Dead People Lore

 Have you ever heard something really weird about someone… but at their funeral? I found out that allegedly my dad RODE A MOTORCYCLE. I wanted to hear about the craziest lore that’s been dropped about people you knew after they died, and you delivered: handcuffs, bathtub gin, and secret pregnancies.

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

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Hi, everyone, it’s Nora McInerny. Welcome back to Thanks For Asking. This is a call-in show about what matters to you.

And I had the idea for this episode when I was at a funeral, which is one of the most Catholic things I could say. I, born and raised, Irish Catholic baby, huge family. Each of my parents had eight surviving siblings, important to note.

Both of my grandmas gave birth 10 times. That’s so many times to have a baby come out of your body. And that means I have so many aunts and uncles and so many cousins, it would truly be impossible for me to name all of them.

But I can say confidently several of them are named John and several of them are named Paul. And if I’m ever in doubt, when I see a man who says he’s my cousin, I say, hey, Paul, John. And I could be right most of the time.

So I’m at a funeral. I’m at a funeral back in Minnesota. This is the funeral where, if you listened months ago, the priest was so young and so handsome.

And then later, after having said that on the podcast, somebody reached out and they said, not only is he young and handsome, but I dated him in high school.

And then somebody else reached out and said, not only is he young and handsome, but he’s also like a great guy. And he really like got my friend through a miscarriage.

And so he’s really, and he was enough about the hot priest, enough about the hot priest. We’re in the basement after the funeral. We’re having the funeral lunch there.

It was actually so good. I’ve had a lot of funeral lunches in my time. I went to funerals recreationally as a kid.

My mom, good Catholic would say, oh my God, my friend’s, mailman’s brother dead. I just saw the notice. I just saw the obituary.

We gotta go to this funeral. And I would like beer plus one for a funeral. So I know my way around a funeral.

I know my way around a funeral lunch. They had gluten-free options. They had like really good fresh fruit, great chicken salad.

I live for a potato salad, a chicken salad, any kind of salad that has no lettuce in it. I am interested in. So I’m there.

A woman comes up to me. She introduces herself. I’ve already forgotten her name and I’m sorry, but she says that the two of us are not related, but she’s related to the decedent.

My aunt who died, who was married to my uncle, my biological uncle. She says she’s related to her, and she remembers meeting my dad or seeing my dad right when he got back from Vietnam. My dad’s dad.

My dad died in 2014. She says, I remember seeing your dad right when he got back from Vietnam.

We were having an extended big family reunion down by Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis, and he pulled up on his motorcycle and I said, I’m going to stop you right there. My dad never had a motorcycle. He never rode a motorcycle.

That is not him. My father had soft hands. My father had the hands of a man who has only ever worked indoors.

My father, he had experienced all the danger he needed to in Vietnam. My dad would never ride a motorcycle. But great story, you must be thinking of someone else.

And she says, no, I remember, he pulled up, he had beer with him. And I said, well, that sounds right. By the time I was born, he was a recovering alcoholic.

But I think at that time, he was actively participating. And so I’m like, okay, well, I’ll thank you for sharing. And I tell my mom the story.

And she says, no, your dad never had a motorcycle. I tell my siblings and they’re like, there’s no way dad had a motorcycle. But I get to thinking about a few things.

I get to thinking, you know, my mom didn’t know my dad at that time. It’s possible he had a motorcycle. It’s possible he knew how to ride a motorcycle.

It’s possible that that was a part of his life he shared with nobody except the people who knew him. In that moment, people would have seen him ride a motorcycle. This woman could hold a part of my father that I knew nothing about.

And she was trying to share it with me. And what did I do? I rejected it.

I said, that’s not the man I know. And therefore, it can’t be true. When really, I think one of the great tragedies of losing somebody that we love is losing parts of them that we never got to know.

Stories we did not know to ask about, lore we did not know to explore. And that’s what this episode is about. This episode is about the things that you found out about a dead person you love after they were already gone.

This is Dead People Lore. Let’s get into it. You know what I really wish we had for this episode?

I really wish I had some potato salad for this episode. I really wish I did, but I don’t. And that’s something that I have to live with.

