In Love and Memory

Toddlers Ralphie and Bronson have lived most of their young lives with dead fathers. Their mothers — Nora and Moe — struggle to understand how to help their boys remember the dads they won’t know directly.

As they worry about what long-term effect the losses will have on the kids, Nora seeks perspective from Ambra Markos, whose mother died when Ambra was just 2 years old.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

NORA MCINERNY: A few weeks ago I spoke at an event in front of about 100 people where I talked about some formative experiences in my life. How in 2014 I miscarried my second child. How my dad died five days later. How my husband died six weeks after that.

The point of my talk was about owning your own story, not letting other people define you by what they think your life is like. When it was over, everyone clapped and there was time for Q&A. A woman’s hand shot up.

She wanted to know if I was pregnant.

Silence filled the room, and like I was Angelina Jolie or something, I just said, “next question.”

I could say a lot of things about this. Like, how I know it was asked from a good place but why are women asked that? Like, if you wanna tell 100 strangers, you tell 100 strangers! Or the irony of having a stranger demand a story told about me when I’d just talked for an hour about personal narrative.

Instead, I will tell you that I was indeed pregnant with a baby I would have a few weeks later and I didn’t want to talk about it with 100 strangers or even 100 of my own friends.

I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone.

I am in love with two men. I have a child by each of them.

This is the storyline for 90% of Maury Povich episodes and I know what you’re thinking, “Who is this irresponsible woman and hasn’t she heard of birth control?”

I’m Nora McInerny. I have heard of birth control.

This is Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Or…it will be next week.

This week… this is a big week. So big that I didn’t want to let it pass by without acknowledging it. For most people, it’s Thanksgiving in America.

For me…

For me … two years ago this week, my husband Aaron died of brain cancer.

I was sad. Beyond sad. Devastated. Beyond devastated. I was feeling things that don’t even have words, and sometimes not feeling anything at all (yay, depression!). But I was not completely insane, and I knew that like annoying people like to say, the world would keep spinning, the sun would shine again, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and any other astrological/meteorological phrase that people like to throw around.

I knew that I would love again. I knew this in part because also people like to say that, too. At Aaron’s funeral, more than one person reassured me that at age 31, I was still young, still beautiful, and would find someone else.

I did not know how hard that would be.

Not the finding someone part. That was actually kind of easy. My friend Moe, who is also a widow, had some friends over and one of them was cute and shy and dorky and fell out of his chair trying to introduce himself and stayed up all night (10pm) talking to me about his divorce and my dead husband and both our hearts were like, “hey, you’re great. Let’s do this.”

Finding someone: that was easy.

Falling in love: also easy. I thought, for sure, I would take it slow. I had never dated as a widowed mother but I knew a few things for certain: my nearly 3-year-old son and I were a team, a unit. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was ever meeting Ralph.

Mister Hart met Ralph a few weeks after we met. Not in a “hi, here is your new dad” kind of way, but in the way he’d met so many other adults during his tumultuous little life, where his father was sick and dying from the day he was born. It was a “hey, this is a guy I know,” kind of way, and Ralph treated Mr. Hart like any other person he’d met a few times before. He offered him goldfish crackers, he bossed him around, he asked him to wipe his butt for him after he pooped.

Being in love brings you a certain measure of happiness. I think for most people it’s actually a *lot* of happiness but I am not most people. I am a people who has lost her husband. Who wrote a book about it. Who started a sort of tongue in cheek but actually very real Hot Young Widows Club. Who spent almost a full year in complete shock and denial before realizing that she was drowning in an ocean of anxiety, depression and grief.

Happiness, to me, was only acceptable in measured increments. I could have a little at a time. Not too much.

I never knew, really, what grief looked like. We are very good at hiding it, compartmentalizing it. Grief is experienced in private, mostly. You are, of course, allowed to actively grieve during a wake, a funeral, a burial. Perhaps you can keen over your husband’s dead body. Post a few sad status updates, write a blog post. But did you know that grief isn’t just crying? That grief isn’t a facial expression or a physical act? Did you know that a grieving person can do a lot of things, like laugh and go to movies and grocery shop and raise a child all while bleeding to death internally?

