This Widow's Podcast, 'Terrible, Thanks for Asking,' Will Make You Less Afraid of Grief

At one point when Nora McInerny was telling me of her grief after her husband, Aaron Purmort, died from brain cancer, I started laughing. Before you decide I’m a heinous person, case closed, let’s back up. Just before that burst of levity, a burble had risen through my phone’s speakers. “That was the baby farting, I promise, not me,” Nora reassured me, laughing herself at her five-month-old son Quentin’s addition to the conversation. I couldn’t help but join her.

We quickly returned to sifting through the heartache Nora, 34, host of the perfectly titled podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, has endured, and laughter continued to punctuate our discussion about the hard things in life. Sometimes it was because of Quentin’s antics, other times because of a funny story about Aaron, or because Nora described a quirk that makes Ralph, the four-year-old son she had with Aaron, so essentially four years old.

It comes down to honoring the past while also embracing the present and future with a kind of relish unique to those who have been through more than their fair share of tragedy.

“Aaron was alive, he was so alive,” Nora says. “I would do him no service, and I would do our child no service, and I would do myself no service, by living less. That does not honor anybody.”

That’s not to say finding this balance has been easy.

“We live on. We don’t move on,” Nora says. “It’s not as if I left Aaron somewhere in the past. The people we love deeply, these formative experiences, they’re a part of us.”

As such, her life with Aaron has a place in her relationship with her fiancé, Matthew. Portraits of Nora, Aaron, and Ralph grace the walls of their home. Aaron’s family is invited to the upcoming wedding. Nora and Matthew recently ran a half-marathon with the American Cancer Society in honor of Aaron, and Nora, Matthew, and Aaron’s mothers all went as well. Matthew’s kids from a previous relationship can tell you Aaron’s favorite color, and Nora delights in the fact that little Ralphie now has so many siblings, including baby Quentin. Together, they all form the patchwork of a lovely blended family.

But, Nora adds, “We get all of that because we lost Aaron. It’s bittersweet.”

After Aaron died, his unconventional—and hilarious—obituary, blaming his cause of death on a radioactive spider bite, went viral. Nora poured her feelings into a blog, various online pieces, and a book, It's Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too): A Memoir about Loving Madly and Letting Go.

Then there’s the podcast, which launched in November 2016. In each dispatch, Nora and her guests dive into the grittiest parts of life and death, the various permutations of grief, and how none of it fits into a neat, tidy box. Ultimately, the message she sends is that living, dying, and mourning are messy—and that’s OK.

Many couples have their how-we-met anecdote so finely tuned that telling it is like a choreographed dance. Nora and Aaron didn’t agree on theirs. He said it happened around 2006, when Nora visited the office where both he and her mother worked, while she thinks it was sometime in 2010, when they ran into each other at a gallery opening in a space special to her family. In any case, listening to the story of their life together is a joy.

“Falling in love with Aaron was really easy,” Nora says. Aaron was the kind of fun that might at first make your mom think he’s not the best fit for you, then eventually come to love him fiercely. This is exactly what happened in Nora’s case.

Aaron and Nora’s mother worked at an ad agency, where her mom was a project manager and Aaron was on the creative team. “Her job was to get people like him to focus,” Nora says. “He was a brilliant designer, but he would do things like sit in his cube with his shirt off and see how long it took someone to notice, or they’d be taking a company photo, and he’d try to stand in the back with his shirt off and see if he could get away with it. He was so funny. He would do anything to make people laugh.”

Aaron was also kind. Years later, two days after he’d had brain surgery due to his cancer, he still pulled off a birthday celebration for Nora. “He had some friends pick me up for dinner, and they took me out, drove me to a south Minneapolis movie theater, and the marquee said, ‘Nora is 30.’ He rented out the theater to play my favorite movie, Dumb and Dumber, and all our friends and family were there,” Nora says. “He had planned this and executed it from his hospital bed. That tells you everything about who he was.”

“Looking back, that sounds like five minutes, but when you’re in your 20s, a year is a long time to be with a man,” Nora says. “It was out of the realm of possibility that anything bad would ever happen to us…[but] suddenly we were just on a completely different planet.”

On Halloween morning, 2011, Aaron had a seizure at work. “We were in such a state of denial…we thought it was hilarious to be in the hospital and couldn’t figure out why everyone was making such a big deal out of it,” Nora says. “We truly thought we’d be handing out Halloween candy that night.”

