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Episode Description
What happens when everyone needs you to be okay, but you’re barely surviving yourself?
Hollywood screenwriter and producer Lee Ehlers spent years learning how to survive rejection, but nothing prepared him for the loss of his wife, Erin, or for discovering that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is stop pretending you’re okay.
Lee’s professional breakthrough and personal devastation collided when his feature film EXES was finally being made as his high school sweetheart and wife of twenty years was dying from breast cancer. Suddenly widowed with children who were just 10, 7, and 5, Lee found himself trying to grieve while becoming the person they still needed every day. We talk about the private cost of performing the “strong dad,” the period when alcohol became the only way he could sleep through overwhelming grief, and the moment he
finally admitted, “I’m not okay. I’m struggling.”
In this episode:
- Grief after the death of a spouse
- Widowed fatherhood and raising children through loss
- Performing strength when you’re falling apart
- Depression, isolation, and asking for help
- Self-medication and coping with acute grief
- Why grief doesn’t follow a predictable process
- Supporting someone who is grieving without prescribing how they should heal
- The strange collision of happy memories and devastating loss
- Starting over after losing the person you built your life with
- Identity after loss
- Persistence through rejection and uncertainty
- Nearly two decades of pursuing a Hollywood career
- Screenwriting, creativity, and finding your own writing process
- What repeated rejection can teach us about survival
- The making of EXES
- Why saying “I’m not okay” can be the beginning of getting help
Watch Lee Ehlers’ film EXES on Amazon:
Lisa Lacy | Notes From the Edge:
What did you perform in order to survive?
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