S4: Normalize “Bad Women” with Rebecca Woolf

Being a widow is complicated. On top of the earth-shattering grief you experience, there’s a huge societal pressure to be the perfect image of a grieving partner, missing the love of your life. But what if the person who died was actually kind of a huge jerk? How do you take care of someone who doesn’t really deserve it? And what does it mean to be a good woman or a good widow?

⁠All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf⁠

⁠The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite

–

Fordham University’s Master of Social Work program is ranked among the nation’s top 8% of graduate social work programs by the U.S. News & World Report. With three New York campuses, plus hybrid and fully online options, Fordham’s flexible program works with your schedule to help you earn a degree on your timeline. Our evening and weekend part-time study plan is ideal for working adults, with most students maintaining employment throughout their education.

Learn more about Fordham University’s Master of Social Work program at: fordham.edu/TTFA.

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

---

Hi.

Hi. Hi, there.

Hi.

Hi.

Hey, Nora.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you. We tend to make saints out of the dead.

Whether it’s grief or good manners or decency or denial, something scrubs away the rough edges of a person’s life once they’re dead.

You’re not supposed to say, for example, that this dead person was actually a hateful racist, even if you are simply quoting a public figure’s very own public words. Grief is the great magic eraser that wipes away anything but sadness.

The socially acceptable form of grief is a very simple recipe. It says, someone very loved died and their death is sad and nothing else. End of sentence.

First-ring grievers are allowed to feel sorrow, devastation, haunted by an absence that is everywhere.

If there was prolonged suffering, those grievers might be allowed a little sprinkling of relief, but only if that relief is also paired with the acknowledgement that this is a crushing and unquantifiable loss.

Outer-ring grievers can say things like, yeah, oh my gosh, that’s so sad. I’m so sorry for your loss, but we can’t say things like, wasn’t he kind of a bastard?

Now, that there are universal elements to grief does not mean that grief is universally the same, of course. Grief is an experience that is as unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake or a third unique thing.

Grief is a recipe that can never quite be replicated because every time you experience it, it’s new. Every time you experience grief, it is somehow for the first time.

It’s the first time you’ve lost your mother, the first time you’ve lost your father, your friend, your husband, your uncle.

And I’ve had, I can’t even count how many uncles have died, but it’s the first time every time because it’s the first time that uncle has died.

And your experience of grief is also colored by the relationship that you had with that dead person, a relationship that only you had with that dead person. We all are different people to different people.

My dad was a different dad to me than he was to any of my siblings. That relationship that we had was unique to us. One dead person can be grieved in a million different ways.

And sometimes a dead person kind of sucked when they were alive, at least some of the time to some of the people who mattered to them. And today’s guest is a woman who isn’t afraid to say that and more.

Rebecca Woolf is the author of All of This, A Memoir of Death and Desire. She is also one of the OG mommy bloggers, formerly known as Girls Gone Child. Very clever.

For over 20 years, she’s been writing on the internet about the reality of womanhood, marriage, motherhood. And in 2022, she published a book about the reality of being widowed by a man that you were ready to divorce.

A few months ago, we published an episode where a listener asked if it was OK to want to leave your boyfriend when he has a terminal illness. And this episode got a lot of responses and we will get to some of those at the end of the show.

But one of those responses was from Rebecca, who was suddenly very pushed into the role of caregiving the man that she was trying to leave when he was diagnosed very suddenly with stage four pancreatic cancer.

And her book is about the many complicated feelings of their marriage, his illness, and of grieving and moving forward from a loss that did not fit neatly into that socially acceptable script that we are supposed to follow as widows, as grievers.

Both Rebecca and I lost our husbands young to cancer. Both of us cared for them at the end of their lives. But our experiences and our reactions to that initial question, is it okay to leave my boyfriend if he has a terminal illness?

They’re very different. Like the woman who wrote in, Rebecca’s dying husband was not gracious and loving and kind to her as he faced his own mortality. He did not want to go gentle into that good night.

He raged against its dying. So we ended up having a pretty expansive conversation about what it means to be a good woman, a good griever, a good widow, and whether women are obligated to become caregivers. Let’s get into it.

Your widowhood experience is one that I really am so intrigued by and so fascinated by.

5:53
Caregiving a Dying Partner

And so I think in awe of as well because we have kind of come at these things so, so differently.

And you represent a probably not as small as people think it is number of women who are not grieving the loving, gentle light of their lives and love of their lives.

Well, when my husband got sick, I was actively pursuing separation and we were not speaking.

We weren’t speaking when he was started to feel ill to the point where like, I didn’t even take him to the hospital when he was in excruciating pain because I didn’t even believe him at that point.

I was so checked out that I thought he was just making excuses for me to take care of him or whatever. I didn’t even go with him. He was diagnosed terminally alone because I couldn’t even drive him to the hospital.

Mind you, we had small children, so I would have had to have somebody come to the house. But still, I was like, you’re on your own.

I think for me, and part of the reason I do so much work in the divorce space now, and really specifically sitting with women who are trying to decide whether to leave, is because I feel like, it’s not shame, but I feel I got out of my marriage in a

passive way, right? I think in my head, if he would have not gotten sick and been healthy, I would have left. In my head, I can say, yes, absolutely, 100% I would have left, but that did not happen.

That’s not my story, and so I think for me, my grief experience had a lot to do with grieving. I had grieved my husband before he died. I had grieved him.

I had grieved us before he got sick. I was already out. I was already disconnected.

I was already extremely protective of myself in our relationship. There’s all these articles that have come out recently about the quiet quitting your marriage. I was definitely one of those people that had been quiet quitting my marriage for years.

We didn’t have sex for the last two years of our marriage. I refused to touch him. I was still married, but I was not in an intimate relationship with my husband.

So when he got sick, which is extremely, as you know, very intimate to take care of someone who was dying of cancer, it was a real challenge for me to become, just to allow myself to love him in the way that I knew that he needed me to love him in

that time. Just to draw from the beginning, from the parts of him that I still loved, or to remind myself where that love came from.

I remember right when he was diagnosed, I went back and started looking at old photos, old videos, old notes to try to fall in love with him again, so that I could be there for him when he was dying.

Mind you, for those who have experienced with pancreatic cancer, it is extremely fast. When you get diagnosed typically, it is, you know, the prognosis is very dire. So his prognosis was basically weeks to months.

He was alive for four months. So I took, I was able to, and I was able to say to myself, I could do this for this amount of time. If he had been given a diagnosis, it was going to take years, et cetera.

I don’t know that I would have been able to do that. Again, I don’t know. I’m a caretaker by nature, but it was, those four months were very, very hard.

