Forum From the Archives: Jonathan Hirsch on Losing His Father to 'A Cult and Dementia'
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From Kikubidi in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal with a special holiday edition of Forum from our archives. The Bay Area was awash with spiritual seekers during the 60s and 70s, but the gurus didn't just disappear when the age of Aquarius became the Reagan era. Our guest this morning, Jonathan Hirsch, knows this well because he grew up in what many would call a cult here in San Francisco and Marin. His parents felt their allegiance was to their guru and their son suffered because of it.

Then just as his own family and life were blooming, his estranged father was diagnosed with dementia and Hirsch was faced with a stark set of choices. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Jonathan Hirsch is an award-winning radio and podcast producer, the founder of Neon Hum, which has made a huge number of hit podcasts. He also did work for NPR, and most germane to this show, he produced a podcast about his life growing up here under the influence of a local religious guru called Dear Franklin Jones.

He has a new audio memoir out now called The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. And I also happen to know that Jonathan was a massive Forum fan growing up here. So let me give you the warmest welcome to Forum, Jonathan. Thank you so much, Alexis. It's great to be here. Yeah, I grew up listening to the show, so I'm pinching myself today to be on with you.

So let's start with you as a kid, like your Bay Area. I mean, at one point you're living in kind of one of the most idyllic settings one can imagine, you know, across from Marina Green. What was your life like as a little kid? I mean, I think there's a couple of things that I think about, particularly in context of everything that's happened in the last several years of my life and the subject of the memoir.

It was a beautiful place to live. I remember riding around in the marina on the green, learning to ride a bike there. I loved San Francisco. It was absolutely my home. But our home inside of the house was something that most people didn't have access to. So it was normal to me. I went to school. I played with my friends. I shot hoops. I rooted for the Warriors. And then when I came home,

I had an entirely different life. And so if I had brought friends over to my house, which we never did, you would have opened the door to the house and you would have seen a couch right in front as you open the door. And on the couch would have been a cardboard life-size cutout of my parents' guru, Franklin Jones. He went by many names, but I call him by his birth name, Franklin Jones. Mm-hmm.

So the life that we lived inside of the house... Like actually a cardboard cutout, as if he was sitting on your couch? A literal cardboard cutout as though it were a person that you were worshipping. And our spiritual practice was to worship the image of this person. So we would literally sit in the mornings and meditate in front of this image of this individual.

How did your parents get into this world? Like you don't just you know show up and maybe you do just show up in San Francisco and suddenly a cardboard cutout of a guru is on your couch That's actually possibly a more common San Francisco story than I think but how did your parents get yeah, if any place would be the the location of that Happening to you. It would probably be San Francisco but you know my parents arrived at the sort of spiritual search and

That defined the lives of many boomers in different ways. My mom grew up in suburban Midwest, but ended up living in Nepal for almost a decade in the 70s. Explored various different

Ways of living. Alternative lifestyles, I think they were called. Yeah, spirituality. She had proximity to those ideas, was interested in them. My father lived a very different life. And this is all before they really met and came together. But my father grew up in Budapest, Hungary, in the...

you know, the 40s and into the 50s. He's, you know, what they would call a 56er, somebody who left during the Hungarian Revolution, fled conflict and war there and came to the States and started a life. And I think along the way, he, you know, he arrived as a young person in his 20s in Los Angeles, you know, during the height of

drug experimentation, alternative spirituality and religion, the rise of the counterculture movement. When I asked him many years ago what it was that opened him up to LSD, he said LSD, period. That was it. Very Thomas thing to say at the time. But I think they both were looking for something more than the lives that they had lived.

been handed the cards that they'd been dealt. And both of them arrived at this notion that perhaps there was some way of personal advancement, of self-betterment, of spiritual evolution that would afford them a state of being that was more true, more real, more transcendent, is a word they probably would use to describe it, than the lives that they

That they were saddled with. And so the two of them actually met at a spiritual sitting. Retreat or something? Yeah. It was what we call a satsang, like a sitting with a spiritual teacher who was not Franklin Jones. It was another guru. And they met in line and they ended up becoming friends and then eventually dating. And around the time that I was born, they became involved with Franklin Jones. Wow.

