Why Getting Real About Your Grief Can Help You Heal
Nora McInerny, host of the podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” is on a mission to help people break through the isolating barriers of tragedy by arguing: "it’s OK to not be OK." In one of her most revealing interviews yet, Nora shares her life story with the hope of changing the stigma around grieving and teaching the world to talk about death. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We do have a group called the Hot Young Widows Club and you'll hear stories in there and you're like, oh no, that one's worse.
We all are like, oh no, yours is worse.
Yeah, yours is worse.
Yeah, I'll take mine.
You guys get together frequently?
We do, yeah.
We have meetups all over the world now.
We have widows everywhere.
Men, women.
Turns out people are dying all the time and leaving behind loved ones.
Best club you'll never want to join.
Yes, we have t-shirts.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
My next guest became a widow at just 31 years old.
Less than two months before she lost her husband, her father had died of cancer.
In the midst of all those tragedies, she suffered a miscarriage.
When you ask Nora McInerney about her life, she won't sugarcoat her tragic reality.
Despite how uncomfortable and depressing it may seem, that's actually the point.
It is uncomfortable, and she wants to live with it.
She's the host of the wildly successful podcast, Terrible.
Thanks for asking.
She's on a mission to help people get real about loss and grief and break through the isolating barriers of the tragedy that we all face in life, hers more than most, by arguing that it's okay to not be okay.
But just to be honest about it.
So I thank you very much for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
It's beautiful out.
So if you don't mind, I'm going to just ask how you're doing just to get past that.
And I know you make a big deal about not wanting to have small talk.
You want to have big talk, which is what I want to do as well.
But I do have to ask as a clinician, that's a lot to go through.
It is.
It is.
I'm doing really well.
I'm doing really well right now.
So, I mean, today, just alone, I got to walk through New York City on my way here, and I used to live here a million years ago, and it's like seeing an ex-boyfriend who looks different and still good, but you remember why you broke up.
So, I don't know, my life is good, and all of these things that you mentioned are still a part of my life, even if you look at me, you probably think, that's just a normal, 30-ish, mid-30s, still mid-30s.
Young 30s.
Young 30s.
Late 20s.
Right, late 20s.
Who knows?
Ageless woman who just seems like she has it mostly together.
But all of us, like you pass all these people in New York or wherever you are and everybody is going through something and you have no idea.
What happened when you started being honest with people about the fact that it wasn't okay?
Oh my gosh, my life became so much less lonely.
So much less lonely.
I had felt as if the only way for me to go through widowhood, go through Aaron's death, my dad's death, go through all these things, was to be fine.
Or at least present the appearance of being fine.
And what you don't realize is by doing that, you are creating this sort of prison of loneliness.
So when you ask somebody that you really care about, how are you?
And they give you the same answer that they give the beggar at the grocery store.
They're not giving you a chance.
They're not giving you a chance to be there.
And I hadn't given anyone a chance.
So while I was boiling with this sort of resentment, honestly, of the people who had loved me and had loved Aaron and just thinking like, where is everyone?
I mean, I was keeping them at bay by telling them that I was fine, but I also had to tell myself that I was fine.
So I remember this conversation with my sister in her car where she said to me, you make it look easy.
We all think you're okay.
And I looked at her and for the first time out loud said, I'm not okay.
I'm not okay Why would I be okay?
It's been a few months, but if you checked my Instagram feed or you saw me out and about, you'd probably think, oh, wow, Nora's husband is dead, her dad's dead.
She lost a pregnancy.
She's doing great.
That new lipstick?
And I would tell you that, too.
That new lipstick, right?
So, I don't know, telling my siblings that, telling my friends that, I... It was like opening up a whole new life I could actually experience, like my grief, which I had been really avidly trying not to do.
You talk about it in your book, It's Okay to Laugh, Crying is Cool Too, and there's a little rain coming into your head, a big cloud over your head.
So when your sister, obviously your family, who cares for you, heard this, how did...
How were they able to help you be less lonely?
Or was it more just attitudinal than you realized, you know, everyone's got pain?
