How tragedy taught me the key to happiness is quality relationships
It’s a sad life truism—sometimes you only learn the value of the quality relationships around you after you lose them.
The Summer of Death
After my first year of grad school, I went through a summer of death. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a cool video game featuring zombies and chainsaws. My life was about to unravel and I didn’t know it.
Until the summer of 2013, I had been fairly lucky in terms of death. All the people I loved were healthy and alive. But I was 45. Time was no longer on my side. One day my phone would ring and someone would tell me I lost someone I cared about.
When the phone finally rang, it didn’t just ring once. It rang four times in a span of four months.
The first call came from my friend Mike Rich. We had been good friends for almost 20 years ever since we laughed and drank our way through a study abroad program in Paris. Okay, we mostly watched movies, but we did laugh. A lot. Over the next two decades, we bonded over cross-country road trips, long coffee-house conversations, and more movies. The last time we talked we discussed his next trip to California. This time we discussed his stage-four kidney cancer and his two years left to live.
Little did I know, this was the first of many calls. I immediately made plans to hang out with Mike, determined to spend as much time with him in case the inevitable moved faster than expected. While I was back on the East Coast, I was in time to attend a funeral. Not his. But another friend.
My old, high school friend Tom Hutchins had been sharing his health issues on Facebook for the past year. Back pain. Then a stroke. After he recovered from physical therapy, he posted he had congestive heart failure. He was two years younger than me. I had no idea what that meant. Naively, I wished him a speedy recovery.
The phone continued to ring. The second day after arriving at my Mother’s home, my step-father Karl Kaminski entered the hospital. He had also been having health issues the past year. Pneumonia. Lack of energy. His hands trembled. We had lots of theories. He was in his 70s. My mother thought he might have congestive heart failure. We were all wrong. The doctor said stage-four lung cancer.
All I knew about lung cancer was you don’t recover from it. When a friend’s father was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, he entered the hospital and never returned. Our doctor wasn’t sure how long Karl would live. It could be weeks, maybe months. So I returned to Santa Barbara feeling somewhat useless. A week later, I was walking to an open mic at the Marquee when my sister called to tell me Karl had died.
At least, I comforted myself, I still have my Dad. Sure my father and I had an up-and-down relationship for years, but he was still alive. He was 76 and the last time I visited, he assured me he would live to 110. That was plenty of time to get our relationship back to an up spot. So I called him to chat. As usual, he didn’t answer and I left a message to call back.
A week or so later I was woken from my nap by my phone. The screen read Dad. But when I answered, a strange man was asking me, “What’s your relationship to Dr. Crocco?” I was wildly confused. I said I was his son. Then he and a nurse told me they found my father lying on his office floor, unresponsive. Did he have any medical conditions that would cause him to collapse? I said no.
As it turned out, my father Dr. Richard Crocco had just celebrated his 25th anniversary working at the VA hospital in West Palm Beach, went back to his office, and collapsed from a massive brain hemorrhage. My father’s brain was too damaged. He would never regain consciousness again.
Letting go of hope is hard. After a long week of tense waiting, my father’s wife made the decision to turn off life support. My brother called me in the afternoon to say he had a strong heart and it would take a while for him to die. By the evening, my summer of death had ended.
So began my years of grief.
Being on your own puts strain on your health.
I never quite understood how important good relationships were to a happy life until I lost so many so quickly. When the summer started, I had a support team of parents and old friends. When the summer was over, I was supporting a dying friend, comforting a grieving mother, and dealing with my own grief and loss.
I had no idea how much support my family and close friends had given me until they were no longer there to provide it. They had been like this invisible net waiting to catch me if I fell from one of my daring acts in life, or like a spotter waiting to give a hand with a heavy weight when I tried to do something exceptional.
My grief was magnified by distance and lack of community. Most of my close friends and family were on the East Coast (or a few hour drive away in Orange County). I had only been in Santa Barbara a year. While I had made some new friends at the university, we hadn’t developed the same level of rapport where I felt confident in confiding in them. The people I usually reached out to for support — such as Mike, or my father and mother — were dying, dead, or needed their own support.
I swore I was fine. My body said otherwise. The strain manifested in my health. In the fall, I thought I had an ulcer. In the winter, my jaw became sore from grinding my teeth in my sleep. By spring, I started waking up in the middle of the night and breaking into a total sweat. I ended up visiting the health center on campus a number of times.
Community and connection is important for happiness.
It was on one of my many health visits, I got my first inkling into the importance of community and connection. The nurse practitioner put a hand on my shoulder and asked how things were going. The physical touch, the empathy in her voice, made me feel noticed. It was the first time I admitted to anyone—even myself—I was struggling.
The next lesson in connection came soon after. After my winter break, I visited the open mic at the Marquee where I had been playing regularly but hadn’t been to for a month. The host, Dustin Janson, welcomed me back with a big bear hug. I thought, Wow, that hug felt really good. Then the bartender, Natalie Sampila, came over to get my order. She held my hand while asking me what I wanted to drink and then kept holding it while she chatted with me. I thought, it feels really nice to have my hand held. It made me realize I hadn’t been touched in a long time and how important physical touch was to health and happiness.
The key to health and happiness is quality relationships.
I had to learn the hard way quality close relationships are necessary for health and happiness. This lesson isn’t new or original—but needs to be said as a reminder. Sometimes we don’t realize the support people give us just by being there.
Science has also confirmed the same idea by longitudinal research. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following the lives of their research subjects and descendants for about 80 years. After reviewing the data, the current director of the study, Robert Waldinger, said the evidence was clear. The single determining factor for which people had the best health outcomes and happiest lives were those who had quality close relationships. The outcome for those without quality relationships was not so good: poorer memories, less happiness, and shorter lives.
So if there was one positive outcome from my summer of death and years of grief, it was understanding the importance of creating quality relationships and maintaining those I already had. I keep in touch regularly with the people I love.
While that tragic period is over in my life, I know it’s only the eye in the storm. More grief lies ahead. The only difference is next time I will embrace the wonderful people around me for help, instead of trying to bear it on my own.
Kyle Crocco is the Chief Creative at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and the lead singer for Duh Professors. He regularly publishes content about business thought leaders and personal growth on Medium, Business 2 Community, and Born 2 Invest.
