Out of The Void, Into The Dating Pool

In this episode, we get an update from widower David Cherson. This is the first part of a two-part series called Life of a Lonely Widower.

For Life of a Lonely Widower (Part 2) and other full episodes, the full back catalog and a listener community, you can join us here.

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

---

Um, how are you? Most of us say fine or good, but obviously it’s not always fine and sometimes it’s not even that good.

This is a podcast that gives people the space to be honest about how they really feel. It’s a place to talk about life, the good, the bad, the awkward, the complicated. I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking.

Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that you’re married for 40 years to the love of your life. She dies and you have to figure out how to live without her.

Now imagine that you call me and I try to hook you up with my mom for a long-distance relationship. That’s what happened with today’s caller. His name is David.

You might remember him from our episode called The Void, where he walks us through his very, very, very fresh grief. The last time we heard from David, his wife Marion had been dead for not even a year, and he was describing living without her.

This call, we catch up with David. We talk about what it’s like to date when you’re over 60 and a widow, and yeah, I try to get him to at least e-mail my mom. Hi, David, it’s Nora McInerny.

Well, Laura, long time no hear.

How are you?

I’m doing okay. Sorry, I was having some technical difficulties. It was a challenge to make a phone call today.

That was this morning’s challenge for me.

Okay. I’m a little confused. You live out in Phoenix, right?

I do.

Yeah.

Okay. But I’m still using the Minneapolis number.

Yeah. Once I get a phone number, I never let it go.

I know. My daughter’s been in Brooklyn for a year, so she still has a 617 area code number.

Yeah. Once you’re attached to a phone number, it’s hard for me to let it go.

Well, we started a few some years ago with The Void.

I know.

Of course, The Void’s still there, but of course, it’s always been there. Yeah. Well, I do some foolish things like getting to dating.

And I just decided to, I just came up with a decision to put it on long pause.

Long pause.

I was recalling, my father-in-law died at 68. He had a ruptured order. So a few years after that, I asked Marion, that was my wife, you know, is your mom going to do with dating?

She had to be able to, in fact, no f-ing way. In other words, she was a one-man woman. And I kind of thought about that and said, you know, I think that’s, I’m a one-woman man.

Yeah.

And no matter how much, you know, it’s nice to meet other people and things.

But, you know, and maybe I don’t think it’s wrong to say this, but I’m still married to Marion.

I don’t think that’s wrong to say at all. Yeah. I don’t think that’s wrong to say at all.

I think that makes sense.

Believe it or not. Believe it or not, there’s some women out there. I have one woman who said to me, I don’t want to compete against a corpse.

She’s like, what a way to put it.

Wow.

I wish you could see my face.

Yeah, well, there’s some people out there.

I’ve met a few people who are like really nice. You know, something was always wrong. If it was a nice person, if we find it physical, there was something wrong there.

If it was emotional, intellectual, you know, you name it, something was always wrong.

Yeah, and it’s just all I did was put myself in for a big dose of frustration.

Yeah.

And it’s not our fault.

Well, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time, like you spent your, you know, pretty much the entirety of your adult life with Marianne.

And, you know, that’s like all the versions of you have been touched by her. You know, like it’s it’s I do think that would be I think that would be really challenging.

I and I still feel even though I’m I’m remarried, I love Matthew, I do still feel like I’m also married to Aaron.

And well, yeah, but you’re you’re you’re much younger than I am. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I understand that, you know, of course, you feel, you know, feelings for your husband.

I think in when you when you’re 76 now, so I can you know how long it’s like, I mean, you know, when we started to get together, we’re still building that love. It wasn’t really, you know, you know, it took a lot. It took a while.

Yeah.

And when you think, you know, it’s just something you can go fall in love again.

Yeah.

Love is rare. It is rare, you know, like it’s I always feel like it’s a lot of luck to fall in love personally.

Well, my mom used to talk about fate, and I think she’s kind of right about that.

Yeah. I think, yeah, I do think there’s something about it that feels like fate. What were, besides somebody saying they didn’t want to compete with a corpse, what were some of your dating experiences like?

A few years ago, I actually continued to go out with a woman for about four or five months.

Why? I don’t know. It didn’t get anywhere, you know.

And at that time, I was only a few years out. And this woman had been booted herself for six years. She hadn’t gone out with anyone.

Oh. But she had some, she had a little kind of support she was looking for, that I couldn’t give her. Yeah.

And, you know, and then, you know, I just, I didn’t like the fact, you know, I had the only one who said she was going to compete against the corpse. I also had a few other women. They didn’t want to hear about them.

You know, it’s like, I don’t get it. You know, that’s why I just got I got up. I said, that’s it.

Bye. Yeah.

Just kind of like saying like, you know, I don’t want to hear about your, you know.

No, no, no, I didn’t want to get into my life.