How did parenting fit into this quest after a transcendent life? Like, I think it feels to me complicated when you're kind of existing on a spiritual plane or searching for that. You know, so much of parenting, you're a parent, I'm a parent, so much of it is like logistics-ing. Oh my God. Like, how do you get stuff into the pantry? How do the kids get fed? Who needs to go to what activity? You know, at times it feels like the opposite of spiritual searching. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. There's effort and like a mundanity to the daily life of having to just make sure everything... It's very administrative, you could say. I mean, I think the short answer is I don't think parenting factored into it, truthfully. I don't think that was a way of life that they saw as necessary. But I will say they had an idea.

Perhaps a fantasy a dream whatever you want to call it that their spiritual Evolution and they would frequently tell me this would almost like they it was passed down genetically hmm would Would benefit me so their advancement as spiritual seekers

would translate into my spiritual advancement and development. So it's kind of back to that thing we were talking about a moment ago with walking into the house and seeing the cardboard cut out. That's what I knew and understood to be true as a young person. I understood that inside of our family world, we were living a spiritual life that as my parents advanced, I would benefit from.

And at the center of that was this man, Franklin Jones. And he was the example that we needed to live by. I mean, what were his teachings? What was he actually saying about what a spiritual life was or what the direction of your parents' life should be? I think to answer that question, you have to understand the context in which

gurus like Franklin Jones, my parents' other guru, Frederick Lenz or Rama, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, many of these sort of charismatic gurus

from that era, what they presented to a very particular audience that my parents were the exact demographic for, which is people who had lived through the counterculture, people who might have been aging into an adult life where they had to make decisions about whether or not they wanted to have a family, whether or not they wanted to suit up and get a day job, sell the Volkswagen thing,

van and put their thumb down and get a job, or if they wanted to sort of explore something more radical, because I think it felt revolutionary and radical to my parents that they were involved in something other than... The rat race. Yeah, that they weren't squares. They were doing something different. So these gurus were all very accessible people.

They were conversant in pop culture and Western philosophy and ideas. And in many ways, I think they mirror the kind of attractiveness that people have towards, you know, spiritual or inspirational figures that seem to be speaking to you now. Right. And I think to a lot of... Like they would kill on TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. They would crush it. They would totally crush it because it just feels like...

this person is not only bringing this mystical, like fetishized Eastern philosophy to a Western audience, they are also doing it in a way that like invokes the things that, you know, the sort of conventional middle class American is familiar with. And so Franklin Jones fit perfectly into that when he wrote his autobiography,

and launched a bookstore in the early 70s in Los Angeles on Melrose. And he could talk about T.S. Eliot and existential philosophy, but he could also bring in the Vedanta traditions and Buddhism and various different more esoteric spiritual teachings. But

One of the reasons I feel like that context is important is because his teaching really changed dramatically over the years. So in the early 70s, the presentation was, I think, very much like Buddhism. It was a practice of compassion and compassion.

and meditation and non-dualism or the idea that like, you know, our sense of self, our individual sense of self as something to be let go of, to be transcended, to feel more like you would adhere within like a larger consciousness or mind or whatever you want to call it. And then as the years progressed, he became an increasingly central figure

in his own cosmology. A deity himself, practically. Right. So to find that spiritual state of mind or being, you needed to sort of mirror what he already had.

So it meant worshiping him to get that. And that's how you get a cardboard cutout on the counter. That's how you become a cardboard cutout. We are talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir. It's called The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break. ♪

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia.

So, you are growing up in this family that is part of this spiritual group led by this man, Franklin Jones. You, on the other hand, though, wanted to just be a regular kid. And I was thinking, you know, sometimes people...

Say, you know, may you live in interesting times, you know, but it's kind of like a curse, you know And it's sort of like may you have interesting parents, you know, this is a complex thing to reckon with What it is to have parents who don't have you at the center of their life and this really kind of reaches a

a new peak in difficulty when they decided they kind of want to move to this sort of commune with the spiritual leader, right? So how old were you and how did that go down? Yeah, so I mean, things were really starting to boil up as I got older, 10, 11 years old, 12. I think my parents were becoming increasingly involved in Jones's group. He had been living on an island that the group owned in Fiji, right?

for some time and had moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area where one of their major, their sort of primary compound is located. And, you know, that meant that he was around. He was doing these public sittings with followers. And so everybody at the drop of a hat would hear like, the guru's giving a meditation tonight and, you know, I'll have to pop in the car and drive up there. And meanwhile, I am, you know, on vacation.

like my CYO basketball league and trying to practice my corner three. And my parents are practicing something very, very different.

