S2: Happyish Holidays: The Worst Thanksgiving Ever?

Two days after Nora’s husband Aaron died, she celebrated Thanksgiving with her family. Well… maybe not “celebrated.”

Every year, millions of people do the same thing during the holidays. In this episode, we talk with some of those folks, including Dr. Lucy Kalanithi and comedian Amber Tozer.

We also spend some time with some of the women of the Hot Young Widows Club, talking about their hopes and dreams for the upcoming year.

Plus, stories of some of the worst holidays ever.

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Come see the Happyish Holidays Live Show: A Petty LIttle Christmas at The Parkway Theatre in Minneapolis on December 4th and 5th, or join the livestream on December 5th!

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year… um, but is it really? The holiday season can be complicated. Sometimes instead of cozy nights with hot cocoa and meaningful moments, we get tears, ruined plans, and nights spent hiding in the bathroom at family parties. If the holiday season hasn’t always lived up to your expectations, join us for Happyish Holidays, a collection of holidays gone wrong presented by Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Happyish Holidays to you and yours!

 

Terrible, Thanks for Asking tells the real stories of real people who have lived through the terrible things in life. TTFA Anthologies are a curated collection of some of our best stories; released in seasons that focus on a specific topic. You can find our entire episode catalog ad-free on Apple+ or Patreon.

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

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I basically just assume that you are always here and always recording, like it’s the Truman Show. But with our ears. Okay.

Oh, shit. Now we’re recording. We need some signal, like.

How do I start? Do I say this is terrible? Thanks for asking.

I can’t remember. This is terrible. Thanks for asking.

The holidays can be a really difficult time for a lot of people. You have all these parties and people keep expecting cheer. And they ask how you’re doing and they want you to say amazing.

I love everything. Cheer, cheer, joy. But a lot of people don’t feel that.

They’d rather respond with terrible. Thanks for asking. And if that’s you, you’re going to love this show.

We put together a holiday special filled with different kinds of holiday stories. Stories that are sad and funny and wacky and weird.

Basically like every holiday you’ve ever experienced except without food because I didn’t bring enough for everybody. So here we go. My family was never great at holidays.

Oh, one Thanksgiving, I tried to have courses and…

Oh, you made Cornish game hens for everybody.

Yeah, that was…

That was pretty cool.

That was cool.

I told everyone at school I ate a baby turkey. I was like, we all got our own turkeys. But for my family, even our worst holidays are at least memorable.

Do you remember that Thanksgiving where I made lamb?

I cooked lamb and turkey in the same pan or something.

Dad freaked out.

But Mom, I mean, you knew he hated lamb.

Why would you put it in the same…

Like, did you think he wasn’t gonna know?

I didn’t think they would co-mingle so much.

In the same pan?

And I was trying to be efficient. Like, I didn’t want to dirty too many pans.

I just remembered Dad, do you think you can bite on the turkey?

And going, God, **** it.

And then this, like, and then he was done.

They’re never perfect, but they’re always memorable. Even Thanksgiving 2014, which no one in my family can really remember. Here’s my big brother, Austin.

I don’t even remember very well, to be honest.

Yeah, it’s all just kind of a blur.

And this is my big sister, Megan.

Thanksgiving week?

It’s really hard to remember.

The date was November 27th. Two days before, my husband Aaron had died to brain cancer at age 35. And six weeks before Aaron died, our dad died of all the cancer.

If ever there were a time for us to cancel a holiday, put on some sweatpants and eat Chinese food and just watch movies, this was it. But we didn’t. We all dressed up, went to our mother’s house, and pretended like it was a normal holiday.

Here’s my sister Megan again.

And then all these people just offered to bring us food, cook us food for Thanksgiving. And for some reason, we all decided not just to do Thanksgiving, but to get dressed up.

And there was all this food, so it was really weird because there was nothing to do because everything was here. And I do remember looking forward to it and thinking, this is going to be good, we’re all going to be together, this will be good.

It was not good. This was not a normal holiday. Two of the most important people in our lives were dead, and we were wearing fancy outfits and eating stuffing and not talking about anything.

I don’t even remember if we talked very much.

I remember dinner went by really fast. And then I remember this feeling of like, is that it? Like I guess that’s Thanksgiving.

We all just ate food. Now we’re done. I guess now we go sit in the living room with each other.

Like it was just like we just didn’t know how to be. We didn’t know how to be.

So why do we do it? Why didn’t we just call the whole thing off? Why didn’t we look at one another and say, wow, isn’t this just the worst?

It was, it was insane. We should have gone to a movie or gotten Chinese food from Kwan’s.

We should have just stayed in bed.

Yeah, we should have opted out.

