When Death Hits the Reset Button
When I saw the headline about Rob Reiner, I felt that familiar internal jolt. I stopped. I stared at the screen. I let the weight of it settle before my mind immediately went to reflection.
I have a photo of Rob Reiner on a shelf in my living room.
We met once, briefly, nearly two decades ago. It was one of those special moments that, with the passage of time, has become something else entirely. Not because of fame, but because of what that moment now carries with it: memory, absence, and the quiet accumulation of loss.
Even though he isn’t in it, the photo reminds me of my friend Marty Hendin who died shortly after.
The news of Reiner’s death triggered memories of Marty, a reflection on addiction, and sadly, in the weeks following a host of other complicated emotions compounded by our family coping with a profound loss of our own.
On Christmas Eve, my father-in-law Mick McLaughlin died.
It was a blessing that we were all together by his side at the hospital.
Yet, watching my son and wife, as well as my wife’s family grieve has been hard. We all loved him so much and are coping with grief.
Grief is a powerful primary emotion that carries unpredictable secondary emotions.
I’ve learned this over a lifetime of compounding losses. For me, death functions as a reset button.
Death makes me stop. It makes me look at myself honestly.
It pulls my attention away from noise and puts it squarely on what matters.
It forces me to take stock of the past, the people I love, the choices I’ve made, and the ones I’ve been avoiding.
Often, it leads me to change something.
So, when I saw that headline about Reiner’s death, I didn’t want to add my voice to the churn of condolences, hot takes, or algorithmic grief.
I hate the race to chase visibility online.
In this context, it felt unseemly. Instead, I found myself looking at that old photo, seeing a version of myself I barely recognize anymore, and feeling the familiar pull inward, while at the same time feeling profound empathy for those who cared about him.
This is not a typical essay about a celebrity death.
It’s about what happens when death and grief force you to pay attention to what really matters.
The Meeting That Lingered
I met Rob Reiner once, in June of 2007, because my Cardinals’ front-office colleague Marty Hendin insisted that I should.
Marty handled celebrity visits for the Cardinals, and he loved that part of his job—not because of status, but because he genuinely enjoyed connecting people. I usually didn’t care much about meeting celebrities. It came with the territory.
But when Marty told me Rob Reiner was coming to town, something in me lit up.
Not because of All in the Family, though I had watched every episode, but because of the films he directed.
I started listing them to Marty—Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men. Marty laughed and told me I was such a nerd. He couldn’t believe I thought of Rob Reiner first as a director rather than as “Meathead.” He insisted that I meet Rob.
When he introduced us, he told Rob that I admired his work behind the camera. Rob seemed genuinely surprised. They both ribbed me for it.
We talked for maybe fifteen minutes—about baseball, growing up in New York, filmmaking. That was it. I’ve met hundreds of well-known people over the years, and I have very few photos to show for it. This one sits on a shelf in our living room.
Part of why it matters to me now has nothing to do with Rob Reiner at all. Marty died not long after that. He was the heart and soul of the team, and he died too young. When he was in the hospital, I went a few times and read the paper to him. I wish I had gone more. Marty’s death hit me much harder than I expected.
That’s how these things work—you don’t know what will linger until it does.
My Relationship with Death: The Reset Reflex
I’ve come to understand that I have a different relationship with death than most people. It doesn’t paralyze me. It clarifies me.
When death enters my life, directly or indirectly, it forces a reckoning. I stop. I look around. I look back.
I look inside myself.
I take stock of what matters and what doesn’t. I reprioritize my life. Often, I change something.
It started early for me. I lost my father when I was five.
When that happens, you develop an awareness most children don’t have yet. You realize that anything can happen, and it isn’t all good.
You grow up fast.
There’s a profound sense of absence that follows me.
At times in my life it has felt like abandonment. At times, it has felt like unfairness. The kind that breads a sadness or resentment.
At its emotional core, it is a feeling of not belonging.
At other times it simply feels like a hole you can’t quite name.
Labeling my emotions is skill I’ve failed to master despite more than half a century of effort.
I’m getting better, but I’m more tortoise than hare with this.
With my dad, I’ve always been haunted by the feeling of not knowing him.
