Bereaved But Still Me

When a Comedian Loses a Brother

April 07, 2022 Jordon Ferber Season 6 Episode 4
Bereaved But Still Me
When a Comedian Loses a Brother
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Show Notes Transcript

Jordon Ferber is the Host of “Where’s the Grief?” Jordon Ferber’s only brother Russell was killed in a car accident in 2002 at the age of 21. He was just about to graduate from The Culinary Institute of America with a Pastry/Baking Arts degree. Jordon was 24, and just 2 years into his own career as a stand-up comedian.

Jordon Ferber has also been running a local support group for siblings – The Compassionate Friends Sibling Support group – for a decade. He believes he has found his calling – that of finding ways to normalize the conversations we have about grief so we can talk about it the same way we talk about everything else; often with inappropriate humor. Jordon’s family created The Russell Ferber Foundation, which provides yearly scholarships at the Culinary Institute of America in their pastry/baking arts program in honor of Russell.

Links for Jordon:

Twitter - @WheresTheGrief and @JordonFerber
IG - @WheresTheGrief @RussellFerberFoundation @BeatnikNudnik
WheresTheGrief.com
RussellFerberFoundation.org
WheresTheGrief@gmail.com
BeatnikNudnik@yahoo.com

Grief Support:
https://www.compassionatefriends.org/

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Jordon Ferber:

There is no up without down, there is no laughter without crying, so I think that they are, they're two sides of the same coin and I've often talked about how sometimes unless you see it happening, it's hard to tell the difference between crying and laughter

Michael Liben:

Welcome to the Sixth Season of "Bereaved But Still Me". Our purpose is to empower members of our community. I'm Michael Liben and the father of three children; Idan, Sapir, and Liel. Liel, my youngest daughter, was born with a heart defect, and later developed autism and epilepsy. Losing her at 15 is what has brought me here to be the host of this program. Here with us today is our guest, Jordon Ferber Jordon is the host of"Where's the Grief?" Jordon Ferber's only brother, Russell, was killed in a car accident 2002 at the age of 21. He was just about to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America with a Pastry Baking Arts degree. Jordan was 24 and just two years into his own career as a stand up comic. Jordan Ferber has also been running a local support group for siblings, "The Compassionate Friends Sibling Support Group" for a decade. He believes he's found his calling; that of finding ways to normalize the conversations that we have about grief so we can talk about it the same way we talk about everything else, often with inappropriate humor. Jordan's family created the Russell Ferber Foundation, which provides yearly scholarships at the Culinary Institute of America, in their Pastry Baking Arts Program in honor of Russell. He'll be discussing life after losing a sibling, post traumatic growth, and the ways in which people can get involved. Jordon, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Michael Liben:

Let's start first by telling us about Russell.

Jordon Ferber:

My brother Russell, I think he lived more in 21 years than most people I know, lived in a lifetime. I always say he was the type that asked for forgiveness, not permission, and even then, not so much.

Michael Liben:

I think I know that kid.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, he got away with a lot. Because he was very charming. He was a very savvy kid. He knew how to read people very well. He treated a lot of people as equals even when he would be interacting with adults. He treated them as though he was just as smart as they were in a lot of times he was, if not more so.

Michael Liben:

Can you give me an example? That sounds really cool.

Jordon Ferber:

So when Russell was 13, he had a business card that said "The Little Man With the Big Mouth". Growing up, Russell had a growth hormone deficiency. So he had actually had to take shots to grow. So he looked a lot younger than he was. So when he was 13, he looked like he was about nine, probably. And he became friends with all of the New York Knicks at the time, he was a basketball player himself at 13. And he talked to the players as though they were equals, he would talk about game theory and watching tape and skills he had learned. And it was interesting to watch how he was able to not put these guys on a pedestal.

Michael Liben:

How did he pull off being friends with the Knicks? I mean, you just can't call up the Knicks and say, Hey, you want to go out?