And mine's probably more discernibly, more definably worse than others, but...
I did have 25, 30 years of bliss before the tragedy hit me.
Oh, completely.
Some people never got that either.
Yeah, I think it did help me put things into perspective.
And I'd always been very sensitive to the suffering of others.
And so in a way, I did think to myself, and one reason why I was trying to present this facade of fineness, I do have it easy.
Yes, my husband died.
No, he didn't have life insurance because we were young and who needs it?
Yeah, my dad's dead.
And when my husband got sick, I was like, well, I'll still have my dad.
False.
Yes, I'm 31 and I just quit my job because I couldn't figure out how to show up to it anymore.
But I'm still a 31-year-old middle-class white woman with a net to catch her.
And most people are not.
Most people do not have even what I had, which was no matter what, I was going to be okay-ish.
A roof over your head.
I would still have a roof over my head, even if I lost my house.
Someone else would give me a roof.
Why is there a stigma?
As you've lived this, which is the ultimate research tool, a stigma that prevents people from talking about their grief.
You point this out, but I always wonder on the show, I see people coming to the audience, we have 200 people a day, And I ask them what they're doing.
They say, I'm doing fine.
And I'm thinking to myself that there's very little likelihood that your life is as fine as you're making it seem to me.
Well, I think that no one wants to be a bummer, right?
Like, no one wants to bring down the energy in the room.
And we also have this sort of...
Mythologized idea of what suffering is, right?
Which is that it's something to be overcome.
And kind of like the faster the better.
Like we love stories of people who overcome something.
We love comebacks.
We love a happy ending.
Like we really, really want a happy ending.
And you can get there, certainly.
Like you can be okay again.
I think the writer Anne Lamott, I don't know if you've ever read any of her writing, but she says you're just going to have to learn to dance with the limp.
So it's not as if...
I hate the phrase moving on.
People use that all the time.
Like, oh, it's so great.
You've moved on.
Like, you don't move on.
You move forward.
And all of these experiences, all of your negative experiences, all of your positive experiences, they all add up to who you are.
But we want to present the best version of ourselves.
And there's something about, you know, even the phrase like, oh, turning your lemons into lemonade, right?
Maybe.
Someday.
But first you just have a bunch of lemons.
Right.
You know?
Like, was it Chrissy Teigen who got like a delivery of like 100 limes from her grocery delivery?
There's not...
She can't make enough pies.
Okay?
There's just not...
It's very difficult.
It's very difficult.
So it's hard for us to...
I don't know.
It's hard...
Isn't it hard for you to watch people be uncomfortable?
Of course it is.
Yeah.
Yet...
Interestingly, part of it is because there are some problems I can help with and some that I can't, and it makes a big difference.
So, you mentioned the most great quote about learning to dance with a limp.
If someone's limping down the road that I know, I ask them why they're limping, they'll tell me, you know, maybe more detail than I want to know, but usually not.
You know, I bang my knee, and I'll say, oh, I mean, a better story than that, pretend you were in a bar fight, and then we joke about it, and we move on, but maybe they have a minuscule tear, and you can get it fixed, and it'll be gone one day, or a memory, or they'll have a scar, and they'll dance with a limp.
But if they're walking down, they're suicidally depressed, and I've had friends who've committed suicide that I've been with 24 hours before they killed themselves, and I had no idea.
I mean, none.
And I said, back, as we all do, if any of us have been through that, and probably most people listening know someone who's taken their own life, and they say, how did I miss that?
First of all, you feel hurt they didn't tell you, but then you also think, how did I miss it?
I mean, I was right there, and we were talking about everything else.
I mean, how can that even come up?
The things you're talking about were such small things, back to your complaint, and not the big things.
So I do think it's different between physical problems and emotional problems, although the emotional problems ultimately manifest in physical issues.
Yeah, I think that I'm not a doctor, so there's very little I can do when people have, like, a physical problem.
But there is hope.
You'll know that, yeah, you'll have your meniscus surgery.
Don't take your appendix out.
