Radio Icon Delilah Opens Up About Her Son’s Suicide
“Slow down and love someone.” Those words are as recognizable as the name behind the slogan - Delilah. She’s a radio icon. With her signature soothing voice, she inspires her over 8 million listeners, sharing their stores of hope, love, and healing. In this interview, Delilah is revealing her own story of healing, by opening up about a family tragedy that changed her entire life, and how she’s learned to take on the world - one heart at a time. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My sister spoke at his funeral and she said, you know, Zach has given me the courage to live life fully.
And in his honor, I'm going to take a lot more chances.
And she has.
You know, she's stepped out of her comfort zone so many times.
And so I have to keep my eye on the prize, you know, and I have to live life well.
In his honor and his legacy.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Slow down and love someone.
Those words are recognizable as the name behind the slogan, Delilah.
She's a radio icon.
Finally, I have her trapped in the studio here.
Her signature soothing voice, which I'll seek to emulate, she inspires over 8 million listeners sharing their stories of hope, love, and healing.
Today, Delilah is here revealing her own story of healing.
She's opening up about a family tragedy that changed her life and how she's learned to take on the world one heart at a time.
God bless you for being here.
Thank you.
I'm going to quote you.
There's actually a social media post that you wrote, but it was compelling to everyone who hears it.
My heart is broken beyond repair, and I cannot fathom how to go on.
But I have to believe he is at peace with the Lord and that God will get us through.
You write that about your son.
Your biologic son.
Sorry.
Don't be sorry.
It's been a really tough year.
You know, I didn't think I would be able to cry any more than I cried when I lost Sammy in 2012. But when I lost my son Sammy, it was unexpected, but there was a reason.
He had sickle cell anemia and we knew his life would be shortened.
I thought he would live to be 30, 40, 50. I did not have any clue that his life would be as shortened as it was.
But when Sammy passed, the doctor that was the team of doctors at Mary Bridge Children's Hospital, most phenomenal team of physicians and nurses I've ever met in my life, he came and sat with us and he said, Sammy's heart was twice the size it should have been for a boy his age.
But because it had worked so hard pushing the sickled cells, and when he was in Africa, he had no medical attention.
His heart had worked so hard during his young life pushing those sickled cells through, he didn't get blood transfusions in Africa, there was no medication, that it just gave up.
And he was in, I mean you know this, he was in excruciating pain every day of his life.
The reason he was orphaned, his parents put him out.
Because he couldn't stop screaming, and they thought he was possessed.
His name was Zolali, which means spirits fly.
And they thought he was possessed because he couldn't stop screaming.
He was screaming in pain because he had sickle cell anemia, but they didn't know that.
So that grief, there was comfort in knowing he no longer hurt.
There was so much comfort in knowing that his spirit flew, that he was at peace, that he was with God, that he was probably reunited with his biological family.
But Zach was such a live wire.
Zach was my miracle child.
I was not supposed to be able to have more children.
He came late in life.
I was almost 40. And from the time he burst into this world, he was alive.
Vibrantly alive.
He climbed every mountain.
He slid down every stream.
He had 13 broken bones by the time he was 13 because he was born without the fear factor.
Nothing scared him.
Nothing.
I redesigned my house.
I live in an old farmhouse and I had a wraparound porch built on it.
And when they first built it and they finished it, I said, this isn't going to work.
And I talked to my business partner, Craig, out there.
I said, I don't know how to tell the contractor.
He's got to take it off and do it again.
He said, why?
Oh, gosh.
I said, because when Zach climbs out the window, that pitch is too steep and he's going to really break his neck.
So I need him to make the porch wider and the pitch less steep.
He says, what do you mean when Zach climbs out the window?
Tell him not to climb out the window.
I'm like, yeah, right.
Unless I remove all windows on that floor, he's going out the window.
That's a given.
That whole time when he was being a wild boy, and even for wild boys, 13 broken bones in 13 years is a lot.
