When Surviving is Enough

Published Nov 7, 2022, 5:00 AM

After Nora McInerny’s husband died of cancer in his thirties, Nora became well known for writing about the messiness of grief. She also led grief groups, launched a podcast about grief, and started a non-profit. Nothing Nora did ever felt like enough, until a terrifying moment made her slow down and take a hard look at her own grieving process.

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Pushkin. I almost immediately fell into this trap that I've seen a lot of other people fall into, which is very natural. Right. We want to make meaning out of our experiences, but we want to do it really quickly, and we want to alcomize our suffering into some form of self improvement or a product, a literal thing that we can point that and say, look, look, I made this thing. This is what it means. That's Norah McInerney, author and hosts of the podcast Terrible Thanks for Asking. She is best known for writing and talking about how to navigate the intensely painful feeling of grief. Norah lost her husband into brain cancer in twenty fourteen, and in the months and years following his death, she found comfort and meaning and helping others navigate their grief. People started to see her as a grief dula of sorts. Over time, these responsibilities began to mount, and Norah felt overwhelmed, but she didn't think she had a way out. Are you allowed to quit anything? Winners Quarters number wino? What is I gonna win the best Widow Award? I don't know. I felt. I think in a lot of ways like I had inadvertently built this identity that had become a cage for me. On today's show, Norah McInerney breaks from her identity and changes how she grieves. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of the big change. When Nora was in her early thirties, she lost her husband Aaron, and her father to cancer, and she suffered a miscarriage, all within this fan of just six weeks. I wanted to have Norah on the show to talk about what it was like to navigate these losses in real time, but also what came after, not just in the months after, but in the years after. The dance of grief, how it shapes and reshapes your values, and the particular challenges that come along with the label widow. We started our conversation with Nora recalling the day when everything changed for her and her then boyfriend Aaron. The year is twenty eleven, and it is such a simpler time, Maya. We're not I messaging on her computers, yet we're still on g chat, and we're on g chat all day. And I've been dating this guy for a year and all we do. We go to our respective jobs at ad agencies. We log on and we chat all day. We're sending each other links. I have just secretly moved into his house that should not be described as a house. It was a structure. I've secretly moved in with him because I'm not a practicing Catholic. But old habits die hard. There's no reason for my parents to know where exactly I live. We are planning our first Halloween together as an official couple. We're going to pass out candy together. We're playing house. Okay, I'm chatting him. I'm like, do you want to go to and this is not suitable for home depot? Later? You want to go home depot later? He never replies. I'm livid. Why is this man not replying to me? Usually his response time is like thirty seconds, bring your laptop to the meeting, keep the conversation going. He doesn't reply, He doesn't reply, and my phone rings and it's him. I'm in an open office. How dare you call me and exposed to my boss how little work I am doing? But it's not him, it is his coworker and his co worker is calling from Aaron's phone. And he wants to know if Aaron has ever had had a seizure before. Oh my god. And so I went to the hospital immediately where the ambulance was taking Aaron. And we find out that Aaron cannot go home to pass out candy and Halloween because Aaron is going to need a brain surgery because he has a brain tumor. And he has three questions that I remember, and one is how will we pay for this? Because yay America. Two he's like, I really don't want to die. I was like, oh, you're not going to die, dude, No way, no, no way, no no. No. Other people die, but we are not other people, that is for sure, not you. And then he said you can't marry me. We can't get married because I'm going to be sick. And I was like I am going to marry you, Like, oh, I'm marrying you. I'm marrying you the minute you get out of this hospital. Like I don't even know if it was a proposal so much as I just announced it. We are getting married. We are going to get married. Yeah. What was it like when you found out together that it was actually terminal brain cancer. That's just where everything changed. The brain tumor was brain cancer, and it was glioblastoma, which anytime I say that word out in public, there's like an audible oh right, right, because if you don't know the word, you don't know the word. But if you know the word, you know that it's an incurable, horrifying, aggressive, aggressive, and violent form of brain cancer. We said to the doctor's right away, because we had discussed this a little bit beforehand walking in, we were like, no matter what, like, what do you want out of this? And he was like, I don't ever want to hear how much time I have left. So before the doctor even talked, I was just in it and I was like, listen here, Bud, no point are you going to tell this man how much time he has left to live, like at all, even if you think he's like literally dying that moment, No, no, he's