- (female announcer)
Production funding for this program is made
possible in part by: the WKNO production fund, the WKNO endowment fund, and by viewers like you.
Thank you. [upbeat instrumental music] - She's the author of
three best selling books, and hosts the podcast,
"Terrible, Thanks for Asking", that reaches over
15 million listeners. She helps us navigate
grief with a sense of humor and insight, and now
it's time to join me for A Conversation
with Nora McInerny. So Nora, let's start out,
give viewers a little bit of your story, because you had
three very tragic incidents back to back to
back that set you on this course
that you're on now. So, let's start there with the three very traumatic incidents. - Yeah, I think
like most people, my life was good until it
was hard, and bad things were always something that
happened to other people, and then all of a sudden
I was other people. And so for me, that
started in 2014. My husband Aaron had had
brain cancer for three years, but in the fall of 2014, I
lost our second pregnancy, and five days later,
my dad died of cancer, and six weeks after
that, Aaron died, also. So prior to that, I was
just living my life, going to work, and everything
completely changed. - And so, let's
start with Aaron, because I think it's a
neat story in terms of, obviously falling in love,
but also too, doing something special with a very tough
situation, and making the best of it, and living
within the moment of it. So describe kinda,
falling in love, and then ultimately what
happens a year later. - You know, falling in
love is only interesting to the two people who
are doing it. [laughs] So it was exactly
like you fell in love, or everybody fell in
love, where finally you just meet this
person and it clicks, and you're thinking,
how did we both exist on this planet without
knowing each other? It's like, you've discovered
a secret that nobody else has ever learned, except
for all of the other people who have fallen in love,
but it's still so special. And I met Aaron, and we
were together for a year, and almost a year to the day he was diagnosed
with brain cancer. It came out of nowhere,
at least to us. It had been growing in
his brain for a while, and Aaron was, the day I
met him and the day he died, the funniest person
I'd ever met. I was completely unequipped to deal with
something difficult. I had not been through anything
hard or seen anyone really go through something hard in
my life, and neither had Aaron, but watching him
deal with things was laying out the blueprint
for the rest of my life, truly. Aaron lived every
moment in the present. So he and I agreed right at
the onset of his diagnosis to tell the doctors to never tell
us how much time he had left. Like, what are you
gonna do with that information except
watch a clock tick down? We wanted to just make the
most of the time we had. And I think when you
think about that, like this sort of yolo,
like you only live once, live every moment mentality,
it's kind of easy to think, well, I mean what, did
you climb a mountain, did you jump out of an airplane? We went to work, we got married, we had a baby, we
walked our dogs, and I yelled at him for not
taking out the trash. [laughs] - Very normal. - Very normal, it was like
everybody else's marriage, and that is what
has really made me appreciate what I
have in every moment, even when that moment
is really, really hard. Aaron was a funny person,
and I think the best exhibit of that that I
have is his obituary, which I think I've shared with
you before, but we wrote it-- - This is a very famous obituary at this point.
- It's a very famous obituary. It's literally, I've
written three books and this is my most
famous piece of writing is that Aaron and I co-wrote
his obituary before he died. And it says, "Purmort,
Aaron Joseph, age 35, "died due to complications of
a radioactive spider bite, "and years of crime
fighting against "a nefarious criminal
named cancer, who has plagued our
society for far too long." It talks about our son Ralph avenging his father's
untimely death. Aaron was a huge Spiderman fan. He was the kinda guy
who always made you feel like you belonged, when
you were around him, oh, I'm in on this joke,
I'm a part of this. We wrote that,
and it went viral, and suddenly the entire world was in on this,
which was so Aaron. So I think when we lose
the people we love, we never have a choice, right? We don't have a choice about
when these things happen, but we do have a
choice as to whether we close ourself
around that loss, or whether we use their light
to help us burn brighter. And I hope that I do that with Aaron.
