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.
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We do have a group called the Hot Young Widows Club, and um, you'll hear stories in there and you're like, oh no, that one's yeah, that one's work. Like we all are like, oh no, yours is worse, Yeah, yours is worth Yeah, that's I'll take mine. You guys get together frequently? We do? Yeah, but what meetups all over the world? Now we have widows everywhere men women. Turns out people are dying all the time and leaving box, leaving mind loved ones. Best club you'll never want to join. Yes, we have t shirts. Hey everyone, I'm Doctors and this is the doctor Os podcast. My next guest became a widow at just thirty one 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 asked Nora Matt and Arney about her life, she won't sugarcoat her tragic reality. Despite 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, and 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 a beautiful out. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna just ask how you're doing, just to get past that. And I know you make a big deal, but not want to have small talk you and have big talk. This is what I want to do as well. But I do have to ask this 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's like looks different, like good, but you remember why you broke up. Um, So my life is, My life is good, and uh, all of these things that you mentioned are still a part of my life. Even if you know you look at me, you probably think that's just a normal thirty ish, mid thirties, still mid thirties, young right late, who knows ageless woman who just seems like she has it mostly together. Um, 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 uh, 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 like the beggar at the grocery store, like they you're not 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. 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 dad, her dad's dad. She she lost, she left a pregnancy, she's doing great, a new lipstick, And I would tell you that lipstick, right, So I don't know telling telling my siblings that, telling my friends that I and it was like it was like opening up a whole new life. I could actually experience like my great 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 hands, a clubbing 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 discernably, more definably worse than others. But you know, I did have years and bliss before that tragedy hire completely. Some people never got that either. Yeah, I it did help me put things into uh, into perspective. And I had 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, Like, yes, my husband died. No, he didn't have life insurance because we were young and who needs it, you know, Yeah, my dad's dead, and I kind of when my husband got sick, I was like, well, I'll still have my dad. False. Um, yes, I'm thirty one and I just quit my job because I couldn't figure out, like how to show up to it anymore. But I'm still a thirty one year old, like middle class white woman with a net to catch her, and most people are not like most people do not have even like what I had, which was like no matter what I was going to be okay ish and your head, I would still have a roof over my head. Even if I lost my house, someone else would give me a roof. So why is there stigmas? You've lived this which is the ultimate research tool, a stigma that prevents people from talking about degree if you point this out. But I always wondering on the show, I see people coming to the audience. We have twohundred people a day, and I lost one. They do one. They say I'm doing fine, and I'm thinking to myself that there's a 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 bomber, right, like no one wants to bring down, uh, the energy in the room. And we also have this sort of um 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, we love a happy ending, like we really really want a happy ending and you can get there, certainly, like you can you can be okay again. Um, I think the writer and Lamont I don't know if you've ever read any of her writing, but she says you're just going to to learn to dance with the limb. 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. Um, maybe someday, but first you just have a bunch of lemons, you know, Like was it Christy Teagan who got like a delivery of like limes from grocery delivery and there's not she can't make enough pies? Okay, there's no. It's very difficult. It's very difficult. So it's hard for us to um. And it's hard. Isn't it hard for you to watch people and be uncomfortable? Interestingly, part of it is because there's some problems I can help with something that I can't. It makes it make difference. So you mentioned last great quote about you know, learning the dance with a limp. If someone's limping down the road that I know, I asked them why they're limping, they'll tell me, you know, maybe more detail than I want to know, but usually not I banged my knee, and I'll say, oh, I mean a better story than that. Pay you're in a bar fight and we chell go bad and we move on. But maybe they have a miniscule tear and you canna get fixed. It will 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 there suicidally depressed. And I've had friends who've committed suicide that I've been with twenty four hours where they killed themselves and I had no idea, but none, And I said back, as