You'll be fine.
Yeah, and a solvable problem is wonderful, and I think that there's...
I feel like every time you're presented with somebody else's discomfort, you learn about the way that you process things, right?
And so are you the kind of person who is there to compare against somebody where your friend says, like, oh, I'm really struggling.
I'm having a hard time finding a job.
And you're like, well, I lost my job once.
There are people who want to do that, you know?
Right.
And then there are people who want to, like, rush and fix it.
There are people who want to be like, look, here's what you do.
The fathers.
Right, yeah.
And then there are people who just will avoid you, like, or who will avoid it completely.
And I think, by and large, most of us do try to avoid the discomfort of others.
And it's not out of malice at all.
So Aaron died.
We wrote his obituary together.
The unintended consequence of that is that it went viral.
Yeah.
And I got a lot of messages from a lot of people from all over the world, not all of whom had dead husbands, although I do have a niche for that.
You've cornered that market.
Got a good market on the hot young widows.
So I got all these messages from people who were going through something really difficult, and why were they emailing a total stranger?
Why were they emailing a stranger in the middle of the night?
not because they don't have anyone in their lives, but because they were afraid to make the people in their lives uncomfortable or the people in their lives had stopped asking because they didn't want to make that person uncomfortable.
Like, oh, God, do I bring up your dead dad?
Will I remind you of him?
And I just think at the root of it all is this need that we all have to just be seen and heard through our difficult thing, to not be rushed through it.
And that just means being okay with just being really uncomfortable for even a small amount of time, for like sitting with someone's silence, sitting with somebody's tears and just letting them be there without trying to, you know, joke your way through it or without trying to fix it or without trying joke your way through it or without trying to fix it or without It is hard.
It's something that I struggle with all the time.
How do you break the ice on that?
Let's say someone has a bad diagnosis.
You just want to be there for them.
So, how you doing?
Well, I'm prying.
Kind of dying here.
Kind of dying here.
As my dad told one of his nurses.
Exactly.
She was like, I'm so sorry.
He was like, don't be, I am.
Humor, as you just did, right?
Which can be disarming.
I mean, gallows humor works.
We do it in the hospital quite a bit, but it has limitations.
There's the reality that if I ask you, can I help you?
I'm not giving you homework to tell me what to do.
Right.
If I offer to help you, I might be doing something you don't want.
Yeah.
Hey, I got some socks for you.
Let's knit.
I got knits.
We've got so many socks.
So how do you break the ice?
I guess once you're there, you can sit silently and look around awkwardly.
But how do you get into the place where they're comfortable having you near so you actually can help if you see something you can do?
Okay, so there are two sides to this.
One is that if you are the person who is suffering, let's say your loved one is sick, you're sick, you do have to...
Part of the responsibility is yours.
Part of the responsibility was ours.
hours and when Aaron was sick, when a person is actively in grief or is actively dying, is actively sick, the machine around us kind of knows what to do, right?
Someone rises to the occasion.
Yes.
Someone sets up a GoFundMe page.
Someone sets up a meal train.
Somebody's coordinating, like, all of the tasks that you need.
But it's afterwards when things get really quiet.
Because really quiet.
And if you are a person who is feeling super lonely in what you are going through and it's hard for you to pick up a phone and tell somebody, I am super lonely and very sad and this is very difficult...
Write it down.
Write it down on Facebook and tell people, I cannot reply to your text messages because I am not sleeping and I don't know when I get them.
I don't know what I need right now.
I can't tell you what I need.
Part of that is we have to, as the suffering person, as the grieving person, our job is to teach people this.
Because even if they've been around...
A million widows before.
They haven't been around you specifically.
And there's not like some, I wish, I wish that there was some very specific protocol you could follow, but there isn't.
So you do need to have like some knowledge of yourself while you're also going through this experience that you've never been through.
And if you are a person who is grief adjacent, as I call it, your job is to just do what you can do.
Don't go beyond your limits.
If you are not a very verbal person, maybe don't try to have a conversation about it.