not. Aaron did not want to become a cancer person. He did not want that to be his identity. He wanted it to take up the amount of time it required, and absolutely no more. And I was like, fine, you're the boss, and I will make sure I'm executing your vision. Nor you really walk the walk on that one, because even after finding out about the terminal cancer diagnosis. You and Aaron have a child together, you get married, and you also have a child. So in that appointment we asked, okay, so what about kids? And I remember the nurse practitioner looking at me like what about him? Baby? Yeah, like what about them? So we decided to try, and a year later we had Ralph. And a year later Aaron's brain tumor was back. And that is when I knew, knew. Oh wow, this man gave me something. I think he knew more than I did, Like he signed up to be a parent knowing that he wouldn't be there for Ralph's whole life. And when I look at our son, I think like, oh, I don't know if I would be strong enough to do that, to know that I wouldn't be there. And he was such a wonderful, fun dad for the twenty two months that he was there. You know, he woke up with the baby, he did, he did everything. He was just so fun and present and wonderful. And I am so glad he got that, even though it wasn't and would never be enough for Aaron or for Ralph. So Aaron was able to be Ralph's dad for twenty two months, and he ended up dying on November fourteen. And you know, you can intellectualize what it'll be like to lose someone, and then when you actually have the emotional experience unfold in real time, you can sometimes surprise yourself with the reactions you're having or the reflections you're having. And I'm just wondering what shifted for you. You know, my dad had just died too, and I had this sense of closeness with my siblings and my mom and Ralph, and like my world seemed very, very sharply in focus, and it's like, these are the people who matter. I remember driving to you my dad's funeral with my siblings. We were all together, and I was like, we have to stay all together all the time for the rest of our lives. We should all live together. We should be traveling everywhere in a single bus so that if there's an accident, we all go together. Like it was just so I was like, this is it, this is it. It's all of us right here. Oh gosh, I can so resonate with that. Yeah. Roughly a month after Aaron dies, you and your friend who lost her husband informally start a group called the Hot Young Widows Club, props to an extremely charming name. And I'm wondering if you can tell me more about the group and what you were hoping to achieve with it. So here's the thing I wouldn't say. Almost immediately, but very quickly, after Aaron died, I had I was buried in. It was like wearing a weighted vest at the dentist all day, this sense of guilt that Aaron was dead and I was alive, and he was objectively better than me in every way. Everyone loved Aaron. He made everyone feel like they belonged at the party. The party could not have started. Maya's here. Now open up the physical circle, physically, invite you into the conversation, hold your hands, make you dance? Can I get you a drink? Like just he had that presence to him for everybody. At his funeral, a guy came up to me and he said, high school was so hard, it was hell. And every day Aaron made sure I had somewhere to sit at lunch, like that kind of person, And I almost immediately fell into this trap that I've seen a lot of other people fall into, which is very natural right. We want to make meaning out of our experiences, but we want to do it really quickly, and we want to alcomize our suffering into some form of self improvement or a product, a literal thing that we can point out and say, look, look, I made this thing. This is what it means. And there was a woman named Moe in northeast Minneapolis where I lived, and her husband had also died. He died by suicide. I'd never met her. I did not want to meet her. I did not want a widow friend. Aaron didn't want to be a cancer person. I didn't want to be a widow. Yeah, I didn't want to be a dead husband person. But we went to the same coffee shop, and the coffee shop ladies were not going to let it rest. So I had to meet Mo and I did, And I will remember forever again just a month after my husband has died, like three months after her husband has died, like lock eyes on a winter sidewalk in Minneapolis, and we like run towards each other. Wow, we run to each other and we're like holding each other and we're crying, and we're immediately just like, tell me about your kid, tell me about your kid, Tell me about your husband, Tell me about your husband. We're saying to each other these horrible things that no one else wants to hear, like do you have flashbacks? Do you see a dead body? Like? Oh, do you sleep at night? I don't sleep. Have you been able to cancel his cell phone? No? Me neither. What are you doing with the student loans? Not just admin stuff, but just these like are you lonely? What are we going to do with these boys? Just the act of having someone who understands where you are, even if they didn't get there the same way, was so immediately obvious that I could not believe it took me that long to meet her. And we called ourselves the Hot Young Widows Club, and we would just meet up with our boys, because you don't have a husband to watch him anymore. And we'd meet up, we'd have dinner, we'd have breakfast, and then you know, someone else's husband died and they got looped in with us. Someone sends