And I don’t know if I would have been able to be the caretaker that he needed in those moments for longer than the time that I was caretaking.

The way that your relationship, you know, comes together quickly, the way that the cracks start to show in the relationship, and the way that you are doing this very sacred thing for somebody who has also hurt you in so many unspeakable ways, and the

way that you are also managing his end of life and his reputation at that same time. It is so very tangly to read. And also, it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me.

And I don’t know if that is just the natural caretaker in me, like the woman in me that I’ve just been conditioned to take care of, of other people, specifically men.

Or if it’s just the fact that so many things can and always are true at the same time.

So interesting. Obviously, I wrote this book because it didn’t exist. And it was it was scary.

It was I mean, you know, I lost people who did not want me to write it and want me to publish it. I law I knew that would happen.

I mean, I’ve been writing on the Internet for long enough to understand that, like, every time you press publish, you’re risking blowing up a relationship. Right.

But it because the book that I needed to read while I was going through that didn’t exist was why I wrote it.

And I, you know, in those years since it’s been published, I mean, I can’t tell you how many women who have come to me, women in my own family, people who’ve had very similar experiences, but we’re so afraid that if they not only acknowledged it

I really want to hear from you about how you grieve a person who hurt you, who was bad to you, who you did not want to be with, because I really think, Rebecca, you did a really beautiful job.

I’m going to cry-text you in the middle of this, too, where I was like, you’re such a good mom. You’re such a good mom, because to do that stuff with your kids and show your kids that kind of grief, we also aren’t shown what grief looks like.

And if we’re lucky, we have a really solid religion that hasn’t harmed us, that gives us rights and rituals that we can do. I don’t know, how do you hold all that?

How do you let yourself feel these holy and righteous feelings, like anger and grief together?

I honestly feel like my whole life, I was… This is going to be a very emotional episode. Woo!

Let’s cry, baby.

I feel like so much of my life was like, in a lot of ways, was working up to this, because I had always sort of…

You know, I’ve been a writer online since my teens, and my thing was always honesty. It was always the paradox. It was always being vulnerable and human and very naked.

For better and for worse. And I think, you know, my kids knew that we were unhappy. They knew that I was miserable.

They knew that we were fighting a lot. I knew that it would have been disingenuous for me to act like my grief looked a certain way.

And so, and I also understood that their grief was gonna look different than they were expected to, because they lived with an angry person. And even though they loved him, he was really difficult to live with for all of us.

And I’ve seen this happen again in family and also with friends who someone died and they were not a great person and they pretended like they were. And I think that’s actually more damaging to the children.

It’s more damaging to the family to gaslight everybody into saying this person was so-and-so when they weren’t.

And so, you know, I think in the beginning, I was definitely prioritizing my kids’ experience and feelings and wanting the whole space for them, but also making sure that they knew that I was feeling complicated things, that I was feeling sad, but I

was also feeling really angry. That I also didn’t want to be married to him and how hard it was for me to take care of someone that I didn’t want to be with. I just was really honest with them.

I, you know, confessed to them that I had affairs right after he died.

Because I wanted them to understand that even though dad, because you know, they were like, their father was very human, but I think they assumed that I was maybe, they had put me on more of a pedestal because I was the, I was the one that like put

out the fires and I wanted them to understand that I had had affairs, he was very angry at me about that, that I wasn’t perfect either, that you’re not perfect, that none of us are, and that everything is complicated, everything, even when you don’t

think it is, it’s complicated. And so I wanted them to feel like they could have every feeling, anger, sadness, you know, joy, relief, right? There was relief there.

And I wanted them to feel validated in every single feeling that they had and that they could come to me with every single feeling. They could be like, fuck dad, what a dick, I’m glad he’s dead, and I’d be like, fair?

And they could come to me and say, I miss dad so much, I will never heal from this. I’m so, so sad. And me to say, fair.

And that every single feeling was valid and it came from an absolutely just place and that I had the same feelings. And that everyone has the same feelings when someone dies. It’s not as simple as they make it seem in movies.

And, you know, these were conversations, I think, you know, we had, you know, age appropriately. My kids, when my husband died, my twins had just turned seven and then my other daughter was 10 and my son was 13.

So they’re, you know, those different age demos and the genders has to do with, you know, the difference in relationship.

And so I, I really, you know, talk to them separately, talk to them together, shared my own feelings with them, didn’t hide them, didn’t hide them was very, you know, when I started dating, let them know that I was going to start dating, but that I

wasn’t going to, that there was going to be no, you know, I wasn’t going to replace their father, like I wasn’t looking to get married, that they were safe here with me. And that’s, you know, it’s been seven, over seven years now and it’s, that’s,

it’s still that, still the story. It’s still just me and them and I have outside things and they don’t need to know about them. If they have questions, they can, but I keep that very separate.

And yeah, I just, I, you know, we all had a complicated relationship with him. And so the conversations, you know, felt, felt really organic at the time.

I don’t ever remember feeling like I was like, I’m not a formal, like, I’m like this with like sex talks too. I’m not like, it’s time to sit down and we’re going to have a conversation about our feelings.

I’m very like, it’s, it’s definitely like, yeah.

We’re in the car. Car’s the best, okay? One, they’re trapped.

Two, you don’t have to look at each other. You’re looking at the road.

There’s also something very poetic about moving in the same direction. Like we’re, we’re in this together and we’re going towards the same destination and everything about the car.

So thank you for bringing that up because I always say that’s the best place to have any tricky conversation, the best place to have it. And honestly, if you need a prompt, make it like a mixtape with songs that remind you of X.

You could be like, oh my God, this song reminds me of high school when I had my first kiss. Maybe we should have a conversation about consent or whatever. You know what I mean?

These are good tips, these are good tips.

But I really loved especially the way that the funeral came together, and that you had parts of that experience that you saved just for you and your kids, too. And I think that’s so special and so important.

And again, not something that would be necessarily on a funeral director’s checklist to say, like, go, you’re going to the headstone, and you’re going to dance on your father’s grave. But, you know, that it’s beautiful.

And it’s like what you and your kids needed. And there it is.

Oh, my God. So that I feel really lucky. And I have to give a shout out to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, who really took care of us.

I mean, they literally, my kids basically buried their own dad. I mean, we had him cremated. And then we took a trip.

Here’s my unsolicited advice. And fuck unsolicited advice. You can basically ignore this.

But I will say what we did. So obviously when he died, I mean, there was, I mean, we had, I’m sure you had this experience. Like there were people in the house basically for four months in and out of our lives.

Like we didn’t have any time, just us, really at all. So after he died, I took my kids. It was the, and it was the first time we’d been a family of five, right?

Because we went from being a family of four to six, because I twins and then five. So it was actually this wild thing where like we had never been this number before.

