Christian radio personality to blast his mom's ashes skyward with fireworks

On Friday night, Doug Griffin, surrounded by loved ones, will watch his mother’s ashes explode in fireworks as part of a pyro show at a friend’s house.

It will be a celebration, but the truth is her death — and the scattering of her ashes — is as complicated as the relationship was between mother and son.

Griffin, a longtime Nashville Christian radio personality, lost his mother a year ago.

Suicide.

Michelle Griffin climbed into bed in her Franklin home and shot herself in the head with one of the small antique handguns her late husband had collected.

“I had to fight with the police to see my mom,” said Griffin, who lives three blocks away. “The officer said, ‘You don't want to see your mom like this.’”

It was the last act of a woman who battled depression for most of her life.

The battle led to a challenging relationship between her and her only child.

The one she almost gave up for adoption.

The one she threatened with big knives.

The one whose arms she tugged behind his back, demanding to know which one he wanted broken.

“It was,” Griffin said, pausing, “difficult at times."

His mother was pistol-whipped as a girl

“I never look back on it and think I was abused or I was a victim. Not me,” said Griffin, a personality on 94FM The Fish since the station launched in 2002.

“What’s normal? I didn’t know any different.”

His mother told him later she herself had grown up with an abusive mom, one who used to pistol-whip her and hold her head under water in their home in northern California.

To escape from the house, Michelle Griffin got married at age 15, to an electrician in the Navy who was four years older than she.

When Michelle Griffin was 19, she got pregnant, and she and her husband split. Her aunt convinced her to keep the baby instead of giving it up for adoption.

Doug Griffin said he remembers happy boyhood times when he and his mom sat up playing cards, and she’d regularly take him to amusement parks.

He also remembers being a latchkey kid who was on his own most times.

And he remembers his mother being abusive — though he didn’t call it that back then — many times before she got remarried when the boy was 11.

'She was sort of like a shell'

As adults, Griffin said his mother apologized for much of her behavior when he was a boy.

“At different times, we’d put all of our cards on the table. And our relationship got close.”

But, while his mother saw a therapist, she wasn’t willing to do the hard, painful work necessary to get to the core of her issues, Griffin said.

“She wanted a pill to fix her.”

His mother flourished professionally through the years, getting a nursing degree and a law license, eventually landing a lucrative government inspector job.

But she was hit with multiple sclerosis about 1995, and 12 years after that, she had what Griffin calls “a nervous breakdown” at work.

Griffin, by then an on-air personality in Nashville, flew back to California to be with his mom. He was devastated at what he saw.

“She was sort of like a shell. Sitting there picking things out of the air that weren’t there,” Griffin said.

“It was scary. It was probably the first time that Mom wasn’t the champion, the superhero, that I saw that she was vulnerable.”

Joking around with mom on the air

His mother retired and got some help, but her physical health deteriorated, and she moved to Franklin, Tenn., to be near her son after her husband died in 2012.

Once here, she eventually started cutting herself, and she revealed she had been thinking about suicide.

Her son and daughter-in-law, Sheryl, took her to Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital and later, Rolling Hills treatment center near Franklin. Everyone thought she was getting better.

Griffin would even include his mom on his radio morning show on The Fish now and again, and the two would joke around on the air.

The family got together Monday nights for games and dinner, and one Monday last July, Griffin sent his 17-year-old son to pick up his grandmother for the festivities.

A short time later, several police cars and an ambulance whizzed by the Griffins’ house, and the radio personality, half-jokingly, said he hoped they weren’t heading to his mother’s house.

“Mom swore up and done she didn’t have bullets,” Griffin said. “She obviously did.”

The funeral was hilarious, just as Michelle Griffin wanted.

'This is the last thing she held'

She had long before made a list of her wishes surrounding her death:

Funny stories about her at the memorial;

Certain possessions had to go to certain charities;

Put her remains in or on fireworks, and set them off.

“She wanted to go out with a bang,” Griffin said, shrugging.

Within weeks, police asked Griffin if he wanted the gun his mother used to kill herself. Unsure, he said yes so he might later have a choice.

A year later, the gun sits in a police evidence box on his desk at home, just a few feet from the urn that holds his mother’s ashes. Griffin can’t bring himself to get rid of it.

“This is the last thing she held,” he said.

“It was the instrument of her death, but it’s the last thing she held.”

Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384 or on Twitter @bradschmitt.