Bob Saget Contemplated His Own Mortality Months Before Death in Newly Unearthed Podcast
A newly unearthed podcast with Bob Saget has just been released capturing the actor speaking candidly about his mortality, months before his sudden death in January 2022.
Saget sat down to speak with journalist Radio Rahim for an episode of his podcast Til This Day back in May 2021. The interview is finally being released in three parts by the media company, Luminary.
In the interview, Saget speaks openly about growth, his tragic childhood, and the way he climbed out of immense grief.
“I’m proud of myself, because I’m onto a new thing at 65. I’m different than I was,” Saget said. “We’re all rethinking what we said 20 years ago. 10 years ago, four years ago. I’m not even rethinking it. I just don’t have the same way of doing humor or conversation. I guess therapy, having three kids, watching people pass away in the past few years, mortality, all that stuff has fortunately changed me. My kids tell me ‘Dad, you’re different. It’s so nice to watch you grow!'”
“I hear more frequently than people having these epiphanies and understandings of life at 50 people are getting afraid at 59, 65 is settling in and actually harnessing the wisdom,” Rahimn added.
“I know a lot of people and I know you do that — Get afraid at 30. And I was loving getting into 30 cause I didn’t wanna live in my 20s. I was so depressed,” Saget admitted.
He recalls losing a lot of family members during young adulthood and how experiencing immense grief shaped him into wanting to make films as a form of escapism.
“When you started losing aunts and uncles. How old were you?” Rahim asked.
“I guess it started when I was like seven and then every two years somebody died,” Saget said. “I had a cousin die, she died at 23 of cancer after giving birth to her child. And then a lot of cousins went through a lot of hardship. So I was like 9, 10, 11, 12, 14. It was a lot. And then I lost both my sisters.”
Rahim asked how Saget dealt with seeing his parents lose so many family members.
“What was it like for you watching them go through that? And then how did you digest it yourself? How did you feel your role was in this whole thing?” he asked.
“Well, to be honest with you at nine years old, I picked up an eight-millimeter camera and I just made projects,” Saget replied. “I shot all these terrible eight-millimeter movies and put friends in them that I could find and made friends by putting them in movies.”
Rahim then asked about escapism and how that specifically helped Saget process the tragedy.
He replied, “Well, there’s so much pain and my parents couldn’t deal with it. And every time they finally started to try to regroup something else, terrible happened.”
Saget passed away on January 9th in an Orlando, Florida hotel room at the age of 65. His sudden death was suspected to be from injury caused by an “unwitnessed fall.”
Listen above via Til This Day with Radio Rahim.