My lack of potato salad is something that I’m going to be living with.

Okay.

After my grandpa Kenny died, we learned his first name was actually Walter. Like his wife didn’t even seem to know that. There was, that tracks, that tracks, there was an era where men could be called anything, you know?

I had an uncle named Babe come to find out that’s not his name. That’s not his birth certificate. He wasn’t named Babe.

He had a different name. Okay. There was a time, I kind of missed this time, where your name could be like Robert, but everyone just called you Buddy and you went through your life being called Buddy.

Why you’d be named Walter but go by Kenny, I can’t explain, but I also know that it makes sense. I know that it makes sense culturally. I know that it makes sense generationally.

I know that sometimes you simply must go by the name Kenny even when your birth certificate says Walter. And what a time to find that out.

Hi, Nora and team. This is Erica. I live in Maine.

I am here to tell you my family lore about my grandfather. So my grandfather grew up really poor, and his parents were Irish immigrants. And he grew up in Brooklyn and kind of various places in New York City.

And I always knew him as a very professional man. He worked in sales for like 40 years, law abiding citizen, all of these things.

And at his funeral, I learned that after the Great Depression, his father, who was kind of a low-key local hustler and bookie had lost his job.

And my grandfather was at the time doing some odd jobs for a butcher, mostly involving delivering chickens to neighborhood housewives.

And his dad, my great-grandfather, in an effort to make a few extra bucks, started brewing bathtub gin, which was apparently a thing that you did during the Depression and during Prohibition.

And so my grandfather, at the ripe old age of eight or nine, was delivering bathtub gin along with his chickens to all of the neighborhood ladies. And that’s how my family survived the Great Depression.

So it was, needless to say, really shocking to myself as a 20-something to learn that my beloved grandfather had been a rum runner during Prohibition. I hope you have a lovely day, bye.

He’s actually a gin runner, and there’s a difference between gin and rum. And the difference is, I don’t know what it is, but I know that they’re different alcohols. I don’t know enough about alcohol.

I think I know plenty. All right. I know, I know what it does to me, and I have learned enough.

Okay, I’ve learned enough. I love that. I love, that is very good lore.

Making bathtub gin, hopefully nobody needs to bathe because we have to. I mean, how do you make, now I got to know how you make bathtub gin. Bathtub gin.

How to do it. First thing on Google, bathtub gin recipe. Okay, here we go.

Okay, and like every recipe website, first you gotta scroll through a memoir to get, okay, this doesn’t seem like enough. Come on, you can do this in your bathtub, get a grip. Okay, they’re making this on a stove, that’s not bathtub gin.

Here are the ingredients for gin.

Okay, fresh cilantro, lemon or lime peel, marjoram leaves, juniper berries, I guess that’s what makes it taste like a pine tree, cardamom pods, crushed, white peppercorns, sugar, vodka, white wine, that can’t be right.

How are you making alcohol out of alcohol? Like, how to make real bathtub gin, that’s what I… Oh my God.

People ask, this is a common thing, common enough to show up on Google, how do you get into bathtub gin? How do you get into it? Like, I mean, it’s in the bathtub, you literally step in.

How do you get into the business of bathtub gin? If you have to ask Google, I don’t think this is the career for you. If you have to Google, how do I get into the bathtub gin game?

You’re never gonna make it. You’re never gonna make it. This is a, you gotta know somebody to get into the bathtub gin game.

As I Google, bathtub gin game. What to mix with bathtub gin? How does bathtub gin work?

My God. We’re going to the Wikipedia. That’s where we should have started.

Okay, bathtub gin refers to any style of homemade spirit made in amateur conditions. Okay, so I guess you don’t have to make it in a bathtub. So I was being a little bit harsh.

Okay. Created by mixing cheap grain alcohol with water. How do you make grain alcohol?

So already, your family, what you come from is a family of entrepreneurs, inventors, creators, survivors. That is so cool.

I would be so proud to know that my grandpa was a little kid delivering bathtub gin and that my great grandpa was a man who said, I got to feed my family. We’re going to be delivering chickens and we’re going to be delivering some homemade gin.

That’s cool. That’s cool.