me a text message, my friend's husband just died. Can she talk to you? Yeah? Yeah. My friend's cousin's mailman's husband just died. Can they meet up with you? Yeah? And so it's not just me and mow anymore. It's a bunch of widows in Minneapolis, and sometimes we have brunch and sometimes we meet up for drinks, and sometimes we're just texting on a group chat. And then there are more people, and then there are more people, and then we can't all fit in a living room, and you know, can it be a Facebook group? And can my friend join even though you know they live in Montana or Wisconsin or Florida, Yeah, yeah, sure, sure sure, And it just keeps growing and then it's thousands of people. It's so wonderful, Maya. In so many ways. We had more than one Christmas where the widows who had kids who couldn't afford Christmas presents, everybody pulled their money and sent them a bunch of gift cards so they could buy their kids Christmas presents. It's beautiful. You know, people met up for vacations and made best friends. There was always someone online, so when you woke up in the middle of the night and needed someone, there would be someone there when you posted, and you could say it's something like I am having wild sex dreams right now, like I think I just need to hook up with someone. Is that okay, and a chorus of other voices would be like, yes, you were still alive, it's okay. That is like a biological mean, that's okay. It does not mean you don't love your husband or your wife or your boyfriend. And there was just always somebody there who could relate to whatever crazy thing you were feeling, which was so so validating. You know, you're thinking, I survived Aaron, and Aaron's supposed to be here, and I need to live this incredibly meaningful life. And I find myself in this situation bringing comfort to this other person. Did it maybe release some of the burden that you felt. I think I was seeking a way to kind of like balance the scales and also to prove to myself that I deserved to be alive and like be okay, And so anything somebody asked me to do, I would do. You know, in the idea of like there's so many five thousand, three thousand, two thousand, one thousand people, they're not all going to get along, yeah, you know what I mean, Like they're not going to and they're all we're all deeply hurt, many of us incredibly traumatized. It took me a long time to go to therapy after Aaron died. So I'm also dealing with my own undiagnosed PTSD and depression and untreated anxiety and trying to manage interpersonal conflict. Or this person said this about you know, this kind of disease, and I found it offensive. And when do we kick someone out? And when do we? You know, I'm like, I don't know how am I in charge? Yeah? Yeah, Yeah, it seems like you were. You were thrust into a group that you never thought you would be leading, right, I mean, yeah, in many ways, you were so interesting or it's like you were you were acting as a grief dula for so many people, even though you're not trained as a great dula. Hell no, I'm not. No, But then what I'm also hearing from you is you were actually serving as like a grief group dula, because now you're managing the interpersonal dynamics of everybody who's navigating the worst moments of their lives, and I were trying to figure out how they can interact with each other more peacefully. Yeah, that is an incredible responsibility. You know. You mentioned it's like I was sort of thrust into this position and even when I thought like, this shouldn't be me, I didn't say anything. I did not know that it was okay for me to say, like I shouldn't be the one doing this, Like I should not be in charge. Someone asked me to do it, or they're asking me to do it. So I guess I just have to say yes. I guess I just have to keep doing it. And by the way, the Hot Young Widows Club grew alongside all these sort of other parts of my life. So I ended up falling in love again about a year after Aaron died, and getting married sometime after that, and getting pregnant and having a baby and blending this family of four kids Matthews, two kids, Ralph, and there's a newborn baby. And I start this podcast Terrible thanks for asking. I put together a ted talk about grief. I start this nonprofit that does what happened for me and Aaron, like gives people money when their lives are falling apart. And the Hot Young Widows Club is this big, big part of my life. This is, in a lot of way is kind of the center of it. Walk me through a sample day in the life of grief. Dula Nora, Yeah, Mo and I are trying to find ways for people to connect when it's online or when it's in person, and where, you know, coordinating meetups in Minneapolis that are regularly scheduled. And I constantly, constantly, constantly have Facebook open on my phone so if somebody tags me and they need something, they need anything, that I can see it and I can respond to them. We're coordinating like the gift car drives for people around the holidays or all year round, for people who just need necessities, need money for groceries, need money for gas. We're doing FaceTime meetups so that you know, anybody who's alone at the holidays isn't really alone. I was constantly drinking from this fire hose of other people's very real suffering that I am built to care about to my own detriment. You know, like if somebody texted me and they needed me, I would step away from my dinner table and answer them. I would take a FaceTime call. I would do my best to respond to things like as immediately as