Yeah.
How many did our son, Oliver?
Not that many.
Three or four.
He stopped counting, but it wasn't that many.
Yeah.
Sisters, none.
Zero broken bones.
Total of three daughters, now no broken bones.
Wow!
But during that time, was there ever an inkling of emotional issues of...
Well, he was diagnosed at 18 months old as being on the autistic spectrum.
He had something called sensory integration disorder.
So he did not sense pain like you and I do, thus the broken bones.
He had no fear factor and he did not feel big hurts, but something as simple as, you know, a gentle touch like this.
Would drive him nuts from anyone but me.
I was the only one who could touch his head.
I was the only one who could wash his hair.
He only ate off a green plate with a green fork and a green spoon.
He would have an absolute meltdown if somebody touched his green fork.
And so his siblings discovered this.
Oh, gosh.
And so they would take the green fork, you know, and slowly lift the green peas on the green fork to their mouth in front of Zach just for the reaction.
I adopted a little boy just a year younger than him named TK. And TK would do what we call drive-bys on his trike because...
Zach was so wild, and TK would take it and take it and take it, and then he'd wait until Zach was distracted, and then he'd ride by on this trike and just slam into him and then take off riding the other direction.
But Zach was very theatrical, very imaginative.
Until he was six or seven, he had to wear a cape every day.
Had to.
I sewed them on the sleeves, the corners of the shoulders of all of his shirts.
I just sewed them on because I got tired of, you know, trying to keep them safely on him because I didn't want to tie a cape around his neck because I knew he was going to jump off the porch and I didn't want him getting choked.
So my whole life was keeping Zach safe.
From dangerous elements.
So when he was a senior in high school, he had never lived with his father.
His dad and I divorced when he was a year.
He loved his father and longed for a relationship with his dad.
And so he asked me the year before if he could move in with his dad.
And I permissioned it.
And then his dad...
Was not in a situation to take him.
So his dad called me and said, you have to tell him you said no.
Like, I am not doing that.
No way, Jose, this is on you.
And so then, you know, a few days later, Zach came in my room screaming and yelling, saying, that's not fair.
Why did you say I can't go to dad's?
But his senior year, his dad had gotten in a different position and had a job and said, I want him to move in with me and do his senior year with me.
And so I tried to reason with Zach.
I said, Zach, you've done your whole education in this school system.
All your friends are here.
You're in the elite choir.
You have an opportunity to be the lead role in the plays.
You love theatrics.
You know, really, son, you need to think about this.
And our community is very blue-collar, very down-to-earth blue-collar folk.
And his dad lived in a very wealthy community, a new, up-and-coming, very wealthy community outside of Seattle.
And I said, the kids you're going to be going to school with might not get your green hair.
Just saying.
Mm-hmm.
But no, he wanted to do it, and there was nothing I could do legally or anything else to stop him.
And I had bought him a car, so he and his car and his little furnishings moved to his dad's house, which was about an hour and a half away.
So he was only there.
He moved in September.
And in October, there was a horrible storm in Puget Sound.
Power lines down everywhere.
Trees down everywhere.
And he was coming home from a girl's house and got in an accident with his car.
Totaled his car into the side of a police officer.
And the police officer wasn't wearing a belt and hit his head on the windshield and knocked him out.
And there was blood everywhere because he gashed his head and Zach thought he had killed this man.
And the trauma of that affected him so deeply he never drove again.
I said, you know, I tried to say, it's just rubber and metal.
The cop's okay.
I'll get you another car.
Never drove again.
It really traumatized him.
That was the end of October.
The girl that he was coming home from her house, she had met him at school and she kind of, you know, followed the beat of a different drummer and they were hitting it off and all of her friends kind of welcomed him into the circle.
In December, she dumped him and On a text, and all of her friends dumped him.
And no explanation given, you know, they're teenagers.
And so he goes to school, and all this new circle of friends he had made turned their back on him when he walked by.