Well, now you know, so you won’t be surprised when it happens to you! That grief — that sneaky, stalkery, internal bleeding kind of grief — can’t be posted to Instagram. It can’t be performed on cue when you run into former friends who’ve evaporated from your life, or acquaintances you recognize you from the internet. People were always telling me how much they appreciated my honesty and transparency and I would think, why? Not because I was lying about anything, but because even if I was made of Saran Wrap and glass, there is no way you can see this part.

Grief was my constant companion. I didn’t totally hate it, either — I still don’t. It is a bruise I get to push, a pain that reminds me that what I had and what I lost is real. It is the price I paid for loving deeply, for being loved. It is the evidence that Aaron was here, that he is really gone.

Falling in love didn’t take my grief away, and didn’t diminish it at all. My grief scooted over a bit to make room for Mister Hart, it invited him and our relationship to live in my heart at the same time. But happiness, love, are so much easier to demonstrate than grief. They are so much easier to see. And something about that made me uncomfortable.

Maybe I was afraid of the judgment of others, but mostly I think I feared my own judgment: that loving another person would somehow diminish what I had with my dead husband Aaron. That if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore. That if I wasn’t sad anymore, I must not have loved him. That I didn’t actually deserve to be happy again.

I fell in love with Matthew without falling out of love with Aaron. Aaron did not leave a space to fill. There is no replacing something that big, not in any way. And adding something new and good to your life doesn’t erase anything. If it did, then compulsive shoppers and hoarders would have the key to happiness.

Before my husband died, I lost our second baby. We were right at that magical 12 week mark, you know, where you’re officially A OKAY AND NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN TO THE BABY. But the baby died anyway. Maybe days before, maybe weeks. Either way, while my husband and father lay dying on opposite sides of the city, eaten alive by cancers their own bodies had created, I closed my eyes in a hospital room while telling the anesthesiologist about my manicure and when I woke up I was not pregnant anymore and I was worried I’d given her the wrong name for my nail polish.

An entire universe, a human life, had bloomed and withered inside of me without anyone but our family knowing, but I didn’t have time to weep for that. My dad would die seven days later, Aaron six weeks after that.

Matthew knew all of this. He’d heard bits and pieces from Moe, and then from me. I sent him the manuscript to my memoir of grief and love before we got serious, a little bit of a warning for him, so he could fully understand the levels of Fucked Up I was, and make an informed decision. He himself had untangled himself from a gnarly marriage. Years of stress and betrayal and layers of pain. things I couldn’t understand doing to someone when you’d promised to love and cherish and make pancakes for them.

He wasn’t scared by any of that.

But I was.

Three months after we met, I was alone when I took the pregnancy test. We’d talked about babies, of course, in those far-off ways you talk about things when you’re newly in love. When would we get married? Well, probably a year or so? Should we have another baby? Yeah, duh. And soon. He’s almost 40, and who knows how long it would take me. My body had never really recovered from that miscarriage. My set-your-clock-to-it period had disappeared since my DNC procedure the year before. Pregnancy was a dream, an impossibility.

I woke up one day, bewildered, on my sofa, where I’d been writing. It was 1pm. I’d been asleep for, what? 30 minutes? An hour? Either way, a nap was out of character for me, but I felt that dark velvet of sleep wrapping around me again and decided to make it a double.

I woke up and drove to Walgreen’s, where I made another uncharacteristic choice and went with the store-brand pregnancy tests.

That second line showed up immediately as I peed. It was dark pink, and I smiled to myself, holding a small piece of plastic soaked in my urine.

“Holy shit!” I said to only me, and I watched myself smile in the mirror.

When I told Aaron I was pregnant with Ralph, four years earlier, he wept and we slow danced in our living room together. He had stage IV brain cancer, but this baby would keep him alive. We took baby classes together. We told our friends and family in small, intimate groups. We posted photos online.