Instead, a different reality took shape. Doctors diagnosed Aaron with a brain tumor known as a glioblastoma. “I didn’t even need to know much more than just the word ‘glioblastoma’ to know it was really, really bad,” Nora says. A family friend had died of this cancer.

The family friend's funeral had been on the night Nora was originally supposed to have had her first date with Aaron, but they’d rescheduled so Nora could attend the service. “I think about that a lot,” Nora says. “I was supposed to go on a date with a boy who was growing the same kind of cancer this man had died of.”

The night Nora and Aaron got the news, she climbed into his hospital bed. "We'd always been talking about getting married, and I said, 'I don't want to wait. I think we should get married as soon as you get out of the hospital,' " she says. At first, Aaron was reluctant because he worried his diagnosis—which doctors still weren't sure of at the time—might be serious. Eventually, the two decided getting married was still the right choice for them.

Nora’s sister planned the wedding, which took place a month after Aaron’s brain surgery. They got married in the gallery where, depending on whose story you believe, they either met for the first time or had a sweet second reunion.

After that, Nora and Aaron lived a pretty normal life except for the “huge asterisk” of treatment, she says: chemo, monthly MRIs, radiation. Still, rather than burrowing into what-if rabbit holes a cancer diagnosis often unearths, they tried to carry on as usual.

“We had told Aaron’s doctors from the beginning that we didn’t want to know too much,” Nora says. “We didn’t know what the future really held for us.”

Part of what the future held was Nora getting pregnant four months after their wedding. “Aaron was meant to be a dad,” Nora says. “I just knew that we had to have a family together and that there was no point in waiting to do anything in life. We should do everything we want to do and do it with our whole hearts.”

Then, a month before Nora was due, an MRI showed the brain tumor had returned. Aaron was getting MRIs around every four to six weeks, which points to how aggressive his cancer was. “You think, 'When could this be happening? While we were watching Game of Thrones? While I was making him fresh-pressed organic juices?' It's such a betrayal,” Nora says.

When their son Ralph was around 22 months old, Aaron’s tumor came back for a third time even though he’d had a second brain surgery and was still getting chemotherapy. Soon after that, Aaron started having regular seizures. He lost control over the left side of his body, eventually needing a sling to support his arm. He started sleeping for 20 hours a day.

“They gave him another MRI, and they told us that there was nothing else that could be done. His brain tumor was growing back, and it would continue to get worse,” Nora says. After this news, they went and got pancakes, then gathered their loved ones and delivered the news. Two weeks later, on November 25, 2014, Aaron died at home.

Just over six weeks before Aaron died, she had a miscarriage of a much-wanted second baby. “I truly believe Ralph kept Aaron alive for as long as he was alive. Babies are magic,” Nora says. “In some ways, I thought maybe another baby would have the same effect Ralph did. There was the sense we were racing against the clock to have a second child,” she says.

After miscarrying at 11 weeks and six days, Nora wrestled with immense guilt. “I felt like I had let Aaron down and hurt him in a way that I couldn’t take back,” she says. “Even though I know it’s never your fault, it felt like I’d broken everything in the universe.”

Five days after the miscarriage, Nora’s father died, also of cancer. A few weeks later, Aaron went, too.

Nora estimates she spent around a year stifling her grief over these losses, projecting the image that she was as OK as possible. “Truth is, I wasn’t fine or good at all. But I didn’t know how to accept or ask for help because I didn’t know what I needed,” she says. “I had no proficiency in grief or suffering.”

Instead of being viewed as four defined stages one must pass through in order to reach the final stage of acceptance, now processing a loss is generally seen as, well, a process, grief and bereavement counselor Deborah S. Derman, Ph.D. tells SELF. “Grieving is…an ongoing adaptation to a loss that may take a lifetime of accommodation,” she says.

At one point in the year after Aaron died, Nora had a revelation. “I woke up…and thought to myself, 'Oh my god, I’m so lonely, and I’m so lonely because I’ve isolated myself.' ” As she acknowledges, this wasn’t her fault. “I didn’t know how to sit down with [people] and say, ‘I am lost, I am the kind of sad I can’t describe, I’m sad in my bones.’”