And then over Christmas, he got very sick and he missed two weeks of school in January.
And his counselor called him into the office and said, I hate to tell you this, but you're not going to be able to graduate.
You've fallen so far behind, you're going to have to go to summer school to graduate.
And those three things combined crushed him.
And he was a heap on the floor in her office.
And it just so happened that that day I woke up and I thought, I need to go to Zach's school and have lunch with him because I would do that every week or so.
I would just, you know, tape out my show and drive over and buy him lunch and spend a few hours with him and...
And then come back to do the show.
And I woke up at 6 in the morning and said, I've got to go see Zach.
And I pulled up to the school just as this is unfolding.
So I talked to his dad and we decided to get him into a really good counselor and a really good doctor, which we did.
And the doctor put him on an antidepressant.
And after a few weeks, he was having complete meltdowns.
I would hear him.
He'd come back home crying in the shower for half an hour.
So I called the doctor.
I called his counselor.
I said, there's something very wrong.
This is getting worse, not better.
So when he went back to see the counselor, the counselor called the doctor and they put him on a different medicine, a much stronger medicine.
And over the next seven months, he was very engaged in his mental health.
He knew he was depressed.
He knew he was very sad.
And He moved back home.
He was going to summer school.
He was determined to graduate.
He never missed a counseling session.
He didn't go on our family vacation because he really bonded with his counselor and his counseling was so important.
He would take the bus, a two-hour bus ride to get to his counseling sessions.
But I started noticing weird conversations.
He kept talking about deja vu.
He said, everything is deja vu, Mom.
Everything.
Everything you're about to say, I already know what you're going to say.
I said, okay, what am I going to say?
He says, well, I won't know what you're going to say until you start to say it, then I'll know what you're going to say.
And he started talking about all this weird sci-fi stuff.
And his dad's really into sci-fi and Star Wars and Star Trek, and they love watching that together.
So I assumed that it was kind of an extension of that, and he had taken an interest in the book A Wrinkle in Time, which he had read in school years before, and a movie was coming out and he was talking about that.
But something was troubling me in my spirit.
So I called his counselor, had a wonderful conversation with the lady, and she said, Delilah, you know, you believe in a God you can't touch or see.
That's kind of weird.
And yeah, the stuff he's talking about sci-fi is kind of weird, but maybe he's just exploring his spirituality, you know, in some kind of avant-garde way.
Okay.
But I also saw other things that his temper was just trigger.
You know, he'd just go from zero to 60. Slam the microwave door one day.
And I said, why are you so mad?
And he turned and looked at me with sadness in his eyes.
He said, Mom, I don't know.
I don't know why I'm so mad.
I just get mad.
So I called his doctor twice.
And left messages.
And Zach had permissioned his doctor to talk to me.
I said, there's something wrong.
My son does not usually fly off the handle like this at me.
But still, you know, no big red flags or anything like that.
So the night before I went, the day before I left for Africa, it was a Wednesday, he walked through the house with me and was picking out my furniture.
He said, I want this couch.
I want this.
I want this.
I said, what do you mean you want this?
He goes, Michael and I are going to get an apartment as soon as he graduates.
I said, that's like a year off.
He goes, I know, but I already, because I had helped him go online and find the school, the college he was going to go to and the film program he wanted to enlist in.
And he said, this is the furniture I want for my apartment.
I said, that's my good couch.
He said, I know, Mom, but it's really comfortable.
I said, you know what?
You get through high school, you finish these classes, I'll give you the couch.
I mean, he was very hopeful about the future.
And then three days later, he took his life.
And he left a nine-page letter that was complete crazy ramblings about being a time traveler.
Completely delusional.
He said that he was one of the few that could enter, that time is a river, and he could step in and step out at any point that he chose, and that he was a chosen one that could do this.
And he said that the deja vu is actually that he's lived before, and that he's sorry that he has to make this decision, but that he would wake up the next day in his own bed.