And, you know, really around that time is when I think my father started to have a particularly hard time reconciling his own spiritual desire with the desire. Raising a little jock. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like the desires of a young, you know, preteen. Um, and all of this, um,

comes to a head when, you know, they start going up there almost every weekend. And I'm, you know, playing competitive basketball, et cetera. And, you know, my dad and I are fighting. And he says at one point to me that I either need to quit the league and start going with them or I need to find another place to live.

And you're how old? 12. Around 12. You don't forget that. And so all of this started to swirl around in me internally around that time.

I think it was really like the summer between eighth and ninth grade. And I started to try to do what I thought would be being a good son, which was adopting the spiritual philosophy of my parents. So I started reading things like, you know, Jones's books, the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Yogananda, all the stuff that was of interest to them. And what I found was a...

An emotional validation and reciprocity from my father that I had never experienced before. I basically didn't exist in many ways to him. If I look back at those years in San Francisco of like, you know, sitting in the bleacher, the Bonds Bombers bleachers in Candlestick Park when Barry Bonds was like the greatest hitter ever still is.

And, you know, going, learning to ride a bike on the Marina Green, you know, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, like everything that like I remember about my home here. When I look through that reel. Montage, yeah. He's not there in any of them. He was never there. He was never present for my life. But when I, under his threat, determined that,

that I would do what he wanted to do with his life. I think it validated him enough that he could in some way start to engage with me as a young person. What's interesting to me is it's such an inversion of how

It feels like, you know, counterculture and rebellion would tend to go. A lot of kids, you know, I had pretty normie parents, lovely, wonderful people, but like quite, quite normie. And it would be like me who would be like, well, look at this, like Eastern spirituality. What am I going to learn from this? And,

Did any of the teachings that you were reading outside of what they were doing for your relationship with your dad, did any of that land with you, though? Do you think it actually did sort of transform you spiritually in any way? Or was it really just like...

As if you were going to Catholic church because your dad was a priest. Or I guess that's not how it works. But, you know, you're going to Catholic church because your dad is very devout. Yeah, that would be more complicated. You know, I think it was a little bit of both. Because I'm also becoming a teenager at this point. And I'm being introduced to literature and storytelling. And so I'm reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, you know, Dostoevsky. Yeah.

And I'm also reading these Eastern gurus in spirituality or like Christopher Isherwood that sort of connects some of those worlds together. And so I saw...

the value intellectually in that, that spiritual pursuit. And in part because many of my literary heroes were engaged in those conversations. Gary Snyder would have been like right there. Oh my God. Gary Snyder. Yeah. A hero. Jaffe. Like I loved that world, you know? And so I had a complicated relationship certainly with that piece of it.

Because I think when you take it to the logical conclusion of where my parents arrived, there was a man at the center of it who was positioning himself towards the end there as a unique physical manifestation of God. That in order to find your spiritual enlightenment, you or to be in that state of enlightenment, you sort of needed to go through him.

I know it and you do not. Direct quote from Franklin Jones. And all miracles are potent in my heart. And I remember those words saying,

spinning around in my head over the years thinking like how can I be him if he knows the thing and It didn't make sense to me on like a literal level and on a spiritual level It's a fraught idea among academics and people who think about Eastern philosophy already to sort of suggest that somebody has that physical ability to transmit some kind of spiritual power or

So I struggled with it quite a bit, but I knew that it made my parents, my dad, oddly proud. The only time I remember him having tears in his eyes for love or being proud of me or any sort of emotional expression of that love was the first time he saw me put a flower at the feet of his guru.

So I knew that love was conditional, but I needed it. I wanted it. And to be honest, I think it even informed decisions I made later in my life when he got sick.

Yeah, let's speed ahead a little bit. Because you do... You essentially become estranged, right? I mean, you have this relationship with your father in which, you know, love is entirely conditional on, yeah, laying a flower at the feet of his guru. And you end up moving out at 18. Yeah. And making a life out on your own. And...

You know, like many people, you kind of grow apart from your parents, but really you would call it estranged, right? I would. Like you would describe the relationship, your adult relationship with your father before he got sick as being estranged, yeah? I absolutely would. And I think probably the line in the sand where I would go from not really being sure if we had a relationship at all to...