No, I’m saying, like, if you don’t want to hear about someone’s like dead wife or dead husband, like that, that’s like saying you don’t want to know anything about their life because, you know, that that person, Marion was like a huge, huge, huge,

Well, yeah, but but I OK.

But in the beginning, I did make mistakes. Like, I want to in fact, I try to counter you have been talking about Marion, but I think, oh, shut up. You tell me about yourself.

I don’t say anything, which was kind of like, yeah. But, you know, I never intend to spend the entire conversation talking about Marion.

But if I say things like, oh, we should go to this restaurant here or go, this is why we should go to the farm and something like that. Yeah. So that’s all I’m saying.

Yeah, I’m on your side on this one.

Well, it’s good to have you on my side.

But, you know, I’m just thinking like, Jesus, maybe I’m doing a lot of studying or thinking gorgeous online. And that’s how I’m trying to like, that’s how I’m getting involved in.

But, you know, from meeting women, I think I need at least a long break.

Yeah. Where are you meeting these women?

And maybe, well, of course, you go to the different dating sites. You know, it’s like, well, the pandemic helped out greatly because I used to refer to COVID dates.

In other words, you had to have a cup of coffee or you were just going to walk separate ways from them. And you really wasn’t anything else to do. But yeah, I was thinking to myself, you know, fate has been both good and bad to me.

So maybe I just let old fate do what it wants and we’ll see.

What are you studying right now? Like, what kind of classes are you taking?

Well, I’m mostly in Jewish studies. And in fact, I did a course on first century Judaism and early Christianity, which I want to delve into more.

But yeah, of course, I’m the guy who’s a professor of Jewish studies at the Holy Cross in Worcester, you know. And so in some other subjects that I did take. So that’s been good.

I mean, Mondays were turned into learning days. And these are also starting to turn into pandemic on, you know, courses on Zoom. Yeah.

As a matter of fact, it’s something I prefer now. I get lazy. Yeah.

Once you don’t have to leave your house, trying to leave it gets a little harder, I have to say.

Yeah.

Well, I don’t want to be permanently stuck to the seat here, but you know, it’s just to be in. And then I’ve got another course coming up in Talmud in March. So, yeah.

And then I was thinking, like, geez, if people still do, you still do the podcast.

Yeah. And people still do.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I was thinking about doing, like, romance in the 70s, but I mean, age 70s.

Oh, yeah. I don’t know.

I want to listen to that.

Well, I’ll see. I mean, you’ve been at this for quite a while, so.

Yeah. But I mean, you know, trust me, anyone can do it.

Like.

Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. So, yeah, I’d say, well, my media goals get my taxes out of the way.

Oh, God.

Yeah. Forgot about that.

Oh, no, no, we had no. It’s it’s much easier now. The first it took marrying God bless the memory.

She wasn’t a mismanager of finances, but she worked for herself as a psychologist.

And so she didn’t pay quarterly.

Oh, Mary Ann, you got to pay quarterly. God.

No, well, she fell behind in reporting.

Yeah.

And so it took me like three years with the help of a good account to get to get through this stuff. And so now I finally I think I’ve got it. You know, a lot of people think the IRS will never get you.

They work slow.

Yeah. They’ll don’t worry. They’ll get it.

They’ll get their money.

OK. Well, maybe Trump will get the IRS and then we’ll go about it now.

Good God. I mean, I’m a little bit. I’m a little bit of a Marion.

Matthew, thank God for Matthew, because now he does all of that because I was so disorganized and he was like, did you ever invoice for this? And I was like, oh, no, no. Oops.

Oops. Did you pay your quarterly taxes? I’m like, I feel like I did.

And then so now he’s in charge of all that because we need self-employed people do need a person who is organized and can do that.

Well, you know, it’s my fault for letting you be the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

That was a little joke.

I mean, like I say, she wasn’t she didn’t mismanage money, not at all.

But she’s just she had other things on her mind. OK, we have other things. We have other strengths.

She of course, she plenty of them.

But she had we had this inheritance coming. And I was kind of like, I remember dropping a payment off at the post office. And then I guess it was another one of them in a car.

I think you remember when we did our protest that I looked at her to the passenger seat and I smiled, well, I looked at the passenger seat and I started laughing. I said, she thought about Margo’s money. And she thought, oh, we’ll pay it off.

It’ll be fine. Oh yeah, someday, yeah, it’ll be great.

Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’m not sweating it, okay.

So, you know, like she knew me, but I knew her too. So, you know, and that’s why I was on the times where empty passenger seat, you’re on the spot and you’re laughing. People think it was crazy.

Yeah, I feel that sometimes in the car.

Like I drove by this place that I used to go with Aaron.

I was in Minnesota for a work trip and I was driving up north past, you know, where his grandpa had what they called the ranch, which is this like little piece of land and, you know, where Aaron used to have parties and I like drove by it.