Okay. So this is gossip about my grandmother after she died. She died in August.

And it is definitely okay to air this because my father actually told this story after funeral. So the story is my grandmother died of complications due to dementia. It was rough.

But anyway, she died in August, so I just like this. It just delighted me. So the story is, towards the end of my grandmother’s life, she was passed around to a lot of different treatment facilities because she had dementia.

It turns out there’s not great community support for Alzheimer’s dementia patients. It’s basically like if you don’t have a family member, if you can afford to quit their life and become your full-time caretaker.

Or if you can’t afford full-time care, it’s really, really messy. And so my dad and his siblings had really hard to find her stable place, but she wasn’t stable. She was pretty violent in the end.

And so that made it really hard to find her care. But in this one particular incident, she had fallen and broken her life. And so she was in kind of a physical therapy place.

He was also helping manage her, because she was constantly trying to escape and stuff like that.

This one time, she was trying to escape via wheelchair, and they tried to stop her, and she started fighting them and shouting all sorts of racial slurs, and all of that fun stuff.

And so they ended up calling my father because they were trying to enlist him to help calm her down and get her to go back to her room, or they were going to have to call the police. So I call my dad, explain what’s going on.

My dad’s on speakerphone talking to her, and he’s saying, Mom, if you don’t stop and go back to your room, they’re going to call the police, they’re going to put you in handcuffs. Do you want to be in handcuffs, Mom?

And without skipping a beat, my grandmother said once on a date, and my dad just said, well, Mom, I don’t think this is going to be the same type of experience. I don’t think you’re going to like it.

And I honestly can’t remember if he calmed her down, if he went back to her room before, if they ended up having to call the police to put her in handcuffs, which is devastatingly sad, but I just really, really loved learning that little thing.

If you had a hard time hearing that, when grandma was being threatened with being arrested, which there’s a lot to unpack here.

And I mean, one is we do have like a lack of affordable care options, good care options, quality care options for our elderly, for people experiencing dementia, memory loss, all kinds of things. It’s like truly a horrifying experience.

And, you know, it’s like to lose your mind. Of course, you’d want to escape. Of course, you’d fight somebody.

You should never yell racial slurs. That’s good. Sorry, even if you have dementia, but like, of course, it would be so terrifying.

And of course, you would want to get out. And I don’t know why they’d have to call the police. Like, what are the police going to do?

Be like, ma’am, I know you don’t know what’s happening, but we’re going to arrest you. But this elderly woman’s being threatened with arrest. And her son says, do you want to be handcuffed?

And she said, once on a date. She said, once on a date. She didn’t know she was talking to her son, probably.

She just said the thing. And you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me, all the time.

Whenever we see an elderly person, we’re like, that is such a cute old lady. We sort of infantilize the elderly. It’s the Benjamin Button of it all, right?

Like, you begin life as a baby, you end life as a baby, we act as though, like, you did not have, like, this whole life. Old people used to just be young people, and you know what young people do, okay? They do go on dates.

They do things on dates. They do things after dates. They do things without a date.

Your grandparents, they had experiences, okay? They had experiences that would shock you. And that is why I will be burning my diaries before anybody any of my ancestors can read them, because that’s really, some lore will die with me.

Some lore will die with me. But you gotta remember that sometimes. You gotta remember that.

You gotta remember you are interacting with a person. You are talking to a person. And this person has had a lot of experiences, more than you know.

Some of you don’t want to know about, but good for grandma. Good for grandma that she got to have that experience while she was still young, if she liked it and it sounds like she did. Okay, more about grandma.

More about grandma in the handcuffs, here we go.

Okay, this is Ashley again. Second story, same grandmother, but this one is about my grandfather.

He died when I was, so I actually learned this a good amount of time ago because I was interviewing her for a paper I was writing in college, and just sort of getting some of our family.

I learned that on their first date, which he was a widow, she was divorced, they were next door neighbors and fell in love, super romantic.

But on their first date, he drove her home into her driveway and then, you know, pulled out and went into his driveway right next door. But he never in her driveway and gave her a kiss, and then she used their first kiss.

