Beyond the grave

Jenniffer Weigel writes with style and humor about quest to connect with late father, Tim

'Death can be funny, right?" That's how journalist Jenniffer Weigel inscribed my copy of her book Stay Tuned: Conversations with Dad from the Other Side, a spiritual memoir about the death of her father, longtime Chicago broadcaster Tim Weigel, who died in 2001 at the age of 56.

On the surface, the subject matter of Stay Tuned -- Tim
Weigel's untimely death after a battle with a brain tumor; his eldest
daughter's struggle to deal with his passing (including attempting to
contact him beyond the grave with the help of psychic mediums), and her
wrestling with a desire to do more as journalist than cover mayhem and
despair (in 90-second soundbites) -- doesn't exactly lend itself to
funny ha-has.

But Weigel, an Emmy-winning TV news reporter and a breezy, talented
writer, manages to pull it off with style (and without sounding like a
total "woo-woo," to use her terminology.)

Memoirs often get a bad rap these days, thanks in part to the
spectacular success of the alleged memoirist-turned-fabulist James Frey
and others whose purported nonfiction memoirs turned out to be more
fiction, less non-. And as a journalist, allowing yourself to move from
covering the story to becoming the story is not only difficult, it can
be treacherous.

But Weigel doesn't shy from the warts of her story, one that
involves a complicated family and its foibles including divorce,
infidelity, championship drinking, pain, disconnect, dysfunction,
suffering and death. Nor does she shrink from a kind of gallows humor
that sustains many of us during our most-difficult times of transition
and loss.

One laugh-out-loud scene early in the book recounts her experience
at the funeral for famed film critic (and her father's Yale University
roommate) Gene Siskel a little more than two years before Tim Weigel's
death.

She was working as a reporter for one of the TV stations in Chicago
and had an assignment to interview director/actor Harold Ramis downtown
a couple of hours after the funeral began on the North Shore. So she
took a seat in the back of the synagogue where she could sneak out
unobtrusively when the time came.

Unfortunately, when she decided to leave, she opened the world's
squeakiest door, and people started to stare. It only got worse when
she darted inside and quickly realized it wasn't the exit. She had
walked into the broom closet. Weigel's escape from the closet is like a
scene out of "I Love Lucy."

Even before her father's illness, Weigel was becoming consumed with
all things spiritual, personally and professionally. When she could,
she'd slip a spiritual question into an interview (for instance, with
Russell Crowe on a junket for "Gladiator") and tried to report stories
that made a difference. "Good news" stories, if you will. As hard a
sell as those can be in newsprint, it's even more difficult to get
airtime for them on a local TV station.

Weigel was frustrated professionally, wondering what her true
spiritual calling was. She inhaled books by New Age authors such as
Deepak Chopra, Caroline Myss, don Miguel Ruiz and James Van Praagh. In
her "questing," she also turned to spiritual intuitives -- psychics and
mediums -- for guidance.

The results of her quest are alternately hilarious and profoundly
moving. One session with a medium in which she believes her father, who
had died not long before, was present is both. Through the medium, his
daughter recounts, Tim Weigel apologizes for a few things, tells
Jenniffer she's headed in the right direction and that he's proud of
her and the choices she's made. In order to identify himself, the late
Weigel compliments her on a recent detox diet she and her husband had
been on.

"Good job with the cleanse," she says her late father, puffing on a
big stogie in the spirit realm, told her (through the medium). "[I]
could never have taken that on."

Jenniffer Weigel knows the beyond-the-grave stuff is hard for a lot
of folks to take seriously. She's just asking readers to keep an open
mind.

"I'm just telling you what happened to me," she told me. "There is
so much more out there. We just need to entertain the thought that
maybe we don't have all the answers."

And that, maybe, even death can be funny.