Jordon Ferber:

Well, so he was a huge basketball fan, my dad would get tickets here and there. And eventually my dad got season tickets. The way the garden worked at the time is the if you had the the club seats, the purple seats, you had to have those seats to be able to get down to the club level where they had the private bar and grill. And that was also the level that the players would have to walk across to get to the parking garage across the street. So there were always people there waiting for autographs. First, Russell would have to get somebody that was leaving to give him a ticket stub because we didn't have those seats, to get down there. And he would get autographs. But on one day, he ran to to like this back office where these girls were working and borrowed a pen from them ended up charming these girls that worked in this office that provided it was like customer service for people in the sky boxes. It was like right next to the elevator that the players came out of from the locker room. So he started talking to the players, as they would come down there before anybody started bothering them for autographs. And eventually he didn't even he just started talking to them.

Michael Liben:

And he also, because he was in that place, they just assumed it was okay for him to be there. Nobody questioned it.

Jordon Ferber:

Right. I mean, some people did question it. We became friendly with the head of security for the garden.

Michael Liben:

Oh boy!

Jordon Ferber:

Yes.

Michael Liben:

Yeah, there's a word for that here, that he's a"macher".

Jordon Ferber:

They ultimately actually implemented security measures at the garden to keep Russell out of the locker room.

Michael Liben:

Really? Designed for him?

Jordon Ferber:

They were broad, blanket type of security measures, but the impetus was the fact that Russell was able to sneak in and they wanted to make sure that that didn't happen.

Michael Liben:

Wow, he sounds like he was a really cool kid. But let's go back and talk about the accident.

Jordon Ferber:

He had just come back to New York from his externship in San Francisco working at a restaurant out there and it was July 4 weekend. And he was out in the Hamptons. My parents were on vacation in Vermont, and I was on vacation in Florida. I was basically staying in a house that was like a postcard. My friends and I rented this house on the beach in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Walked right out the back door and you're on the beach, and it was 2002 so I had a StarTAC, you know, it was the flip phone, just left it plugged in all day it was that Saturday, after July 4, it was the sixth. We rented a boat, took it out on the water, went fishing, rode it over to a different beach, basically spent the day drinking beer in the sun. Came back, brought the boat back, we ended up having dinner at a rooftop hotel, a couple hundred yards down the beach from our house, got back to the house at 10 o'clock at night. And I checked my phone, which I'd had left plugged in all day, and I had like 40 messages. And uh...

Michael Liben:

It's never a good sign.

Jordon Ferber:

And not. Right? So first message was from a couple of cousins of mine. Then the second one was from my parents. And after that I stopped listening, I just called my parents and my brother had died in a car accident at 7:30 that morning.

Michael Liben:

I'm so sorry.

Jordon Ferber:

I got 40 messages from people that, throughout the day, who who knew that I died and about and then I started listening to them, about three or four of them. And a lot of them started to realize that I didn't know that he had died yet. So it was very, like weird some of the ways people were trying to avoid telling me but also not It was very strange.

Michael Liben:

Of course, you have to know something is not right, sure.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah. And yeah, I called my dad and could hear it in his voice it was you know, he was pretty, we were pretty floored.

Michael Liben:

Let me ask you did you feel particularly bad because you were out partying all day, had a great time, good food on the water, drinking. And you come home like all of this happened while you were out having a good day.

Jordon Ferber:

You know, I don't know if I thought about that until years later, maybe around the anniversary. Like no, on the day of realizing that I was, that I had spent that entire day in ignorance. Knowing that that I'd spent that entire day not knowing. I think it's a blessing to a certain degree that I was able to spend that entire day. Not knowing I mean, there's one extra day before the world collapsed beneath me. So -

Michael Liben:

You come home and you just sit on this high, I'm having a great day, you're in Florida, you're on the beach and life is so good. And then it's not.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, it was pretty much the worst thing. The interesting thing for me in this passage of time is that that's where the bar is set for what some horrible stuff is to deal with. A lot of other petty stuff doesn't really bother me nearly as much I don't really get bothered by a lot of smaller issues. Because a lot of it doesn't even register as a difficulty. We're--

Michael Liben:

Sure, sure. So as brothers were you very close?