Growing up, I often felt like I didn’t belong because I didn’t have a dad. Being asked to leave the scouts and other similar experiences in the 1970s and 1980s reinforced this phenomenon. Empathy wasn't a defining characteristic of the post-Vietnam era.
That early loss of a parent shaped me more than my young mind could comprehend at the time. Death became a forcing function. It stripped away illusion. It made me pragmatic. It also made me reflective, fueling my imagination and internal dialogue.
My life and career advanced. I graduated college, did a Coro Fellowship, started my career in public service, graduated law school, and went to work for the St. Louis Cardinals. I was now older than my father was when he died. I had put that morbid milestone (29) in my mental rear-view window.
Then in 2003, as we were working tirelessly to get financing to build the new ballpark, I lost someone who served as a mentor and father figure in my life.
Buzz Westfall was the St. Louis County Executive when he died at the age of 59 from a staph infection.
I had worked for him prior to joining the Cardinals. He was a larger-than-life personality. Funny. Engaging.
He was someone who was a joy to be around. You counted yourself lucky to be his friend. His death came out of nowhere.
I have replayed the last conversation I had with so many times in my head.
It was brief, humorous, and, like an episode of Seinfeld, not really about anything as he was headed to get a cortisone shot to help him manage his chronic back pain.
A few days later, he was in a drug-induced coma he would never awaken from.
His death hit me so hard that in the week’s following I had a panic attack, thinking I was dying of heart attack.
It was like a scene out of the Sopranos.
My ambulance ride and time in the ER led me on a journey of stress tests, medication, and ultimately to my first visit to therapy. No, it wasn’t Dr. Melfi, but it allowed me to have more than a few “no shirt sherlock” sort of self-revelations - such as recalling the undiagnosed panic attacks I had in elementary school.
The process helped me gain insight into myself.
Then a few years later, my friend Marty died at the same young age of 59.
While Marty wasn’t a father figure, he was someone I had grown close to professionally.
I spent lots of time in trinket city trying to understand the business of baseball and internal politics of our front office. Marty helped me get my footing and guide me to thrive in our unique organization.
Grieving these losses shifted me personally and professionally.
Then when my mother died in 2010, that reset button was pressed hard.
She had stage four lung cancer and was about to begin treatment, but it wasn’t the cancer that killed her—it was a pulmonary embolism.
I remember standing at her graveside, my wife experiencing a dangerous low blood sugar episode, and realizing with brutal clarity that something had to change.
I was obese. I was drinking. I wasn’t healthy. And in that moment, I decided.
I went on to lose over one hundred pounds. Later, in 2015, I stopped drinking altogether.
These weren’t cosmetic changes. They were existential ones.
Death has a way of demanding honesty.
Grief, Addiction, and the Stories We Flatten
One of the things that’s stayed with me in the aftermath of this recent reflection is how poorly we, as a society, tell stories about grief, addiction, and mental illness.
We still draw artificial distinctions between “mental” and “physical,” as though the brain were not part of the body. Addiction is treated as a moral failure rather than what it is: a dependence issue, a medical condition, a survival strategy gone wrong.
The stigma isn’t in drinking. The stigma is in admitting you have a problem. It’s in asking for help.
I know that stigma intimately.
When I first got sober, I hid it. I pretended to drink. That’s right, I pretended to consume alcohol, not the other way around. I bought root beer in bottles that looked like beer so I wouldn’t have to explain myself at a block party. Crazy huh?
I’ve come a long way in my sobriety since those days.
Today, I can enjoy social gatherings where people drink without feeling any need to explain myself.
More than a decade of sobriety allows me to see how messed up my thinking was back then. Thinking I needed to drink to fit in or belong to group was dumb. But if you are surrounded by heavy drinkers, it is understandable. We live in world where many see drinking as "normal" and not drinking as not normal.
The biggest change I made thanks to my recovery journey is to stop being a people pleaser and caring about what others think. A friend of mine in recovery often says, “what you think of me is none of my damn business.”
But it’s impossible not to notice how often grief and addiction intertwine and how rarely we talk about that honestly.
Grief is the most complicated emotion there is. People reach for whatever helps them cope, and for many, that means alcohol.
Being sober, I do my best to keep my opinions to myself as I’m occasionally around those who are so dependent on alcohol that no occasion is without it. I focus on boundaries rather than judgment and being there for those I care about.