we all do. If any of us who've been through that, employably, most people listening to know someone who's taken their own life, maybe how did I miss that? First of all, do you feel hurt they didn't tell you? But then you also think how did I miss it? I mean it was right there and we were talking about everything else. I mean, I cannot even come up. I didn't talking about we're such small things back to your complaints and not the big things. So I do think it's different between physical problems and emotional problems. With a little emotional problems ultimately manifested for his glaciers. Yeah, I think that. Um, 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 you'll will know that you'll have your surgery not Yeah, and a solvable problem is wonderful. And I think that there's like 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 you know your your friend says like, oh, you know, I'm I'm I'm really struggling. You know, I'm having a hard time finding a job, and you're like, well, I lost my job once, and let me tell you, like you just want to like there are people who want to do that, you know, and then there are people who want to like Russian fix it. There are people who want to be like, look, here's what you do right, yeah, And then 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 I and it's an out out of malice at all. So Aaron, Aaron died, we wrote his obituary together. The unintended consequence of that is that it was it went viral, and I got a lot of messages from a lot of people, um, from all over the world, not all of whom had dead husbands, although I do have a niche for that, but you know, I gotta got a got a good market on like the hot young widows. So um, I got all these messages from people who are going through something really difficult. And why were they emailing a total stranger? Why are they emailing a stranger in the middle of the night, Not because they don't have any 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? You know? And I just think at the root of it all is this um, 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 silent, 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 to compare it. It is hard. It's something that I struggle with all the time, like how do you break the ice on that. Let's say someone has a bad diagnosis, you just wouldn't be there for them. So how are you doing well? I'm prying, kind of dye in here. I kind of die here. And my dad told one of his nurses. She was like, I'm so sorry. He was like, don't be I am. You just did all right, which can be disarming. I mean, Gallo's humor works, we do it in the hospital quite a bit, but has limitations. There's the reality that if I ask you can I help you. I'm not giving you a homework to tell me what to do. Right, If I offer to help, you might be anything to me you don't want. Yeah, I have some stocks for you, isn't it? I got nts you know, I got so many socks. So how do you how do you break the ice? Yeah? I mean I guess once you're there, you can sit silently and yeah, look around awkwardly. But how do you get into the place where they're comfortable having you near so you actually can help if they if you see something, you can do. Okay. So there are two sides to this. One is that if you're the person who is suffering, Let's say your your your loved one is sick, you're sick, you do have to part of the responsibility is yours. Part of the responsibility was ours. And when Aaron was sick. When a person is actively in grief or is actively dying, is actively sick, that the machine around us kind of knows what to do. Right. Someone rises to the occasion. Someone sets up a Go fund Me 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're going through, and it's hard for you to pick up a phone and hell, somebody, I am super lonely and very sad and this is very difficult, write it down, Write it down on Facebook, and tell people like I cannot reply to your text messages because I am not sleeping and I don't know when I get them. Um, I don't know what I need right now, like I can't tell you what I need. Part of that is we have to as the as the suffering person is 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. 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, Like, maybe you're not the person who is going to make them feel bad if a person don't come by, if you're not a nice person, Like send a gift car. 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 your you can still break a yard? Go do that. Do something, Just do something, Just do a thing, and also do it in like the quiet time. Six months later, no one's sinking about your dead husband except you. Yeah, so that's probably the best advice that I learned from my professional mind to give my patients because their families because the patient would donald heard surges. So people die sometimes and I tell the family, you know what, take mom home if the father had died, But remember that, you know, the next couple of weeks from my job to get them to the hospital, and you probably not gonna make it. And if he doesn't make it, the next the rest of your life is your job. So you know it's not a samarathon on a wind sprint. When we call back, we'll talk about what actually happens at the moment of death with Norah, help me understand the fear that people have of the grief of and the pain of witnessing death and actually dying itself. Which which is worse? It was your dad or actually Aaron? How was that? How