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, we were, we were very close. We were three years apart in age, but we were only two years apart in school because my birthday is January and his birthday was December. And that was where the cutoff was was the new year. So we had a lot of mutual friends. And getting into our early 20s. We had sort of just gotten past all of the sibling rivalry stuff. I like to joke that we stopped fighting when he started to be able to take me.

Michael Liben:

Okay, that makes sense.

Jordon Ferber:

But also, I think we matured to the point where we really appreciated the fact that we knew each other better than anybody else. And we were going to be able to be not just each other's protectors, but each other's champions. And my mom had told us when we were fighting back in the day that we had better start to learn to get along with each other because this was the longest relationship we were going to ever have in our lives. And I think about that a lot. But we were definitely very close. You know, I had started my comedy career, he was a huge fan he came to a lot of my shows. About three weeks before he died I did a show at Madison Square Garden. I actually got to do a show at Madison Square Garden. He came to it and he told me that the entire room hadn't left as one until I got on stage like other the comics that went on before me had gotten pockets of the room, but I was the first one that got everybody.

Anna Jaworski:

You're listening to "Bereaved But Still Me". If you have a question or comment that you would like to address on our program, please send an email to Michael Liben at michael@bereavedbutstillme.com. That's michael@bereavedbutstillme.com. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The opinions expressed in the podcast are not those of Hearts Unite the Globe but of the hosts and guests and are intended to spark discussion about issues pertaining to congenital heart disease or bereavement.

Michael Liben:

Welcome back to the program, "Bereaved But Still Me". Today we're talking with Jordon Ferber; comedian, philanthropist, and podcaster. In this segment, I'd like to talk to you about how you became a comedian. Can you tell me when it was that you knew you were on that path?

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, so my parents really imbued me with that sense of humor, and they were both big comedy fans. My dad is a lawyer but when he was in law school, when you're in law school they make you go watch court proceedings. My dad went to Lenny Bruce's court proceedings. When I was a kid, we had comedy records. My earliest comedy influences were"The 2000 Year Old Man", right? Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. The Smothers Brothers. I was a big Shelley Berman fan, right?

Michael Liben:

Cosby, I was hoping you could say George Carlin.

Jordon Ferber:

So Carlin came a little later, we had some Carlin and I remember listening to "AM& PM" [FM & AM] and "Class Clown". But I wasn't I didn't get Carlin until I was a little older. At nine years old, I was still listening to a lot of the rated G/ PG stuff. I didn't really understand a lot of the more adult themes that Carlin talks about.

Michael Liben:

It's funny. It's funny you say that because Carlin in the early years when he was doing this stuff about words can't say and what it was like in the casinos. He was doing that kind of stuff, but he was also doing Ed Sullivan and Flip Wilson on television. So he was really sort of straddling that line between the kind of stuff you were listening to you must have seen him on TV. But his albums were completely different.

Jordon Ferber:

I remember specifically the album that did it for me. Carlin was the game changer for me because I had been listening to all this other stuff. It's odd how differently we think about Cosby today. But, he had an album that I listened a thousand times called "To My Brother Russell Whom I Slept With", [To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With] and, all about his childhood growing up with his brother, Russell.

Michael Liben:

Russell. Sure.

Jordon Ferber:

I listened to that stuff over and over and I wanted to be a comedian. I loved it. I just loved comedy so much. And it was when I first heard Carlin that I actually thought to myself, 'Well, not only do I want to be a comedian, I'm positive that if I can do it that it is the best job in the world'.

Michael Liben:

Oh, yeah. It's not even a job. I want to be a little bit I know that Carlin, and he's talked about it, I know comedians work very, very hard. They write and they write. No, I don't belittle that at all.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah. And that was when I was a teenager. I think the album was, "What am I Doing in New Jersey?".