So I took my kids to the Oregon coast because Hal had always wanted to go to the Oregon coast. He was like obsessed with the Oregon coast. We never went.

He’s like, you know what, we’re going to drop some of his ashes there so he can be there. So my kids, we all went through the ashes. Everyone got to like spoon their own vial.

Then everyone got to find a different place over the course of the weekend to put the ashes. We had the most incredible, beautiful time. Then we took the rest of the ashes and we buried them in the cemetery.

And they let my kids do all the put… I asked them, do you guys want to… And they all did.

And they all shoveled. They put stuff in the hole and they shoveled all, just them, the four of them. They designed his headstone.

It was completely their idea. And so it really felt healing. We had his funeral at the Whiskey Gogo, which is like a rock venue on Sunset.

We had Reston, it said Reston Power Chords on the thingy. My son, his very first public musical performance was at his dad’s funeral. He played Jump because Hal was a big Van Halen fan.

And that was how he opened the funeral. I mean, it really was like an incredible party funeral. And it was because the kids were involved.

And it wasn’t, we didn’t want it to be this like, we wanted it to be the celebration of life. We wanted it to be all the things he was, which was like, you know, loud and musical and, you know. So that’s what we did.

And I really, I have to say in retrospect, yeah, I think I did good and I think he would agree.

And I look back on that time like strangely enough with like so much love and gratitude and fondness for him and for me and for all of us and really, I mean, I definitely have a lot of regrets in my life, but the way I navigated his death is not one

of them. It’s probably my proudest parental moment, I think.

22:11
Challenging a Legacy

You mentioned losing people, right?

Losing people in the wake of writing this book because you told the truth about your marriage and you told the truth about who you’re married to.

And the truth is, like you said, that we are all complicated people and that you can be a good person who’s done bad things, you can be a bad person who’s done good things. And we are probably all like a mix of both.

But it should shock me and also doesn’t shock me that we do tend to be more concerned about a man’s legacy being preserved or like their reputation being preserved than about the impact of the real actions.

I mean, what’s the quote? If you wanted me to say something nice about you, you should have treated me better.

And Lamott, baby, if you wanted me to write more warmly about you, you should have behaved better.

I’m like, if I die, whatever people say, I really think, like, I don’t know, I just think about that all the time. And I think that a lot of people don’t. I think a lot of men don’t.

A lot of men have been able to get away with murder, mayhem. I mean, look at our country. They get away with crazy shit, right?

Women don’t, we can’t even get a fucking woman anywhere, right? Like, it’s like, they get away with… Right, right.

I didn’t like her hair.

She wasn’t… We looked at it. Her voice was so chill.

There’s just something about her and I don’t like it. Yeah. I can’t put my finger on it.

I can’t put my finger on it. There’s just something about her I don’t like.

There’s something about her I don’t like. I am very much like, the fucking buck stops at me. I am breaking the pattern of generations of people justifying shitty behavior from men.

I’m not going to do it. Here’s the thing, I will say specifically about the person who was like, if you write this book, you can’t write this book. I’m like, but I’m going to.

Then he wrote me this letter where he was like, shame on you. I remember opening that letter and it was a handwritten letter, which was like, okay, like you really wanted to make this formal. And I remember opening the letter.

Yeah.

And this being like a big fear of mine while I was writing the book, by the way, and also just a big fear of mine as a writer forever.

It’s like, you don’t want people, you don’t want to lose people you love, right? You love them. You want to be liked.

You don’t want them to think you’re a horrible person. No one wants people that they love to think they’re a horrible person.

I remember opening the letter, reading it, and it was like I had, and I’ve talked about this before, it’s like that superhero moment where like people are shooting at you and you look down, you’re like, oh, this doesn’t hurt me.

You’re like, oh, it’s not penetrating my armor or something.

That was a very pivotal moment in my life and in my work where I was like, I am so sure that what I am doing is the right thing for me, for my children, when I’m modeling to them, to other women, to other men so that they know if they fuck up in this

life, they’re not going to, when they die, they’re not going to be absolved of it through death. It felt like the most important thing. It was like there was on a part in my body that flinched from that note.

If anything, it further enforced my righteousness about it. I’m really grateful for that. And I think about that, I’m really grateful for that lesson.

So I lost a relationship, but I gained this lesson that I truly feel has carried me through the last few years creatively. Because I’m like, whoever I lose, I know myself.

I know, I see the impact that having these conversations is having on women who otherwise felt alone or would feel alone. I, with my own children who feel like they can bravely tell whatever story they want to tell.

I work with a lot of women writers, a lot of women who are writing memoirs specifically about complicated grief, a lot of widows with complicated grief. And there’s so much fear there.

And I always tell them, like, I, like, what you got from, because, you know, a lot of them are working because they read my book and had similar stories and now want to write their own.

I’m like, if I didn’t write this book, like, think about all the women who are going to read your story and feel like they can, they’re now validated in their emotions. They’re like, it is such a gift what you’re doing. Do you know what I’m saying?

Like, if you make it about you, it’s harder to do it. But when you’re like, wait, no, this is like, you’re contributing to changing the culture, to normalizing a very normal experience. Like, oh my God, fucking go.

Yes, we need you. We need your stories.

Yeah. When you share a difficult story, it does open a door for other people to do the same. And I think giving your children the right to own whatever memory and relationship that they have of their dad is going to be so important as they grow.

And as their relationship with this loss and with their grief grows as well. Like, there are some people who truly get to just grieve a purely beautiful relationship. And that is such a gift.

What a gift. What a gift. And what a gift to be also allowed to feel however you feel about the person who has died and to not have to sanctify them just because they are dead.

And I’ve been to funerals like that where everyone’s looking around like, are we talking about the same person or… Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. We’ll just skip over that stuff.

And I’ve also been to funerals where people just said it. People said it out loud. And which one feels realer and better?

Of course.

And also like…

The real one.

You can have relief and anger and be like, glad I don’t have to deal with that motherfucker again. And still love them. Like that’s the thing.

Like you can still love someone unconditionally with all of your might and still be like, oh my God, I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with their bullshit anymore. Like holy shit.

I think especially with those who care take, who are care taking parents or partners or even children who are full time responsibility care taker wise, I think there is relief that we’re not allowed to say, we’re not allowed to express.

And where does that go? Where does that relief go if you can’t express it or if you’re not validated or held in that? What do you do with those feelings?

It breaks my heart that people think they have to suppress so much of their grief experience. Because it really doesn’t have anything to do with how you feel about the person.

It has to do with the complexities of your relationship and what they did and didn’t, how they did and didn’t contribute as parents. A lot of shitty parents that kids are care taking right now. Tons.

