GODSTUFF

‘STAY TUNED’ BEYOND THE GRAVE

“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-Conversations-Other-Side — 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.