And I swear to God, I felt him in the car with me. Like it just felt like I could feel him in the car with me as I passed the ranch. It was so cool.

Oh, I go to the beach.

I go to the beach where we used to go to beach all the time. I mean, you know, she’s there, you know. I mean, you know, so some people laugh at me.

I mean, I’ve had an instance where I fell safe in my chair and I got four caps on my right shoulder.

Oh, I love that. It’s just her saying hi. It’s her saying time to wake up, but don’t nap all day.

Well, I wish you would haunt me.

Yeah, I’m going to ask you like, hey, is it God? What is it? But of course, you never get to.

I don’t believe in ghosts.

Yeah, I don’t know what I believe, but I do think they’re around. You know, I think they’re around, not as ghosts, but I think there’s like, you know, some sort of like collective consciousness that they join.

And, you know, I think they’re OK on the other side. I think that all the suffering is here. I think if there’s a hell, we’re in it now.

If you’re a dog person, you know that you would do anything for your dog, including putting your Shih Tzu in a baby sling and wearing her around the house because you are her emotional support animal.

I would do pretty much anything for Stacey and Meredith. Those are our dog’s names. Yes, they have people names, and yes, my children selected them.

We all want what’s best for our dogs, and we want them to be healthy. We want them to live forever, and science is not there yet. But Spot & Tango is a personalized dog food subscription.

It brings high quality, ready to serve meals, snacks, and supplements, yes, supplements, right to your door. So you’re not running to the pet store last minute ever again. Food is medicine, and our dogs deserve the best.

And with Spot & Tango, I know exactly what’s in their bowls. Fresh, human-grade ingredients like high quality meats and proteins, no fillers, no junk, just real food for our dogs. Spot & Tango does things differently.

They use USDA meats, fruits, and vegetables. Again, no artificial stuff, no preservatives. They use a fresh, dry process where fresh ingredients are gently cooked and then freeze-dried.

This locks in the nutrients. You get a shelf-stable, nutrient-rich meal that is as close to home-cooked as my dogs are gonna get because I don’t cook.

Spot and Tango creates a custom plan based on your dog’s age, breed, weight, and activity level so you know they’re getting exactly what they need.

And if you have two dogs that vary in activity level and age like we do, they’re each getting what they need. Spot and Tango is offering an exclusive deal for our listeners.

So for a limited time, you can go to spotandtango.com/thanks and use code thanks and get 50% off your first order. That’s spotandtango.com/thanks, code thanks to get 50% off your first order. spotandtango.com/thanks, code thanks.

Got it? If you have ever tried to hire somebody, you know that it can be very challenging. You’re not just looking for the right person for the right job.

You’re hoping to find the right person for the right job very, very quickly. So how can you find amazing candidates fast? Indeed, when it comes to hiring, indeed is all you need.

Instead of struggling to get your job posting on other sites, Indeed Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. Sponsored Jobs basically jumps your post to the top of the page for relevant candidates. That’s an important detail.

So you reach the people you want to reach and reach them faster. And that makes a huge difference. Because according to Indeed Data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

Now, there aren’t any monthly subscriptions, there’s no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. And in the minute I’ve been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data worldwide.

So there’s no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/tfa.

Just go to indeed.com/tfa right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. indeed.com/tfaterms and conditions apply, hiring Indeed is all you need.

By now, you’ve heard me talk about Foria for, god, it’s gotta be years now. It’s gotta be years. I love Foria so much, I actually reached out to them to ask them to advertise on this podcast.

So, you know I mean it. Foria is known for sexual wellness products, and yes, I am approved, but I have gotten the guts, really, to tell you all about the awaken arousal oil with CBD, the sex oil.

Yes, I am approved, but I am telling you, even if you don’t think that you need any help in the bedroom, this stuff is going to take you to the next level. The awaken oil uses CBD and warming, it just turns you on.

The sex oil is going to give you, literally, just like the best orgasms of your life. You’re gonna be flying through space. But Foria also is more than just that.

I am a huge fan of their Relief Salve. It has CBD, it has kava. This is a favorite on our household.

Whenever anybody has like muscle soreness or headaches, it is truly miraculous. They also have a period care set and a Cramp’s Be Gone Kit that is so, so helpful.

If you have painful periods, if that time of the month is difficult for you, these are great products.

So they kind of have you covered from every angle, from when you’re feeling good and wanna feel better to when you are not feeling great and want to feel better.

Treat yourself, treat your partner, experience your juiciest, deepest, sensual experience, get a bottle of Foria, try the awaken oil, try this sex oil, you’re gonna love it.

And if you are just sore and have headaches, and I’m like literally rubbing my shoulders right now, wishing that I had the salve here at the studio where I’m recording this, but I don’t and I’m gonna go home tonight and I’m gonna put that on my

shoulders and I’m gonna feel so much better. Foria is offering a special deal for you. You can get 20% off your first order by visiting foriawellness.com/thanks, or you can use code thanks at checkout. You’ll get 20% off your first order.