And then she got out to go inside, and she was like, are you not gonna walk into the door? And he said, I can’t. And he couldn’t because the poor man had changed his stance from one kiss.

I cannot remember how my grandmother worded it. It was discreet. She didn’t say, quote unquote, change his stance, but he said it in a way that was so funny.

And it just killed me to learn that about my grandpa. It didn’t even really gross me out. It just made me laugh.

And I love writing that stuff. There you go.

That’s exactly what I mean.

Exactly what it would be when I say, your grandparents have had experiences, okay? And one kiss and her grandpa couldn’t get out of the car because he had reached the peak in his pants. He couldn’t get up, couldn’t walk right out the door.

That’s how powerful your grandma was. That’s how powerful your grandma’s sexuality was, was that your grandpa was unable to walk right out the door because one kiss sent him over the edge. I treasure that story.

That is so, that’s so, and I love that she told you. She was like, this is our origin story. This is the story of our love.

He’s widowed, I’m divorced, we’re starting over. He’s so affected by a kiss. I’m crying.

Also that she, I would love to know how she worded jizzed your pants. I would love to know that. That’s amazing.

Okay.

Hi, you wanted secrets we learned after somebody passed away.

When I was probably in middle school, my grandpa passed away and I could hear all the family chattering about how my grandma’s wrong made name was put into the obituary. And so I kept asking my mom about it.

And she finally told me that my grandparents were actually next-door neighbors in a town in Minnesota. And my grandpa was in his 30s, married with five kids, and my grandma was the 14-year-old next-door neighbor.

And they ran away together to Chicago or outside of Chicago. And they lied about their names and their ages and the fact that they weren’t married, and started a new life together as this married couple. And they had five more kids.

So I grew up knowing these grandparents, but not knowing the backstory about how they got together.

So it all came out when my grandpa passed away, and they published the wrong maiden name, my grandma’s actual maiden name, in the obituary at Nother Made Up Long. So that was a pretty big secret to learn when my grandpa passed away.

So enjoy, thanks for all that you do. I really enjoy following you, bye.

If you are just listening to this, not watching on YouTube, the YouTube link is always in our show description. I can’t remember YouTube URL to save my life. My jaw’s on the floor hearing that.

We are living in a time where these kinds of secrets are going to be harder and harder to perpetrate. Has to be probably quite disturbing to know that your grandpa was a 30-year-old man.

Yeah, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but you know, it’s not not, you know what we call it when a 30-year-old man wants to marry a 14-year-old girl. Like, you know, you know what we call it.

Even if they have five kids and even if they stay together till they die, wowee.

Yikes.

Also that you’re like, I need to know more. I will be honest, we’re going to be digging into this more.

This will be in this episode, but we’re going to have to come back to this caller because I got to know how your mom dealt with finding out that she had five secret siblings who had a mom, who was abandoned for their 14-year-old neighbor.

I need to know so much about this. And I’m imagining this is happening in the 30s. That’s what I imagine.

Maybe the 20s, maybe the 30s, where you could just show up and make up a new name. These people didn’t have a real ID. They didn’t know.

They were living in a time before a surveillance state that would say, no, you were not that person. You were not that person. Let’s be honest.

Let’s be honest. That’s not who you are. That’s not your last name.

The ability to get away with this. That window is closed, baby. We will, hopefully, we will not have the ability for people to steal away a 14-year-old girl and take her to Chicago and start a new life.

And wow, that’s a lot. That is wild. I got to know how this is ringing through your family to this day because I imagine.

I mean, you’ve got cousins out there, babe. You’ve got aunts and uncles that you did not know about, right? Yeah.

No, great aunts and uncles. Your mom has, no. Your grandpa, yes.

You have aunts and uncles. Like, I don’t even know how you would define that. That’s a story, babe.

That’s a lot. I’m flabbergasted. I’m shocked.

I don’t know that I would be able to talk about anything else for the rest of my life if that happened to me. I would say, nice to meet you.

Did you know that my grandpa actually ran away with his 14-year-old neighbor and started a new life, and that’s why I exist? To father 10 children is, and leave five, be like, sorry, I got to start over. Got to start over.