I mean, it was good to be together.

I would have wanted to have been alone on that day.

I wouldn’t have wanted either of you to be alone.

But we, I think I wanted to be-

But we have this weird play acting Thanksgiving that-

Yeah. 48 hours before this Thanksgiving dinner, my brothers had helped me dress my dead husband. They picked out the right socks for his cardigan.

They felt the warmth leave his body. My sister was the first person to come to my house when Aaron died. I didn’t even have to tell her what happened.

She picked up the phone and knew the moment I said her name, that he was gone.

And I don’t even know if she said anything, but I knew as soon as she called, like what had happened. So I drove over to her house.

Just walked into his room, and she was just laying there holding him, and just like the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, but also just so loving.

Something happened in those 48 hours. Without the nucleus of what had brought us so, so close, we were all just suddenly adrift.

I think we couldn’t deal with how it felt for that to be gone. For them to be gone, but also all of that physical and emotional work of taking care of them and just doing all that stuff.

For that to be gone was, I think we just didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

So then, suddenly, it’s Thanksgiving.

Nora was in her own world. We each were all in our own little worlds, but trying to act like you’re supposed to act on a holiday, I don’t know what was in retrospect. It was so surreal.

Surreal because we didn’t know what to do with two empty seats.

Or a table of food that wasn’t ours.

I couldn’t even say, Mom, that’s really good dressing or that.

Oh, this trick is fantastic. Did you leave a salad in the refrigerator? What have you forgotten to put on the table?

See, we’re missing all that good stuff.

I also have very few memories of this holiday together, aside from laying on my mother’s couch, staring at my phone, because what else do you do when you don’t know what to do with yourself?

And then mom yelled at you.

You yelled at me.

To put your phone down.

You were like, I thought that was called a thick wheel.

Yeah, everyone was like on my case about being on my phone. I was like, I don’t want to be on this planet right now.

I know, we just wanted to be with you.

I know.

My family just wanted to be with me. And I think I wanted to be with them too. But none of us knew how to do it.

So we just sat alone together in the same house eating food we weren’t hungry for, pretending that our worlds hadn’t been turned upside down, that we weren’t having the world’s worst holiday. And last year, last year we skipped the holidays entirely.

We disbanded for Thanksgiving and I flew with my son to Los Angeles and went on hikes and ate pizza. For Christmas, we all fled to Mexico and sat by a pool and didn’t even pretend to be normal.

This year, my family is coming to my house for Thanksgiving. It’s a new house, a new place for us to gather and make fun of our mother.

It’s a new place for us to try not to be normal, but to be as normal as possible for a family with a very, very poor track record when it comes to Thanksgiving.

Yeah, this year will be better.

It can’t get worse.

We’ve always got that.

When we asked people to send us their worst holiday stories, we got a full inbox. And you know what everyone agreed really ruins a holiday? Death.

Mark grew up in Minneapolis with a mother, Mary, who spent most of her life with chronic medical issues. Mary had type 1 diabetes. She had rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid issues.

And in trying to medicate herself with copious amounts of ibuprofen over many years, she damaged her kidneys, resulting ultimately in kidney failure that necessitated dialysis.

Mark himself was born with hearing loss, so he’s no stranger to managing medical challenges. But Mary taught him by example how to flourish under difficult circumstances.

I would have to think just how I feel, even if I get a really bad cold, how crappy and worthless I feel, and how I really don’t want to do anything.

And she spent 30 or 40 years being in pain or dealing with various health ailments and still getting up and doing all the things that she was doing, raising me, raising my sister, going back to school and becoming a paralegal, being an aide at my

In 1997, just before she turned 51, Mark’s mother developed an infection.

Mark was 25 years old.

Thanksgiving was mostly normal. The only thing that was different was my mom was in the hospital and we had to fix a plate for her of all the normal Thanksgiving stuff because you know, hospital, Thanksgiving food is going to suck.

What some people may have seen as a bother or an inconvenience, interrupting your normal holiday routine to deliver food to a hospital bed, was just what Mark did. Mary was his mother. He didn’t want her eating gross hospital food on Thanksgiving.

After Thanksgiving, later on into December, that was when she suffered a series of small strokes, and she was pretty much bedridden, or she could stop dialysis.

And if she stopped dialysis, then nature would take its course and she would pass. The doctor explained what these options were, and she was pretty much nodding her head at the stop dialysis.

And I think that between the pain of the arthritis and the kidney disease and all those complications, she was just done.

And I was torn because, you know, on the one hand, it’s like, I mean, I was 25 at this point, so I mean, you don’t want to say goodbye to your mom.