Trying and fits and starts to make that work to being legitimately estranged was when I did the podcast dear Franklin Jones about about them my mom and dad and about the guru and While I saw that project and I think a lot of people did it was a number one show and it really changed my life while I saw that show as an earnest effort to

to understand and try to answer that question, does your spiritual advancement trickle down to me? What if in those 25 years you spent in search of a better life, of enlightenment, what if you made a mistake? What if somewhere along the line there was a mistake? Now, generationally, or maybe just for me, I feel like that's a ludicrous thing. I feel like I'm apologizing every day for things that I don't quite understand

get right with my kids, with my family, as an adult, as a professional. It's a part of life to operate from that space. But for my parents, that was an impossible idea. And so when Dear Franklin Jones came out, I'm not even sure my father heard it. What he heard was the pressure and commentary from members of the group,

who were telling him this was not the right way to tell the story, that I didn't present Jones with enough deference or kindness or understanding, all of which I feel like I went to great lengths to do. And I think at that point, it became clear to me that this person was never going to see me. And it became hard to come back from that.

Meanwhile, he and your mother had split. And he had entered into a pretty deep relationship with another person in their community. And there is a moment that comes where you realize, even though you're estranged, that you're going to...

One thing that will trickle down, maybe not spiritual, but is just the need to care for your father. When did you first figure that out? I think it was a slow burn. But there were a series of incidents that I described where he was not himself. And he began to have these manic symptoms.

episodes Where when his partner would leave town would go to work He would start to play over and over in his head this idea that she might be Having an affair with his doctor this doctor. Yeah. Yeah, and it got really bad to the point that he would be found wandering out on the street and he had a difficult to define

kind of physiological event. I don't want to call it an ischemic event. It was hard to define at the time, but it was something like that, like a mild mini stroke or some kind of, you know, it's like heart stopped. And he's had events like that for years after that. So it is something specific to his body, but he basically stopped breathing and they had to call an ambulance and revive him. And it was around that period of time that

It became clear that one, his health was not good and that there was something there was some of it was neurological with his mind. And, you know, the doctors were were quick to tell us that they saw this unequivocally as signs of an advancing condition of dementia. Yeah.

We're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. And we want to hear from you, those of you joining us now. Have you had a decision to make about caring for a parent

who was lacking or selfish or you were estranged from, or maybe you've had to rely on a child who you weren't there for and you've had to make your peace in some way, you can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on all the social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, or KQED Forum. You know, there's...

Of course, you have a unique life story and there's a particularity to it. But there's also this kind of, you know, people talk about the sandwich generation. Yes. You know, you've got kids rising and you've got parents aging. But there's a particular kind of Bay Area sandwich. Yeah. I think, too, that your parents really embody, you know, kind of 60s generation seekers who like weren't thinking about their 401k. They were thinking about spiritual advancement. Right. Like you were saying. Yeah.

And did your parents or your father specifically, did he prepare for getting old in any way? No, he did not. And I think you're absolutely right. And I think one of the things I hope that this story highlights for people is that this was an almost...

And forgive me if I'm painting a little bit with a broad brush here, but it was almost an ingrained cultural facet of that generation's spiritual search that to engage in anything other than foregrounding your spiritual development rather than, say, maybe meeting with a financial advisor was a distraction from the pursuit of

you know? So I think, which actually might very legitimately be true. It, it might be, it might be. And look, they're, they're looking to these stories of spiritual, uh,

you know, hermits living in the mountains and eating, you know, Milarepa, like drinking nettle tea in the Himalayas or like, you know, the Buddha under the banyan tree or whatever, right? It's part of the mythology of the spiritual pursuit.

There's another wrinkle to it, too, that's very specific to your family, which is, you know, your father was kind of a mystic, a guru himself to people around him, someone who had visions. Swami Tommy. Right. And so how do you tease out, you know, what was disease from what was a lifelong mysticism? I think as I.

As the disease progressed, I became less sort of attached to this idea. But I do remember and I don't write about this. So it's funny you bring it up. We can talk about it here. Yeah.

I remember when there was, you know, he would see doctors and he would sort of say things in a way that felt Thomas-y. You know what I mean? They'd be like, are you, are you, you know, do you know what year it is? And he'd be like, well, it's whatever year you make it, you know, or something like that. And you'd be like, okay, this is him being clever and existential and thinky. Yeah.