That is foriawellness.com, foriawellness.com/thanks for 20% off your first order. Again, I recommend Trying Awakened or The Pleasure Set, it has all three of their best sellers. Thank me later.

Let’s get on with the show.

My daughter seems to think my wife has turned to a bee that buzzes around them. Oh. I told her, I said, I don’t want to be a bee.

Yeah, I don’t want to be a bee.

So, yeah.

So, you know, this, you know, we also, I don’t know, something we didn’t mention, before a couple years before Marion’s coup, this moment that we lost our son a lot, you know, took his life. So we had our share here.

Yeah. More than a share.

And Shosh’s, you know, really had a, you know, she’s a single mom and, you know, and, you know. So anyways, Nora, I tried to send an email to you a couple of times, and it sort of sunk in to.

Oh, really?

A bloody note to it. Yeah. So.

Well, I’m a mess at emailing.

I will. I’ll find you and I’ll email you because I’m recording this. I don’t want to put my real email out there for everybody.

I’ll give you the real email. But no, no, no, no. I have the weirdest thing to say to you, David.

But I do think and I know you’ve listened to the podcast, so I know you’re aware. But I think not romantically necessarily, but I think you and my mom would really get along. Like she’s smart, she’s interesting.

You know, she was with my dad for 40 years. This woman can write. This woman likes to write an email.

This woman likes to correspond. This woman reads. This woman’s got a brain.

And I just think that you guys would be good, like pen pals, friends. I don’t know.

Are you trying to fix me up, Nora?

A little bit, a little bit. Okay.

There are very many people.

Okay, maybe I am. Maybe I am, David. All right, would that be so bad?

Would that be so bad?

No, no, no, no, no. No, I didn’t say, I didn’t say, I don’t want to have anything to do with women entirely.

Yeah, you just got to take a break from dating. And, you know, like, I love the East Coast. I think my mom is pretty pretty staunchly a Midwest person.

But, you know, I don’t know. I just think it I think you guys would have good conversations. That’s all I’m going to say.

She’s also a lifelong learner. She’s interesting. I’m just going to put that out there.

I’m going to share her email with with you. I don’t know. I just think you guys would have a lot to talk about.

And you’re both like, really, you’re both really great. So that’s just that’s just one woman’s opinion. My opinion.

So but no pressure. No pressure. I’m going to tell all your fans like he’s still here.

The void is still here. It’s is it more bearable than the last time we spoke?

Oh, yeah, that was still fresh.

It was so fresh.

I mean, it’s always, you know, I don’t, you know, it’s always there. Yeah, but it was really fresh, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s I think it’s when I look back at, you know, those really fresh moments and I have, like, you know, various artifacts of that time. I have journals. I don’t have a lot of video.

I don’t have any audio of that time, but it’s it’s like visiting another planet almost, because when you’re in it and you’re in kind of like the thick of grief and loss, when you are in the void as you were, it feels like that’s all you’re ever going

to feel. And it was so I was thinking about this this morning, because now it’s, you know, now it’s been 10 years. So now I can think about, OK, where I was 10 years ago, I was such a man, I was just such a wreck.

I was such a wreck and I really didn’t know it.

This may be the fifth anniversary. I’m thinking, she was a school psychologist for a very long career. I’m trying to, what I should do is try to have a seminar or something, put in her name or subjects to a special education kid.

She tested 20 gazillion Asperger’s kids. But it’s easier said than done. But I have tried to reach out and contact people.

There is a National Association of School Psychologists, and there’s also a Massachusetts Department. And, you know, by the way, I’m a UA grad, you know.

I did not know that. Okay. A wildcat.

Bear down.

Yeah. Bear down.

Bear down. Doesn’t make any, still doesn’t make any sense to me, but you know. Are they wildcats or cat bears or something or bear?

I thought it was wildcats, but they say bear down?

No, bear down is like bearing down. It was, the origin of that to some, if I remember, a long time ago, it was somebody in the University of Arizona in the third, I think, the turn of the century, and he wrote this fight song.

It’s one of the legends of the fight song. In fact, I turned, I tried my hand at rewriting the lyrics into a X-rated, called Fight Down.

So yeah, but you know, and then it was like, I remember Saturday night, two in a football game, and they had this one night where they had every high school band in Arizona on the field with the U of A band, and playing a giant beer down Arizona.

That was coming from Boston.

This was like, I loved it, you know?

Oh, God, and going from Boston to Tucson, Arizona, that’s a big change. That’s like going to another planet.

Well, then, and this is like the late 60s, the first week I was there, I was crying. I look like I just, someone had dropped me on the set of Ozzie and Harriet. I couldn’t believe it.

Fraternities and sororities, you know. And then I read on some guy who, he said, if you want to go for a drive. I said, sure.

He had this weed that was soaked in peyote.