- And that's something that you encourage people
to do is, it's tough, but write your obituary
while you're alive so that way you're telling
the story that you wanna tell. You're not leaving
it someone else, and family that might think
that, I need to be listed first, but really allowing them
to tell their own story. - Yeah, and there's so
much power in that, too. I will also tell you that you
can say that you're Spiderman. They're gonna publish it. - They'll put it. - You pay for it. [laughs] You pay for it. You do pay per line, but if
there's anytime you should be splashing out, it's when
you die, okay? [laughs] - Write a whole narrative. - Yeah, take a page
if you need to. - But one of the things
that was interesting is, you said that a lot of
his friends, as soon as they found out, they started
treating you both differently. Elaborate on that. - Look, sad things
happen everyday. The world is full
of sad stories. But when you turn somebody into just a sad story, they're
no longer a person. They're no longer
the person who threw the best Halloween party
you've ever been to. They're no longer a
person who definitely does wanna go see that
Marvel movie at midnight. And we don't distance
ourselves from people because we're bad
people, we do it because we're so afraid of doing
or saying the wrong thing. Then instead, we do or say
nothing, because that way, I mean, we can't do
or say anything wrong. And to me, that is something that happens when
you pity someone. When you feel bad for somebody, it allows you to
separate from them, and when you feel
bad with somebody, when you can use
your imagination. Our parents just
told us, you know, put yourself in
someone else's shoes, and we were probably
like, gross, no. Why would I wear [laughs]
somebody else's shoes? But what they were
asking us to do is to just use our imaginations,
and to really, really feel with somebody, which
is really uncomfortable. And I felt that sense of
pity from a lot of people in our lives who I
know cared about us, but could not take
that next step. And I know that in the
past, I've done that, too. I've absolutely done
that, I've removed myself from a situation because I
thought, what would I add, what would I do, I
don't know what to say, and so I'll just hang back here. - Share what you and
Aaron both were doing, because you were doing,
both of you kind of in the ad industry so to speak,
so you both were creatives. So give us a little bit of
the flair for what you two were doing professionally,
and some of that side of it. - Yeah, Aaron was a
designer, a graphic designer, and he focused on websites
and app development, but he was also just
wildly creative on his own, which I think is the best
kind of creative person, a person who can
do it for money, but also do it out just
of his own passion. I'm not a designer. He would be horrified
if he saw the things that I've put in a PowerPoint. He used to look over my shoulder at presentations I was making. We worked at different agencies,
we were basically rivals, and he would say,
"Are you gonna center that?" And I'd say, "Yeah,
it's in the middle." [laughs] "Is that the
font you're gonna use?" "Yes." "Are those the
colors you're...?" "Yes, these are what
I'm going to use." But if I had an idea,
and I'm a words person and always have been, I
could bring it to Aaron, and he took it seriously, and
he wanted to make something. And it didn't have
to be for money, and it didn't have to be for
attention, he was so humble, but he was so good at bringing
other people's ideas to life. And just for fun. If you had a great
idea for a name for your softball team, okay? And you wanted a T-shirt,
and you didn't even have a good softball team, he would
design that T-shirt for you. He would act as if it were
a serious art commission. And for that I am
forever grateful. - Well, and that's a non-profit
arm that you have, as well. - Yeah. - Share about that, because that can borrow that.
- Wow, good. That is what you were asking. - Yeah, see? Yeah.
- Good, good, good, good. - I was going there. - I'm great. So, when Aaron was
like also kind of a, he was just a funny guy, and
he had this huge collection of vintage T-shirts that he
had bought at thrift stores, and some of them
were, like you know, Little League tees, and he
had this T-shirt, kelly green, threadbare, clearly homemade. And on it, in cracked,
worn out letters, it said, still kickin. The kind of T-shirt
that somebody probably made 30 of for their
grandpa's hundredth birthday. Somehow it fell
into Aaron's hands, and was young and healthy,
and so he wore it ironically. He wouldn't let me borrow
it because I'm sweaty. Thanks. Don't say that to your wife. [laughs] 'Kay, make up any other reason to not lend her your
favorite T-shirt. Like, oh I was going
to wear it today. Don't say, you're too
sweaty for this T-shirt. I mean, it's true, but come on. So, Aaron was wearing that shirt the day that he had a seizure. He was wearing that shirt
the day we found out he had a brain tumor.