I fell in love with a kid. Wild. I got to call you.

I’m going to be texting you. Okay, that was wild. That was wild.

I’m floored. I’m speechless, which is not a good place to be when you have a podcast and people are expecting you to be speaking.

Okay.

Hi, Nora. I’m calling because I wanted to share, I guess it’s not really gossip, to be honest. It’s more just like a what the hell situation about information that I can’t ask my mom, my dead mom about because she’s dead.

But basically, my mom died from breast cancer, and she had a recurrence of breast cancer in her 60s. The first time she was diagnosed, she was in her early 40s and I was a toddler.

And I’ve had multiple conversations with her about how when she was first diagnosed, she was pregnant. And ultimately, she ended up losing the baby, unfortunately. And I’m an only child.

I don’t have any siblings. And so I’ve always wondered about this baby that could have been in our lives and I could have had a younger sibling.

And after my mom died, I was talking to my dad about this and he was like, what the heck are you talking about? She was never pregnant. And I was like, what do you mean?

Never pregnant. So to this day, we’ve, he, she’s been gone for almost five years. He does not believe me that this was ever a conversation that I had with her.

But it is, I’ve had multiple conversations with my mom about this mystery baby and my sibling that I never got to meet. And he’s just like, why would she not tell me? Why would she not tell me she was pregnant?

If it’s true, there’s no way she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t know. I would love to know the answer to that question.

Why didn’t you tell your husband? I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter because she knew she was probably going to lose the baby because she was sick, and she didn’t want to make my dad more devastated. I don’t know.

But it’s just one of those things where like, it’s so frustrating that I can’t ask this question. Like, I will literally never know the answer to this, and it’s so frustrating. And it’s just one of those interesting nuances of having a dead person.

So I just wanted to share. It’s probably not the juicy gossip you were looking for, but.

I think it has pretty juicy gossip, and I agree. Not gossip, but like a tragic thing to learn. And the fact that your mom shared it with you meant that it meant something to her still.

And now I’m going to cry because I used to think like, oh, you know, I lost her pregnancy. I mean, you know, we’re coming on 11 years now, right? It’s been a solid 10 years.

And I used to think, well, like, it won’t, someday it won’t hurt, like someday it won’t matter almost, right? Like someday it just like won’t, it won’t like affect me. But I do think like, obviously it always will.

And so like hearing this about your mom and the way that she wanted to share this with you, like, I understand her wanting to share it with you.

And I also understand her not telling her husband, because it feels like, in my experience, and the experiences I’ve heard other people say, it just does feel like it’s your fault. You know, like, it’s happened, it happened in your body, it happened.

And I’m like, you know, you’re watched, like, you’re supposed to carry this. And like, I can only imagine that’s compounded by like being sick, and giving the person who loves you something more to worry about or more to hurt them.

And, you know, in my case, you know, my husband was sick, I wasn’t sick, but I just remember thinking like, oh God, like, now I have to give him like this pain too. And I wish I hadn’t, and I bet.

I bet your mom didn’t want to give your dad something else to be sad about. And I also bet that she wanted you to know, fuck, I, like, I gotta stop crying on this show.

I’ve never cried more on this show since we decided to make a less sad show, and I’m crying all the time. But I’m guessing too, like, she wanted you to know, like, she wanted you to have a sibling too. So, anyway, love to cry.

And I wish you could ask your mom about this too, because it is so hard to learn about these, like, big life-altering things about somebody and not be able to, like, excavate them and, like, understand them and turn them over together.

But, you know, I think that was, like, her way of trying to connect with you about it, even if she didn’t give you the whole truth, which is, your dad doesn’t know this. And you know why I also bet it’s frustrating?

It’s because your dad’s saying, like, that’s not true, and you’re like, yeah, it is, okay? Like yeah, it is. It’s also hard to be a person who knows something about a dead person that nobody else knows.

And to be like, okay, was that supposed to be a secret? Is that supposed to be something that only I know? What am I supposed to do with this information?

If you’re not going to, you didn’t give me instructions for this information, but thank you for sharing that, and sorry that I cried. You should have been crying. That’s your sibling, that’s your mom.