Maybe you're not the person who's going to make them feel better.
What if you're not a nice person?
Don't come by.
Yeah, if you're not a nice person, send a gift card.
Okay.
Everyone can do that.
Like, just send something in the mail.
But when people are like, what can I do?
Like, my answer is like, what can you do?
What can you do?
If you're not a nice person, I bet you can still rake a yard.
Yeah.
Go do that.
Yeah.
Do something.
Just do something.
Just do a thing.
And also, do it in like the quiet time.
Six months later, no one's thinking about your dead husband except you.
Yeah.
So...
That's probably the best advice that I learned from a professional of mine to give my patients and their families.
I'm a heart surgeon, so people die sometimes.
And I tell the family, you know what?
Take mom home if the father died.
But remember that the next couple of weeks for my job to get them to the hospital, and he's probably not going to make it.
And if he doesn't make it, the rest of your life is your job.
So it's not a marathon.
It's not a wind sprint.
When we come back, we'll talk about what actually happens at the moment of death with Nora.
Help me understand the fear that people have of the grief and the pain of witnessing death and actually dying itself.
Yeah.
Which is worse?
Was your dad or actually Aaron?
How was the fear for him versus the fear for you?
I think that Aaron and I talked about everything.
Everything.
How long were you married for again?
We were married three years.
So he was...
I mean, technically.
He was buried on our...
His funeral was on our third wedding anniversary.
Yeah, and we were together for a year before that.
So we were together for four years.
Four years total, okay.
We were together for four years, and my parents were together for 40. So right there, right, you have this automatic comparison of...
And I will just confess this because I have told my mom since, which is that, you know...
I did resent my mom.
I was like, you had 40 years.
Like, buck up!
You know?
Like, be grateful for that.
And like, how dare I? Because she lost 40 years of history, and I lost 40 years of future.
What's worse?
I don't know.
I'll never have to know.
Because you lose what you lose, and you don't get to pick it.
As far as dying, I am no longer afraid to die.
I just am not.
I was there when Erin died, and it was...
I think it was more beautiful than having my babies be born.
These words are overused, but it's so holy.
It was the biggest honor of my life, honestly, was to be there with him in that moment.
And the minute that he died, I swear to you, I felt like I understood my space in the universe and the meaning of life.
It was like everything opened up to me and I just thought, it really is okay.
Like this is how it all works.
Like I get it.
I get it.
And then like two days later, I was like yelling at someone in a Target parking lot.
But those windows of enlightenment are so small and like you just have to take them when you get them.
It really is okay.
People who disappeared when Aaron was really sick, they were just afraid.
They were just afraid and they missed out.
They really did.
Because, I don't know, you don't get to pick when you go.
You don't get to pick what takes you, but you can choose how to show up for somebody.
And I think they were afraid to be sad.
They were afraid that...
I don't want to remember him this way.
Neither do I. And I don't necessarily, when I think of him, I don't think of him sick.
I don't, even though that was the majority of our marriage.
I think of just like, I just think of him.
Take me to the time around his death, if you don't mind.
Who was in the room with you?
Just us.
Just you.
Our house had been filled for weeks.
He was on hospice for two weeks.
It was just always people there, so many casseroles.
In Minnesota, we call them hot dish.
Hot dish.
So many hot dish.
I was like, I'm gluten-free.
I can't even eat this.
It's just like, here's a hot plate of carbs.
As a doctor, you would not approve of literally any of this great food.
It's bad.
Like, would you like something dense?
Yeah.
And just cheesy, not good for your heart, I've heard.
And I don't know, there were just so many people.
So they're all gone.
They're all gone.
I told everyone to leave.
Our baby came in that day.
He was almost two.
He went to daycare literally at our next door neighbor's house.
So I would just sort of open the door and be like, there you go, there you go, buddy.
And she'd wave, pick him up.
And Ralph was almost two and he walked into Aaron's room or the room where Aaron was and he was wearing his little overalls and he got on his tippy toes and, you know, he's not even two.
He...
There's so many cords.