Although there’s often a temptation to suppress grief, sharing these feelings can be so helpful. “The patients who come to me are very willing and very relieved to have someone to talk to—talking about feelings, even if they are uncomfortable and painful, is very therapeutic,” Derman says.

Nora’s podcast fills that gaping maw by bringing grief and hardship into the light. “Grieving can be a very isolating experience, which only adds to a person's distress," Derman says. "There is great comfort in knowing that you're not alone with your loss—there are others who have experienced similar things."

The idea for the podcast was rooted in the outpouring Nora got after sharing her story. “I just have never had an empty inbox. People send me their stories…they’re asking for my advice or, more commonly, just reaching out to tell me [their experiences] because the people in their lives had stopped asking them,” she says. “I wanted to do something to help other people feel heard in the hopes that it would help make it easier for them,” she says.

Like any enterprising person with a Twitter handle and an idea, Nora messaged people she thought could help her make the podcast a reality. She and Hans Buetow, a producer with American Public Media, met to discuss the concept last March. To date, they’ve released 16 episodes, and the future of the podcast is bright.

“We have so many ideas and so many stories that we could easily make an episode every day for 10 years and not be even close to telling them all,” Nora says. But along with that enthusiasm comes a certain weight.

“Having the book out there was like having my heart and my love for Aaron available for purchase and review,” Nora says, referring to It's Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too): A Memoir about Loving Madly and Letting Go, which was released about a year and a half after Aaron's death. “Having [the podcast] out there is like having not just my heart available for download, but really, the hearts of all these people who trusted me enough to talk with me and let me tell their stories.”

In episode one, you’ll hear Nora’s discussion with a woman who has become her good friend, Moe Richardson. Moe’s husband, Andrew, died by suicide in September 2014. In the aftermath, Nora posted the GoFundMe page for Andrew’s family on her blog, even though she didn’t know them. Moe emailed to thank her, and a friendship began. They met in person around four months later, after Aaron had died.

“We pulled up at the same time,” Moe says. “It was like a movie. We ran to each other on the snowy sidewalk and embraced. She felt like my home,” says Moe, who later introduced Nora to Matthew.

Moe and Nora bonded over how similar Andrew and Aaron were—although the men didn’t know each other, they shared a common love of Spiderman and a less common tattoo of a barrel of monkeys—and what it’s like to parent a young son whose father has died. Nora has become the person Moe calls from the car to rehash the things that happen with her son, Bronson. “She’s like my other parent,” Moe says.

Their close dynamic is obvious in their podcast episode together. “I was really nervous, but when I sat down to do [the podcast] with her…it felt fine because I felt like we were in our living room having a talk like we always do,” Moe says. Hearing the podcast once it aired was “very freeing.”

“I never wanted to have Andrew’s not being here anymore be nothing. I want to educate people and talk about it and make it OK to talk about,” Moe says. In response, nearly a dozen people have told her that hearing Andrew’s story has saved their lives. “That is amazing to me, and it just makes it feel a little better that he’s not here,” she says.

“I know I love my time with her, and now everybody can have a little bit of time with her,” Moe says, ticking off the reasons she adores Nora: She’s “full of realness,” smart, caring with a “big, big heart,” and, as evidenced by how she handled Quentin’s gassiness on the phone, she’s funny.

When I ask Nora about how she weaves humor so seamlessly into discussing some of the darkest parts of life, she’s careful to make clear that it’s not intentional.

“I don’t try to make the situation funny. I’m not a comedian or anything,” Nora says. “[It’s the] way I tend to relate to people in general—a big part of my personality is humor and a little bit of awkwardness, but acknowledgment of the awkwardness. When we try to pretend we always know the exact right thing to say, that’s when things go wrong.”

What comes from this is an honesty that rings, clear and true as a bell, throughout each episode of Terrible, Thanks for Asking. We’re all just feeling our way through this together, sometimes grasping around in the dark for a hand to hold, a connection to someone who also thought they were alone in the inky depths.

“These things are life. Life isn’t just baby showers and weddings. It’s not just a highlight reel. Life is this,” Nora says with enough emphasis that I can imagine her pointing to a mound of shitty, tangible tragedies next to her. Not pretending to have all the answers—listening to each other as an answer, instead—is often the best gift we can give.

“It’s not possible for us to be adept at all these things we haven’t experienced yet. That should not be our first goal,” Nora says. “It’s OK to not know.”

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