Oh, my God.

Stolen for four, I was stoned for four days. Seriously. Fortunately, I came down, time to clap.

I didn’t leave for four years. So, you know. Oh, I love it up there.

So, listen, Nora.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Tell all the women out there that they were told it.

I will.

I will.

And if your mom. OK, fine. No problem.

Yeah.

My mom is so interesting. She’s cool. She is.

I don’t know. I think she’s great. And I don’t know.

You could at least have a great conversation.

OK.

Yeah.

No problem with that. Right. No problem.

All right.

Well, David, we’ll talk soon. I’m going to email you my mom’s email address.

OK, you think.

OK, that call was really special. The last time we talked to David, his wife, Marion, the love of his life had really just died.

And the episode that we made with him was called Into the Void, because when we spoke to him, he spoke so beautifully of loss as like as the void, right? This void that he was adjacent to that was with him at all times. It was so beautiful.

I loved that episode. Marcel Malekibu had the beautiful idea to just let David talk, to just let that episode be him. In the past, our podcast was a lot of narration, a lot of sort of driving a story forward.

And that episode was so different for us. And it remains a favorite. I’m sure it’s a fan favorite too, because it’s almost like a grief journal.

And hearing David’s voice again, we’ve kept in touch, we email. He’s a subscriber to the podcast even in this iteration. So thank you so much, David.

But it’s so good to hear his voice. You’ve talked to a million widows, right? You haven’t heard the story of grief because grief is different for everybody.

Widowhood is different for everybody. And his experience as an older man is so different from mine. My mother and I were widowed within six weeks of each other.

My mom lost her husband of nearly 40 years. I lost Aaron and I had been with him for four years, married for three. She lost her entire past.

I lost my entire future. Those were really, really different losses. I am remarried.

David’s not, my mom’s not. Yes, I am trying to match them up. You heard it here.

And I do think that it would have been harder for a lot of reasons for me to have the life that I have now if I had been older. It’s a totally different experience. It is.

And yet, I do still feel some of the things that David is describing. And I know I felt them when I was at the five year mark versus the the ten year mark as well.

But I do still feel like I am married to Erin, even though I am married to Matthew, who is alive. I will say that in my experience, having never done polyamory with two alive people, it’s a lot easier when one of them is dead.

This morning, not knowing that I was about to have this call this morning, earlier this morning, I was talking with Matthew, and I said, God, I forget that you and Erin weren’t friends.

Sometimes the way that I think of both of my husbands is that they were friends and I met through them, like they have their own history together.

And I think that because while they’re so different, personality wise, they have so many of the same interests.

And because, and we’re doing a whole other episode, Invisible Strings, Erin and Matthew were undoubtedly in the same rooms as each other, rooms that I never would have been in because I am not into the music that they were into, by and large, I

should say. That has always been a comfort to me, knowing that these men that I love so much, like in their young adulthood, their, you know, teenagerhood, that they were at the same concerts, that they had the same interests, and that does mean a

lot to me. But that was a wonderful update from David. So that’s David Cherson from Into the Void. That episode is, what I actually think we’re gonna end up doing is, you know what we’re gonna do?

Is we’re going to play the rest of David’s episode right here, and this is now an update. I thought this was just gonna be one random call, but now we actually have an update episode. So stay tuned.

After the break, you are going to hear the original episode with David, Into the Void, recorded just after he lost his wife, Marion.

If you have your spouse in your mind and your heart, that doesn’t mean, oh well, you know, screw the present.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible Thanks For Asking.

Grief has this way of forcing us into a world we didn’t choose, and a world from which we have no escape. It’s like being washed out to sea. There on the shore are all the pieces and players of your old life watching from dry land.

Maybe the waves of your loss will lap at their ankles. Maybe they’ll swim out to try to see you or save you, but there’s a part of this sea that is yours and yours alone. The universal experience is also as unique as every person who experiences it.

And if I have learned anything from my own ocean and from dipping my toes into the experiences of others, it is that our grief needs a witness. Inside every loss is a story that longs to be told.

Inside every griever is a nearly uncontrollable urge to make the people around us understand what we had and what we have now. In 2020, David’s wife Marion was diagnosed with glioblastoma.

It’s a word I only know because I had to look it up when my husband Aaron was diagnosed in 2014. And it’s a word that is just shorthand for a horrible, aggressive, incurable brain cancer.

David and Marion had been together for 39 years when Marion died two months after her diagnosis. And nearly a year after Marion’s death, David wrote me this email.

I was just referring to your 2018 Ted Talk on Moving On. Our situations are similar, but not exactly 100 percent. And I’m 72, my wife was the older woman by five weeks.

It was kind of an annual joke with us, that all our birthdays followed each other. Marion also died of a glioblastoma, although she only lived a bit more than two months. She had suffered a stroke in between her two surgeries.