I mean, it's a hospital bed.
And Ralph gets up, and he's rubbing Aaron's face, and he's like, all gone, all done, goodbye.
And he just lays down with him, and we all lay down for a while.
And Ralph gets up, gets out of bed, waves goodbye, goes to the front door like he's ready to go to daycare.
I walk him over.
I come back, and...
Yeah, we laid there for hours, and then at 2.43, he just breathed out.
I'm sure that you've witnessed this too, but it's like, your body wants to live when it's 35. Your body wants to live even if cancer is making its way through all of your organs and shutting you down.
Your body wants to live.
And I could feel his body fighting, but I could also feel the peace of his spirit and of his being.
And I just knew the last time he breathed out that he wouldn't breathe in again.
It's like that really labored breathing.
There's like a rattle to it.
They call it the death rattle.
Actually, part of that day.
Part of death is very monotonous, and I want people to not feel bad about that.
I want people to not feel bad.
It's not as if you can carry on a constant vigil.
I was reading a pamphlet about death called Gone From My Sight.
Are you familiar with this?
No.
Highly.
highly distributed in hospice.
I don't think they've updated the design since like 1983.
There's a ship on it and it contains this poem about, you know, death is just a ship sailing over the horizon.
You're saying goodbye to the ship, but someone on the other side is just seeing it arrive.
It's really beautiful, but it also walks you through, is this person dying?
Because honestly, you don't know.
Hospice is truly DIY death.
They just give you a bunch of drugs.
They're very sweet people.
They kind of teach you what you need to know, but I'm not a nurse.
And also, I remember while Aaron was dying, I was like, I should be a nurse.
And he was like, you should not be a nurse.
You once threw up when they took my blood.
I'm like, that was...
Yeah, I did.
Oh my goodness.
I'll be a nurse who doesn't touch blood, okay?
You don't touch patients.
Yeah, I'm just there for the experience and I'll just bring some energy to the room.
Part of it, I was reading a pamphlet, okay?
I was reading a pamphlet being like, is this death?
Do we know?
I don't know.
He's breathing in a certain way.
Sure.
I don't know.
You just can't tell.
DIY death.
You touched on something that I've noticed in my own life, when I've seen death, that there's a subtlety to...
And it doesn't hit me hard, because I've seen it enough, perhaps, but I've seen death, and most people haven't ever seen it.
But there is a magnificence to it.
I won't call it beauty, because it's painful, but...
Magnificence is such a good word.
But you see it and you think there's something happening.
And people I've had on the show who have gone through death and come back for whatever reason, they always describe it in that phrase.
It means unimaginably beautiful, which is why I'm trying to find out what it felt for you because you're so verbal.
Yeah.
I like to have you come by if I'm just grieving.
Just explain to folks what that felt like, that sense enlightenment or whatever the phrase is.
It is.
I don't know.
It is magnificent.
I don't know if I'm going to do better than that unless you have a thesaurus lying around.
But it's, I mean, so especially for hospice or wherever you are, okay, so very rarely will somebody die in like a four-poster bed on like a beautiful estate surrounded by like roses and candles.
And their horses.
Yeah.
Right?
You will be in some odd mix of your real life and this medical life.
In our case, we were in what used to be my office with a hospital bed in it, with, like, yeah, just a hospital bed and all of these weird hospital things around.
Do you, side note, you can cut this out, are you, like, bothered by, like, how poorly designed, like, medical things are?
Like, why is the kidney pain, like, that light pink plastic?
Yeah.
Drives me crazy.
It's so bad.
It all smells bad.
And the lighting is bad.
The lighting is so bad.
I was just like, everything is so...
Like, before Aaron had his brain surgery, we're on this bed that was like an air mattress, and if you shifted, the air shifted with you.
Yeah.
I was like, we didn't sleep at all.
Well, this classic line is Oscar Wilde, the great 19th century British writer.
On his deathbed, look at the wallpaper, which was horrible, and he said, either this wallpaper goes or I go.
And then he died.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so commonly talked about that it's become part of our literature.
