grief echoes.

The play seems to carry something that cannot be reduced to plot. It carries a father's wound. In watching it, I felt the quiet recognition of another father's wound.

There is a kind of writing that comes from the mind. There is another that comes from the fracture. The first can be clever.

It can be elegant. It can entertain. The second carries a different force.

It may not always be polished. It may not always behave. But it has blood in it.

It has memory in it. It has the tremor of someone trying to speak from a place where language never failed. That is the writing I understand now.

The writing that comes after the world has broken. The writing that does not ask, what story would be interesting, but instead asks, how do I keep living with what I now know? For me, writing has become one answer to that question. Not the whole answer, not a solution, but a way forward.

A way to keep building when a part of life has collapsed. A way to continue loving when love can no longer move in the ordinary direction. A way to ask again and again whether death is truly an ending or whether it's only the most painful threshold the living must learn to imagine beyond.

This is why art matters. Not because it saves us from suffering, but because it gives suffering a form that can be shared. Private grief, when carried alone, can become unbearable.

But when it enters art, it becomes visible. It becomes something others can stand beside. It becomes a bridge between one wounded heart and another.

That is what Shakespeare gave the world. That is what Hamnet reminded me. That loss does not become art because grief is beautiful.

It becomes art because love is still looking for a way to speak. And sometimes, when the person we love is gone, the only place left for that love to go is into the work, into the sentence, onto the stage, into the story, into the ghost, into the hope that what has been lost in one world may still be waiting in another. I do not believe art redeems the death of a son, but I do believe it can carry the love that remains.

And perhaps that is the unbearable work of turning loss into art. Not to make grief acceptable, but to make it useful. Not to make it beautiful, but to give love a voice after the world has gone silent.

And now, in honor of the anniversary of the murder of Charlie's son Michael, we are rebroadcasting last year's episode when Charlie shared his memories and his grief. Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life.

And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every person viewpoint to our podcast. We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions when a crisis hits. Also, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice.

Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. Welcome to this week's show. We're so glad to have you join Charlie and me for the next hour as we talk about the murder of a child.

This podcast is a combination of education and entertainment, edutainment if we're going to make up words, delivered in three halves. Our main topic is in the second half, and you can fast forward to that yak free zone if you'd like. In the first half, I have the recipe of the week and a story about New Hampshire's state motto, live free or die.

In the second half, Charlie's going to talk about the death of his son Michael, who was shot five years ago today in New York City. And in the third half, I have the story and lyrics to Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven. We are tripping out on the road to New Hampshire, home of Granite Mountains, Foaming Ocean, and the serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett from Gilmartin, New Hampshire, who confessed to 27 murders.

But what New Hampshire takes considerable pride in is its memorable state motto, live free or die. The New Hampshire motto originated in a letter written by General John Stark on July 31st, 1809. Stark was a New Hampshire born war hero who served as an officer in the British Army during the French and Indian War, and a major general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Stark led troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later at the Battle of Bennington, where a strategic victory earned him the nickname a Hero of Bennington. 32 years later, Stark, then in failing health, was invited to a reunion of the Battle of Bennington veterans, but he was not well enough to travel. He sent a letter instead saying that he'd never forget the troops he commanded in Bennington.

Quote, there were men that had not learned the art of submission, nor had they been trained in the art of war, but an astonishing success taught the enemies of liberty that undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves. End quote. As an afterword to the letter, Stark included a brief passage to be read as a toast to the veterans.

Quote, live free or die, death is not the greatest of evils. End quote. Some perceive New Hampshire's motto as severe, but it fits the fierce independence of the Granite State.

Live free or die, and everyone dies. And a trip to New Hampshire would not be complete without trying poutine. The French word poutine is slang for a mess, and a mess this food is.

Natives with a strong French Canadian heritage, especially near Manchester, or if you live in Manchester and you know any of the older French Canadians, they would say Manchester, carry a gravy slathered torch for this iconic cheesy French fry combination. This dish, offered as a basic recipe in many bars around town, is a warm combination of rich gravy, mild slightly squeaky melty cheese, and fries making it a comforting, satisfying, and indulging experience. Don't obsess about getting the fries super crispy because you're just gonna add gravy and then they're gonna soften.

I think this would be a better dish to comfort someone who's graving rather than bring to a funeral lunch, but I'm not gonna dictate where you take your poutine. Bon Appetit! Please go to our website for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program. Everyone Dies is offered at no cost, but it's not free to produce.

Can we count on you to contribute? Your tax-deductible gift would go directly to supporting our nonprofit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone. You could donate at www.everyonedies.org, that's E-V-E-R-Y, the number one dies, dot org, or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Charlie? Longtime listeners know that my son Michael was murdered.

It's been five years. He was murdered about three months after my mother died. During her funeral mass, immediate family members sat in the front pew.

We all sat and stood for about an hour. Michael and I were on opposite ends of the row, occasionally making eye contact. During one glance, he shook his head no, as if to say, never again.

As soon as the service ended, he pulled me aside to say he would not hold his church ceremony for me. Not always known for his sensitivity, I reminded Junior that my mother was recently dead, that these rituals were important to the living, and that his grandmother would have liked the mass. I never told him she was not the best of mothers.

We eventually made peace and enjoyed each other's company over the last several years of her life, when I learned to accept her not so much as my mother, but as a flawed human she was. Early stages of dementia began to seep in a year or so before she died. My mother, not me.