possible, because I remembered how absolutely lonely, especially those early days were, and I felt like, well, you know, I've got this new husband, I got these kids, like look at all that I have, Like I should be available, right, it should be available for all these people, like to the people that need me. And no, I was not trained, No, I was not qualified. No I have no sort of like protective measures between me, like no protective boundaries between me and these people that I care so much about. None. And you know, you mentioned, Nora that other parts of your life were growing alongside this support group, and one of those big things that was growing was your family. Right. You're you're parenting four children, Yeah, one of whom you share with your new husband. You are navigating a new marriage, And I just wonder, you know, they're of course trade offs with your time. Right, So you're leaving the dinner table, that means you're not having a moment with Ralph. Right, you do a FaceTime call with someone on Christmas Eve, that means you're not actually connecting with your husband. And I just wonder whether, in the throes of all of that, did you ever take a step back and question whether you were doing too much? Yes? And no, because I would think, like, yeah, I can't stop doing it, you know, like, I mean, what's the point I'm knowing it's too much? But why couldn't you stop doing it? I don't know why I couldn't do it. I couldn't stop doing it because are you allowed to quit anything? Winners never quit, Quitters never win, you know, like you what was I gonna win the Best Widow Award? I don't know. I felt like I don't know. I felt in a lot of ways like I had inadvertently built this identity that had become a cage for me. But I was so afraid. I was so afraid of not doing the Hot Young Widows Club anymore. But every time I thought about not doing it anymore, I felt so relieved. I felt so relieved. I felt so relieved, and I just did not know how to do that. I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to not do things anymore. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Or you mentioned, you know you didn't know how to quit this group? Yeah right, you said every time you fantasized about it, you felt profound relief. But it was just unclear how you could ever go from point A to point B. Yeah, and then there's this one day that forces you to go there. Yeah, where you realize that something has to change. Yeah, it's winter in Arizona, which is the most beautiful season because it looks like summer anywhere else. And we had friends visiting us from Minnesota. And these friends have five kids, and so we're all going to go on this big hike, you know, the dads the moms, like seven kids and three cars and it's so sweet and so cute, and all our little kids are like collecting rocks and identifying plant life. And we're all coming back to our house and the dads are going to grill and the kids are going to play and the moms are going to talk, and it's so wonderful. And we pull up to our house and everyone tumbles out of these cars and everyone switched seats. You know, I've got some of her kids, she's got some of my kids. And we all inside and the dad's do grill and the moms do talk and the kids do play. And I'm talking to my friend and I tell her, because I am in my late thirties, I'm like, you got to see this tree. Okay, you got to see this tree. If you drew a tree as a kid, this is that tree. One trunk, two big branches, big canopy, the most gorgeous tree. We walk outside to see this tree, and she's, honestly, she's as impressed as I wanted her to be. She's like, that's a hell of a tree. And we hear and I look over and there's this little hand beating against the tinted window of my car. And I'm immediately so mad because my then four year old was in the backseat of the car, and he knows better. You don't play in a car. You don't play in a car. And I take three quick steps across the driveway and I op in that door, and he's harnessed into his car seat, and he looks at me with his giant blue saucer eyeballs, with so much relief and so much love, and he says, can I get out of the car yet? And look at my friend and we both go completely pale, and I know that she knows that I left my kid in the car. And I pick him up and he is soaking wet, and part of it is tears and part of it is sweat, and he's clinging to me like a little baby monkey, and he's immediately telling me what happened. Everybody got out of the car. Everybody went inside, and I called it for you and you didn't hear me? Did you forget it me? And it had been an hour and no one noticed, but more importantly I hadn't noticed. And I carried him inside, and my husband, Matthew is outside, and this is the baby you share with, Matthew. Yeah, this is like our little miracle baby unexpected. Did not think this baby would happen. Here he is, and like I have to tell him, I have to tell him. And Matthew is so kind. He's the kindest person I know. He's so sweet, and like he looked at me like I was his enemy, and like the little kids don't know, right, they have no idea what's happened. But like every parent is looking around like, oh God, like we all know what just almost happened. You know, it's like probably seventy degrees, which means it's like could be ninety ninety five in the car, like kids die that way, like they do. We all know that. We all know you're not supposed to leave a kid in the car. And Matthew wants to know how it happened, and like, what can I tell him other than I don't know where