But on the other hand, you realize that your mom’s been alive for 51 years, and just about all of them have sucked because of pain and various, you know, and I don’t want to make anybody live through more of that. And my grandmother was upset.

She did not want to be giving up a daughter. I mean, I had medical power of attorney or whatever that term is, and so I could have overruled and said.

This is a heavy choice at any time of year. And when Mark is faced with it, it’s nearly Christmas, a time when Mark and his big, loving Polish family all convene in his grandmother’s house for countless pierogies.

And at 25, Mark has the power to decide whether this Christmas will be his mother’s last, whether he loses his mother, whether his grandmother loses a daughter, and whether his mother can be free from nearly a lifetime of pain.

But I did what she wanted, and nobody really questioned it. That was about a week or so before Christmas. They told us that, you know, once you stop dialysis, it’s going to be fairly quick.

And one of the things that I think reinforces for me that she made the right choice was, they said that one of the factors that would influence how quickly it would progress would be her appetite.

And she had had a lousy appetite for a long time leading up to this. And the hospice nurses, when we came over, said she had the best appetite we’ve seen. So, I mean, she was ready.

Mary was born just before Christmas, so she celebrated her very last birthday in hospice, surrounded by her family and lots of flowers.

Because there wasn’t any point in giving her birthday gifts.

And then it was Christmas.

And even though Mark had made this monumental decision, things just sort of progressed as normally as they could, given the circumstances.

Our Christmas Eve was similar to Thanksgiving, where we had all of the family together, but she was in hospice care at that point. We were at my grandmother’s house. This was as Christmas Eve had pretty much wrapped up.

And we finished all the dishes and started to put everything in my grandma’s house back in order. When they called us and said, okay, she’s getting close.

So Mark and his family drop what they’re doing and head to hospice to be there as Mary dies.

She wasn’t really talking. So we couldn’t really have any conversation with her about her eyes. We could see from her eyes.

She could look and still focus on us. So I mean, it just sounds mean, but you know, it’s boring. It’s gone out and there’s really nothing to do but to sit there.

You don’t really want to have conversations because it feels, you know, trivial and disrespectful.

By the way, this is not a mean thing to say. Death can be as tedious as it is holy and sacred. Do you have small talk?

Do you eat snacks? Do you look at your phone, play a crossword, take a nap? The answer is yes or no.

There is no answer. But as the hours pass, Christmas Eve turns into early Christmas day. All over the world, kids are asleep waiting for Santa, and Mark and his sister are waiting for their mother to die.

We spent four or five hours there together.

We actually were at the point where her breasts were getting so drawn out in between that we kind of were like, it’s okay, Nia, now. You know, we’re all here. And so we were kind of rotating, taking breaks from being bedside.

And so my sister was bedside, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t actually see that final moment.

After all the waiting, after supporting his mother’s decision, Mark was asleep for the last moments of his mother’s life, in the small hours of Christmas Day. And of course, he’s conflicted about that.

But he did get to say goodbye to her before she died. He did get some peace.

To know that it was largely painless at that point was, I guess, helpful for me.

Mark’s mother died on Christmas, and I guess that makes this a sad story, but it’s such a beautiful story, too.

At such a young age, with such a young mother, Mark was able to give her the only gift that she wanted, even if it meant they would never have another Christmas together.

But almost 20 years later, Christmas still happens, and his family still celebrates it, pierogies and all.

Mark Snyder works as an environmental scientist with the state of Minnesota, and volunteers his time all over Minneapolis, where he lives with his adorable cats. Coming up, a conversation about holidays, love, and loss with Dr.

Lucy Kalanithi, who wrote the moving epilogue to her late husband Paul’s posthumous bestseller, When Breath Becomes Air. This is Terrible, Thanks for Asking.

I know it’s the holiday season, we’re supposed to be shopping for other people, but also I know in my experience, I’m shopping for myself first. So I have a gift idea that is a gift that keeps on giving.

So, we’re back. You always know when you’re doing something for the first time. We measure our relationships in particular in firsts.

Your first kiss, your first date. But your last things, your last kiss, your last date, can be harder to spot, even when the person you love has a terminal illness. Lucy and I know each other because we know this feeling.

Our husbands died within a few months of each other. Mine from brain cancer, hers from lung cancer. Lucy is Lucy Kalanithi.

She’s a doctor, a mother to a beautiful girl named Katie, and the widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, the author of the best-selling When Breath Becomes Air. So, your last Christmas together was Katie’s first Christmas, wasn’t it?

Did you know that that would be your last Christmas together? Did you have a feeling as like a doctor or just like a wife or a human?

Yeah, I think I knew it was more likely than not the last Christmas. Nice to meet you.