I know people who are taking care of abusive fathers right now. And I think about that, like, what my experience was nowhere near what they’re experiencing. Because I had a limited window and also like, that’s your parent.

So I just feel, I feel again, and I know, and gender too, it’s typically women who are doing the care taking.

And a lot of women are taking care of abusive partners and parents and aren’t getting the love, validation and empathy that I wish that they were getting.

30:22
Widowhood Versus Divorce

So you do say in the beginning of your book, like the bravest women you know aren’t widow, the bravest women you know are divorced.

And now you do work, you work with a lot of women who are considering divorce, women who are in these sort of like complicated relationships and situations, and it rings true for me.

And I think one reason is that divorce is still so, so risky for women. And women still come out of divorces often much worse off financially.

I have watched women get fully discarded, erased, erased from like the history of their family once they no longer want to be married to a man who has not treated them well. Now, they are somehow flipped. They’re on the outside.

How dare they do this? It’s really shocking. It’s really alarming to me.

The amount of people that I know have said to me, I’m so jealous that your husband died.

And guess what I say? Yeah, I get it. Because my life is so much easier in so many ways than my friends who are in the process of or have divorced, narcissistic, sociopathic, abusive, whatever.

They have to share custody with these men. They have to deal for life if you have kids with these men. It is…

And I’m not going to even try… Financial abuse? I am not going to pretend that I have it harder.

And that was sort of my point about that line. I… We had a clean break.

Obviously, I didn’t want him to die. Obviously, I wouldn’t wish death on anyone. But the truth is, my life is so much easier as a widow than it would have been as an ex-wife.

Period.

Period.

I know that. And I… You know, in these workshops, we have that conversation because people tiptoe it around it with me.

And I’m like, you don’t have to tiptoe around that. I know… I get it.

I know what my experience for the last seven years has been. And I know what the experience of my friends who are dealing with exes has been. And mine is so much easier.

And that’s another reason why I feel like I have this space and capacity to hold people in that space, right?

Because I recognize that there is a privilege that comes with not having to deal with not only an ex-husband, but a man in this moment, right? I’ve raised teenage daughters without the male gaze.

They could walk around naked in my house without worrying about anyone commenting on their wardrobe, on their clothes. There’s not all of those things don’t exist in my home, right? My kids don’t walk on eggshells.

They don’t have to leave here to go somewhere that they don’t want to go because by law, they have to do that. Like there’s so much that I don’t have to deal with. Yes, financially, it’s very hard.

I cut my life 360 like, you know, like my weekly, like driver’s report and I drove in the last week, I got in my car and drove 101 times. I don’t even, just to like pick kids up and drop them off places. None of that was for me.

And I had driven almost a thousand miles this week. And I was like, what? Like, huh?

But like that is something that like, what? You don’t get it unless you’re parenting three teenagers, four kids, my son’s in college now alone, right? Like, but still it’s so much easier.

And I wish that we could like, you probably are going to have to cut this or maybe you won’t because we’re not allowed to talk about, we’re not allowed to say this. It assumes that I’m a sociopath or a murderer or want people to die.

And it’s not true. It’s like we don’t even allow ourselves to have these conversations. And it’s detrimental to the culture, I think, for us not to feel like we can freely talk and actually understand each other.

I think we immediately go on the attack and start judging and start insinuating that I mean this instead of just like taking a step and being like, actually, yes, that makes sense. That’s actually probably true.

Yeah. Here’s the thing is in the beginning of widowhood when and this is again, like I was so deeply in love with Erin, like to this day, right? I like I, I am in love with Erin and Matthew.

You’re polyamorous.

It is easier to have a couple when one person’s dead.

Okay. It’s easier when one person’s dead. If I had to listen to two men tell me about their day, I don’t think I could do it.

I don’t think I could do it, but I already got that with one. So at the very beginning of Widowhood, where I think one of our grief reflexes, which is like the uglier one, I like to talk about the uglier ones for the same reason you do, right?

It’s like you’re feeling it.

You might as well say it because someone else is too, which is like that miserly version of grief where you’re like golem and you’re like, but mine is the most precious and no one will ever understand this one and I’m just so special.

And I remember people casually just being like, oh, I know what you’re going through because I went through a divorce and I was like, not the same motherfucker, right? Like not the same.

But I feel that way whenever someone says, I know how you feel because I went through X, Y, Z, right? But that reflex, I was like, you don’t know because it is so different. Then the people I love started getting divorced.

Okay. Then I started, then I met a divorcee. I fell in love with a divorcee.

And people are also so romantically insecure about the idea of somebody still loving a dead person in a way that we’re not about a person with Xs or an X that they’re tethered to forever. Can’t take an international vacation.

Can’t take a vacation, period. You got to get everything cleared by another person, all these things. And so I started to get it.

And I think comparison is sometimes the thief of our humanity. I do get it now. I do.

I get those parallels. And I get not just the parallels, but the intersections of those experience too, which is, you know, I think in the beginning too, it’s like, well, you know, grief is like, if it’s not death, it’s not grief, baby.

Like, I’m a grief gatekeeper and I’ll tell you what counts. And, you know, you got to love him and he’s got to be dead. And those are the rules.

And I felt that way when, you know, when Aaron was diagnosed and I remember someone saying like, well, like, you’re grieving right now. And I was like, no, I’m not. And don’t ever say that to me again.

No, I’m not, cause he’s alive. And we are yoloing, you know, the longer that I like live with it and experience it, I’m like, oh, it is all of these things. And you saying, oh, I grieved my husband.

I grieved that marriage while, you know, sharing a home with him, while trying to figure out how I can leave him, while, you know, having affairs because, you know, you’re just so lonely and unloved. To be unloved is another kind of unkindness.

To be kept by somebody, but not loved by somebody is so cool.

There are so many corpse-like relationships. There are so many dead marriages. There are so many people who feel dead in their marriage.

And a lot of the grief that I felt after he died was grief for the relationship that I wasn’t able to grieve. And I think that’s really common too. I was devastated that I wasn’t grieving the love of my life.

And it made me realize like, oh, I guess I never had that. And I spent all these years with somebody. Maybe I missed out on that.

Maybe I’m never gonna have that. Maybe that’s just wasn’t for me. And I think I really went through this sort of experience where I went from grieving the marriage I didn’t have to being so grateful that…

Sorry.

To being so grateful that that’s the person I had kids with because my kids are like the loves of my life.

Like the absolute loves of my life. And I’m so okay with that. Like I’m really okay with like that.

And so without him, they wouldn’t be here. And I have like, you know, the survivor’s guilt of being the one remaining parent. And like my kids are amazing.

