Michael Cruz Kayne turned his newborn son's death into a special that will destroy you
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In 2009, Michael Cruz Kayne and his wife, Carrie, were ecstatic when she gave birth to twins, Truman and Fisher.But 34 days later Fisher died, leaving them weighed down by a universe of grief.Parenting Truman and later their daughter Willa kept them moving forward, but the sense of loss remained visceral, even if it was not something they felt comfortable talking about with others.
Ten years later, Kayne decided to write about his grief on Twitter and the posts went viral.The response inspired Kayne to write a one-man show, “Sorry For Your Loss,” about his family and his experience but also about grief in society.After performing it for several years, Kayne has now released it on Dropout.
The show opens with material about Kayne, Carrie and their two children, but 20 minutes in, he stops and explains that there’s someone missing from their family portrait.Kayne still finds laughs throughout the rest of the show — he shows on a screen the receipt from the funeral home that says, “Thank you, please come again.” But Kayne, who has been writing for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” since 2020, tries to make us understand to whatever extent we can what he and Carrie went through, saying things like “I cry all the time,” “We felt utterly alone,” and “You can’t believe how far you are from what you thought your life was going to be.”Kayne recently spoke by video from his Brooklyn apartment about what he hopes the show can mean to audiences and to his family.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.How did the show evolve into what we now see?I couldn’t go to a comedy club and wax poetic about sadness — some kinds of sadness you can do that with but the death of a child is such a specific and profound taboo.
So I had to find spaces that would let me try something a little weird.My first show was basically an hour of extemporaneous gr...