my brain is. My brain is always somewhere else. It's never a cute. I don't know what I was doing. I don't know. And Matthew could forgive all the times I was on my phone when he was talking. I could forgive all the times I got it from the dinner table, or you know, to get another call or scheduled a zoom call for bedtime. So he did all the bedtimes or any of that. But like, this was like the unforgivable thing. And I understand why it was because of six years at the time of just piling stuff on, trying desperately to prove to myself and to some imaginary arbiter that I was worth it. I was okay, like I had earned a place on this earth. I still deserved to be here. And all of it was so much that I never knew what day it was, what I was doing, what was going on, Like it was just all a constant swirl of chaos. What thoughts were going on in your mind after you recovered from that initial shock, Yeah, the cycling was like you're horrible person, You're a bad mother, you don't deserve this baby, Like you almost killed them with your negligence, because like you're constantly doing stuff and what are you even doing? Like why are you doing all this stuff? Just a firestorm and just a wantlet of thoughts. You know, there's not enough cognitive behavioral therapy in the world to swat that many away. It's like fruit ninja. But for feelings, it was too much. This crescendo of things had been building, right. There was so many things that I was doing, none of them particularly well, but I was somehow central to every single thing. And I realized I have to do a lot less. And I was afraid if I was not in the hot in widows club, if widow was not a front and center part of my identity, then to step away from that would also be stepping away from Erin. It felt like quitting the club would be quitting Aaron, and not even just to me. But I was afraid that it would somehow telegraphed to other people that that part of myself, that part of my life, that part of my identity, didn't matter anymore, and that I was somehow just shearing it off and leaving it behind. And I say all the time, like I will always be his widow, I will always be his wife, but I'm also someone else's wife. And a friend of mine had said after her husband died that we have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our losses. It's a bitch though her words, and I think that is so true. And I was not living fully. I was so distracted, so consumed constantly by the ways that I had fractured out my attention to any and everything that might need me right, Like, there's this organization, there's this organization, there's this podcast, there's writing, there's my family, bottom of the list, my family actually bottom of the list me. Yeah, And I had just fractured myself into so many pieces. It always felt like I was juggling on top of like a pogo stick on top of a ball. And I can't do any of those things, so why was I doing them all at once? And I was like, okay, let's stop doing it. And I talked to Moe and she was like, yeah, yeah, I've been feeling that way too. She's like, yeah, I want to retire. I want to retire from this thing. And we thought, okay, so what do we do? And we talked to a couple of the widow's that's male widows. We talked to a couple of them and we're like, would you want to take it over? Just take over, change the name. You can figure out how you want to run things. And they did. They were like, yeah, absolutely, would be honored to do that. And it was that easy. It was that easy. I got maybe one message from a person that was unkind, yeah, and everyone else was like I get it, I get it. Thank you. Yeah. Wow. So there wasn't that judgment that you were anticipating. No, No, it is literally like so many things all in my head, all in my head. The biggest shift in my mind and in my life and in my heart and my being is this shift from doing and accomplishing and achieving and tacking boxes to existing to actually being. I'm not meant to just be a favored dispenser. I'm not like a vending machine for other people's needs. And by the way, nobody treated me like that. I treated myself like that. No one was like, no one was setting out to be like I want to really wreck this lady to day. No one, no one. But it's like I did not allow myself any boundaries. I didn't know how to do that kind of stuff, and I sort of turned myself into the giving tree, which is really of all of Shelf Silverstein's work. Not his best, you know, not his best, not a great message. You painted this really beautiful cozy picture. At the beginning of our conversation about how when Aaron died, you were like, let's just all live on a bus together and be together all the time, and then if something bad happens to one of us, everyone else is there, and it's all about my family and the people that I love most in my life. And it feels like, in quitting the Hot Young Widows Club and other things that you decided to also stop doing, you're like slowly building that bus. Yeah, we are, we are. It's like the other day my husband actually left town, which he rarely does because he's a stay at home parent, and he went on a little trip with one of his best friends since they were eighteen years old, and they went to two shows at Red Rocks and he texted me and he was like, I just can't wait to get home because I love being around our family. I was like, dude, me too, That's how I feel like. I just love being around our family. I love Friday movie night. I love that you make waffles on Sunday, And these were, by the way, all things