And I would like to take all the credit for it because I’ve been doing the… I mean, I did the book that worked from the beginning, but I’ve definitely been doing all the work for the last seven years.

But I also know that they have a lot of him and them. They have so much of his musical talent and his charisma and his humor.

And I’m like, oh, I picked a really good person to make kids with because the kids are like, no notes, like no, no, no notes. And so then there’s this grief on top of that, that like I have these amazing kids that like he’s missing out on that.

So so much of my grief. And whenever I get emotional, it always has to do with my kids, obviously. Because I like I’ve never missed a single performance because I feel like I owe it to him almost to be there for everything.

Like like there’s no dividing and conquering. Like there are moments where I have one of my daughters plays club sports and one’s like very involved in theater.

And like sometimes things are at the same time and I have a panic attack that I can’t be there at the same time. And I always look at the parents who are like, we’re dividing and conquering.

And one person is in one audience and the other person is in the other. And I’m like, I feel like rage. Because I’m like, I’m so mad that he’s on here in that way, right?

That he can’t be here as a parent and see them and be as proud of them as I am. And I know he would be. And I tell them that too all the time.

Like I incorporate him in their successes and make sure that they know that like, oh my God, not only am I like so proud of you, but like dad would have been so proud too. And, you know, that’s definitely the hardest part.

And I know that divorced couples have that feeling too, where you are all alone with your kids and you have no witnesses. Like there are so many times I’m like, oh my God, can you believe how fucking amazing our kids are? I’m sure you have this too.

And you just want to be like, oh my God, look what we made. And like, there’s no. And I remember like that was one of the hardest things right after he died, was being like, oh, I don’t have a witness for my life.

Like, no one is watching me parent. No one is like, but then I was like, you know what? I, like, why do I feel like I need that?

Like, why do I feel like? So anyway, my relationship with myself has changed so much. Um, and like my expectations of others and then realizing, like, is the only reason I wanted to have a partner so that somebody could validate me?

Do I, why do I need that kind of external validation? Like, what is it about me that doesn’t feel like I’m doing enough and can give myself that validation?

Yeah, I wanted to know, like, you know, because the book was written in, what, like two years after Paldy?

Yeah, I started it in 2020 and it came out in 20. So yeah, two years, I think, had passed, two years.

Okay. The act of excavating the experience to write about it changes it a little bit, right? Like, just accessing our memories changes them, which is always so spooky to me.

You know, I’m like, well, dare I remember something or will I damage the memory?

And yet, like, isn’t that what it’s all for, you know, is to let our experiences sort of, like, rub off the edges of it and recolor it, and that happens when you’re writing.

And then there’s, you know, the book coming out, and, you know, hearing other people process it and you reprocessing it as other people are telling you what they got out of it.

And then there is just simply, you know, the passage of time and the life that you live and the therapy that you go through.

And then suddenly, it’s almost 2026, and now it has been, you know, seven years, and now here you are, and you have this whole other view of what it means to carry grief for this person, and also the unvarnished reality of who this person was.

Yeah.

Like how different is that this year than it was even when you were writing the book?

I think for me, the biggest thing that has come from the time is, I don’t feel angry anymore. I think I was really angry for years. Angry with him, I was really angry with him, and angry with myself for like who I was when I was with him.

I don’t think we brought out the best in each other. And I was mad at myself for being complicit in my own unhappiness, because I believe that I was.

And for being too afraid to just advocate for myself, which is probably why I’ve become such a fearless advocate now, because the pendulum just was like, I’ve let go of so much anger for him.

And there’s been so much healing with myself in my relationships and the kind of people I gravitate towards now versus the people that I gravitate towards then, understanding where that comes from.

And being able to raise my kids in my own gaze, in my own way has been very healing. There was, I think, a lot of trauma in my home that I didn’t even really understand or know until he wasn’t here.

Just a lot of pain, a lot of anger, a lot of fighting, a lot of eggshell walking. Like none of that exists anymore. It’s like, so I feel I’ve been able to let that go.

I also feel like there’s like things about him that especially when he was dying that I think I didn’t understand or was resentful of specifically the way he was with the kids.

And I think the more I hear from other people’s experience, which is why it’s so important that we talk about it, the more I’m like, it’s actually pretty normal for someone who’s dying of cancer to be really mean to their kids. I didn’t know that.

I didn’t know that. I thought that was like, he was just being so mean to them. And I was so mad at him.

And now I’m like, oh, this is, this wasn’t necessarily him. This was the cancer. This was his brain going.

And so that’s been really helpful.

Honestly, hearing from other women, men too, but mainly women, about their experiences as younger widows, navigating this with children, all the complexities, the relief, the grief has been so helpful to me and my own healing, which is why I continue

Rebecca’s here because of a comment that she left on Instagram.

It was a clip of an episode of a listener who was asking if it’s okay to leave her boyfriend who was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness and given three years to live.

That listener’s boyfriend was not accepting his diagnosis gracefully, let’s say. He was shutting her out. He didn’t want to talk about it.

She was really going through a difficult time with this. And I had forgotten about Rebecca’s own experience until I saw the comment that she left.

Dying with someone who feels obligated to care take them instead of called to it wouldn’t be helpful for him.

Perhaps she recognizes this in herself and wants him surrounded by people who are not only willing to take care of him while he dies but want to. That to me is a loving choice.

To know what she is and isn’t capable of and to advocate for his end of life care to be in the hands of someone else.

Now, Rebecca is not wrong. I can’t argue with that comment and I wouldn’t dare because caregiving is so hard. Love is so hard.

Death and grief are so hard.

And I think I feel so protective of women who caretake, knowing how hard it is, knowing how much they have to suppress, knowing how much they have to perform.

I always think of the woman who’s taking care of the spouse or the parent and the people asking how the spouse or the parent are doing. How are they doing? I’m thinking of them so much.

When the reality is that it’s so much harder for the caretaker. It is. It is.

And a lot of the reason is, is because people aren’t checking in with you in the same way. They’re not thinking that you are suffering, that you’re struggling.

You have to sort of in order to survive that, you have to hold it together, especially when you have small children. So people that I’ve talked to over the years, young widows, like we are, we were, are, are, were, are.

I guess you’re once a widow, you’re always a widow.

We are young widows because we were, we locked in that title at the age that we were widowed. Okay, so we’re gonna keep getting older, but we will still be, we’ll be young widows, I guess.

So the protective nature over caregivers and specifically female caregivers, I think, is important for a lot of reasons. And one is that statistically men don’t stay. Men don’t stay, men leave.

And men will leave for, you know, a lot gentler cancer, right? A slight handicap.