And in one of these ironic moments of life, one person suggested to me that Marion is lucky in going fast. And I asked myself, I don’t know how to respond to this.

I’m lucky?

I get what you mean by moving on and going forward. Right now, I am two months away from the first anniversary of Marion’s passing. And I’ve analogized my life since then.

To a sine wave in electronics, up and down, up and down, etc. At the beginning, I was too devastated to think about much. Marion and I were together for about 39 years.

I often said if it wasn’t for meeting her, I wouldn’t have ever been married and it would have become some sort of curmudgeonly bachelor. So like other widowed people, I first recognized that I have to manage the void that is always with me.

I remember driving one day up to the North Shore and looking at the empty passenger seat beside me and realizing that fact.

Actually, it was satisfied to come to that realization.

So I know what you mean in relation to moving forward. For me, that just means that I’m managing to live my daily life, nothing more. Note that does not mean a break from Marion or our life together.

I always repeat the mantra that she will always be in my heart and mind, but will also have to coexist in my present and future.

That’s all.

That’s all.

Just that big, huge task to live your present and your future while holding your past. David’s email wasn’t asking me for a conversation or asking me to interview him. He was just reaching out.

He was looking for a witness to where he was and what he was holding. He had an experience similar to mine and so, so different. So this episode, we’re asking you to be a witness to a story that is fully unique and painfully universal.

Two people fall in love. Two people build a life together. One person dies and the other has to live without them.

This is David and Marion’s love story.

We met, we were in our early thirties. She happened to come into a synagogue that I was started attending. And I just noticed her from a distance.

The second time we actually did meet, we were attending a speaker or a meeting. She made it kind of obvious she wanted to meet me. Took a seat next to me and mentioned a few things.

But anyway, after that, I said, you want to go out for a drink? I said, yeah. And we get to talk more.

It turned out that both our fathers were butchers. Well, hers is a bit different than mine. But, you know, we had some in common.

And, you know, I told her, I said, I give her a call tomorrow night. And she figured that, you know, most guys say things like that, and they never do call you again. But I did.

I never really had much experience in terms of having long-term girlfriends. I didn’t. In fact, my family had given up on me.

You know, the thing was, they said, David’s not programmed to be married.

Well, anyways, my other siblings were married during what my wife and I used to refer to as normal age, you know, in the 20s. But, no, I, and through my teen years, I was very shy. And I didn’t get over that until I was in my 20s.

You know, recognize the other gender. But that’s, you know, it took a long time for me to find someone.

But David did find someone. And by the third date, for David at least, it was a done deal.

All together, we were together for almost 40 years. That’s quite a long time. We would always go out.

You know, I mean, you know, we always, whoever it’s movies, go out to eat. They always like to do that. We weren’t people who just stayed at home all the time.

And we’d do things on our own. I mean, apart from each other, too. So we were cool.

Like, she had an avocation of arts and craft. You know, she was always going to craft shows. And she also had an attitude towards fashion as art.

She was someone that, you know, didn’t think that it was not highbrow or something. They’d be interested in fashion. And she considered it a part of art.

And once in a while, we’d actually sometimes go to a craft show with her. We had a way of, we had a strategy. I would take a couple of turns around the exhibitions with her, and then I would have a book with me.

And we’d have our phones and say goodbye. You know, that’s it. You know, she could, because she could spend forever.

And I go off and read my book. And, you know, afterwards, you know, when she had satisfied, satiated her, you know, interest or bought it to things, you know, and then he got together and, you know, left the show.

So there were things that we, a lot of things we did together and a lot of things we did on our own. She had no interest in sports, but she tolerated my interest in sports. You know, she always knew I was a big hockey fan.

And sometimes she’d even sit in the same room with me if I was watching a game, but I had to sound off. That was a compromise anywhere. And, you know, I didn’t care because I got tired of listening to the announcers and their BS and everything.

I know what’s going on. No one ever tell me, tell me, you know, so I just watch it, you know. It really was what we want to think of as a marriage of two people.

You know, people might have thought we were opposites, but in reality, you know, we, we weren’t so opposite when it came down to life itself.

How else were you and Marion different?

She talked a lot more than I did. Even though we didn’t share identical politics, she was always open to discussing everything, you know?

Like she was a big Facebooker, and she would get involved with people who were Trump supporters and have civilized discussions with them. I can’t, okay? But you know, she could.

And I always say to people, we all want to take a page out of her book, and maybe society would be a lot better off. And more often than not, we saw eye to eye on the real issues of life. I don’t mean the politics, you know?

But getting along together, raising a family, you know, our outlook on morals and our same outlook on, you know, or even God, what if I bring that up? But she was genuine, you know? I used to call her an idealist.

I have a thing about idealist. She was idealistic in some ways, which I wasn’t. I’ve had experiences in my life that, you know, turn me off, particularly in people and groups.