And I'd be like, oh, no, no. Like, you just, like, I can read him. Like, I can read this man. This is like, don't, you know, don't give him more drugs or whatever you're going to do. Make sure he says 2019. Yeah, exactly. And so there was an aspect to that where you had a hard time knowing whether this was him. And I do think it contributed to a longer relationship.

A delay in him actually getting legitimate medical care for his dementia, because, you know, that's just Thomas. He's eccentric. He's you know, he he he says things that people don't always quite understand anyway. Like no wisdom. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, gosh, you know, we're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and...

dementia, we want to hear from you. Have you had to make a decision about caring for a parent who was lacking or selfish or you were estranged from, maybe was one of these spiritual seekers? Or maybe on the other side of it, you've had to rely on a child that you weren't there for and you've had to come to a sense of healing with that child.

The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. And of course, you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQED Forum. Or you can go over to the Discord where there appears to be a conversation going on. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more with Jonathan Hirsch when we get back.

Support for Forum comes from San Francisco Opera. Amidst a terrible storm, Idomeneo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters. But as he arrives safely to shore, his relief transforms into horror when the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son.

This summer, venture into the storm with Mozart's sublime opera, Idomeneo. June 14-25. Learn more at sfopera.com. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together! Xfinity!

Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Texas fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary.

Lexus Madrigal here. We're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. I want to get to this listener comments. We're very on point here. Listener says, my partner is being exploited by a failing ex-cult member parent who partially due to bad physical problems and partially due to their going into parenthood unprepared and unsuitable did a shambolic job.

of parenting. Having lost literally all their money to elder scammers, they are now draining us, not dry, but injuriously. We don't have a single set of norms in our culture limiting the bounds of obligation, making us pray either to being neglectful or to being exploited. How do we decide where the limits would, or I would add, should be?

This is basically the question of your book. Right. Right. Yeah. So how did you decide? I mean, how did you decide? Like, this is, I'll do this much, but not that much. Or were you just kind of making decision by decision, kind of walking down the road? I'm so touched by that comment because I think it does speak to the real question.

pain and complication that many people, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a lot of these groups proliferated in the 70s and 80s and defined people's lives, that where they were created, I think my body told me when it was enough. Because as my father was getting sick and

And maybe this is a little bit beside the point of what your listener was saying, but as my father was getting sick, my career was heating up and I had a new baby. And I was...

really anxious all the time to the point of really not being able to function effectively, just living in that state. And it became really clear to me that I needed to, the only way out was through. So I had to confront those things directly. And to be honest, writing this story was a form of healing. I had, I had re re

started therapy at that time and my therapist, bless his heart, believed in narrative and storytelling as a way to make your way through the difficult times. And so this story became itself a sort of document of my own healing. When it comes to the spiritual piece of surrendering to a group or an organization, I think at the point

at which agency is lost on your personal affairs, you're in trouble. I don't think that any spiritual organization at this point in our history should be meddling in those things at that level that your listener suggested. And certainly my parents spent all of their money on their guru and didn't have anything to show for it. Yeah.

Let's bring in Danielle in Berkeley. Welcome, Danielle.

Thank you. I just wanted to say that I empathize with the author of the audio. I similarly have a situation where I'm a sandwich generation person. I have two children under four. I have an aging mother now in a nursing home. Oh, my gosh. She did not join a cult, but in a way she did. She was a compulsive gambler. Oh, wow.

Being a woman of the 70s and also being a person who did not plan for their future, I don't have any resentment for her behavior, but my sibling definitely does. And it keeps her fresh and

engaging but now being in the Bay Area she is now in a nursing facility in Alameda and I find myself having the third child that I never wanted and it's not that she's a burden she's just a person that I now additionally have to care for and also make decisions for us from medical directives and she is a front line but she also does relies on me for a lot of the answers like

Currently, she's in Medi-Cal and Medicaid, and we're just thinking like, oh, my God, you just survived stage four cancer after being forced into care four years ago. You're in remission. You're in a facility. You need a knee replacement because you're immobile. And what's going to happen with that nursing facility if these patients,

But monsters like make it happen. And I'm just kind of and she's like, where am I going to go? And as much as I know, she wants me to say, I will take you in. I know realistically I cannot give her that care. And I'm just like, I just have to leave her with. I don't know. And in the back of my mind, the part that I don't say is that you did not plan ahead. You did not plan ahead.