But sometimes I just get very affected by doing this job and talking to you guys. And also, I asked for this. I asked for this.

I said, what’d you find out about a dead person? Like, I couldn’t possibly be shocked that it’s sad stuff.

Hi, I’m calling about gossip. You heard about someone after they died. So it wasn’t until my great-grandfather had died that the full story came out to my family that he was actually my grandfather’s uncle and not his father.

My grandma was married to his brother. He lived with them as a young man and just trying to get on his feet. It turned out that their biological father was an alcoholic and abusive.

So eventually, my great-grandmother left, and my great-grandfather kept helping out the family because he felt bad about his brother being such a terrible husband and father.

And they eventually fell in love and moved to a completely different state, and just told everybody that they had been married all along.

And my great-grandfather lied about his age for a long time, because his age would have made it extremely clear that he wasn’t their father.

They didn’t really find out all of this until he died, and they were going through his papers, and obviously came upon his correct first date.

Okay, once again, once again, we are talking about a bygone era, an era where you could assume somebody else’s identity. This was such a popular trope in film and TV and books, because I think it was, it absolutely was a much simpler time.

You could simply show up in a new city and say, me, I’m insert my brother’s name, okay? And I’ve always been married to this woman, and these are my children. That was something that you could do.

That was something that you could do in the days before social media. You try that now with TikTok, there’s gonna be like a 55 part series on you, a man who assumed the identity of your dead brother.

I also want to say, and not in defense of your dead great grandma, but because you’re not judging her, and I doubt anybody in your family was either, but it’s actually quite common.

It’s quite common when somebody is widowed, for them to end up in a relationship with their dead person’s sibling, best friend.

I do think that there’s something kind of poetic, something kind of lovely about that, about two people who shared some kind of connection.

It sounds like your biological great grandpa maybe wasn’t like the best of the best kind of people, but in a lot of instances, like you love your brother, your brother loves her husband, that husband dies, like, yeah, like you gotta have somewhere to

put that love. I love this man stepping in and saying, my brother sucked and was a bad husband and now I’m gonna be the husband and these are gonna be my kids. Like that’s like a, that’s a good man. That’s a good man.

That’s a good person to do that. Did we have to lie about it? I believe, yeah, I believe that was part of the deal, right?

You can’t just slot yourself in because in an era where, you know, blended families weren’t as common, weren’t as accepted, certainly weren’t celebrated, you wouldn’t have wanted a kid to feel like he was any less of your kid.

And that’s that, like people still have that assumption now, right? Like people still comment to me about our blended family, or those like Matthew’s kids, I’m like, that’s not how we say it, babe, right? That’s not how we say it.

That’s not how we say it. And it’s like, I understand it, but what a revelation. What a revelation.

I would love to know more about the dynamics there too. Like, did your grandpa feel that when he was growing up? But also now you’re, how are you ever gonna find out?

How are you gonna find out? Yeah, okay, and then they found out about his birthday. And what a thing, what a thing to discover.

And so I wonder if your grandpa, if he sensed that when he was growing up. Maybe not, I mean, an uncle and a dad, that’s pretty biologically similar, so it’s not as if this is just a random man stepping in to pretend to be his dad.

But I had friends who I knew as adults who had found this out about themselves. I mean, these are people who were born in the 80s, right? Who are like, okay, do we need to lie about it in the 80s?

Do we need to lie about who my dad was in the 80s? And honestly, I think, yeah. I think for a lot of people, yes.

If the situation felt like that’s what it called for, yeah. And also, you’re all doing the best that you can with the information you have. And also, we have to remember, for a long time, children weren’t people.

Like, we didn’t really note that they had feelings or really care about their feelings or, like, consider the fact that they would be adults someday who wanted to know where they came from. And so, you know, a lot has changed.

What am I trying to say here is that that is a heck of a story. And what I’m also trying to say here is that I have to make a correction, which is, you know, not a correction.

I have to make an addition to the origin story of this episode, which is, I went to that funeral in March, where I was told about my dad allegedly riding a motorcycle. And then I got an email from Beth Peterson. Shout out to Beth Peterson, May 23rd.