Performative Grief and the Pressure to Speak
In the days following Reiner’s death, I noticed something else: the rush to comment. The posts. The tributes. The hot takes. The urge to be seen participating in the moment.
I felt that pressure too. And I resisted it.
There are times when speaking publicly is appropriate and necessary. And there are times when it feels unseemly, when the motivation is less about meaning and more about proximity to the news cycle.
Silence and listening, in those moments, can be a form of respect. God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. I feel the need to remind myself to listen more and talk less. While at times I feel compelled to offer my unsolicited thoughts with the world, this little mantra helps me refocus when I feel pressure – sourced internally or externally – to speak.
Grieving is a process that takes time. Finding the right words to ease the grief of others isn’t easy. I believe timing matters. Reflection matters. Knowing your audience and being intentional matters.
So instead of posting, I waited. I thought.
I stood in front of an old photograph and let it do its work on me before sharing my reflection on the remarkable filmmaker and storyteller I admired.
My Reflection: Storyteller First, Always
Reiner’s early fame came from acting, most notably as “Meathead” on All in the Family. That success earned credibility inside the system. But rather than stay in front of the camera, he moved deliberately behind it.
Reiner understood that acting could open doors, but story control lived elsewhere. Directing and producing were positions of authorship. They determined which stories were told, how they were shaped, and whose voices were elevated.
One of the most remarkable and underappreciated features of Reiner’s career was his range. Very few directors have crossed genres so successfully without being typecast or sidelined. Reiner understood that genre is a delivery system, not an identity. Story comes first.
Reiner’s films are also a masterclass in collaboration. He repeatedly aligned himself with elite writers and storytellers, including William Goldman, Nora Ephron, Aaron Sorkin, and adaptations of Stephen King.
Reiner consistently positioned himself as a story developer. He knew how to spot material, support writers, and protect the integrity of the narrative through production. In 1987, he co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment not to chase blockbusters, but to develop enduring stories.
Named after a fictional town in Stephen King’s work, the studio became known for writer-forward development, mid-budget, story-driven films. It was prestige without pretension. The studio also focused on long-tail television IP, including bringing us Seinfeld.
Castle Rock functioned as a story development engine, creating repeatable processes for identifying, shaping, and packaging narrative IP. That serves as a model for what we are developing with our studio.
Eventually, Castle Rock was acquired, first by Turner Broadcasting, later by Warner Bros. Now it may become part of Netflix.
With his storyprenuership, Reiner had converted creative authority into STORYSMART® enterprise value that endures beyond his life. That is the storyteller’s long game that I admire most.
Being Charlie: When Storytelling Gets Personal
There is one film in Rob Reiner’s body of work that doesn’t fit neatly alongside the others.
In 2015, Reiner directed Being Charlie, a small, personal film about addiction, recovery, and the uneasy terrain between privilege and pain. The story was co-written by his son, Nick Reiner, drawing directly from Nick’s own experience with substance use disorder and treatment.
It was the only feature film Rob Reiner ever made with his son.
The film does not romanticize addiction, nor does it resolve neatly. It resists the kind of moral clarity Hollywood often demands.
Recovery is portrayed not as a finish line, but as a process, uneven, uncomfortable, and deeply personal. That honesty likely contributed to the film’s mixed reception. Stories like this rarely perform well when measured by conventional industry metrics.
What Death Keeps Teaching Me
If death has taught me anything, it’s this: clarity is a gift, especially when it arrives wrapped in loss.
Death has helped me let go of people-pleasing. It’s helped me understand that belonging and the nature of your relationship with others is revealed by those who show up, not by who promises to. It’s taught me the importance of boundaries, and the cost of ignoring them.
My grandfather used to say that funerals are for the living, not the dead. He was right. You remember who comes. You remember who doesn’t. You learn where you stand.
It is important to be there for those you care about to let them know they matter to you.
That lesson has stayed with me. I can personally attest to experiencing profound anagnorisis when another’s true nature is revealed in these key moments.
Every encounter with death, real or imagined, reminds me that time is finite.
That stories matter.
That the way we live, the way we cope, and the way we show up for one another all count.
I don’t write this to offer answers.
I write it as an invitation to pause, reflect, and ask yourself what death has been trying to teach you.
Because eventually, it teaches us all.