And it hurts and kills me to say that and think that. So I'm just like, what is there to do? Yeah. Thank you so much for that call. I mean, anyone with two kids under four, you have my sympathy just on that alone. And then adding your mom in. Thanks so much for that call, Danielle. Thank you. One thing that really strikes me, and it's in your memoir as well, is the way that with aging parents in this world,

With aging parents and little kids, it's like one thing after another, one thing after another. Right when you get one situation settled, another thing, another pot is boiling, another pot is boiling. Constant. And do you feel like you were able to find or what helped you find some stable situations for your father? Was it external circumstances? Did you get the logistics right? Was it...

You know, like, how did you... It was a long journey. So I'm very sympathetic with what, Danielle, you were saying there because it absolutely... I'm sure we went through similar processes. I think one of the things that's tricky about dementia is that

The way that it appears and the way that it's sort of cataloged in the medical system, and I'm not an expert, so, you know, don't quote me on the specifics of this. I just know from my experience with my dad that, you know, dementia affects the brain very much in the same way that old age does. And so at what point are you defining a medical condition that's

Just a progressive part of life where you're getting older, it's sometimes hard to say, Dad says wacky things. Is he actually sick? And as a result, the line in the sand between when

recommended care. My father was a vet, so his health care was provided through the VA system. Recommended care in a 24-hour sort of context, in other words, to be able to put him in a home and have Medi-Cal, Medicaid be part of the conversation and having to pay for it out of pocket, that line is almost entirely left up to the medical staff that's reviewing your parent. So in my dad's case, he was very much

completely not somebody who you could care for and live with and be like able to live autonomously. It would take around the clock care. And yet the social safety net wasn't actually there for you. It wasn't activated. For years, we had to pay out of pocket for it. You know, I was running a successful production company at the time, and I used to joke that I was the

you know, lowest paid person at my own company because we had to pay out so much money every month just to make sure that my dad was in a facility that, you know, that care for him. And eventually the doctors did determine he should be in a permanent care situation. And then those things kicked in, but it's not clear and it is tough.

We're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. We're taking your calls and comments as well. Maybe you've had to make a decision about caring for a parent who you were estranged from or who you don't feel like provided care for you. Or maybe you've had to rely on a child in a way you didn't expect to. Maybe you weren't, therefore, in the way you wish you might have been. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-7000.

six, seven, eight, six. That's eight, six, six, seven, three, three, six, seven, eight, six forum at KQED.org. Of course, you can find us on social media, blue sky, Instagram, or KQED forum, or you can join the discussion on the discord. Um,

Daniel's call also reminded me, you also have two children. Yes. And how do you think having your own kids changed the way, and actually, you know, as the kids have gotten older, you know, I think your oldest is like seven, right? Yeah, yeah. Do you think that's given you, most people say, I think, that it's given them more sympathy or empathy for their parents, right? And their parents' decision-making, their parents were just doing the best they could. Like, I hear people say that kind of thing all the time. Right.

I wondered if that's true for you, though. Yes and no. I think part of my journey was letting go of a certain degree of given sympathy that I afforded my father over the years. And I know that might sound harsh. Letting go of the sympathy? Letting go of it. Because I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Because deep down, there was that 12-year-old boy who was saying, if you just...

meet your dad where he is. He's going to love you this time. He's going to care about you. He's going to see you. He's going to see your effort. And so I feel like I, even in the years where he became, we became fully responsible for his care. We moved him down to Los Angeles. I think there was a part of me for a long time, really, until I wrote this. He never gave you that though? No.

No, I don't think I ever got that. But I did get the piece and the finality of that moment. And I write about this. There was a moment when I told him about my second, our second boy who was coming. And, you know, he's a hard time hearing, constantly losing his hearing aids. And so at the nursing facility that he's at in Southern California, they had like a little kind of mini conference.

whiteboard by his bedside where you could write things and I wrote that we were having a baby and that his name was Cohen and the look on his face was shock and fear because you know he very rarely is cogent

barely, but for a moment he could read that and understand it. But his experience of the world is so unvarnished and simple that you almost like a window into his soul. And I could see the fear. Like it was like he was afraid of the idea of having to be responsible for a kid. And that hit me really hard. And he went, oh no, that's what he said out loud to me.

And I think it was at that moment that it registered to me, oh, like for him, being a parent is this burden. It's this thing that he has to get past to get to the real thing, which is the spiritual thing. And I think that allowed me to let that go, to be like, okay, this is not ever going to, he's never going to see, we're not seeing each other.