You’re so tall. I showed up at Lucy’s house in Northern California in early fall. Fall is hard for me.

Fall 2014 is when everything fell apart, when I had a miscarriage, when my father died a few days later, when my husband died a few weeks after that. Fall feels like something bad is about to happen, because this is when bad things happened to me.

This is when all my last things happened, and I didn’t even see them coming. I use a photo storage service by a company that randomly sends me little presents from my past, a video or collection of photos from a specific period of time.

The other day, I sent me a picture of my late husband, myself, and our then-not-even-two-year-old son. We were dressed up for Halloween.

In the photo, you notice that my costume is homemade, that I’m mid-laugh, that my son is dressed as a hybrid of a rhino and a monkey, that my husband is wearing a full-on Spider-Man spandex outfit, including a mask that stretches over his head.

We look young and happy and silly. And we were.

But that photo also doesn’t tell you that my husband had stage 4 brain cancer, that he died 26 days after that photo was taken, that it was our last Halloween, that we were in the hardest days of our lives, but also, I think, the happiest days of my

life, at least that I can remember. Lucy watched her own husband, the father of her own toddler, go through cancer. Lucy gets me.

It was like the fully worst and fully best moments happening almost simultaneously, but the fact of not, for example, that Christmas, where it’s like, probably this is the last Christmas, the fact of knowing that, it wasn’t like, seize the moment,

enjoy everyone, because it wasn’t. It was more like, there is no future. So like, this is it. I’m not like daydreaming about the future and like crowding my thoughts with all these expectations.

It’s just like, here we are, guys, and we love each other.

Before they died, our husbands, Paul and Aaron, were both young fathers. Young fathers who left behind toddlers who got one Christmas with their dads, one they have zero chance of remembering. So Lucy and I remember it for them.

Lucy’s husband’s last Christmas was their daughter Katie’s first.

And she was like just starting to eat food, and she had strappy candy cane pajamas, and like the trappings of the Christmas actually felt really good. And they were like something to do.

And then we were at Paul’s parents’ house where he grew up with all our family. And it was just kind of great.

It was great. Like my last Christmas with Aaron was great. Like that disaster of a Halloween was great.

Because they were there. Because even their vague presence, sleeping off chemo in a bedroom down the hall, was presence. Maybe it’s almost made the holidays like less important to me in some way.

Because it wasn’t like that, oh, we got to do like this very specific thing together. But it was just the fact of them like being there.

You know, and even just the fact of like Paul being there and being so sick, being three months away from his death on your last Christmas together. But like, he was there.

He’s there, right, right, right, he’s there.

When someone you love deeply dies, you know for certain that you will never be normal again. You will never do another normal thing. You write yourself and your family a permission slip to excuse yourself from normal things like holiday traditions.

Like a homemade coupon good for one year of just not doing normal stuff. That’s what I did, and that’s what Lucy did.

Paul died in March in 2015, and the next Christmas we, none of us, especially Paul’s parents, could stand to have it at their house.

And so we did a totally new tradition in which we all went to Palm Springs, California and rented a house with a pool.

And we were following my twin sister there because she and her extended family on the other side go there every Christmas, and we’d never done it.

So it’s like we had a whole group of new people, these two other little cousins, my sister, her in-laws, a new house that we were renting, and just like a whole new flavor to Christmas.

I got one taste of the untraditional holiday and swore I was converted forever. I just wasn’t a holiday person anymore. Not really.

The holidays would never be the same for me, so why bother? Instead, I reasoned, I can just choose the times I’m joyful and thankful, like a man of cafeteria that only serves feelings. I’ll be grateful every week at brunch with our extended family.

I’ll be generous all year round. If you’ll notice, the only person who appears in this entire scenario I described is me. Me.

A 33-year-old adult. Not my 3-year-old son. Some of that is normal, right?

Ralph was 22 months old when his father died. He doesn’t miss him the same way I do because he didn’t know him the same way that I did. And not just at the holidays.

Just all year round. A problem with grief is that we don’t know enough about what it looks like even when we’re going through it.

And what the people who love us don’t know is that, yeah, holidays can be hard, but really it’s every day that can be hard.

You may have had 25 Christmases with your beloved, but that doesn’t make Christmas mean more than the other 9100 days you spent together over the years. You miss your person in the little things. Every day.

Like, yes, Aaron was four years older than me. And like last year, I turned the age that he was when he was diagnosed. And so for me, I spent all of age 32 being like, this is when Aaron knew like his life was going to end.

But it’s not as if Christmas and Thanksgiving or Father’s Day or Mother’s Day are like all that bad because especially that first year, every single day is like, this is my first April 7th without Aaron.