Sometimes I would be, have more of a hard-bitten view of people, you know, that, and she would have a more hopeful view, you know? She was an idealist, but she didn’t let her idealism carry her away.

David and Marion have a longish, happy life together. There are craft shows and family gatherings and hockey games on TV.

The two of them find their groove and they work through the same things all couples work through, and they grow together, they grow up together. And then one day, 39 years after that first date, they’re sitting on the couch.

We’re watching one of our British mysteries. I noticed in her eyes, I’m flying for a minute, they seemed opaque. And then it went away.

David notices that something’s wrong, but it happened so quickly, he just kind of moves on and forgets about it.

And then a month later, Marion starts to complain that her tooth hurts, so she makes an appointment with their dentist and gets in the car to head out.

And what happened was, instead of going to the dentist, she took a right turn towards the town where she did a lot of her work, and she got in an accident, which totaled our car.

And EMT says she looked a little wobbly, they’re going to take her up to a local hospital.

The doctors look her over and decide that Marion’s okay, no broken bones, nothing evidently majorly wrong. So, they discharge her after about an hour, and Marion and David head home together.

And for a few days afterwards, Marion is complaining about muscle soreness.

She was in an accident, so I didn’t think it was strange that she complained about muscle soreness, or anything like that. But then, the next couple of days, she was complaining about being so tired that she was having trouble getting out of bed.

And this accident happened on Tuesday. By that Saturday, she said to me, I don’t feel good. We better go to the hospital.

And I took her to the ER. And that’s what it said to do a CT scan and MRI on her. And then they found the tumor.

There was fluid that developed around the tumor. And we tried to contour a dexamethasone, which is a cousin of prednisone. But it didn’t work.

So the surgeon asked her to bring her back to the hospital and put a drain on her. And she basically was suffering a stroke. And if you’ve ever been around people who were suffering a stroke, their personalities changed completely.

I mean, she was angry, she started yelling at me. And she was also losing her balance. And I had a friend of mine, and that Friday morning, we practically had to take her hostage to bring her back to the hospital.

I’ll tell you from the second week of having the glial bastoma, I knew what I was up against. So I went and did what I called the death stuff. What’s the death stuff?

I got a double plot in the cemetery. I set up the funeral because I knew sooner or later she’s going to die. The prescribed length of life for people with glial bastoma is supposedly 12 to 14 months.

But I think the fact that she also suffered a stroke sort of cut that back. She spent basically the next two months in the hospital.

The treatment for glial blastoma has not changed much in the past decades. It is brutal, truly, and it’s also the only options that you have. It’s surgery, it’s chemo, and it’s radiation.

You know, I sometimes get mad at myself, but a lot of people say they couldn’t blame me.

I insist that they try radiation with her. And when I look back upon this, and she was really terrified. When you jump through the MRI of your skull, you know, you get in an enclosure, you’re mostly enclosed, so I can relate to that.

And she had to hold the nurse’s hand.

She was that scared.

And I realized that, you know, I knew what was coming. I should have found just a good hospice, but I didn’t, so.

We’ll be right back.

We’re back. It has never been easy to lose the person you love, to brain cancer or any other way, but Marion is dying in 2020.

Originally, they had called me from the rehab center and said, how would you like to come down and meet with Marion downstairs? You keep mask on. I said, sure, you bet.

But when I got there, she wasn’t out front, and they told me we’re gonna have to put, what do they call it, PPE, the personal protective gear on you, those gown and mask and everything.

And we went up to her room and I could see she was having a seizure. She looked, it was terrible. And that’s when I called my daughter to tell her to come up here.

Basically, she lasted up until about 1:45 AM. And she was in the hospital. I was living here myself and the dog, you know?

The dog was actually her dog, even though I took care of her. I’m left with a dog and not Marion. I love the dog, but, you know, it’s not Marion.

In my life, you know, before I was married, you know, I had experience of both here and elsewhere, of living on my own. It’s that thing I don’t promulgate as a lifestyle, but I can deal with it, you know?

I’ll tell you one thing that stood in my mind about during that time when she was in the hospital and still alive. I really look forward to the evenings, because I didn’t have to talk to any doctors or nurses anymore for the day.

And I really, that was, you know, that at least could rest my mind for the evening until the next day when you start all over again. A lot of people complain about the days being so long. I’ve had the opposite.

I feel like the time was like, especially in the first year, time was moving faster, you know, it was like, I didn’t want to go to bed, you know. But, I don’t know, it was just my experience.

A lot of people say the second year is worse, and I have to agree with that. I think I was so busy in the first year of clearing up financial stuff and the taxes and all that stuff.

And all of a sudden, it just felt like more of an impact in the second year. And now we’re coming to the close of the second year. As I said, it’s kind of hanging over me for now.

Somebody told me, though, that, you know, Mary and I lived a little more than two months.