was it? How was the fear for him versus to fear for you? I think that Aaron and I talked about everything everything. How long were you married? For you and we're married three years? So he was I mean technically he was buried on our His funeral was on our third wedding anniversary. And we're together for a year. Before that, they were together for four year. We're together for four years, and my parents were together for forty so right there, right, you have this automatic comparison of um. And I would just confessus because I have told my mom sinse, which is that you know, I did resent my mom. I was like, you had forty years, like buck up, you know, like being grateful for that, and like, how dare I? Because she lost forty years of history and I lost forty 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 Aaron died, and it was like, I think it was more beautiful than having my babies be born. It's so these words are overused, but so it's so holy. It was like 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 like the universe and like the meaning of life. It was like every everything opened up to me and I just thought, it really is okay, Like this is this is this is how it all works. Like I get it. I get it. And then like two days later I was like yelling someone at it, yelling at someone in the Target parking lot. But you know, those windows of enlightenment are so small and like you just have to take them when you get them. And 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, you know. I don't want to remember him this way, like 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. House had been filled for weeks. He was on hospice for two weeks. It was just always people. There so many cats roles in Minnesota. We called them hot dish, and so many hot dish. I was like, I'm gluten free, Like 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 and just cheesy, not good for your heart. I've heard um, and I don't know. There were just so many people, so they're all gone, they're all gone. I told her to leave. Our baby came in that day he was almost too. He went to daycare literally at our next next door neighbor's house. 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, or some many. I mean, it's a hospital, little bed. It's just and Ralph gets up and he's like rubbing her in his face and he's like all gone, all done, goodbye. He just lays down with them and we all lay down for a while. Then 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 um yeaw. We laid there for hours, and then at two forty three, like he just breathed out. And I don't I'm sure that you've witnessed this too, But it's like your body wants to live when it's thirty five, Like your body wants to live even if cancer is making its way through all of your organs and shutting you down, like your body wants to live, and could feel like his body fighting, but I could also feel like just like the peace of his spirit and of his being, and I just knew, like 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. Um, actually part of that day, like it's just a part of death is very monotonous, and I want people to not feel bad about that. People do not feel bad. It's not as if you can carry on like a constant vigil. I was reading a pamphlet about death called Gone from My Sight. Are you familiar with this highly highly distributed in hospice. I don't think they've updated the design since there's a ship on it and 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 arrived. It's really beautiful, but it also walks you through is this person dying? Because honestly, you don't know, hospice is truly d I y death like you're like, they just give you a bunch of drugs. They're very sweet people. They kind of teach teach you what you need to know. But I'm not a nurse. And also I remember what while Aaron was dying, I was like, I should be a nurse, and he was like, you should not be a nurse. You're like, you have no You once threw up when they took my blood Like that was yeah, I did. I'll be a nurse who doesn't touch bloody, don't touch patients. Yeah, I'm just there for like the experience and also to bring some energy to the room. So I was reading it. Part of it, I was reading a pamphlet. Okay, I was reading a pamphlet being like, is this death? Do you know? I don't know, Like he's breathing in a certain way. Sure, I don't know, Like you just can't tell death. But you touched on something that I've noticed in my own life when I've seen death, that there's a a subtlety to it. It doesn't it didn't hit 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's a magnificence to it. I won't call beauty because it's you know, it's painful, but magnificence is uch a good word. But you see it, you think there's something happening. And people have 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, like I like to have you come by if I'm grieving, just h just explain to folks what that felt like that sense enlightenment or whatever the phrases. That's best it is. I don't know. It is magnificence. 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, like right, you will be. 