At some level, I feel like that is the work that this memoir is doing, is letting people know sometimes you aren't going to get the thing that you want from the parent. Like there isn't going to be that moment where it's all fine and they recognize all the things. Yeah.

We're talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. This is Forum, of course. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Let's take another call here. Let's go to Ariel in Los Angeles. Welcome.

Hi, thanks for having me on. I just wanted to also kind of offer a little bit of a different view. I have two, like many, I have two parents, but my father has cognitive decline and he has a great pension and he set himself up well, but it's still a struggle and it still costs me $3,000 a month to do elder care for him to make sure that he's okay. And then my mom,

She's much lower income. They're divorced. And she's tried very hard to set herself up. She has a home. She's still paying on. But she's not in a good position. And, you know, I think that there's a little bit of blame that we're not placing on our just society and our structure. Mm-hmm.

The way that we kind of do life is that, you know, you can try your best. Parents can do what they can, but the system is not set up for them to be taken care of. Even, you know, even if you have immense wealth and there's a great book about someone whose mother went into care, she had plenty of money. She ended up penniless and broken. It's actually sometimes you,

easier for you to start out that way because you end up having to sell assets, do all these sort of things to get people the care that they want. And so I completely understand. I'm part of the sandwich generation as well. Ariel, so appreciate you bringing this to the fore, which is that our society should probably have more of a response. Like this is,

Everyone will eventually, if they're lucky, will age. And everyone will need to draw on the resources of the state and their families and whatever else is available. And maybe that burden should be rebalanced to being more on the state so that every individual family isn't dealing with the same set of problems. I completely appreciate what you're saying. And look, I can only speak from my experience of having dealt with

My parents and what they set themselves up for, which was nothing, but what you're saying is absolutely true. We need to do more to prepare for an increasingly large group of individuals who are living longer. Absolutely. Yeah. Let's go to Jen in Pleasant Hill. Welcome, Jen. Hi. Go ahead. Yeah.

yeah i have a mother who is currently living in an rv next door to my house right on my property because i cannot afford and she cannot afford any other care and she had a stroke and it needs a lot of care and she's currently on a list that's two and a half to three years long right um to have any kind of subsidized help um so she's left alone

consistently and as a, you know, a fall hazard and is, you know, in a lot of, in a bad situation that I cannot care for. And, you know, she did not, you know, prepare for any of that. And, you know, I'm not really prepared to care for her for the rest of my life. Yeah. Yeah.

And you have every right to feel that way. I really do. Like, my heart goes out to you because one of the, I think one of the harder parts of having to care for a parent who, for whatever reason, I mean, my father and I had a relationship challenges as people. But even if you love your parent, like, I think a big question I'm trying to get at, and I hear from your listeners too, Alexis, is, you know, we don't always know what we owe, right?

Our parents as they get older if we owe them anything and yet circumstances Especially when you have an ailing aging parent force that question Right into the forefront of your mind and that can be hard to deal with because your answers don't always make you feel good Right. I mean you want right? I mean because at some level, you know I'm Jen you other folks who we've heard from in this hour there there is a

There's a part of me that says, oh, I want to be the person who feels like, well, I'll owe everything, you know? Like that does. It feels good to say that to yourself. It does. But also these situations are impossible. Every story that we've talked about today, you're just like, God, this is so hard for everyone. Yeah. Yeah.

The memoir is called The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. We should probably also mention for listeners, though, that Dear Franklin Jones would be a perfect companion podcast if you want to know the backstory on the cult as well. Yes. Yeah. Take a listen to that as well. Yeah.

One other listener comment was, it's funny that Jonathan addressed the bodies imposing its own limits. I tried to help one parent with time and effort sufficient to break me emotionally and nearly physically. I wouldn't let them starve, but I would cease trying to dissuade them from the bad decisions to which they seemed firmly wedded. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. What a difficult situation. I think...

One of the things I was getting at there was that your body will sometimes tell you when it's experienced enough trauma. We've been talking with Jonathan Hirsch about his new audio memoir, The Mind is Burning, Losing My Father to a Cult and Dementia. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thank you, Alexis, for having me. It has been truly a pleasure. And thank you so much to

All of our listeners who shared your stories, I wish we could have gotten to more of you. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Nina Kim.

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