A slight inconvenience, a slight handicap, something just, this is not what I signed up for when in reality, read your vows again, buddy, because I think that’s exactly what you signed up for. And two, like the broken heart syndrome is real, right?

Like the physical cost of caregiving and loss and grief is real. It does take a toll on a person. I love that we come at this so differently because I did fully delete all of my human needs, right?

I truly thought of myself as like a person who did not have any needs. And reading your book, I felt like you were aware of the fact that you were doing that. And I was not at all.

I was like, how am I doing? Who cares? I get to stay alive, right?

And to this day, I think like, oh, Aaron did like the bravest thing because, you know, we became parents when he was sick. And that is such an astonishingly generous. And I cannot believe that he was able to do that, right?

Like that he was able to like face this and like that, that potential, like not even just potential, like that absolute knowledge that he would not be there for the whole time, right?

And Aaron had all of those conversations with me that Hal would not have with you.

The fear of death, it’s really interesting because I always think about this, that really, like if I were ever to partner, I’m not gonna get married again for sure, but if I ever were to like partner in any capacity with someone, my number one thing

would be what your relationship is like to death and how what, not necessarily like what happens when you die, what do you believe happens when, you know, but more of like an ex, like what is your relationship to death, what is your experience been

with death? Because fear of death, I now realize, seems to be the issue with, pretty much the underlying issue with everything, right? Like I truly feel like it all comes back to fear of death.

Those who are the most alive are those who are the least afraid of death.

And I think for me, the most devastating thing, and I was just actually with someone who is dying and their experience, their relationship to death is so positive and so healthy.

And being around that, and it’s going to make me cry, was so healing because it’s devastating to be around someone who’s afraid to die when they’re dying and having to, like, having to, like, you can’t teach that.

You can’t reorient someone towards a fearlessness of what’s coming. So that, you know, so much of the anger that Hal had was, was, he was furious that he was dying when he was unable to acknowledge it.

So yeah, so like, he kept, he wouldn’t, you know, he didn’t say goodbye to the kids.

He wouldn’t give me, like, the passwords to, like, banking shit, which was like, it took me a year of lawyers to try to get to my own money because it had been under, my name was, like, secondary in all of our stuff.

We had crypto that he had invested in that I still don’t have access to. Maybe I never will, probably. I, like, had to let that go.

But, like, there were so many things that he was unwilling. Again, like, there was no talk of what do you end up, like, like, what do you want?

Funeral, like, we, we had to figure all that out on our own, but it feels like a really important thing to know about somebody now, what their relationship like is like to death. And men, I think, more than women, really struggle with it.

That’s the reason why if you’re in the death space, the majority of death doulas, the majority of people who do hospice work are women.

You know, we, we are, again, if we’re talking like epigenetically, we’ve been there at births and deaths, like we’ve been the midwives of, we’ve brought people in and helped them out.

That’s just, that’s the nature of a caretaker, but it’s also, you know, it’s, it’s, there’s a femininity to death that I think men are very afraid of. The body becomes very feminine, right? The muscles go away.

You know, like there’s, there’s a physicality of it that feels very feminine.

A true vulnerability, like a true vulnerability, and like a true needing of other people. And to die gracefully really does require, it requires like an inner grace, you know? And I, I don’t know that I have the kind of grace that Erin had at 35.

I’m probably getting closer now, but I know that if, if the roles had been reversed and I had been diagnosed, I would not be a lovely, buoyant, graceful person until the end. I know that I would have been absolutely miserable, you know?

Like I just, I would have been like, but I’m 31. Like, what are you doing? I don’t want to.

I don’t want to. And I’ll never forget him being told at the same hospital, now I’m gonna cry, the same hospital, where I had our baby, had my DNC, where he was diagnosed, where I proposed to him, that there was nothing left to do.

And I remember him looking at the doctor and saying, well, I don’t wanna die, but if you’re telling me I have to, well, I guess let’s go home. You know, let’s go home and die. And there is, it does require like a grace and a knowing of yourself.

And those are not the conversations that we are having when we are falling in love with somebody and certainly not when we’re young. And not when we are, you know, intoxicated by a man with a guitar and a small ironic t-shirt and perhaps a hat.

Right. So I think to your point earlier, I’m very protective of women, I guess just period, specifically when it is assumed that a woman will just take care of it. If something goes wrong, a woman will take care of it.

If someone gets sick, a woman will take care of it. If someone gets hurt, a woman will take care of it. And I think when you are like, I don’t think I have the capacity or capabilities to take care of this person.

I think that it’s actually really brave to say, first of all, to say so and to advocate for someone else who wants to be the caretaker to step in.

Now, obviously, if this person has nobody that wants to take care of them and you’re abandoning them until they die alone, I think I would maybe not be as, like, try it, like, you know, ride or die for you.

But also, like, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t have people, doesn’t have relationships, hasn’t made relationships in your life, and you’re at the end and no one will take care of you, again, you should have made those relationships in your

life. We need to, we must all recognize that we’re all going to die at some point. And someone’s going to want to take care of us, hopefully, if we’re treating them correctly.

So I do think it also says a lot about the kind of person who’s dying, if the person that they’re with doesn’t want to take care of them.

And as someone who took care of somebody that was really hard to take care of, super mean, everything I did was wrong. It was like I was always in trouble. It’s like to not want that experience.

I get it. I get it. So I think for her to ask that question, and just to acknowledge that publicly, A, is really brave.

And I’m like, I want more of that from people. I want people to feel like they can come to you with those kinds of questions and feel like they can and aren’t going to be necessarily tacked for it.

So to that, I’m just like, yes, more of this, please be honest in this way, especially as a woman. And also, would you want someone to take care of you that didn’t want to take care of you? Or didn’t feel like it was their responsibility or calling?

Like, I, there was no question in my head that I was going to take care of Hal. I was like, no one else was going to take care of him. I knew that no one else was going to take care of him as well as I was going to, regardless of our relationship.

He knew that. We had this conversation. He’s like, no, I want you to be my next of kin, power of attorney, caretaker, whatever.

I was like, no one else is going to do this but me. But if I was going to have some visceral reaction, or again, like I’d said before, if it had been years and years of caretaking, I might have been just like her and said, I can’t do this.

I think that we have, there’s so many different uninformative ways to go through life. And one is believing that you have a love of your life, right? This is the love of your life.

You get one shot, this is it. You will never find a love like this again. And which is true, you’ll never find a love like that again, but there’s so much love in the world, I promise you.

Like, there’s love, you have not met even a fraction of the number of people who would be fully obsessed with you and worship at your feet, especially when you’re 30, right? There’s people everywhere, people everywhere to fall in love with.