She said, I had an episode idea. When someone dies, sometimes people tell you stories about them that you didn’t know. It would be fun to listen to a call-in episode to hear what people have been told.

So, dead mom gossip? And I said, that’s a brilliant idea. And now, here we are talking about dead person gossip.

And some of these stories are really, I don’t want to say tragic, some of these are really heavy stories, but I’ve also heard really, really good things.

And I think that is something that I want to touch on and maybe end this episode on too, is that I often hear from people who are like, oh, somebody died who I knew, maybe it wasn’t the closest to them, but like, oh, I have this picture of them from

middle school, or oh, I have this letter they wrote me in high school, or oh, I have this memory of them that I’d like to share. Like, would it be okay to share that with their wife, with their mom, with whoever?

And I don’t know how everybody would take it, but I can say that I have a very specific memory, and I wrote about this in my first book, It’s Okay to Laugh, Crying is Cool Too, where I was at a high school friend’s funeral.

He had died right, not long after Erin had died, and his cousin got up at the funeral lunch.

Everything comes back to a funeral lunch when you’re Catholic, and his cousin was crying, and he said, you know, if you knew him, if you knew Eddie Mullen, one of the best people to ever walk this earth, everyone who knew Eddie Mullen loved Eddie

Mullen. If you knew Eddie Mullen in a way that I didn’t as his cousin, tell me a story. Tell me something about him. Give me a way to hold on to him.

Give me a way to hold on to him. And I remember sitting there and thinking like, yes, give me another way to hold on to him.

And every once in a while, I will get an email with a photo attached, or I will get a text from one of Aaron’s friends from high school or middle school, or I’ll get a piece of him from somebody who knew him in another way, and I will feel so

grateful for that glimpse into his life. Because when we’re gone, we’re gone.

Like, it sometimes strikes me, you know, we will never have, like, you’re not going to have that additional conversation where you can ask your mom, why didn’t you tell dad about the pregnancy you lost when you had cancer?

Or grandma, you know, what happened on your second date?

If that’s, if grandpa in his pants, on the first date when you just kissed him, like, you, that’s it, that’s all you’ll have is what you have, the conversations you had, the photos you have, the memories you have, like, that’s it.

And so to get something from another person who knew you’re a dead person in another way really is such a gift. It is this magic portal into a world, an alternate universe that they occupied that you didn’t, you know?

We are all people of multitudes, and we all are different people too. Different people. And I’ve really, really treasured those instances.

So if you have lore about a dead person, I encourage you to, you know, write it down, send an email, send a photo, send a photo in the mail. I don’t know, like share it with them. Don’t expect anything back necessarily, but get it out there.

You might be giving them a gift when they need it most, you know? And in that spirit, we learned this week that one of my high school classmates, he was a year ahead of me, Derek Robinson died suddenly.

He was, I would say my number one high school crush. And yes, I will make this about me. I’m not really, but you know, he was a super athlete.

He was so handsome. He was so handsome. But he was so nice.

He was so nice. Like, stereotypes about handsome football players are that they are maybe not going to be the nicest person. This was like the nicest person in our high school.

Definitely knew I had a crush on him because I would, I was like, I have a crush on you. I can’t talk. Every time I see you, I can’t talk.

I have a photo in a box over here somewhere where like, it’s the last day of school where like, I think we have like an end of school year dance, and that’s when people can like sign your yearbooks.

And I had somebody take a photo of us, and I’m like clinging to him for dear life because I’ve worked up the nerve to ask for a photo with him. What was I going to do with this photo? I was going to put it in a box and keep it for over 20 years.

That’s what I was going to do. And he really did just make people feel so good about themselves.

And I got a, I posted about that on Instagram, and I got a message from a girl, Sarah, who was a few years younger than me in school, who said that one day she was walking through school and she was wearing like her glitter butterfly clip, she was

wearing her lip gloss, and she was like a freshman. She was younger than me. She must have been like a freshman. He’s like, you know, a senior, and he looks at her and he goes, you look really pretty today.

And she’s like, I was walking on air. I still blush when I think about that moment. I’m like, I’m blushing thinking about that moment, and I am jealous of you.

