“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” co-creator and star Rachel Bloom talked frankly about the experience of losing her good friend Adam Schlesinger and giving birth to her daughter at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in an upcoming episode of Lemonada Media’s “Good Kids” podcast.
Despite the sad subject matter, Bloom takes a hopeful tone, noting that the amount of time she’s spent thinking about “the life cycle and the death cycle, and how they’re linked” had profoundly changed her.
“I gave birth in the middle of COVID and then my daughter was also in the NICU, and then a week later, my friend died of COVID,” Bloom says in the podcast, which drops with the new season Sept. 29 on Apple podcasts. “The second she came into the world, I found out my friend Adam was on a ventilator. And actually, they were on a ventilator at the same time, so I hoped they would both get better. But, there’s nothing more on the nose as one person enters, one person is leaving.”
Schlesinger, a songwriter known for his band “Fountains of Wayne” and as a music producer and composer on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of COVID-19 on April 1.
“But I think the profoundness of [it] — 10 minutes after he died, I was breastfeeding because she needed food. So there’s something very ego-less about, like, I can only grieve for so long right now — I have to feed this child,” she continues.
“And also, grieving life while holding new life, and realizing she’s gonna die someday, we’re all gonna die. Separately, the whole time I was pregnant, it made me think about my future in a really permanent way, of feeling my own mortality in so many ways,” Bloom says. “So it brings up so many profound things, and it was stuff I hadn’t really fully realized or thought about honestly since the time I took too many mushrooms in Amsterdam.”
Bloom then speaks about her daughter’s condition when she was born: “When she came out purple, like struggling to cry, it didn’t hit me at first. I was like ‘oh yes, that’s a baby, she’s just coming out into the world, life is hard. And my gyno was like ‘no no, get a baby nurse in here right now.”
“So none of this has been typical, and even I had worried about postpartum depression, I’d really prepared for that and I stayed on my antidepressants. I don’t have postpartum depression — I don’t even know if I had what’s called the baby blues because during the time I would have had the baby blues I was crying because of someone dying,” she adds.
But Bloom’s advice for others who may be grieving while raising a young child was simple.
“The only advice is you just let your child be your guide. You’re so in it with a newborn, there’s only so much you can think about yourself and focus on yourself.”
There’s much more, and you can listen when the new season of Lemonada Media’s “Good Kids” podcast launches Tuesday.