This is my first, like this is the first time I’ve gotten on an airplane and buckled a seatbelt without him. Like just things like everything is the first thing that you’ve ever done.

And that age thing is interesting because it’s like, I sometimes do that with my parents. Like, oh, this is the age at which my mom had me or whatever sort of milestones people have, the people who are important to you.

But yeah, this is the biggest one.

So yeah, I had written off the holidays because they’d lost meaning for me. But that’s not how Lucy sees it.

There is one thing that I’m really excited about for the holidays, which is having a kid grow into them.

And a lot of the traditions will be the same, but like seeing the holidays through her eyes or in our town in California, there’s one of those streets where everybody just goes completely insane for Christmas and it’s called Candy Cane Lane or

something. And it turned into a one-way street in the neighborhood and people go park and walk around and look at these unreal Christmas lights.

And so to think about doing that with her this year, she’s old enough to be really excited about the lights.

I think that, I think having a child like reopens traditions for you or makes you appreciate traditions in a different way, just like many other things to do with seeing the world through child’s eyes, you know?

So I think that’s like, the traditions stretch into the future in a kind of expansive way.

Yeah, Ralph would be, I mean, almost four. It’s like he will have like a new understanding of it. Yeah.

And yeah, well, maybe I’ve just been extremely selfish about all this stuff, probably, but also because he’s just sort of been like along for the ride, you know, like now he is like expanding into his own like personness and humanness.

What you’re hearing right there is the sound of a person realizing that they might not be the most important person in the equation anymore.

Maybe most people realize that the moment they see their baby, but I’m apparently a late bloomer or one of those flowers that opens and closes over and over again that needs to be reminded to open up to the world around it.

The world around me, closest to me, is a son without a father, a boy who doesn’t feel this season as a season of loss or last things or things that will never be.

A boy who can give me new eyes, who can force me off my own lonely planet and back onto Earth. Before I met Lucy, I read and re-read the very last paragraph of Paul’s book. Lucy has read this so many times that she can recite it from memory.

Paul’s talking about the way in which time and his relationship with the future and even the present is so different from when he’d been a future-oriented neurosurgeon.

And now he’s dying. And then he says, will I write letters to my daughter? I don’t know.

I don’t even know what I would say. I only have one thing to say to her in this particular moment.

And he says, when you come to one of the many moments in life, when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been and done and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated

joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing. Like a little love letter to her, you know. See, I make the interviewer cry.

I know, I like read that when I was getting a pedicure.

So relaxing.

I know the lady next to me was like, are you okay?

I was like, are you okay?

Are any of us okay?

Are any of us okay?

Ever.

Our husbands are gone.

We’ve had our last moments with them. And now we’re allowed a lifetime of firsts with the children that gave us. We are still here.

And how dumb am I to forget even momentarily what a gift that is. It’s dumb of me, but this is also a process. Lucy summarized this really well.

When I asked her the question, I ask all of our guests. The question I want everyone to answer more honestly. Lucy Kalanithi, how are you?

Oh, I don’t even know how to answer that.

I’m becoming a person again. That’s good. Like, I feel like a human participating in what’s happening on Earth.

That’s good.

That is good.

That is what I’m going to do this year, right now.

I’m going to be a human. I’m going to participate in what’s happening on Earth. I’ll stop trying to make this a season of last and try to let it be a season of firsts.

I’ll let this be a season that isn’t just about me. I’ll let this be a season where I’m more focused on the presence of what Aaron left me, our inquisitive, lovely son, than the absence Aaron left in me when he died. I’m going to try.

I’ll try. So, that’s my resolution for today, for this season, for 2017. Dr.

Lucy Kalanithi is awesome. What do you want, I was like, what do I say? Lucy Kalanithi is a doctor, a mother, a public speaker, and she also wrote the epilogue to her late husband, Dr.

Paul Kalanithi’s bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air.

Comedian Amber Tozer has written one of the funniest books I have ever read. I laughed so hard, somebody on an airplane told me to keep it down. Seriously, if you still have gifts to buy for people, just get a copy of Sober Stick Figure.

Before Amber became a successful writer and comedian, she lived her wild, drunken 20s in New York. During one of those years, she came home to stay with her mom for Christmas, like she usually did.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I wake up and I’m hungover. This is when I was really drinking heavily, and I have to go do some last minute Christmas shopping. And of course, I just go to Walmart, because that’s what you do.

And I buy some really bad Christmas gifts.

It’s a thought that counts. Yeah, yeah.

I’m a much better person now, that’s the point. And I come home, I’m still in my pajamas, just hung over and just a little crusty. And I walk into the house, and it’s spotless.