My high school self is jealous of high school you in this moment. So anyways, you know, dead people gossip doesn’t always have to be salacious.

Like it could literally just be a good, or dead people lore, dead people gossip, whatever we want to call it, doesn’t always have to be salacious. It doesn’t always have to be life changing. It doesn’t always have to be.

So many grandparents, assuming other people’s identities, assuming new identities, a bygone era, to be sure, it could just be a really good memory that you have of somebody.

And sharing that is, I think, also what keeps us connected to people and keeps them alive and present.

So, in a future episode, I’m hoping you will hear more from the woman who found out that her grandma was 14 and ran away with a 30-year-old man who, we got it, I think we have to explore that.

And with that, we’re gonna wrap this episode up, everybody. I’m Nora McInerny. This is Thanks For Asking.

If you are listening to this podcast, we also have a YouTube. It will be linked in our episode description. If you’re watching on YouTube, thank you for being here.

I appreciate you maybe being one of our 10,000 subscribers. And if not, do that. We’re an independent podcast.

We do this on our own. We did that intentionally, because we did not want to be a part of a giant media company. We have already done that.

We don’t want to do that anymore. We want to be calling our own shots and doing our work the way we want to do it at a really humane rate, okay? Not burning ourselves out.

So thank you for being here, watching, sharing, commenting, liking, rating, reviewing, all those annoying things that everyone tells you to do. It is because we will always still be at the mercy of the algorithm gods.

And so when you do that, it really does like help. These episodes are made possible by our paid subscribers. Thank you so much.

I know that is not in the cards and in the budget for everybody. But over on noraborialis.substack.com, we don’t have a Patreon anymore. We don’t have Apple Plus anymore.

We just have all of our episodes over there ad free. All of the archives over there. I write over there.

Just one stop shop for everything. You can join monthly. You can join annually.

Or you could kick in a little extra and you could become a supporting producer.

And the one benefit of that, there’s literally one perk, is that you get your name in the credits, which is actually kind of my favorite part of recording, is recording the credits and reading all these names.

So thank you so much to Nancy Duff, to Jenny Medellin, to Jordan Jones, Sheila Kathleen Langerman, Ben, Jess, Michelle Toms, Tom Stockburger, Jen, Beth Derry, Stacey DeMorrow, Emily Ferriso, Stephanie Johnson, Faye Barons, Amanda, Sarah Garifo,

Jennifer McDagle, all in caps, Elia Filiz-Milan, Lindsay Lund, Renee Kepke, Chelsea Cernick, Car Pan, LGS, all caps, Stacey Wilson, Courtney McCown, Kaylee Sakai, Mary Beth Berry, Joe Theodosopoulos, Mad, Abby Arose, Elizabeth Berkeley, Kim F, Melody

Swinford, Val, Lauren Hanna, Katie, Jessica Latexier, Crystal Mann, Lisa Piven, Kate Lyon, Christina, Sarah David, Kate Firejohn, Aaron John, Joy Pollock, Crystal, Jennifer Pavelka, Jess Blackwell, Micah, Jessica Reed, Beth Lippem, Kiara, Jill

McDonald, Jen Grimlin, Alexis Lane, David Binkley, Cathy Hamm, Virginia Labassi, Lizzie De Vries, Jeremy Essin, Andrew Brzezinski, Robin Roulard, Nicole Petey, Monica, Caroline Moss, my best friend, Rachel Walton, Inga, Bonnie Robinson, Shannon

Dominguez-Stevens, Penny Pesta, Kaylee, Dave Gilmore, best friend from college, and Jacqueline Ryder. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Marcel Malekibu, who does a lot of work. Grace Berry prepped this episode and is going to be editing

the videos. We are grateful for her. Our theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. We will link to his album on Spotify and Apple in our episode description. And our closing theme music is by my son, my young son, Q.

He’s going to third grade. He wrote this song when he was in second grade. He’s always working on new music on his little iPad on GarageBand, especially when I say, no, no, no, you can’t play any more video games.

He says, fine, I’ll just play GarageBand. The angry makes music, makes music angrily for me. So thank you guys for being here and we will be back, I think, let’s say next week.

Bye.