Michael Liben:

I don't know. Don't make little of it. These guys worked very, very hard. And what I loved listening to Carlin's interviews because he would talk about language and the sound of language and the texture of language. And if you can clue into all of that, then you really got comedy down it's so complicated. But what I meant by saying not a job at all, is that Paul McCartney, who is one of the most prolific music writers of the century, two centuries, he says, "I've never worked a day in my life". That's cool, right? And if you can feel that way about comedy, then yeah, it's a great job. You're right, I totally agree with you. I wish I could do it, I wish I had that kind of job, I wish I had that kind of stamina. I wish I had that kind of mental energy to do it. I just, I just can't. But I respect it. And I love it. And I think it's great. We've talked about this in other contexts, comedy is a great way to relieve stress and a great way to work through grief. Would you agree with that?

Jordon Ferber:

I think it's an essential tool for all areas of life. And I think that it relates directly to grief and sadness. I mean, there is no up without down there is no laughter without crying. So I think they are there two sides of the same coin. And I've often talked about how, sometimes unless you see it happening, it's hard to tell the difference between crying and laughter. They both can sound the same if you're not paying close attention.

Michael Liben:

You're so right. There are studies that are done on that, by the way, and there are photographs of people who are laughing and photographs of people who are like running away from danger. This famous photograph of people in Jerusalem running away from an explosion. And it looks like they're laughing. Because there's no context if you can't hear it, if it doesn't move, and you can't really see it, they look exactly the same. Also chemically in your brain, all emotions are the same. That's what you put on them.

Jordon Ferber:

Is that why they take your picture on The Log Flume? When you're feeling like you're gonna die?

Michael Liben:

Yeah, it looks great, doesn't it? But chemically in your brain, all emotions are pretty much exactly the same. It's what you put on it at the moment. It's how you label it.

Jordon Ferber:

Well, you know, one of the things that I talk about to myself that I remind myself of when I'm doing comedy that I use as a tool is the notion that I've heard it said that fear and excitement, create the same exact physiological effects in the brain. And it's an unconscious decision based on your prior experiences that dictate which one it is.

Michael Liben:

But that's definitely true. Absolutely true. Yeah, but one thing I took away from psychology was that. It's absolutely true.

Jordon Ferber:

And you can flip it because the analogy I use, it's like when you get on a roller coaster, when it's going up the hill and it's about to come down you have that moment of anxiety where you're, just before your stomach drops, there's that whole like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. But this is the experience that you've just paid for. This is what you are, you knew what getting on the ride, what it was going to be. So that's the moment where the fear and excitement are like the same. Yeah, I try to use that to combat any type of fear of putting myself out there, you know, in different ways.

Michael Liben:

Do you have stage fright?

Jordon Ferber:

There's always a little bit of stage fright. There's always a little bit of nervousness before you go on stage. Because every show is its own balancing act without a net. So you never know, even when you feel pretty confident.

Michael Liben:

You mentioned that your dad's a lawyer, my father also was a lawyer. And I went to court with him maybe only once or twice in my life. But I noticed he was acting a little wonky, just before the trial began. I said, "What's up?" He said, "You always get a little bit of stage fright". And I'm thinking that's absolutely true. And I'm thinking, how much different is being a lawyer for being a stand up comic? Did you actually go in your father's footsteps without realizing it?

Jordon Ferber:

Right, I guess we did, we have different hourly rates.

Michael Liben:

Yeah, and you're probably a lot more fun. You are a facilitator for a long, long time with a sibling support group. Tell me more about that.