that we were doing the whole time that I just wasn't very present for Like we've always done that, that's always been a thing, But it's like, I'm really working on being really present for the lives of the people that I know and love. Do you feel that I don't know how to phrase this. It's kind of like, how do you grieve Aaron today? Because for a period there you're grieving him, in part at least through these expressions of love for others, right through the support group, through all of the activities and fundraisers and events that you're putting on, and so I just wonder how you think about that. Yeah, I don't know. I think about him every single day. I don't know if there will ever be a day where I don't think about him. I don't know if there will ever be a day where I don't say his name. I mean, we have a child together. It's so hard to explain that kind of what it means to grieve because it's not like every day I'm like, oh, stab me in the heart, but like every day there's something worth remembering, and there always will be. You know, the label widow is such a loaded, hard identity to navigate, and in part it's because it tethers you to a part of your past, but more importantly, to a specific person who you loved in your past. Yea. And so, as we've talked about, rejecting that label in any form can feel like a betrayal. Yea. The emotional cost of disentangling yourself from that identity just feel so high. I wonder if you have for those listening who have lost a loved one and maybe they don't carry the word widow. Maybe they've lost someone else they love, maybe they've lost a child, maybe they lost a grandmother, maybe they've lost a friend. But I just wonder how you think about these labels and what they do to us, and how they can, I don't know, hold us back and imprison us at times when we actually just need to be free. I think that it's very important to me that it was since the minute Erin got sick, right, that we that everyone is the owner of their own story. That Aaron was not just a cancer story, lard love story was not just a cancer story. That you know, his life is not just like, oh, you know, any cancer, and the headline of your story changes as life goes on. So there absolutely was a period of time in life where the most important thing that I could relate to somebody was that my husband died. They needed to know that, and that needed to be the first thing that they knew because that was the most important thing about me to me in that moment. It's a bullet point now, and that's okay. It is not a value judgment. It does not mean it means less. It is not the most important part of my identity anymore. Widow is a label, and it's one I'm really glad that I embraced. Like I still have that label. It's just not going to be the first thing on my name tag. Yeah yeah. Reflecting back, Norah, I'm wondering what this experience has taught you about grief. Grief is so chaotic, and it is so dark and lonely and disorienting that I can recognize in another person this reflexive need to build something out of the rubble of your life or your loss. I felt that so immediately, like I want to build are in a pyramid? What can I build from? What can I build that shows, like the world, how big this was to me, what this means to me, something that can be seen from the stars. People reach out to me all the time and they say, my brother just died, and I want to do this thing. I want to write this book. I want to start this nonprofit. I want to run a thousand miles. My husband and my grandma. I lost someone, I lost something. I lost something so big, and I need to make something out of it. And I say to them, stop, because what if the only thing that you have to do, the only thing that you absolutely have to do, is just survive. What if that's it? What if that's it. What if that's the only thing that you need to do in the wake of loss. What if that is big enough and meaningful enough. Because it is. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Next week, we hear from the US Surgeon General, doctor Vivekmoorthy on the science of loneliness. Our nation's doctor tells us how dangerous loneliness can be for our health and gives us strategies for building stronger, more meaningful social connections. The mortality impact of loneliness, in fact, is comparable to the mortality impact of smoking. Fifteen cigarettes a day. It's even greater than the mortality impact that we see with substance use disorders. Now just pause for a second and think about how much time, effort, and energy we spend in combating smoking and substance use disorders because of the extraordinary toll they take on society. But think about how little we actually tackle loneliness, or how much we little we invest in thinking about our strategies for addressing it. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louis Skara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, So big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week. Hey nors Hi, Oh my god, that nickname. How much do you hate being called Norris. I love being called that. No one says that except my mom, my sister, and my dead husband. That is so magical that you did that. I just felt it, felt it felt good. You were too comfortable with each other for me to call you Nora, so I was just going to lean in with Norris. Sorry. Oh, I love it.

A Slight Change of Plans

You can follow the show at @DrMayaShankar on Instagram. Apple Podcasts’ Best Show of the Year 2021. 
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