- Wow. - And we both looked at
it and thought, huh, yeah. So, Still Kickin is a
non-profit that I have, and we give unrestricted
financial grants to other people who are
going through something hard. It's pretty common
knowledge, most Americans don't have $500 saved
for an emergency. I can tell you from experience, emergencies are more than $500. That's like the
entry level emergency is $500, and it just goes up. You just add some
more zeroes to it. And Aaron and I
were really lucky because we had great insurance,
and we had great families, and we had this entire
network, not just of you know, family, and friends,
and strangers. People who showed up
and did support us when Aaron was sick,
and when he was dying. He was 31, he didn't
have life insurance. And the entire internet
created a life insurance policy for him that let me pay
my mortgage after he died, that let me pay off his funeral,
pay off his medical bills, and live, and really take
care of my son, and to grieve. And Aaron and I
knew that, I mean, we shouldn't be lucky for that,
everybody should have that, and the importance of having
power over your own story, and not being pitied
is so powerful. So the idea came from Aaron. He said, I wanna
recreate this T-shirt, and I wanna sell it, and I wanna
give the money to a person. And it was 2014, and I thought,
yes, we should do that. Well, it was harder in 2014. Where are we gonna put
all these T-shirts? How were we gonna set up this
website when he was too sick to make one, and he was the
person who knew how to do that? And by 2015, I had an answer. And he was gone,
but I could still bring this idea across
the finish line. So, we sell merchandise
at stillkickin.co, and every month we pick a
person to be our beneficiary, and we tell their
story without pity, and we give them an
unrestricted financial grant to get through this hard thing, and use for whatever they
need, or whatever they want. And to date, over
the past four years we've given out over $200,000. - That's awesome. - And we've sold T-shirts,
and hosted events all around the country,
and we've sold shirts all around the world, and
those two words, still kickin, those mean something
different to everybody. That meant something
different to Aaron when he was sick than
it means to me now. And it is not a phrase
that sugarcoats things, it is a phrase that
acknowledges, yeah, life is hard. Yes, we are all going
through something, and we're still
here, so lucky us. - Talk about where you are
now, because you are remarried, and I want you to kind
of paint that picture, because I think the way you
approach it is very real, but it's also too something
you don't see a lot of because you talk about
disruption on both sides, and a blended family,
and how you have to make that whole, but
not push aside the past. - Right. - So where are you today? - Today, I am in Memphis. Surprised you didn't know that.
- So physically, today you are, yes, yes. - Come on, buddy. But I am remarried, I'm
married to a man named Matthew, and he came with two
children, and I had one, and then we had another,
so there was some organic growth, there
was an acquisition. It is a blended family, and
you don't get a blended family without two families
breaking apart first. And I get asked a
lot, how does Matthew deal with your grief, how
does Matthew deal with Aaron? And I say, well how do you
think I deal with his grief? How do you think I deal
with his other wife? How do I think I do? It's because we've both
been through something. So I don't ask him to pretend
as if this is first marriage, I don't ask his children
who are now our children to pretend as if they did
not have a different life before we met, and he doesn't
ask that of me either. So the two of us both
have moved forward, but our pasts are
a part of our life, they're a part of
our experience. His former marriage, the
children he raised with her, that made him the
man that I love in the same way that my
relationship with Aaron and losing Aaron made
me who I am today. So, it's important for
me to tell people that. When they see our
family on the outside, we have four kids, a
rescue dog, and a minivan. We look great, and we are great, and we have a history of
pain, and that is okay. It is okay. Having a painful
past does not mean that you are not
allowed a happy present, and having a happy
present does not mean that you are exempt
from pain in the future, and it all exists
as a part of life. And when we try to ignore that and only focus on
the highlight reel, the Instagram worthy stuff,
then we feel so isolated when the terrible things happen, and I want to have
children, and friends, and a whole world
who understands, well, we get through
it all together. - Right. - Yeah. - Talk about timeline,
because when people think grief, there's
no finish line. And you talk about it a
lot where even it's not or, it's yes and, and that all
of this makes you whole, and who you are, and
you grow from it. So share when you talk about
timelines and expectations, what is reality when
you talk about grief? - The reality to me is that
it is a chronic condition. And that doesn't mean that
it feels the same for me almost five years after Aaron's
death as it did a year ago, or that first day of widowhood, but it also doesn't mean