Jordon Ferber:

About three weeks after Russell died, my parents started going to the self help support group called, "The Compassionate Friends". It's a national organization, they have 700 chapters nationwide. And they kept telling me that there was a sibling group at my chapter, they kept telling me every week you should come, there's a sibling group, there's a sibling group. And eventually, I went, so they would shut up about it. That was my plan, we will I was going to go, it wasn't going to be helpful, and we would never have to speak of it again. I actually found it to be the most helpful thing that I've found, I have found it to be almost the only helpful thing in a lot of ways. Because there's no professionals there. It's all just people that are in the same boat. Fortunately, for me, my chapter is one of the handful of chapters that had an active sibling group when I first started going, there are a lot of chapters around the country that don't yet have a sibling group within their chapter. But I was very lucky that mine had one. And speaking of stage fright, the guy that ran my support group, when I first got there, was maybe the most uncomfortable public speaker I've ever seen.

Michael Liben:

And he's probably working through his own issues by leading the group.

Jordon Ferber:

Once I started running the group, I understood just how important it was that that group existed. Because I was so against it being helpful. I really was I was sitting there listening to other people speak, I had no vocabulary at all for what I was feeling or how I was to express myself in any way about my grief. And just listening to other people's talk about their grief, it dawned on me, I was relating to things that people were saying, like, oh, that sounds familiar. I mean, maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm not broken. And just by having a group where I was able to talk about what I was feeling where there was no judgment, and there was no changing the topic, I feel like most of the people in my life got tired of sitting in the darkness with me. Yeah, it's hard to find a place where people aren't trying to cheer you up, or don't even talk about it at all.

Michael Liben:

Or run away from you, because they're tired of hearing it. Aren't you done with this yet?

Jordon Ferber:

Right? I mean, the joke I do is that I tell audiences all the time, "I go to a support group for bereaved siblings". And that's a great sentence you can use if you ever need to get out of a conversation.

Michael Liben:

[Laughs] It's so true that is so true. I think though, in your case, it forced you to look at it, it forced you to talk about it, it gave you the vocabulary you needed. And I think that's probably a very good thing for you don't you agree?

Jordon Ferber:

What's interesting, actually, is that it didn't force me it just continually provided the opportunities for me to do so. I think that there was no forcing of anything, everything became came about organically for me. Just being in this group and being able to talk about it, I've likened so much of my comedy, career, and the ways that I work within comedy, to the ways that I think about grief, in that when you write a joke, you don't know if it even works, or if it's even a joke until you say it out loud in front of people. And I felt that same way about my grief. I didn't know how I felt about something until I talked through the idea with other people that really understood. The other bereaved siblings that I met in that group really allowed me to just be myself in a way that I hadn't been able to do. And I think after I started going to the National Conference, they have a national conference every year in a different city that's a couple of thousand people. And the sibling program, there is really where I found myself again, I've often talked about how I felt like I lost a part of my identity. When Russell died, I lost my sounding board for the world. And I literally had to relearn how to "be" just how to be in the world again, and the national conferences are just such a full immersive experience that I found, being surrounded by that type of energy, all the anxiety and nervousness about what version of myself I was going to present just melted away, you know, whatever version of myself I showed up as was 100% accepted. And I was able to talk about Russell if I wanted to or not, and everything in between. And it really allowed me to reconnect with my ways of being funny again, of being silly and of even being able to explain inside jokes that I had had with Russell to other people in a way that wasn't weird or dismissive. That was really revelatory to me that that was able to happen.

Michael Liben:

If you've enjoyed listening to this program, please visit our website, heartsunitetheglobe.org, and make a contribution. This program is a presentation of"Hearts Unite the Globe" and as part of the Hug Podcast Network."Hearts Unite the Globe" is a nonprofit organization devoted to providing resources to the Congenital Heart Defect Community to educate, empower, and enrich the lives of our community members. If you would like access to free resources pertaining to the CHD community, please visit our website at congenitalheartdefects.com. For information about CHD, hospitals that treat CHD survivors, summer camps for CHD families, and much, much more. Jordon, let's talk about your podcast, what brought you in that direction?