And while there’s a tendency and a conditioning for women to self-sacrifice and take care of everybody, there’s also this wider societal sort of like brush off of the difficult parts of life and a very American experience of being like, I just can’t,

like I can’t, right? Like, I can’t, I can’t go to your, I’m over capacity, I can’t show up for people in like small ways, I can’t go to that birthday party, I’d need to like bail for my mental health, blah, blah, blah.

We don’t experience that, we aren’t forced to witness death up close.

And I think like that sort of fear of struggle and death at large, but that aversion to struggle and the belief that like when you find love, life should be easy, puts us in these positions where it just feels like, well, you know, I just, I don’t

think I can do this, right? Like, well, I mean, you can’t do it until you have to do it. And there are so many people who like literally don’t have a choice, right? They are yoked to this situation and they can’t get out of it.

And no, you doing something that you don’t have to do does not make it easier for somebody who has to do it in any way. But and this is also why when people reach out for advice, I’m like, I don’t fucking know. OK, there’s simply too many, right?

There’s simply too many variables. And only you know, like only you know if, you know, if it’s if you’re if you are like you’re saying like you just know this is not for you. This person like one doesn’t deserve it.

And two, you don’t deserve this, right? Like you don’t deserve this experience. Or if you were just sort of like bypassing things, because you think that life is a series of, you know, trains you could take.

And if you step on another one, you’re going to go to baby town USA and be married and pregnant within the time that this guy could have died. And then you won’t be sad about this guy anymore, even though guess what?

If you’re in love with him and he’s going to die, you’re going to be grieving him whether or not you are there, you know, wiping his butt.

And arguably grieving even more because you’re going to regret having not have been there, right? There’s definitely, like, that’s a part of this pressure.

I think like it’s so interesting because the same questions, if you reverse them gender wise, I have a completely different response. I have the same thing about fidelity.

Like, I really do feel like when someone is expected, based on their gender, to be A, I am, whenever they say they want to be B, I’m going to be like, fuck yeah, be B, right?

Because, like, we need more examples of women being B because all of the examples of women being A means that there’s no room for nuance, there’s no room for discussion, and there’s tons of shame when you choose B.

And I guess I just want to get to a place where we can normalize B and say that’s okay and you don’t even if, look, maybe you are a terrible person, but women aren’t allowed to be terrible people.

And until we’re also, we can get elected president for saying bullshit and doing whatever, it is not the same, it is not equitable.

And so I’m always going to be like, I’m going to validate her for being a bad caretaker or a bad mom or a bad wife because she’s not allowed to be those things in our society.

And so in order for us to have nuance, we have to allow for people to be, their women to be their worst selves. And death sometimes brings out worst selves. It certainly does for men.

And we allow that. We allow that. It was like so interesting.

It’s like when Hal was dying, he had like two male friends that showed up to see him. And the rest were like, didn’t want to, were just so freaked out about it. They couldn’t even be around it.

And the people who came, who showed up for him were my friends, right? They were women.

Yeah.

They showed up with meals. They showed up with love. They showed up with childcare.

They showed up with help. And all these people are so interesting. All these men were like, you know, like try to be like, I’m going to come in and like hang out with Archer, like my son.

Nobody did, which is fine. I probably wouldn’t have wanted them to come in anyway. But like, there’s this like, very, it’s very gendered, but there’s a very different standard gender wise.

And so again, if that was a man that would have come to you, I would have, I would have responded differently.

Yeah, no, that’s true. I would have been like, listen here, buddy, I’m going to need your address. This is post-production Nora coming in to tell you that the audio that you’re about to hear is going to be a little bit different.

And that’s because in a kind of poetic fashion, Rebecca’s computer died in the middle of this recording. And then maybe two weeks later, it died, died. Like it is dead forever.

So we had to pick up the interview on her phone. I also think that there is this pressure for women specifically to do things that nobody is asking them to do. And a dumb example of this is like Elf on the Shelf, right?

It is like saying like, you know, like, the mental load is simply too much. I cannot keep repositioning this. You don’t need to, right?

There’s there’s the real responsibilities of like, you know, womanhood, motherhood, caregiving, love, being married, being a parent, all being a citizen in the world.

And then there are sort of like these additional things that we add on top of that that are not necessary and that nobody is actually asking us to do. And part of I think what I sort of like got me about this this message, right?

Which I also understand, right? Is saying like, you know, the question was, do I stay? Not do I take care of him, right?

But like, do I stay? Right? Do I stay knowing that it might mean that I might not get everything I want in life?

And if I’ve learned everything and is like, you won’t get everything that you want in life. And there’s no choice that you can make that will insulate you or inoculate you from future suffering of, you know, any kind.

And I have done the sliding doors trick with myself to say like, okay, but what if I had not gone on that date with Aaron and instead had gone on this, that date with this other guy? Right? And that would not, I believe that man is still alive.

It would not guarantee me a long, healthy, happy marriage or life just because that guy, you know, is alive. And the caregiving does fall typically on a spouse and typically on a, especially when that spouse is a woman.

And we don’t have to do absolutely everything. You know what I mean? Like we don’t have to do every single thing.

And yet, Rebecca, I thought I did. I was like, that’s a good woman. Okay, you know what a good woman is going to do?

Everything. And I don’t need help. Thank you for asking.

But I actually, no, I don’t want to. And the advice I could ever, I’m like, take every bit of help you can and invent new forms of help and accept those also.

That’s why, that’s why like when women are like, I actually am going to, my husband’s sick or my boyfriend’s sick and they’re leaving, I’m like, we need, we need that paradigm too.

Because that’s so, because it, because we, we hold women to such a higher standard that she’s going to get way more shit than a man would in the same position, period.

And until we have equity in those areas, I’m going to be on her team and be like, yes, get free, get free.

We’re at a point, I think, culturally where in order to, in order to push the needle in a different direction, we have to listen to stories like this woman.

We have to normalize the woman who leaves, the woman who cheats, the woman who steals, the woman who is a fucking human being. And we have to allow her to be imperfect or to be selfish or to be all these things we don’t allow her to be.

And hopefully, we get to a point where there is more equity there and then we can start judging.

All right, we will be back again after this break and we’re going to get into the feedback that you all had on that episode.

All right.

This is a little bit of a segment that we call Feedback Loop. This is where we take feedback from episodes and we share it with the group because you know what?

Your feedback matters to us and I think that everybody always has such interesting takes about a topic.