that it's going to feel the same today as it will in
five years or in 50 years. And I think that
living in the west, we don't have a great
culture around grief, so most people don't get
a lot of time to grieve. The average bereavement
leave is like three to five business days if
you lose a spouse or a child. What if you lose
your best friend? What if you lose the uncle
who raised you like a dad? What it's going to come down
to is what your employer will allow you to
take, and as a result, when we see people
out in the world acting like normal
people and going back into their normal
routine, we think, well, I guess it's over,
I guess they're okay. And then we start to feel like, well, I guess I
should be okay by now. Most people have this
idea in their head that the year mark will
be sort of a finish line, and I definitely
thought that, too. I thought, well, if
I can just get there, if I can stay busy enough,
then a year will pass, I'll have avoided
feeling truly horrible, and I'm a genius. But that was just
a way of sort of kicking the can down the
road, and it did come out. It did come out, and I
had to deal with my grief because otherwise it
was dealing with me, and I was not in control of it. So, I try to, whenever
I meet somebody who is really in
the thick of it, say, this is hard, this is
really hard, and that's okay. It's okay if you are
struggling right now, it is okay if this
is extremely painful, it's supposed to be. And when you push against
that and try to cover it up, that creates even more
pain within yourself. So, try to sit with it,
try to work through it, try to lean on the
people around you. You can get professional
help, you can get help within your community and
your faith community. It is so hard to
open yourself up and say, this
actually really hurts, but the people who matter,
who want to be there, need to know that so
that they can show up. - And you talk a
lot, and I definitely want you to cover
this because we all struggle with, we say,
how are you doing? And you feel like you
have to say, oh, I'm fine. What do loved ones say,
when they know they're obviously not fine, and they're
struggling, how do you help? What do you do? For all of us who know someone who's going through grief
and pain, how do we help? - So, the first thing that
you can do is show up, and show up consistently, and
show up for the long term. Now, not everybody that
you love who is suffering lives within driving
distance of you, or walking distance of you, but you can still
check in, right? So the first thing
that I do when somebody has experienced
a loss is I do reach out and I say, you
don't have to reply, but I just want you to know that I've heard the news, and
I'm thinking about you. No need to reply. I want them to feel
no obligation to me. Then I put that
date in my calendar as a recurring event every year so that I can be a person
who remembers with them. In the long term,
we all want to know that the person we loved
mattered in the wider sense. That we are not the only person who thinks of them
and is missing them. It is wonderful, one
of my favorite things is when people who knew
Aaron will e-mail me and say, hey, I was walking today
and I saw this thing that made me laugh,
and I knew Aaron would've laughed at
it, and I did too. That's great, that's great. And they didn't make me
sad, or maybe they did, maybe I cried a little
bit, but I'm so glad to know that he matters
to more than just me. So letting a dead person be
more than just a sad story, reminding people of, and
letting a person talk about their dead person as more
than just their death, too. So, not how did
your husband die, but tell me about your
husband, what was he like? And like, what did he love,
what did he look like? There are so many
things that you can do, but if you really, really
care about a person, and it's a very
close person to you, being there and
listening is so hard. It's so hard for us to
not fill that silence, to not make a
joke, to not create some sort of a diversion,
to not change the subject. You don't even have
to bring it up, but just sitting with a person, and letting them
know that you are present with them is
really, really powerful. - And that is something that
you've had to teach yourself to do on your podcast,
and even in the, is it the Jewish faith is they, well, actually, share
what the Jewish faith is. - I also found so much
comfort in knowing the grieving rituals
of other cultures, and in the Jewish
tradition they sit shiva. They spend seven days
in intense mourning, and that's like really,
the core group of mourners, like immediate family. And you go to them, and they are the people
who can break the silence. They are the people
who can tell you like, what the subject
of conversation is. Now, in my tradition, which
is like, Minnesota Catholics. Like, we walk in and we're
like, here's some food, and also, what's something
we can talk about, you got a new rug, oh
wow, your dog's so cute. We just have to talk
and fill that quiet, and we want to bring up
something that is not sad. But there's so much power
in just sitting there, and if the mourner wants to
talk about their new carpet, or their dog, or the
weather, you can do that. And if they wanna talk about their dead person,
they can do that. And if they don't
wanna talk at all, then you can all sit quietly. And I think there's really