Jordon Ferber:

Yes, let's talk about the podcast. I really think it's the perfect medium for talking about some of these things that don't always lend themselves to comedy. I like to talk about how comedy saved my life partially because I found a lot of comics that I was able to be real with. In addition to going to the support group, I was able to find ways of being real with other comedians offstage and talk about the heavy stuff. And just by virtue of me sharing the vulnerable parts of myself, I found other comedians very open to sharing parts of their selves and their struggles. And that's sort of when the podcast thing really took off, was really around that time was when the podcasts started to become a lot more ubiquitous. And I started talking to other comedians asking them if they would be willing to talk about losses that they had, when I once I started learning that there were other comedians that I knew who had lost siblings, or had gone through traumatic loss. It was a no brainer for me to start a show. Once other comedians were on board with it, I couldn't not do it. And then once I started doing the show, I couldn't believe how much I was getting out of doing each episode, I felt like I was learning so much about my own process, just being able to talk with other people that have the same sort of shorthand of comedy and riffing and tangents and flights of fancy and delusions.

Michael Liben:

Do you think it's endemic to a comedian that he has to have some sort of starting background of loss or pain or sadness that makes them a comedian, do you think that's part of it?

Jordon Ferber:

I don't think it's a requirement. I think that there are plenty of comics you can find out there that had happy childhoods that get along with their families that are hilarious. Part of it is that we deal in the trauma, we take our personal pain and turn it into a joke. And we mine every aspect of our own lives, when we have all this opportunity to talk about whatever we want. I think comedy is the last place where you really can delve into your own psyche and turn it inside out. I don't know if it's necessarily any more so than any other artist or any other person that deals in turning their own emotions into what they do.

Michael Liben:

Yeah, but you know what, I think it's important because a good comic will say something, and if it hits, it hits everybody. I could talk about things that I'm reasonably certain most people experience, and if I made a joke about it, it would really hit far and wide. I think that's the comedic guy. I think that's what they're good at. I think that's what makes a good comic a good comic, because he hits something that's as universal as you can get.

Jordon Ferber:

While also still being completely honest about their own experience, I think.

Michael Liben:

Right? Because it comes from within.

Jordon Ferber:

Right. The audiences connect to us the most when we are being genuine with them, the audience can really sense when you're being inauthentic.

Michael Liben:

We all have certain things within us that are common. And so when a comedian looks inward to find his comedy, he's looking inward, essentially on all of us, then he hits the things that hit all of us, and that's why it works so well.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, for sure. The old Woody Allen joke, "I got thrown out of my existential philosophy class; I looked into the soul of the boy next to me".

Michael Liben:

Okay, there you go but that's what they do. That's what comedians do, they look into their own selves but what they find is the thing that we all share in common. We've talked about this over the years in grief. And you've mentioned it, I know I heard you on another program, talking about how grief is completely personal and I would agree with that to a point except that everybody's grief is their own. But there are certain common elements of that grief that we can latch on to when we share our grief. And that helps lighten the grief because we're sharing with other people. And if there wasn't that commonality, we couldn't do it. And so grief and comedy have that in common because they touch us all in a way that is both individual but also universal, if that makes sense.

Jordon Ferber:

I totally agree. I think that also everything is about perspective. They say that comedy and tragedy, it's really about perspective, how you tell the story, you know. If you tell some of these jokes without the jokes, they could, it could be pretty sad.

Michael Liben:

You think? Yeah, I know it.

Jordon Ferber:

I mean Rodney Dangerfield, without without the punch lines, very depressed man.

Michael Liben:

Yeah, you noticed that. We've learned over the years, there's a term called"Post Traumatic Growth", where you take a traumatic experience and you somehow, instead of lying down and being depressed for the rest of your life, you get up and are empowered to do things that you never would have done before. My examples, this podcast itself, I never would have done a podcast if it didn't have a reason to. Have you experience that?