Now that episode that Rebecca and I are talking about got a really big response across all these platforms because we have strong feelings about death and love and responsibility and something that I thought is interesting, I mentioned this to

Rebecca briefly, is that the question was asking whether or not it’s okay to leave but we all assumed, I think myself included, that the default mode for staying with a partner who is terminal is also to become their primary caregiver and I do think

there will always be an element of that to a relationship at the end of life. I personally find that to be a holy experience, an honor, but again, I was caregiving somebody who was very loving to me, very accepting of the end of their life and it was

still difficult. I also think that that responsibility by default should not fall on one person. I think that life requires community and I also think dying requires community and Rebecca and I were both lucky to have friends and family who could and

did show up and do elements of that work at the end of our husband’s lives and not everybody has that, but everybody should. And I think that that kind of grace comes through in a lot of the feedback that we got from this episode, including this

comment. As a recent young widow, I completely understand the sentiment. She’s trying to spare herself the heartbreak and I completely understand creating distance before he dies.

That said, I think I would have had more regrets if I’d left him because I knew he’d die because I loved and still love him so deeply that walking away would have felt like I was turning my back on the chance to have a beautiful life and love

together until the universe took him away. In short, loving him till the very end is worth the heartbreak and hurt and pain I feel now, but this is a very personal decision and I totally understand why she’d want to protect her heart because this

sucks. And it does. It sucks to have somebody die young. It sucks to not get what you want out of life.

But then there’s this other perspective, and this comment comes from somebody who has not been the caregiver, but who has… You’ll hear it. You’ll hear it.

As someone on the other side of this, yes, you are the a-hole. He’s obviously not the love of your life, and you’re showing who you really are. And that might feel a little bit harsh.

But when I look at this experience, I think that… I’ve heard people say, dying is the easy part, and surviving a person is the hardest. Well, we’ve only ever survived.

We’ve only ever survived. I’ve never had to die. I’ve never had to die.

And so I can’t assume that that is the easier thing. And I don’t think that I would, at the age… I don’t think…

I think maybe now I could face my death gracefully. But I don’t think I was capable of that in my early 30s, my 20s. I don’t think that I was capable of that even directly after watching Erin do it.

You know, not everybody has that. Okay. I thought this one was interesting too.

This person writes, My husband and I always had a tumultuous relationship. One day we had a really bad fight and I told him it was over. I let him convince me to stay.

Two years later, he died by suicide. Sometimes I fall into the trap of trying to renegotiate the past and think about how I should have left when I said I would. But I think if I had, then I would think that I shouldn’t have left him.

So often in life, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And you just have to choose which way you want to lose. I’ve never heard somebody say it that way.

You have to choose which way you want to lose because you really, you can’t have it all. You can’t have it all. And I really think that’s such a wise way of putting it.

All right. This is another very different perspective. This is somebody, I’m going to say their username because they’re a person that I follow on TikTok and they just have a very interesting perspective period.

I said her TikTok username is my twice-widowed life because she’s been widowed twice, she’s been widowed twice. She wrote, don’t leave him because he’s dying, leave him because he’s being a terrible partner.

As someone who has done this twice, the aftermath is bad enough with someone who did every single thing humanly possible to treat this as a thing that would happen to us, not just him. Time equals hope.

I’d do anything to have had three years worth of hope. Many medical advancements can happen in that time, but the issue of not protecting your partner and the eventuality of your loss is a non-negotiable for me. And I feel that too.

I feel that too. There’s a lot of loving choices that you can make before you die, before you are even directly facing your death. And I do think that is a way of showing love and kindness to the people who will or may survive you.

And Rebecca went through that, not being able to access finances, not having that stuff squared away makes grief even harder.

To compound your grief with the stress of admin, there’s always admin with death, but to compound it with actively avoiding end-of-life decisions, I mean, it isn’t partnership, and I really appreciate this comment too, because partnership is a

two-way street. It’s a two-way street, even if one of you is dying, and I think that’s an important thing to remember too. So if you are healthy right now, I do want you to do some prep for end-of-life, okay?

Healthcare directive, medical power of attorney, wills, making sure that your beneficiaries are set up, making sure that your partner, your family, knows where to find this stuff in the event of your death.

It’s just something really nice you could do. Get life insurance, get life insurance. I can’t say that enough.

Do those things, do those things. It is a way of being kind to the people around you and of showing your love. All right, so that’s the episode.

That’s what we got for you guys. I’m Nora McInerny. This is Thanks For Asking.

Thank you for being here. There’s so many ways to support this independent production. Listening is one of them, so thank you for being here.

We are an independent podcast, and that means that we depend on you. We depend on you. You guys are our supporters, and we love making this show for you.

And there’s a lot of free ways to support it, like listening, I already said that one, rating and review it.

I know every podcaster is harassing you for that, but it takes like two seconds, and it really does give us a little boost, sharing an episode on social media, texting it to a friend, calling us, texting us, emailing us about what you want to talk

about. It’s 612-568-4441 or thanks at feelingsand.co. You can, if you want, you can join our Substack. There’s a free version.

You’ll get weekly essays. We have monthly reading roundups. You can pay monthly or annually and get ad free episodes, the entire back catalog, or you can become a supporting producer and get your name in the credits.

And speaking of credits, this episode was produced by Marcel Malekebu. Our opening theme music is by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, whose albums are linked in our episode description. But our closing theme music is by My Youngest Son, Q.

And now it is time to shout out our supporting producers who help us keep this show going. Gotta, gotta zoom. And we got some new ones.

So welcome and thank you to Augie Book, Joy Heising, No Name, Nancy Duff, Jenny Medain, Kathleen Langerman, Jordan Jones, Ben, Jess, Tom Stockburger, Beth Derry, Sarah Garifo, Jennifer McDagle, Kathy Sigman, Sarah David, Mary Beth Barry, my high

school gym teacher, Sheila, Crystal, Kaylee Sakai, Virginia Labossi, Lizzie DeVries, Rachel Walton, David Binkley, Lisa Piven, Michelle Toms, Nicole Petey, Renee Kepke, Melody Swinford, Stacey Wilson, Car Pan, Caroline Moss, my best friend, Michelle

Oh, Anna Brzezinski, Amanda, Stacey Demaro, Jess Blackwell, Abby Arose, Crystal Mann, Bonnie Robinson, Lauren Hanna, Jacqueline Ryder, Patrick Irvine, Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, Cathy Hamm, Erin John, Penny Pesta, Madd, Christina, Emily Ferriso,

Elizabeth Berkley, Chiara, Komastai, Monica, Alyssa Robison, Faye Barron, Kaylee, Kate Beyerjohn, Jessica Reed, Courtney McCown, Jeremy Essin, Jen, Lindsay Lund, Jessica Letexier, Stephanie Johnson, Alexis Lane, Robin Roulard, Jill McDonald, Dave

Gilmore, Elia Filiz-Milan, LGS, Chelsea S, Kelly Conrad, Jen Grimlin and Micah. Thank you guys and we’ll see you back here again soon.