IDEAS TED TALKS

May 1, 2019 / Nora McInerny

Mourning the loss of a loved one isn’t efficient, compact or logical, and it changes us forever, says writer Nora McInerny. She explains why.

I quit my job shortly after my husband Aaron died in 2014 following three years with brain cancer. It made sense in the moment, but I needed money to keep my son and myself alive so I went to a networking event to hopefully make connections. I was introduced to a successful woman in her early 70s who everyone referred to as a “legend.” She wanted to meet me for coffee and I thought, “What could she possibly see in me?”

What she saw in me was herself. She had been 16 when her boyfriend died. He was her first love and they were teenagers in a different era, when it was perfectly plausible that you would be married after high school. Instead, he went to the hospital one day and never came back. She learned later that he’d died of cancer, which his parents had kept secret from him and from his friends. They didn’t know how to talk about it, and they didn’t want him or his friends to worry.

This boy had died decades ago. She was married, a mother and a grandmother. And she told me about his death as if it had happened weeks ago, as if she were still 16, still shocked and confused that her beloved was gone and she’d not had a chance to say goodbye. Her grief felt fresher than mine did, because I didn’t feel anything yet.

The only guarantee about grief is that however you feel right now, you will not always feel this way.

Time is irrelevant to grief. I cannot tell you that it will feel better or worse as time goes by; I can just tell you that it feels better and worse as time goes by. The only guarantee is that however you feel right now, you will not always feel this way.

There are days when Aaron’s death feels so fresh that I cannot believe it. How can he be gone? How can it be that he will forever be 35 years old? Likewise, there are days when his death feels like such a fact of my life I can hardly believe that he was ever not dead. I thought I would be able to control the faucets of my emotions — that certain days (his birthday, his deathiversary) would be drenched in meaning, and most days would not.

I wish that were the case; I wish we could relegate all our heaviest grieving to specific days of the year. It would certainly be more efficient. Instead, I know that I have some friends who will understand perfectly when I call them to say that the entire world feels heavy, that I’ve been crying for reasons I can’t quite explain other than that I am alive and Aaron is not, and the reality of that happened to hit me in the deodorant aisle, when I spotted Aaron’s favorite antiperspirant. I bought a stick for myself, so that my armpits and his armpits would be forever connected.

In 2017, Lady Gaga released her Joanne album, named for an aunt who died before she was even born. The titular song is 100 percent guaranteed to make you cry, and it’s written about someone Lady Gaga never even met. In her Netflix documentary, Gaga: Five Foot Two, she plays the song for her grandmother and bawls uncontrollably. Her grandmother listens to the song, watches Gaga weep, and thanks her for the song. She does not shed a tear. Their grief — even for the same person — is different. The roots of grief are boundless. They can reach back through generations. They are undeterred by time, space or any other law you try to apply to them.

The woman I met had lived far more of her life without that boyfriend than with him. Time had not healed that wound, and it never will.

A common adage is “time heals all wounds.” It is true physically, which I am grateful for because I am typing this while hoping the tip of my thumb fuses back together after an unfortunate kitchen accident involving me attempting to cook a potato. But it is not true mentally or emotionally. Time is cruel. Time reminds me of how long Aaron has been gone, which isn’t a comfort to me.

The woman I met for coffee had lived far more of her life without that boyfriend than she had with him. Her grandchildren were now the same age she’d been when she lost him. Time had not healed that wound, and it never will. If you’re still sad, that’s because it’s still real. They are still real. Time can change you, and it will. But it can’t change them, and it won’t.

And here’s some advice for the grief adjacent. For you, time marches on, steadily and reliably. A year is just a year. A day is just a day. You are not aware of the number of days it’s been since they took their last breath or said their last word. You’re not mentally calculating when the scales of time tip, and more of your life has been lived without them than was lived with them.

We do not move on from the dead people we love or the difficult situations we’ve lived through. We move forward, but we carry it all with us.