But can you imagine saying, either this kidney pen basin goes or I go...
That honestly sounds like my dad.
If it's not going, I'm going.
I'm out of here.
My dad had been diagnosed and was...
With lymphoma and I mean, it was everywhere.
So we just say cancer.
And he was in the ICU with pneumonia.
They sent him home.
They gave him the hospice talk.
And I just remember looking at him and being like, my dad's not going to do any of this.
And he was talking all day, hanging out with us all day.
And he died that night.
And I truly think it was just...
He just was goodnight, flipped off the lights.
Adios.
Yeah, in his library at home, you know.
Also, my parents' house was under renovation, and he was like, I never thought I'd die in a worse house than I lived in when I was 22. I was like, sorry, Dad.
And he was so funny right up until the end.
And so, okay, where we started, my train of thought is like really, it's going in a couple directions.
We're going to bring it back to the station for you.
I'm with you.
So the magnificence of it.
So you will be in a situation that is a mix of your real life and a mix of this sort of medical infiltration into your normal life if you're in hospice.
So maybe you'll be in like a hospice facility and they'll do their best to make it pretty, but you'll be in your house with like these ugly things and you'll be, you know, using some app to try to track when you're supposed to give somebody morphine and A lot of it.
You don't know when somebody's on hospice.
Will it be six hours, like with my dad?
Will it be two weeks, like with Aaron?
Will it be a year?
We have no idea.
You have no idea.
So you are exhausted.
And for me, I was 31. My husband was 35. I know that that is not...
I know that that's not okay.
You're not supposed to be doing that when you're 35. There are things that you have to do for somebody that...
That are a part of your wedding vows.
You know, like, sickness and health and, like, until death parts you, like, really does mean something.
So for me, it was like, do I want to be doing any of this stuff?
Yeah, I do.
Like, who but me should do this?
Like, who but me should make sure that, like, that when you go, you feel as okay as possible?
Like, so...
There are like those moments where you're doing something that's like traumatic and horrible and that you won't tell anybody else about.
But also you think like, yeah, this is where I'm supposed to be.
This is who I am.
And I'm this person for you.
And I hope that everybody has that.
And I know that not everybody does.
I think that's what's really...
I think that...
I think that when we're afraid of death, we're mostly afraid that We're afraid for ourselves.
We're afraid that we won't be okay without this person that we love.
And a little bit of us is looking at our own lives and thinking, like, is what I'm doing meaningful?
Will it matter?
Will anyone care after I die?
Will anyone do this for me?
I think we see ourselves in the sick and the dying, and we are forced to confront our own Really, our bodies are so weak and dumb.
I don't have to tell you that.
They're so amazing.
You're like, oh my gosh, honestly, your heart?
You know this.
Crazy amazing.
And also, real tricky.
Aaron's brain grew cancer.
That's so stupid.
Why would you do that?
Stop doing that.
Like, what?
He had this little heart murmur that apparently is really, really deadly.
Wolf Parkinson White, you know it?
Yes, it's an arrhythmia.
Yeah, and they're like, well, for some people, you know, it really bothers them.
We didn't even notice you had it till you had cancer.
Like, there's all these, like, we're just so fragile.
Like, there's this amazing system that keeps us alive, and then also, anything could happen, and we're really just, like, just grown-up babies.
Did you speak at all when he passed at that moment?
Yeah, I remember just telling him, like, I mean, the same things that you tell everybody.
That, like, it's okay, and, like, we'll be okay.
And I recounted, like, all of our, like, first dates.
I played this playlist that, honestly, looking back, I knew he would hate.
So I kind of feel...
I kind of feel bad about it because he didn't like my taste in music, but I was like, these songs remind me of, like, falling in love with you, even though you hated them.
And I put in some of, like, you know, he had a playlist, too, so I played his playlist.
When we come back, more questions with Nora.
What did you tell your son when he came back from daycare that day?
Yeah.
2.43, you said.
2.43.
And he came back at like 6, maybe.
I remember I texted my daycare lady, like, might not be a great time.