And I’m like, what’s going on? And I go, I walk into my mom’s room, and she’s in there, and she looks beautiful. She’s in this dress.

It was long, and it was like a V-cut, but it was green. It wasn’t white. And I said, what, are you going to church?

And she was like, oh, what are you doing here? And I said, well, you know, it’s Christmas Eve. I’m home for the holidays.

I’ve been staying here for a few days. What do you mean? What am I doing here?

I’ve been your child for 22 years.

We’ve been doing this for literally 22 years.

Hi, my name’s Amber. She’s like, oh, I thought you were going to be gone today. I said, you know, I’m going to hang out here until we go to the Christmas Eve party.

I said, what’s going on? Are you going to church? She said, no, Wayne and I are getting married today.

And I was like, what? Where? And she said, in the living room.

And I said, why didn’t you tell anybody? And she said, oh, I just, I didn’t want to bother anyone with it. I’m like, mom, this is huge.

And I wasn’t very articulate back then. I was hungover. I was like, young.

I just had all of these emotions that I couldn’t really spit out. So my natural thing was to just shut down.

So I was like, all right.

So then, I just feel like a fly on the wall at this point, because I’m not even supposed to be there.

I wasn’t even invited.

And I was just filling up with rage. I was like, I can’t believe this is.

Also, you’re still in your pajama pants, just so everybody knows.

I was in my pajamas with, like, plastic bags from Wal-Mart. And everyone’s nice to me. You know, Wayne is like, oh, hey, kid, I’m glad you’re here.

Now you can take some pictures. And he hands me this disposable camera. So they have this little ceremony in the living room.

They were just standing there by the TV in front of a couch. And I set off to the side on some stairs that lead to upstairs. And I think, you know, I’m supposed to be taking pictures of this, and I didn’t want to.

So I just took pictures of the dog. I did not even… I don’t know if they have any pictures of that day, because I was the only one with a camera, and I just took pictures of the dog, because I was so upset.

And they have this cute little ceremony. It’s really short. And then I go upstairs, and I send tons of emails to my friends, being like, you’re not going to believe this, but I just walked in on my mom’s wedding.

And it’s over.

But that night, we had a huge party at my aunt Sabrina’s house, which is traditional.

You know, there’s like 30, 40 of us. And everyone is really upset with my mom. And she honestly, I think that’s when she started to regret it.

And so we have the party, and my brother and I get buzzed. And I’m still staying with her at her house. And it was late.

I think it was like one or two in the morning. And we’re sitting in her driveway, and we’re just a little drunk. And like, can you believe it?

I can’t believe she did this. And I’m like, let’s TP. Let’s go get toilet paper and TP her house for getting us a new dad for Christmas.

And he’s like, yeah.

Wait, while she sleeps soundly on her wedding night?

Yes. I remember being in the house, and it was dark, and just having to be real quiet going to each of the bathrooms.

You ran a teepee here with her own toilet paper.

Yes, I went into her house to steal her toilet paper to teepee her house on her wedding day. And we need way more.

And my mom’s friend Jan, who is this hilarious hippie lady, buys every single family member a roll of paper towels for Christmas as a joke. And we love it, because you always need paper towels.

Had you already unwrapped them, or did you unwrap them?

I think we had to unwrap them.

So you were like the Grinch stealing Christmas.

Yeah.

And then?

We had loads of paper towels from hippie Jan that are wrapped up in Christmas. So I bring out all the paper towels that Jan had bought. And we PT her house with paper towels.

And then I slept in the house. That’s where I was staying.

My brother went home.

I slept in the house that I T.P.ed. And the next morning, most of it was gone because it was really windy. So it was like at the neighbor, on the neighbor’s house.

All the paper towels that just look like someone trashed the neighborhood. So exciting.

So you didn’t even get like the desired effect, which was at the time, that night, you’re like, my mom’s going to wake up and just know.

Yeah.

We don’t approve.

She’s going to know we’re upset. But I do, you know, I sort of feel bad telling this story because my mom is incredible. She’s not a horrible person.

And I have more empathy for her now because she honestly, in her head, I know she was thinking, I don’t want to bother anyone with this. Even though it seemed like a selfish move, I know her well.

And I know she was thinking, I’ve been divorced twice and thank God we all like Wayne. You know, it wasn’t him at all.

Did you open presents that day then?

Yeah, yeah, I think we did. It was sort of business as usual. And, you know, Wayne was there.

We’re like, oh, well, he’s going to be here now on Christmas. But he buys gifts, so that’s nice. He always gives cash.

So I was like, all right, all right.

Amber Tozer is a comedian and author. Her book, Sober Stick Figure, can be found anywhere books are sold, and it is so funny, I would not recommend reading it in a public place because people found my laugh disturbing.

