208 - Tragedy, grief, healing, and finding happiness | Kelsey Chittick

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Nate Chittick lived to the extreme, in good ways and bad

  Kelsey Chittick met Nate in the summer of 1998, when she was a swimmer at UNC Chapel Hill. He was a poor kid from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who made everyone he talked to feel like the most important person in the room. He wasn't a first-round prospect, but he hustled his way into the NFL as a center and won a Super Bowl with the St. Louis Rams. They got engaged at the top of the World Trade Center in July 2001 and married in 2002. Kelsey says he was extreme in every way, good and bad.

• 02

  Leaving the NFL in your mid-20s is a brutal transition

  Nate retired around 2004, before their son was born. Kelsey describes the drop from signing autographs as a Super Bowl champion to an ordinary job that might pay in a year what he used to earn in a week. Peter points out that the median NFL player's career looks nothing like Tom Brady's. Nate went back to school and was offered $50,000 a year. He eventually found purpose in serving others, but Kelsey says many former players 'fall off a cliff' after football.

• 03

  His weight became a lifelong fight

  To play on the line, Nate bulked up to about 300 lb. He felt good at 235 and loved himself around 260, which Kelsey thought was still too heavy. In 21 years together, she never slept beside him without a sleep apnea mask. His weight was a recurring fight between them, and she later said she had been 'mean' about it before learning how sick he really was.

• 04

  She had premonitions for years

  From about 2014–15, Kelsey dreaded leaving the family whenever she travelled and sometimes woke up screaming that Nate was gone. In November 2017, Nate encouraged her to go to a spiritual retreat in Jamaica. They texted lovingly for four days because she was too frugal to buy a calling plan. While she was there, he collapsed and died at age 40 while playing basketball with children during a toddler session at a trampoline park. Paramedics worked on him for 50 minutes. He died on 11/11, at about 11, which she takes as one of his 'nods' to her.

• 05

  Her North Star: the kids lost their dad but would not lose her

  On the flight home, Kelsey decided her children, then 9 and 12, had lost their father but were not going to lose her. As a child, she had watched friends lose a parent and then lose the surviving parent to unending grief. She told her children they were not victims. They had had the best father for 9 and 12 years, and they would figure out a great life together.

• 06

  The autopsy found heart disease and stage 2–3 CTE

  The cause of death was left ventricular cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart; she says it fit, because he had a really big heart. The LA County coroner's brain exam found nothing, so she sent the brain to Boston University. She admits she partly hoped for compensation and wanted to know whether to let her son play football. Dr. Ann McKee told her Nate had stage two, almost stage three CTE, with lesions throughout his brain, and that it would have been a very hard life. Kelsey says this lets her feel grateful that she didn't have to watch him slowly deteriorate.

• 07

  Grief and happiness can coexist

  Kelsey rejects the idea of moving neatly from one stage of grief to the next. She misses Nate terribly and is happier than she has ever been. She now has a very different relationship with death, and her household openly accepts it. She suggests modern comfort has made us less used to pain than people 10,000 years ago, who regularly recovered from terrible losses.

• 08

  Children grieve differently

  Kelsey believes children are wired to move on faster, especially around 12, when friends become their whole world. Her daughter didn't want to draw her father dying, and needed to forget for a while to integrate what she had seen. Her son needed someone to talk to who 'didn't have a dog in the fight'. The family uses dark humour about how absurd Nate's death was.