something beautiful in that. - Share a little teaser for
the podcast, and give us maybe, I won't say favorite, but
give us a recent guest and something you
learned from the guest. - So, "Terrible, Thanks
for Asking" is a podcast that you can get anywhere
you listen to podcasts, Spotify, iTunes, and it's a
narrative interview podcast. So you're not just
gonna hear two people talk back and forth for and
hour, there's a story arc to it, and there's music to it, but
the whole point is to sit down with a person who's experienced
something difficult, something that is usually
very hard to talk about, and to let them
tell their story, and to tell it without pity, and to help us all flex
our empathy muscles. Which empathy to me does start with just being able to listen. To listen to something
that is uncomfortable, or that you disagree with,
or from a person whose voice bothers you, or a voice that
you don't hear very often. One of my favorite
recent episodes is actually
primarily in Spanish. And it is an interview
with two women who were hoping to adopt
their foster daughter, who did not end up
being able to adopt her, and were wrestling with
that ambiguous grief, that they would never
raise this child, and this child was not dead. They would never see her
again, they love her. They won't raise her because
her birth mother got better, which is the point
of foster care. And holding those two
things to be true, that you love a person who is
also loved by another person, and you won't be able
to be in their life. And one of the women
only spoke Spanish, and instead of muting
her and translating, we let her talk, because
you don't even need to know word for word what she is
saying, because you can tell. You can tell that
what you're hearing is a mom's heart breaking,
because she was a mother for a while to this little girl, and she will always
love her like a child. And that is not a side
of foster care that I had really considered, which
is that all of these people are opening up their hearts
and their homes to children, and giving them as
much love as they can, knowing that it
might not be forever. And that actually the point
is for it not to be forever. And that is not an
experience that I'd had, that is not an experience
that I had spent much time thinking
about, and also, I am only level four on
Duolingo, so I can understand every sixteenth word
that she was saying. I was like, the, her, it, library? But I could tell already,
like I knew what we were talking about, I knew that
what I was hearing was-- - Well mother's intuition, too. The love.
- Right, yeah. - What do you hope readers
gleam from your books? - So, my books, I'll
deal with serious topics, and they're also funny. And they're not funny
in a way that is, you know, flippant
or distracting, they're funny in
a way that I think most people can
relate to naturally, that when something
terrible is happening, you also find these
moments of levity. And that they are not
mutually exclusive, just the way that you
can move through life with a lot of pain
and a lot of grief, and also experience happiness, and bring that happiness
along with all of your past. So the first book is called, "It's Okay To Laugh,
Crying Is Cool Too". That's a very long title. That book is about meeting
Aaron and losing Aaron, and that first six
months of widowhood. I wrote that book in the
six months after Aaron died which is, I look back at that and I think, how did I do that? But I really, really
wanted to write a book that was in the moment, that
did not have the benefit of five or ten years
of perspective, because being in something
is a perspective, too. And the second book is called,
"No Happy Endings", and that is about meeting Matthew,
and blending our family, and holding that love
and that pain together. And the third book is called,
"The Hot Young Widows Club", and that is a practical
book published by TED. It is a grief guide, it
is not just for widows, but that's a catchy title and
also a group that I do have that anybody who has lost their
person is welcome to join. And it is split into
two forms of advice, one for the griever, and
one for the grief adjacent, because as you've mentioned,
we all want to know how to be better for the people
around us who are suffering. And there are no quick
fixes, and there are no top tips and tricks, but
there are certain things that everybody
can get better at. - So the last quick question is, where do we go to follow you and see all of this
information that you put out? - You can find me
at noramcinerny.com, and that's hard to spell, so
I also go by noraborealis.com, which is a play on
the aurora borealis, which I have to
explain to people because sometimes they
think that's my last name. [laughs] So, and I'm on Instagram, and
all of those places as well. I'm pretty easy to find,
there are not a lot of Noras. - Well, we really appreciate
you coming on the show, for being a light and helping
us through the darkness. So thank you for all you do,
for the podcast, the books, everything you put out
there, all the good energy. So thank you Nora for
coming on the show. - Thank you for having me. - And thank you
everyone for joining us for A Conversation
with Nora McInerny. [upbeat instrumental music] [acoustic guitar chords]