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 in my office with a hospital bed in it, with um like, uh yeah, just a hospital bed and all of these weird hospital things around. Do you side note? You can cut this out? Are you bothered by how poorly designed like medical things are? Like why is the kidney like that light pink plastic? Crazy? And the lightning is bad? The lightning is so bad. I was just like everything is 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. I was likely. This classic lion is Oscar wild Great, the nineteenth 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. So, I mean, it's so commonly talked about that it's become part of our literature. But he imagines, Hey, this kidney pen basing goes or I go. That's honestly like my dad, that's not going. I'm going. I'm out of here. Like my dad had been diagnosed and was with lymphoma, and I mean, I just it was everywhere. So just we just said cancer and they he was in the I see you with pneumonia. They sent him home, they gave him like the hospice talk, and I just remember looking at him and being like, my dad, did I kind of do any of this? And he was, you know, talking all day, hanging out with us all day. And he died that night. And I truly think it was just he just was good night, flipped off the lights. Yeah, in his 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 funny to it was like sorry Dad, really uh. And he was so funny right up until the end. And ums, Okay where we started. My train of thought is like, really it's going in a couple of directions. We're going to bring it back to the station for you. Um 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 h medical uh 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 Erin? Will it be a year? Will it be? We have no idea, You have no idea, So you are exhausted. And for me, I was thirty one, my husband was thirty five. I know that that is not normal, Like I know that that's not like Okay, you're not supposed to be doing that when you're thirty five. There are things that you have to do for somebody that um that are a part of your wedding vows you know, like sick us in health and like until death parts do 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 they're like those moments where you're doing something that's like traumatic and horrible and that you won't tell anybody else about um. But also you think like, yeah, this is where I'm supposed to be, this is who I 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 UMM. 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. It's like, so they're so amazing, You're like, oh my gosh, honestly, your heart, you know this crazy amazing and also real tricky. Like Aaron's brain grew cancer. That's so stupid. Why would you do that? Stop doing that? Like like what he had, like this little heart murmur that if apparently um is really really deadly. For Wolf Parkinson White, you know it okay, Yeah, and they're 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 this, 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 um. And I recounted like all of our first dates, I played this playlist that honestly, looking back, I knew he would hate, so I kind of feel I kind of bad because he didn't like my taste of music. But I was like, these songs remind me of like falling in love with you, even even though you hated them, and I put in some of like you know, his 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 yeah, And he came back at like six maybe I remember I texted that my daycare lady like might not be a great time and she saw, like, you know, the unusual day. Yeah yeah, and she had known what was happening. And um, Ralph came home and I think children are amazing. And he knew like he knew. He walked into our house. You know, this little hat on is still there and you know, and we went in there and I said, Papa is 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 be this guy? Will you be the grass? And Ralph was twenty two months old and maybe six months later we were outside and he was waving at the sky and saying, my Papa is the air. Like so some part of him I think just has internalized that. Now he's five helps five, a very very smart five, and he he knows like he knows like my dad a brain cancer. Something was growing in my dad's brain, Like, my dad's body died. My dad's body was really sick. But you were pregnant. Yeah you had on purpose? Oh yeah, on purpose. I we did i UI, which I'm for people who don't know, is like the cheap version of IVF where they just like put sperm in you. Because IVF is so expensive. We had no money. I remember going to that meeting and they were like showing us the prices and I was like, do you have anything like cheap? Isn't it cheaper just to deal fashion way put it in there? Yeah, you can't though, if you are radiated and on chemo. So Eric, 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 worked basically both times and with a very limited amount of product and um and yeah. So like yeah he was like, you know, radiated. They were like, yeah, you can't have any no funny business, and uh so I had to do it medically and we had Ralph, and we wanted Ralph to not be an only child. Brain cancer works like slowly until it doesn't. And when I got pregnant the second time, we can tell Aaron wasn't doing great, but it wasn't doing noticeably worse. It didn't he got m r S 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 um, and so I lost that baby five days after, 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. So you're like jonah, here curse. Yeah. I mean everyone is, though, like and then I look at other people and go, no, that's bad. We have we do have a group called the Hot Young Widows Club, and um, 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 no, like oh no, no, no, that's