Jordon Ferber:

A thousand percent, a thousand percent. Doing this podcast has really been the thing that I feel like is what showed me that this is sort of my calling in a way. So I hate using that term also, it's just a weird thing. But after doing comedy, for so long, and being involved in the grief community, I realized that my work in the grief community is so much more necessary than just doing comedy. Being able to infuse the two with each other, for me, it's been the most, not just empower, I don't like I don't wanna say empowering, but it's been the most rewarding experience because it wasn't until I started doing the podcast that I feel like I really fully came out as a bereaved person. And they were, they were parallel roads, but they were now that I've sort of melded them, I've found a lot more purpose in what I'm doing and finding ways. As I say, a lot of all the time I try to find ways to normalize the conversation about grief, so that we can talk about it the same way we talk about everything else, which means that there will be jokes, it doesn't all have to be sad, and some of the healing part doesn't have to be a kumbaya drum circle.

Michael Liben:

It's simply you have to tell jokes, because you want to share happy memories and a lot of memories that are happy, or funny things that happened. And so even if it's not a joke, but relating a humorous story about somebody who's gone, that's very, very important. First of all, it holds on to that person for you. And it helps you deliver that person to people who didn't know him. People know Russell through you. So you it's almost like a mission. Would you agree with that?

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, for sure. It is. It's my mission, even within family circumstances, to make sure that we continue to tell Russell stories, to make sure we don't forget him, that we keep saying his name. I think that's one of the most important things. I say this in my keynote speeches about how they say that we die three deaths. We die when our physical body dies, we die a second time when the last person who knew us dies, and we die for a final time when the last person who says our name out loud dies. And it is my hope that through this work, that the name Russel Ferber lives forever.

Michael Liben:

Well, along those lines, and we're going to conclude with this, tell me about what your family has done with scholarships and ways to remember him and keep Russell's name alive, literally, forever. What have you done?

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, so, we started the Russell Ferber Foundation. And we have three principal beneficiaries of our fund. We have a full two year scholarship in the Pastry and Baking Arts Program at the Culinary Institute through another nonprofit called CCAP, which stands for "Careers Through the Culinary Arts Program". And they fast track kids out of high school, who want to get a scholarship at a culinary school instead of a traditional four year college and they compete for the scholarship. So it's a 100% merit based scholarship. We don't pick the scholars ourselves, these kids go above and beyond to qualify for these scholarships. And it's really amazing how we've been able to stay in touch with the kids that have won our scholarship in the past. We also have an endowed scholarship at CIA that I believe is just become self-sustaining. And we have a fund at the elementary school that my brother and I both went to, that provides extra funding for kids with learning disabilities whose families can't afford it. And we hold our annual fundraiser for the foundation every year at the school. They let us use the space for free, it's their auditorium. They've got a capacity of about 350 people, we pretty much pack it every year. We do a big comedy show, we do a raffle, a silent auction. My mom bakes up a bunch of brownies and cookies and Grammy's Mandel Bread, and our scholars bake up a storm of stuff. Three of our eight scholars have baked up a storm of goodies the night before the event, stayed up all night, but that had to attend their own high school graduation during the day before coming to our event in the evening.

Michael Liben:

You should be proud of that, you and your family have helped that happen. And you've helped these kids and these kids will go on forever knowing that it was The Russell Ferber Foundation that pushed them for they'll continue saying his name. Man, it's just wonderful. Jordan, I want to thank you so much for joining us. I can't believe we've come to the end. It's been enlightening, and it's been a pleasure.

Jordon Ferber:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Michael Liben:

And that will conclude this episode of"Bereaved But Still Me". I want to thank Jordon Ferber for sharing his experience and his wisdom with us and his comedy. Please join us at the beginning of the month for a brand new podcast. I'll talk with you soon. But until then, please remember, moving forward is not moving away.

Anna Jaworski:

Thank you for joining us. We hope you have felt supported in your grief journey. "Bereaved But Still Me" is a monthly podcast and a new episode is released on the first Thursday of each month. You can hear our podcast anywhere you normally listen to podcast at any time. Join us again next month for a brand new episode of"Bereaved But Still Me".