This baby’s pregnancy has been between me, Mister Hart, our families, and my manicurist. I’m six feet tall, slightly asocial, and for the most part, as a pregnant woman I just look like I did freshman year of college when I discovered unlimited ice cream in the cafeteria. If people noticed, they usually didn’t ask me, and I only told the people I wanted to tell, when I wanted to tell them.

I’ve told myself a lot of things about this. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave an interview after having a baby nobody knew she was pregnant with and told people that she didn’t believe women should be forced to perform their pregnancies. At the time, I was thinking about how I would “announce” my pregnancy to my social media following, and I thought, “you know what, you’re right.” Because we shouldn’t have to! But mostly, I didn’t want to perform love and happiness and grief, this emotional stew I was cooking inside of me. Have you seen stew? It’s disgusting to look at, no matter what it tastes like.

When I was 17 weeks along, we told all our kids about the baby. Matthew’s kids are 15 and 10, and they were excited and probably a little weirded out because they’re old enough to know what sex is and that their dad had it with me and ewwwwww. Ralph is 3, and he immediately asked when he would have a baby and made it all about him and his pregnancy. It was the Friday before Memorial Day, and we were this happy, weird little family unit coming together. Two days later … on Memorial Day, I woke up to go to the co-op and get everyone breakfast and donuts and coffee and suddenly, I was in a blood bath.

The baby was gone. I was miscarrying. I left my basket on the floor of the store and drove home, where I ran up the stairs to my room, texted Matthew to “act casual and stay with the kids, I’m having a miscarriage and will take myself to the hospital.” I texted him that. And then I called my mother, and sobbed, and my friend Moe, who drove across town to pick me up and take me to the same ER where Aaron had been told he was really, truly dying.

Moe sat with me for six hours while we waited for a doctor and an ultrasound tech and I wept and wept and wept. I’d killed the baby with my apathy. By not being truly, 100% excited for it. By wondering how it would affect my career. How it would affect how people saw me and my relationship to Aaron. I had my mother tell everyone the baby was dead, and when they wheeled my bed down the same halls Aaron had been wheeled down so many times, and the ultrasound tech said, “oh! Baby is just fine.” I swore I would be different. I would be happy and grateful for this miracle I never thought I’d have again.

But … I wasn’t. I didn’t buy any clothes or tiny shoes. I didn’t sign up for baby classes. I didn’t think about cute baby announcement or baby showers. I didn’t take the vitamins. I just pretended that life was going on as usual, but with more heartburn and larger pants. Some people I know are like, well, that’s just a second baby for ya! But those are people whose husbands and baby’s fathers are still alive.

People who know about the new baby are happy for me. But that is not the issue. The issue is can I be happy for me. A boyfriend, which I’ve written about, is one thing. But a baby is a family, and my family was me and Aaron and Ralph, and now my family is me and Aaron and Ralph and Mister Hart and his kids and this baby.

Two years ago, my family was falling apart. Today, my family is stitched together from a lot of broken places. I hold one man’s baby while I cry for the man that I lost, and the child I have who lost his father. Aaron’s deathaversary this week can’t just be a day I’ve set aside for remembering him quietly because, um, I have a baby attached to my boobs.

I want to give Aaron and his memory my best. I want to give this baby and this family my best.

And sometimes, I think my best is gone, and what is left is whoever I am now.

So. Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. All of you. And how you’re feeling. Our official season starts next week… on November 28th. So go… have some turkey and stuffing … enjoy your families and your friends. And next week, we’re getting into it.

We’ve spent our summer with some amazing people around the country to talk about life experiences and feelings with. I cry in only like 60% of the episodes.
TTFA Guest 1: My stepmom called and she said, “Michael’s gone.” And I was like, “What do you mean Michael’s gone? Everything was fine.”
TTFA Guest 2: But I just remember that that’s when I did, like, I danced in my apartment as someone waited to hurt me.
TTFA Guest 3: I ask the Lord every day to forgive me for wanting something bad to happen because I, as a Christian, shouldn’t want that. But as a human, I do.
TTFA Guest 4: How come some made it and some didn’t? It hurts. It really does.
Nora McInerny: Is there anything that makes that go away at all?
TTFA Guest 4: No, ma’am. Not at all.