And she saw like, you know, the...
It's an unusual day.
Yeah, yeah.
And she'd known what was happening.
And Ralph came home.
And I think children are amazing.
And he knew.
Like, he knew.
He walked into our house, you know, with his little hat on.
But his father was still...
Aaron's still in his bed?
Yeah, Aaron's still there.
And, you know, and we went in there and I said, Papa was sick.
Like, Papa's body is done.
But inside all of us is this light that never goes out.
And so Papa's in your heart and he's in the air and he's in the grass, all these things that I would make Aaron say to me and Ralph all the time, like, will you be the sky?
Will you be the grass?
And Ralph was 22 months old and maybe six months later we were outside and he was waving at the sky and saying, "My Papa's the air." So some part of him, I think, just has internalized that.
Now he's five.
Ralph's five.
A very, very smart five.
And he knows.
He knows my dad had brain cancer.
Something was growing in my dad's brain.
My dad's body died.
My dad's body was really sick.
You were pregnant.
Yeah.
Did you have it on purpose?
Oh yeah, on purpose.
We did IUI, which for people who don't know is the cheap version of IVF, where they just put sperm in you.
Because IVF is so expensive.
We had no money.
I remember going to that meeting and they were showing us the prices.
And I was like, do you have anything...
Cheap.
Isn't it cheaper just to, like, the old-fashioned way, put it in there?
Yeah, you can't, though, if you are radiated and on chemo.
So air it, yeah.
Oh, you'd harvested the sperm.
Right, beforehand, because I was like, well, don't you want to have kids?
And he was like, yeah, I want to have kids.
So he got to go once.
We had barely, we had, like, two tries to have children.
It worked basically both times.
And we had a very limited amount of product.
And, and yeah, so like, yeah, he was like, you know, radiated.
They were like, yeah, you can't have any, no funny business.
And so, yeah, I had to do it medically.
And we had Ralph and we wanted Ralph to not be an only child.
Brain cancer works slowly until it doesn't.
And when I got pregnant the second time, we could tell Aaron wasn't doing great, but he wasn't doing noticeably worse.
He got MRIs all the time, and it wasn't like...
It was growing again, but there was something different.
So truly, I did get pregnant thinking that it would, I don't know, magic baby would keep him alive or I could just have like one other good thing.
And so I lost that baby five days before my dad died and six weeks before Aaron died.
And I just felt like I broke the whole world and like ruined everything, even though...
I mean, you know it's not your fault logically or medically, but it feels like it because it happened in you.
You feel like Jonah?
You're sort of cursed?
Yeah, I mean, everyone is that.
And then I look at other people and I go, no, that's bad.
We do have a group called the Hot Young Widows Club and you'll hear stories in there and you're like, oh no, that one's, yeah, that one's worse.
Like we all are like, oh no, yours is worse.
Yeah, yours is worse.
And my friend Mo, like, oh no, no, no, that's, yeah, that's, I'll take mine.
Do you guys get together frequently?
We do, yeah.
We have meetups all over the world now.
We have widows everywhere.
Men, women, gay, straight people.
Turns out people are dying all the time and leaving behind loved ones.
It's just, this club keeps growing.
Best club you'll never want to join.
Yes, we have t-shirts.
So, I'm pretty into them.
I want you to read this letter, if you don't mind.
It's a response you gave.
Actually, you describe it.
Okay.
Look, also part of grief is anger and pettiness, if that's okay.
I think that's just a common thing.
You don't want to be angry because you know it's unappealing.
I was checking Erin's email just to make sure I wasn't missing anything important, which I missed one important thing, which was one bill that went into collections for $35.
I was like...
And they literally don't care if you call and you're like, he's dead.
They're like, we'll need that $35.
I'm like, well, you'll get it, but you'll also get an earful.
So Aaron was a designer.
He was a graphic designer.
He was so talented.
And in his email, one day, he got an email.
It wasn't just a bot.
It was like from an actual person who was recruiting him for a position and wanted to know if he was available.