yeah, that's I'll take mine. And I think you guys get together frequently. We do. Yeah, there's meetups all over the world now, like we have. We have widows everywhere, men women like gay, straight people. Turns out people are dying all the time and leaving behind, leaving mind loved ones. It's just this club keeps growing. Um best club you'll never want to join. Yes, we have t shirts, so I'm pretty pretty into them. I want you to read this letter if you don't mind. It's a response you gave. Actually describe it. Look part of also part of grief is anger and pettiness, if that's okay, Like just I think that's just a common thing. You don't want to be angry because you know it's unappealing. I was checking Aaron's email just to make sure I wasn't missing anything important, which I missed, like one important thing, um, which was like one bill that went into collections for like thirty five dollars. It was like, and they literally don't care if you call and you're like, he's dead therek, we'll need that thirty five dollars, Like well, you'll get it, but you'll also get an earful So um, Aaron was a designer. He's a graphic designer. He was so talented, and he um in his email One day he got a got an email, got an email. It wasn't it's like it was an email from It wasn't just a bot. It was like from an actual person who was recruiting for 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 changed to protect the innocent, Dear Francine, thank you so much for reaching out to my husband for the senior art director position on December eight. 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 asked 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. Right, No, I just day. She probably just went home and cried and I'm sorry. I watched some of your stuff and listen to the podcast. Obviously I didn't know what to expect, but I barely enjoyed meaning. And I think I started by creating mechanical Hart pumps and these, you know, getting had a chance of making the patients. So 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, Dad, the little child you lost. But I remember frequently reminding people that they had been blessed with gifts that others hadn't had the first thirty five years of their life with someone that they would never see again, but least they had their thirty five years. And there's so many stories that I ran into along those lines that when people came back to him. But the most compelling of all, I'll tell you with you stand this podcast. There was a a gentleman who needs to bypass surgery, and he came in and he was obviously despondent, and it's bad news that need you 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 at least energy energizing to survive the darkn operation. And finally his wife started crying, this is really bizarre. I'm trying to piece the pieces, put the pieces together on this of this puzzle. And she said, our son was the most charming sixteen year old you have imagine. He was murdered, actually case the mistaken identity in a parade gang thought he was a member of the rival gang, and he killed an innocent kid. And we've not been able to put our life together. And my husband doesn't care if he's gonna live or die, you know, really completely ambivalent about it. And I said, I can't operate on you. I can do open heart surgery. If you're not really into it, that doesn't work right. You sort of have to want to get through it. And uh, and then I was sort of speechless, which is a rare format. Didn't you know what to tell him? To get him psyche that for surgery. Now do it for your wife. You might get get past it. Now that works. They 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 on hold. Same day that comes in similar age. He's the exit actual operation and uh, I you know, I see you listen. You gotta get ready for the operation. So I'm here, Doc, I'm ready. He said, well, I know, but I mean there's a sub tilling. You know. I don't need all details. I don't read a pep talk. I am ready. I will survive. And I said, why are you so confident? He said, I've got a sixteen year old child at home who's profoundly developed mentally 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 sixteen years. That father, I'm a dad, had made plans with his son for the rest of his life. He had catch with you know, with them. He'd done things that they were that fathers do his sons that would bring him pleasure, and he'd never be able to do the things you do with that twenty five year old boy. But he did all things you could do up to sixteen years of age. And that second father never had any of that, never any of that bliss. And I told the first father that story, and it was enough to get him through the procedure actually operated on them a similar time. And I never forget the fact that we often, and you mentioned earlier discussion, overlook those subtleties bust the bliss we have. And that's why I love her so much. Yeah, it does always end, It does. It does a pleasure. Thank you, Thank you for having yes, wonderful, wonderful job to check out our podcast is it's brilliant, beautiful as she is. Uh and you can go to the Young Widow's Club if you want to do You don't take outsiders though, right, we don't take. We don't take. We don't take lucky lose. We to require death certificate. I'm not kidding, because everyone's a while you get a weirdo terrible. Thanks for asky neighbor. Podcast looks cold. It's okay to laugh crying. It is cool too. Thank you.