She did not always immediately recognize her firstborn when I would visit. Often, I saw her trying to remember who I was. However, as soon as I said Michael wanted me to give her a big hug and apologize for not visiting with me, he was in his first year of nursing school.

She immediately smiled and would pretend to talk to him in the same baby voice she used when he was a baby. I live in New York City and the flight to Michigan is short. One day, my sister called to tell me the old girl was suddenly deteriorating quickly.

My cousins picked me up at Detroit Metro Airport. In the car, I phoned the nursing home. My brother told me she was going fast, but that she was waiting for me.

I told him to put the phone on speaker and hold it next to her ear. She was not quite unconscious and her breathing was shallow, common at the end of life as a body shuts down. I told her not to die yet, that I would be there soon, that she owed me.

She hung on. We all said our goodbyes. I was the last one to leave, telling her that I loved her, admitting that the piña coladas my sister and I would bring did have rum when we assured her it was virgin, which made her blush, and that it was time for her to be with her mother, who had died when my mom was five years old, and not understanding why her mother was suddenly gone, surrounded by her father and brothers who offered her no support.

That trauma followed her for the rest of her life. I left her room and she died a few hours later, and here's where you might want to take notes. Marianne pointed out later that, though unconscious, my mom was cognizant of my presence, as is the case with many people at the very end of their life, since hearing is the last sense to go.

I told myself I'd left too soon. I still have occasional moments when I feel I let her down, and that I had left her to die alone. I pointed out to Michael after the mass that the day was not about him, so some empathy was called for.

He was close to both his grandparents, especially my mother, so his snarkiness might have been his way of processing her death. He asked me what I wanted when I died. Since his mother and I were divorcing, I told him that unless I had a partner, the decision would be his when I shuffled off this mortal coil.

Hamlet, look it up. I'd be dead, so what would I care? If there were someone else in my life, he would have to make decisions with her, but not to worry, since I would have prepared all the necessary documents. And, as a reminder, have all your advanced care directives, proxy and a living will, plus your trust, unpaid bills, access to your finances, etc.

in order, while you could speak for yourself. Otherwise, someone might make decisions for you you would never have made for yourself. I also told him that my driver's license stated that I was an organ donor, and suggested he do the same on his license to help others in need of healthy organs.

I told him he would just have to go to the DMV to make this update. He said it was not worth the wait in line. So, when my child, my only child, was in ICU, kept alive by a machine that was breathing for him because his body had shut down when the bullet went through his neck, hitting the base of his brain in such a way that he was clinically dead a few minutes later, I told the nurse to take his very healthy organs.

Michael was 21 when he was murdered, about three weeks shy of 22. The next day, his mother, understandably upset, told the staff they would never butcher him and take his organs. She told me this, and I told her to piss off and to think past her own grief and allow his life to save others.

She had a few choice words of her own. Next day, his mother called to say that a doctor had later told her that Michael's driver's license listed him as an organ donor, and per his wishes, the hospital would take their cut or cuts as per his instructions. More startling, he had actually listened to me.

I was with him alone in his room when it was time to pull the plug. I don't remember all I said, but I did read Green Eggs and Ham to him, one of his favorites. I thanked him on behalf of the eight people who would have new organs and a chance at a full life.

I also reminded him he still owed me the 15 bucks I'd lent him. His body twitched on occasion. I had asked Marianne if I was killing my brain-dead child by turning off the machine.

She gently explained that the switch was a natural reaction of the body and there was a reflexive action, that he was in no pain. I kissed his forehead and wished him well on his next journey. For a while, I told myself that I had killed him by flipping the switch.

Intellectually, I knew that was not true. While emotions rule, I eventually got past that thought, mostly. Michael would never want to be in a vegetative state.

That night his body was transferred to Bellevue Hospital on the east side of Manhattan. On the same street, First Avenue, about a block up is New York University Medical Center, where he had been born. His mother called me the following morning to say his organs had been harvested and his heart had just been transplanted into a gravely ill 20-year-old whose parents wanted to meet me and say thank you.

I said, no, not me. I could not imagine eight people telling me how wonderful, etc., my son was, as if he had made a choice. Nothing wonderful about a random bullet.

I don't want to remember, but I can't forget. I'd kill for that. Eric Clapton wrote Tears in Heaven in 1992, one year after the death of his four-year-old son.

On March 20th, 1991, his son fell from a 53-story window of an apartment in New York City, belonging to a friend of his boy's mother, Lori Del Santo. After the four-year-old Connor died, Clapton went into seclusion for an extended amount of time. Eventually, he returned to songwriting and wrote one of the saddest, most heartbreaking songs.

Here are the lyrics. Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven? Would you be the same if I saw you in heaven? I must be strong and carry on, because I know I don't belong here in heaven. Would you hold my hand if I saw you in heaven? Would you help me stand if I saw you in heaven? I'll find my way through night and day, because I know I just can't stay here in heaven.

Time can bring you down. Time can bend your knees. Time can break your heart.

Having you begging, please, begging, please, beyond the door, there's peace, I'm sure, because I know there'll be no more tears in heaven. Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven? Would you be the same if I saw you in heaven? I must be strong and carry on, because I know I don't belong here in heaven, because I know I don't belong here in heaven. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening.

This is Charlie Navarrette, and from the ending of Hamlet, good night, sweet prince. And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift.

This podcast does not provide medical advice. All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health.

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