Like just a quick Google search, by the way, would reveal that not only had he died, but he had written an award-winning viral obituary before he died.
So I was just irritated.
A lot of other things were happening.
And I wrote the following.
Dear Francine, not her real name.
Names change to protect the innocent.
Dear Francine, thank you so much for reaching out to my husband for the senior art director position on December 8th.
Aaron is more than qualified for this position and would be a great candidate for your client.
Quick question, does this position require the candidate to be alive?
I only ask because he's been dead for several weeks, but I don't want that small detail to overshadow his many qualifications and take him out of consideration for the job.
Did she write back?
No.
I just probably ruined her day.
She probably just went home and cried.
I'm sorry.
I watched some of your stuff and listened to the podcast, obviously.
I didn't know what to expect, but I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you.
I started my career doing mechanical heart pumps.
At the beginning, they had a 50-50 chance of making the patients.
I ended up quite frequently having to deal with the grief, not as closely linked to the patients as you obviously were, Aaron, or everybody else, frankly.
Your dad, the child you lost.
But I remember frequently reminding people that they had been blessed with gifts that others hadn't had.
The first 35 years of their life with someone that they would never see again, but at least they had their 35 years.
And there are so many stories that I ran into along those lines that when people came back to me, but the most compelling of all, I'll tell you with you to end this podcast.
There was a gentleman who needed bypass surgery.
And he came in and he was obviously despondent.
It's bad news to know you need heart surgery, but it was more than that.
And I kept on trying to get him a little bit more cheerful about the whole process, at least energized to survive the darn operation.
And finally his wife started crying.
This is really bizarre.
I'm trying to put the pieces together of this puzzle, and she said, our son was the most charming 16-year-old you'd ever imagine.
He was murdered.
Actually, case of mistaken identity in a parade.
The gang thought he was a member of a rival gang and killed an innocent kid.
And we've not been able to pull our life together.
And my husband doesn't care if he's going to live or die.
He's really completely ambivalent about it.
I said, well, I can't operate on you.
I can't do open-heart surgery if you're not really into it.
That doesn't work that way, right?
You sort of have to want to get through it.
And then I was sort of speechless, which is rare for me.
I didn't really know what to tell him to get him psyched up for surgery.
Do it for your wife.
Come on.
Get past it.
None of that works.
Mm-hmm.
They'd actually already had those conversations.
So I said, you know, I'll hear something somewhere that will maybe be helpful to you.
I'll keep my ears open, but we're not doing anything right now.
It's been on hold.
Same day, guy comes in.
Similar age needs the exact same operation.
And I, you know, I say, listen, you got to get ready for the operation.
He says, oh, I'm here, doc.
I'm ready.
He says, well, I know, but I mean, I said, stop talking.
You know, I don't need all the details.
I don't need a pep talk.
I am ready.
I will survive.
And I said, why are you so confident?
He said, I've got a 16-year-old child at home who's profoundly developmentally delayed.
I have to change his diapers.
If something happens to me, I won't be there for him.
And that was my clue.
Because as crazy as it might sound, the first child had been with his dad for 16 years.
That father, I'm a dad, had made plans with his son for the rest of his life.
He had cats with them.
He'd done things that fathers do with sons that would bring him pleasure.
And he'd never be able to do the things you do with a 25-year-old boy, but he did all the things you could do up to 16 years of age.
And that second father never had any of that.
Yeah.
Never any of that bliss.
And I told the first father that story, and it was enough to get him through the procedure.
I actually operated on them at a similar time.
Oh, wow.
And I never forget the fact that we often, and you mentioned it earlier in your discussion, overlook those subtleties.
The bliss we have, that's why love hurts so much.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it does always end.
It does, it does.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Laura McInerney.
Yes.
Wonderful.
Wonderful job.
Check out her podcast.
It's brilliant and beautiful as she is.
And you can go to the Young Widows Club if you want to.
You don't take outsiders though, right?
We don't take.
We don't take looky-loos.
We require a death certificate.
I'm not kidding because every once in a while you get a weirdo.