But if something goes wrong, he said, I will catch up with you.
So, my husband gave me the letter and I read it.
And I said, this is the dumbest suicide letter I've ever heard.
There was no, I'm sad, I'm sorrowful, you know, the world doesn't understand me.
It was, I'm a time traveler.
What did this doctor say?
How did they make sense of it?
Did they think he was manic?
Did they think...
They didn't.
They never returned my call.
Even to the day they haven't returned your call?
They have never had a conversation with me.
They know that your son killed himself?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So we waited.
My personal assistant, a woman named Joni, went to get his effects from the coroner.
And he said, was this young man by chance on this medicine?
Was one of the side effects delusional thoughts?
She said, why do you ask that?
He said, this is the third young person in this community that is suicided the same way.
Oh my gosh.
On the same medicine.
I'm enraged.
I'm insanely enraged.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
They said, oh yeah, this is a common side effect.
It's got a black box warning, which says, oh, by the way...
Use of this drug may cause increased suicidal ideation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Does it say homicidal ideation too?
It does.
And the black box?
I believe it does.
I don't know.
I never saw the black box because I didn't pick up his first prescription.
His father did.
But...
At 18 years old, actually at 13 in some states, but when you're a teenager in America, you get anonymity and privacy with your medical decisions.
So my son, who was clearly depressed, knew he was depressed, owned his depression, we sought the best advice, we sought the best doctors, we got him to counseling, we did everything you were, quote, supposed to do.
And I said...
I went so crazy, my husband had to take my computer away because I'm digging deeper and deeper and finding more and more facts and thousands and thousands and thousands of families that have been destroyed by this, not just young people, older people too.
The side effects for men is sexual impotence.
Sonny, my oldest biological son, is as stable and steady and steadfast...
Police officer.
He's a police officer.
He's a father of five.
He and his wife are adopting their fifth.
They have four children and they're adopting a fifth.
He is as steady as the sun that rises.
He is just...
He's like a calm river.
Zach was the...
The ripples in the river.
And Zach was a waterfall.
He was a tsunami.
So you have pain...
Never being able to see him again.
Oh, I will see him again.
I will definitely see him again.
And then there's anger.
A lot of anger.
A lot of anger.
You're so good at playing the right song, the right conversation.
What song would we listen to right now?
Tell your story.
For Zach?
For you?
For me?
For you right now?
Probably Amazing Grace.
Because it's only...
By grace, God's grace.
If I didn't know that I know that I know that there is a hereafter and that there is a merciful God and that in the hereafter there's no sense of time, To Zach and Sammy and my mom and dad and everybody else, my brother that I've lost, it's a blink of an eye before I'm going to be with them.
But it's God's grace that sustains me every day.
Somebody said to me right after Zach passed, a few weeks after Zach passed, he said, Zach is much more a part of your future now than he is a part of your past.
I said, How can you say that?
All I have are pictures.
All I have are a few videos.
Okay, a lot of videos.
How can you say such a stupid thing?
I'll never see him again.
And he said to Lyle, you'll see him again.
And you're going to spend the rest of your life looking forward to the future you have with him.
And that changed everything.
I had to change my focus from looking at what I don't have.
I don't get to go to his graduation.
I don't get to go to his wedding.
I don't get to hold his firstborn child.
But I couldn't have an eternity with my boys.
And so I have to keep my eye on the prize, you know?
I have to keep reminding myself that He is a part of my future.
And I have to live life well.
In his honor and his legacy.
My sister spoke at his funeral and she said, you know, Zach has given me the courage to live life fully.
And in his honor, I'm going to take a lot more chances.
And she has.
You know, she's stepped out of her comfort zone so many times.
Did she break any bones yet?
Not yet.
We're working on that, though.
I'm going to get her on a horse before.
It has been an absolutely wonderful time speaking with you.
Thank you.
I treasure all you do, and it just reminds me why you're so successful, because you care.