Can I ask you a question? Are you afraid to make a mistake? Are you afraid to crumble?

Yeah, absolutely.

When your life falls apart, people always want to know how you do it, how you keep putting one foot in front of the other, how you live.

And the answer is mundane and true. You don’t have a choice. It needs to be done.

All right, well, should we call to order this first meeting of the Hot Young Widows Club? Should we?

We need like a gavel.

We do. Right now, we’re listening in to a top secret meeting of the Hot Young Widows Club. OK, it’s not a secret.

We had it in my kitchen. The Hot Young Widows Club started as a kind of joke, something my friend Mo and I would use to refer to our time together. But it’s actually a real thing now.

What qualifies you to be in the Hot Young Widows Club? Your person has to die. That’s basically it.

You don’t actually have to be a certain age or look a certain way, just to be clear.

And as the club, which is a secret group on Facebook, grows, it’s cool and it’s hard, because someone found a group they needed, but they need it because they lost their person.

Every new member signifies a huge loss, a hole punched into the center of someone else’s universe.

We rarely meet in person because we’re all over the world and a lot of us have kids, and also it’s just hard when you’re all grown ups with full-time jobs and full-time grief, but I asked Fay and Gina and Mo to come over for Thai food and drinks and

talk about the kind of stuff we talk about online in our secret Facebook group. Okay, so I’m Nora. My husband Aaron died of brain cancer in November 2014.

Hi Mo, my husband died by suicide in September 2014.

I’m Gina and my husband dropped dead on a run in September of 2012 and I was 20 weeks pregnant.

I’m Fay. My husband Jason died in a bicycle accident involving the light rail last December, so it’s almost a year.

Mo and Gina and Fay and I lost our husbands in wildly different ways.

We’ve experienced each of these losses so differently, but we share this common thread of experience, of losing our own personal North Star and then having to paw around in the darkness on our own, through a full year of firsts, a first day without

our person, a first week, a first holiday. This is Gina.

We celebrated things differently for Thanksgiving. I think that we went to my brother’s house instead.

Usually we went to my mom and dad’s, but I think the thing that bugged me the most was they had some other people there and they just kind of avoided the topic and they kind of treat you with kid gloves or something.

If you’re not going to bring it up, it’s not like I’ll then forget.

Exactly. It’s not like it’s not happening.

I call that, like, everyone stares at me like the puppy no one wants to adopt. And if they do talk, it’s a tilt and a, oh.

Totally, yeah.

But they don’t know what to say, so they don’t say it, so then they just stare and smile a lot, or, you know, like, they have all these expressions, but no one says it. You’re like, just…

Just acknowledge it.

He’s dead.

Yeah. It happens.

And it’s the holidays, and this sucks.

Yeah. For those of us in the Hot Young Widows Club, all of our husbands are stuck in time. We will get older, and they will stay the same age, locked in the same year.

But we do nothing for them or us or our children by trying to anchor ourselves to the past. The world, whether we like it or not, will keep spinning. And it’s our job to move ourselves forward.

I don’t believe in moving on. I never say moving on. Moving on implies that these people we loved are left behind.

And anyone who has lost someone they love knows that’s impossible. We don’t move on. We move forward.

And their love and loss remains a part of us forever. So that’s our job, with a new year coming for us.

Well, I turned 40 in 2017, and that’s like… So am I, Mo. Yes, and feeling old, and like…

Like, I’ve been really working hard on setting boundaries, and I also have a man friend, and figuring out what that is like, and being okay with saying that I have a man friend, because that is awesome.

You’re happy about things, but you’re sad about it. So I think it’s like figuring out what I want my relationships with everybody to be, and that I get to choose how I want them to be.

And if they don’t like it, they don’t have to be my friend, my family, or whatever. So I think I’m going to learn to be more selfish. Does that sound horrible?

No, it sounds good.

Yeah, I like it.

And I want to get Botox.

Same.

2017 is going to be just a weird year for me. The next time you see me, I will have a new face. Faye, what do you want out of the next year?

I think for me, I spent 2016, like you, Nora, really wanting to make everyone comfortable, and I didn’t want to make anyone more sad.

And I felt like because I didn’t have kids and don’t have kids, I get to just focus on myself a lot. And I thought I would take a really long time to cope and figure this out and figure out who I was.

And I found that the more I put my energy into that and made it like a priority to learn about myself and who I was without Jason, I found myself pretty quickly.

And I purposefully did things like traveling by myself, just to see like, what do I do when I’m traveling? Like, what decision do I make when there’s no one here to collaborate with or to share the moment with?