You may be tempted to tell the grieving to move on. After all, it’s been weeks. Years. Decades. Surely this cannot still be the topic of conversation. Surely, at this point, they must have moved on? Nope.

But, you may be thinking, “This person has gotten married again or had another baby! They have so many good things in their life, this one awful thing can’t possibly still be relevant … can it?”

We do not move on from the dead people we love or the difficult situations we’ve lived through. We move forward, but we carry it all with us. Some of it gets easier to bear, some of it will always feel Sisyphean. We live on, but we are not the same as we once were. This is not macabre or depressing or abnormal. We are shaped by the people we love, and we are shaped by their loss.

“Why are they still sad?” you may think. Because this is a sad thing, and always will be.

Excerpted from the new book The Hot Young Widows Club: Lessons on Survival from the Front Lines of Grief by Nora McInerny. Reprinted with permission from TED Books/Simon & Schuster. © 2019 Nora McInerny.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nora McInerny has a lot of jobs. She is the reluctant cofounder of the Hot Young Widows Club (a program of her nonprofit, Still Kickin), the bestselling author of the memoirs “It’s Okay To Laugh”, “Crying Is Cool Too”, and “No Happy Endings” and the host of the award-winning podcast “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” McInerny is a master storyteller known for her dedication to bringing heart and levity to the difficult and uncomfortable conversations most of us try to avoid, and also for being very tall. 

 Melinda

Originally posted in 2022

You’re stupid, that’s what my mother always said to me growing up. Stupid, like an idiot, like a person that can’t do anything? Is that what you mean? I would think to myself. This was not a rare occurrence but daily. She wanted me to believe it and it pissed her off that I would not give in. 

One morning I walked into our kitchen and she yelled at me “You stupid slut!” She didn’t like the jeans I had on. So she proceeds to berate me and walk toward me. I’m 12 years old and have not hit her back until this day. 

She comes over and grabs my hair and starts yelling and yelling while hitting me and pushing me. I snapped and hit her right in the head. Like lightning out of nowhere, in comes my step-father who is 6’2″ and 220 and he hits me right in the mouth. Busting up my entire mouth since I had braces, and blood all over my face. 

Think about it, a grown man hitting a 90-pound 12-year-old girl with a mouth full of braces. I’m not sure I said a word the whole time, just let it play out like the other times only today was the first time he hit me. 

I walked to my room and by lunch, I was black and blue. Of course, I couldn’t go to school because the teachers would see the damage, and our storybook life would end. My step-father came home from work with a hamburger for lunch and I couldn’t eat. What the hell was he thinking!  

I was able to go to school three days later and still had visible marks around my mouth. I acted like nothing was wrong until my music teacher called me into the hall and asked what happened to my mouth. I said the door hit me, and she was insistent that I go see the School Counselor. I told her that I would not go talk to anyone and she stood me down in that hallway until I went to the counselor’s office. 

Walking through the counselor’s door, I said I had to call my Granny first. I had never told them my mother was abusing me. So I wanted her to know that I was in trouble. She would know what that meant for me. More beatings. She had her suspicions but never could pin down anything concrete

The next day Child Protective Services showed up at school and I got called out of class for extensive questioning. Now it was going to get very ugly and I would be on the losing end.  

I told them everything that happened and that hitting me was commonplace. I answered their questions as they filled out the forms and that was it. Until one day after school, two women showed up at our house. Now it’s really going to get ugly. 

They come in and my mother is so calm and cool. She asked them why they were there and what the problem was. My life took a dive for the worst and I thought it couldn’t get any worse. My mother proceeded to tell them that I was mentally unstable and that she was in the process of having me committed to the State Mental Hospital. They leave completely satisfied while I wait in my room. She had lied to them right out the door. 

After my step-father hit me what could she do to make it hurt worse? Kill me? She knocked me around the room and set off a chain of events. Not long after that fateful day, I got permission to live with my dad who was 50 miles away. I packed up a few belongings, told my brother goodbye, and off in silence I went.  

I bought this Warhol years ago, it hangs in my office and it’s a positive reinforcement. 

Melinda