Former media personality talks about spirituality, aging, and the emptiness of modern life in a new memoir

He’s been an actor, a stand-up comic, a radio and TV host, a cancer patient, and, these days, a spiritual guide. Now, Ralph Benmergui is detailing his incredible journey in a new book. In I Thought He Was Dead:  A Spiritual Memoir, Benmergui details his decades in the public eye while also sharing his thoughts on spirituality and aging.

He admits the title is something of a comment on the nature of fame itself.

“In the last 10 years or so I really went into work that was out of the public eye. So, if I was at some party, before COVID when we actually went to parties, I would be sitting there and someone would say, ‘This is Ralph Benmergui.’ And there’d be a look on the person’s face. And I could tell they were thinking, ‘I thought he was dead,'” he explains.

“And I realized that I do that! Mort Sahl, the comedian, just died. He was 91 years old. He was a 1960s and ’70s icon and when I heard he died, I literally said to my wife, ‘I thought he was dead.’ So that’s really the genesis of that.”

Speaking of fame, Benmergui says he learned long ago not to attach his self-worth to his work. And he doesn’t think you should either.

“It’s really not what can sustain you because then you’re relying on other people to decide whether you’re good or bad or doing a good job,” he says. “Be honest with yourself when you’re not doing things well. But, really, keep your center and try to become yourself as much as possible, which, as a spiritual memoir, that was the job I was trying to do in this book.”

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Benmergui, perhaps best known as the host of the CBC’s Friday Night program in the early `90s and then Benmergui Live on Newsworld, is now an ordained spiritual counselor.

“To help people get their spiritual centre back again, or to find it, really, in some cases. It’s really about being and enjoying that experience and really listening to people from my heart to their heart.”

He also has a lot to say about aging and elderhood.

“We don’t think of ourselves as old and improved. It always has to be new and improved, because we’re commodities. So, I don’t want us to become seniors looking for discounts at the drug mart. I want us to become elders and cultivate our wisdom so that we can actually be useful to people.”

Benmergui, who turned 66 on December 13th, is trying to set that example in his own life.  I Thought He Was Dead is also informed by what he feels is the emptiness of modern life.

“Really, we’ve got to come together as people stop being individuals to start being a collective that is a common good. And it used to be that religion was how we created community. We have to recreate community now in different ways.”

It’s that idea of a common good that Benmergui calls ‘walking each other home’ that he feels is missing nowadays.

“[I was] just talking to somebody whose mother is 91 and she was very sad about it. And I said, ‘You know, you’re there for her. You’re literally walking her home, like, just walk her home.’ That’s all we can do with each other. We’re not in this alone. The sooner we realize that, the more we can do to help each other live a better life, I think.”

I Thought He Was Dead:  A Spiritual Memoir is available from Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.