Like, Jason and I have been together since we were 18 and became adults together. And so I had to figure out who I was. And eventually it came to a point where what I wanted for my future in 2016 was eventually to be married again.

Now 2017 looks weird and interesting and scary and crazy. And I want to be unapologetic. I want to celebrate being unapologetic.

Yeah.

I think when you lose your partner or someone close to you, like they die, you’re reborn, a new person. And then you’re spending this rest of this time, like learning this new life and this new person all at the same time.

And it’s like, I like parts of my new person. Being selfish is kind of awesome in some ways. I don’t know if it’s being selfish.

I think it’s learning yourself and being okay with it. Yep.

And just making decisions based on like, what does my happiness look like and what am I pursuing in order to achieve that happiness versus how can I make everyone else really comfortable? And I don’t want to be rude to anyone.

I don’t want to step on their toes and I don’t want to make things harder for them but at the same time, I think they need to understand too, like the steps that they need to go through to do the same thing.

Like don’t look to me to try and help you through this. Like we all need to, I think, just focus on ourselves a little bit.

Now it’s Gina’s turn. Gina is the most experienced of us widows. It’s been four years for her.

When her husband died, her daughter was a toddler and her son wasn’t even born yet. She gave birth a few months after her husband died.

So I think I was giving grief too much space in my life. You know, I’ve been so focused on taking care of my kids and not letting things fall apart. And so in 2017, I think I would just like to pursue more that makes me happy.

You know, I would like to be in a relationship again, and I haven’t found anybody and you know, partially I think it’s because I compare all of them to Brian and that’s a really hard high level for somebody to be compared to.

But I really like a lot of who I am since he died. And I really realized how much I like being in charge.

And that’s great for my family because I, you know, I get to tell my kids what to do and I get to make the decisions for their upbringing and I’m really comfortable doing it. And I didn’t know that I was going to be that way.

My husband was always kind of the stronger parent. And I think, you know, the day that I had to tell Zoe that her dad was dead was the worst day of my life.

And I think about how strong I’ve had to be for her and how I would like to now, I think, focus a little more on me.

None of us are where we expected to be. None of us would have ever found each other without these losses. And that’s a weird thing, being grateful for people who are only in your life because of the worst thing that ever happened to you.

But that’s what we have. We have our dead husbands and our weird lives, and we have each other. And future we’re walking towards together, ready or not.

Well, thank you for doing this with me, everybody. Cheers.

Cheers.

We’re drinking in case people are wondering, we’re drinking a new drink invented by Mo. It’s called the Hot Young Widow. It is part lemon tea, part ginger tea, and part fireball.

And it’s real good.

Ask for it by name at any bar.

They’re familiar with it. I don’t have any science to back this up, but I’m pretty sure that the worst parts of us come out in various parking lots during this time of year. You know why?

Because even if you are Suzy Holidays, this stuff is stressful. I promise I’m not a Grinch, and I hope you all have the best holiday season ever.

Or if you’re having the worst holiday season, you just skip it all together and go see movies or something.

You’re totally allowed, and I wish someone would have told me that back when I was trying to choke down mashed potatoes before my husband had even been cremated. You’re totally allowed to love the holidays or hate them.

Or to want to love them, then actually decide in the middle of dinner you hate them again. You’re allowed to decorate your whole house like your real-life Pinterest board or not even bother.

You’re allowed all of your multitudes and all of your feelings. Every day, of course, but especially these days. I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible, Thanks for Asking.

Our producer is Hans Butow. Thank you to Lucy Kalanithi, Mark Snyder, Amber Tozer, the Hot Young Widows Club, and my family. And thank you for listening.

We wish you a very happy holiday season. Seriously, so happy. You can find us on social media as TTFA Podcast.

We are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can find our podcast on iTunes or wherever you like to get podcasts. Also, rate us.

It helps. It helps other people find our podcast if you rate it. If you have your own holiday story to share, we want to hear it.

Here’s how you can do it. Record your story using the Voice Memos app on your iPhone, or something similar if you have not an iPhone. Record it.

Hit the little share button and send it to us in an email. Our email address is TTFA at americanpublicmedia.org. If you like today’s episode, we have more of it.

You can text TERRIBLE3 to 677-677 to get a little mini bonus episode of me and Lucy Kalanithi talking about other things we sat in her living room for 3 hours. You will not get a 3 hour episode, I promise you, but you’ll get an episode.

So that’s TERRIBLE3 to 677-677. Oh, messaging rates apply. Never forget the messaging rates.

If you love our theme music, which I do, big fan, it’s by my friend Joffrey Wilson. He’s also got a band called Just Post Ballum. You should look him up.

Terrible Thanks for Asking is a production of American Public Media.