We didn’t get the prescribed 12 to 14 months of life that you’re supposed to be able to GBM. And he said to me, well, you’re lucky she didn’t have to live long. And I didn’t know how to respond to that.

I mean, yeah, in one sense, maybe, sure, but lucky? What do you mean lucky? I lost my wife.

Lucky, you know.

And then there’s dating. I think I made a mistake with dating.

I was, as I say, too early and I pulled back because, you know, it just experiences show me that. Although I can safely say that dating is still dating and the act of dating itself.

What I found was this getting beyond the date, you know, and having how to navigate this was really kind of strange to me.

I’ll tell you about part of the reason that I did start dating back then, was that I wanted to reach out and meet people, just meet people because not only my wife, but a lot of our friends passed away.

So, you know, we’re kind of down to the part in life I realized that where, you know, you saw my parents’ friends die and they were like missing them. And that’s the way I do too.

But, you know, it’s to meeting the people and, you know, getting to make friends. But it can be for a pretty complicated process. It’s not like we were in the 20s and 30s.

It really isn’t, you know.

We don’t want to get married again.

But somehow some women say that they want to find the last love.

And I just find it’s baffling.

Love is not something that you go to a delicatessen and get a quarter pound of love, you know.

It’s really isn’t.

And marriage is not, you know, in the cards, as I said. I was married. But, you know, to find someone that you could be a companion or special friend, you know, maybe I’ll still have someone I can find.

Moving forward, it doesn’t mean you have to find a new person.

It doesn’t mean you need to remarry or find a companion or a special friend.

I would like it if we could all go to the deli and order a quarter pound of love, but instead we just have the task of living our lives without the person we had shared our life with.

We always talk about the void. And in fact, I realized early on, we like to go to a certain beach in the summer. So after she passed away, I started making a routine sort of on Saturdays, just to drive up there, even if it was off season.

Matter of fact, I kind of prefer beaches off season. One time I was driving, you know, I looked toward the passenger seat and I realized, Marin’s not there.

But I also had an experience in my house, where at that time I was still belonging to a bereavement group. And I told the people, I said, you know, I went from one end of the house to the other.

And the void seemed almost measurable as if I could have taken a tape measure out and measure it. You know, I wouldn’t open her closet door for a long time. And then finally, I said to myself, oh hell with it.

I opened the door and I said, ha, you don’t scare me. And I closed the door. And now I started using the closet.

Now I don’t, I don’t believe in ghosts or anything like that. And I don’t know what, what there is beyond or there’s above us or, I wish I could ask marrying, but I can’t.

One thing I tell to, not just younger people, but you know, everybody that’s around and they’re married or there was someone, don’t ever take it, anyone for granted, really. Cause you never know how life works, how life is complicated, you know.

When you become a widow, it’s like now I’ve told a few friends that, now I feel like I’m really up against life. Before life was kind of this big thing around us, but now it’s like I’m up against the wall. That’s the way I feel about it.

You know?

Life can be very trying at times.

I never thought that I would be without Marin because we were planning on our retirement together and taking a couple more trips.

But, well, I’ll do a couple trips on my own, and maybe my daughter, my granddaughter, are on trip, and that’s the whole two of me too.

This has been terrible, Thanks For Asking. I’m Nora McInerny. I wanna thank David for sharing Marion with us and for reaching out.

And also, I don’t know, there are a million Davids, there are a million Marians, and also there’s only one.

And sometimes I just like to listen to stories like this one to remind me of that, to remind me that every person that you meet is carrying their own story, their own version of this. So thank you, David, for sharing that with us.

Our team here at Terrible Thanks For Asking is Marcel Malekibu, our senior producer, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer, Claire McInerny, Larissa Wicher, and Eugene Kidd. We are a production of Feelings & Co, known as Eff & Co.

The F could also stand for flowers. That’s not as funny. Honestly, it’s not as easy.

I am not recording this in my closet. I’m not recording this in my home. I’m recording this at Malekibu Studios in Minneapolis.

In the background, you might hear a rowdy two year old who has taken a snooze and is ready to frickin party. OK, what does she want to tell you about her Moana T-shirt? OK, she’s wearing a Moana T-shirt.

She’s going to tell you that she wants to tell you that. You can find our show at ttfa.org. If you rate and review and share our podcast with someone that you think would love it, that is very helpful.

And if you would like to support us in a financial way, certainly no pressure. You would go to ttfa.org/premium. We offer ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and more.

And that and more is quarterly mail. And I love sending mail and I try to make sure I send you something good, something worthwhile, something wonderful every quarter. Our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson.

As always, you should look him up. He has a new band called Lamar. That is really lovely that you should be also looking into.

If you want to email us, it’s terrible at feelingsand.co. And our phone number is 612-568-4441. You can add to a story, you can comment on a story, you can ask us questions, whatever you’d like.

I’m not going to tell you how to leave a voicemail. That’s your business. 612-568-4441.