We dont move on from grief. We move forward with it Nora McInerny
So, 2014 was a big year for me.
Do you ever have that,
just like a big year, like a banner year?
For me, it went like this:
October 3, I lost my second pregnancy.
And then October 8, my dad died of cancer.
And then on November 25,
my husband Aaron died
after three years
with stage-four glioblastoma,
which is just a fancy word
for brain cancer.
So, I’m fun.
(Laughter)
People love to invite me out all the time.
Packed social life.
Usually, when I talk
about this period of my life,
the reaction I get is essentially:
(Sighs)
“I can’t – I can’t imagine.”
But I do think you can.
I think you can.
And I think that you should
because, someday,
it’s going to happen to you.
Maybe not these specific losses
in this specific order or at this speed,
but like I said, I’m very fun
and the research
that I have seen will stun you:
everyone you love has
a 100 percent chance of dying.
(Laughter)
And that’s why you came to TED.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So, since all of this loss happened,
I’ve made it a career
to talk about death and loss,
not just my own,
because it’s pretty easy to recap,
but the losses and tragedies
that other people have experienced.
It’s a niche, I have to say.
(Laughter)
It’s a small niche,
and I wish I made more money, but …
(Laughter)
I’ve written some very uplifting books,
host a very uplifting podcast,
I started a little nonprofit.
I’m just trying to do what I can
to make more people comfortable
with the uncomfortable,
and grief is so uncomfortable.
It’s so uncomfortable,
especially if it’s someone else’s grief.
So part of that work is this group
that I started with my friend Moe,
who is also a widow;
we call it the Hot Young Widows Club.
(Laughter)
And it’s real, we have membership cards
and T-shirts.
And when your person dies,
your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend,
literally don’t care if you were married,
your friends and your family
are just going to look around
through friends of friends
of friends of friends
until they find someone
who’s gone through something similar,
and then they’ll push you
towards each other
so you can talk amongst yourselves
and not get your sad on other people.
(Laughter)
So that’s what we do.
It’s just a series of small groups,
where men, women, gay, straight,
married, partnered,
can talk about their dead person,
and say the things
that the other people in their lives
aren’t ready or willing to hear yet.
Huge range of conversations.
Like, “My husband died two weeks ago,
I can’t stop thinking
about sex, is that normal?”
Yeah.
“What if it’s one
of the Property Brothers?”
Less normal, but I’ll accept it.
(Laughter)
Things like, “Look, when I’m out in public
and I see old people holding hands,
couples who have clearly
been together for decades,
and then I look at them and I imagine
all of the things they’ve been
through together,
the good things, the bad things,
the arguments they’ve had
over who should take out the trash …
I just find my heart filled with rage.”
(Laughter)
And that example is personal to me.
Most of the conversations
that we have in the group
can and will just stay amongst ourselves,
but there are things that we talk about
that the rest of the world –
the world that is grief-adjacent
but not yet grief-stricken –
could really benefit from hearing.
And if you can’t tell,
I’m only interested in / capable
of unscientific studies,
so what I did was go to
The Hot Young Widows Club
and say, “Hello, friends, remember
when your person died?” They did.
“Do you remember all the things
people said to you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Which ones did you hate the most?”
I got a lot of comments, lot of answers,
people say a lot of things,
but two rose to the top pretty quickly.
“Moving on.”
Now, since 2014,
I will tell you I have remarried
a very handsome man named Matthew,
we have four children
in our blended family,
we live in the suburbs
of Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
We have a rescue dog.
(Laughter)
I drive a minivan,
like the kind where doors open
and I don’t even touch them.
(Laughter)
Like, by any “mezhure,” life is good.
I’ve also never said “mezhure,”
I’ve never once said it that way.
(Laughter)
I don’t know where that came from.
(Laughter)
I’ve never heard
anyone else say it that way.
It looks like it should be said that way,
and that’s why the English
language is trash, so …
(Laughter)
So impressed with anyone
who, like, speaks it
in addition to a language
that makes sense – good job.
(Laughter)
But by any measure …
(Laughter)
By any measure, life is really,
really good, but I haven’t “moved on.”
I haven’t moved on,
and I hate that phrase so much,
and I understand why other people do.
Because what it says
is that Aaron’s life and death
and love are just moments
that I can leave behind me –
and that I probably should.
And when I talk about Aaron,
I slip so easily into the present tense,
and I’ve always thought
that made me weird.
And then I noticed that everybody does it.
And it’s not because we are in denial
or because we’re forgetful,
it’s because the people
we love, who we’ve lost,
are still so present for us.
So, when I say, “Oh, Aaron is …”
It’s because Aaron still is.
And it’s not in the way
that he was before,
which was much better,
and it’s not in the way that churchy
people try to tell me that he would be.
It’s just that he’s indelible,
and so he is present for me.
Here,
he’s present for me in the work that I do,
in the child that we had together,
in these three other children I’m raising,
who never met him,
who share none of his DNA,
but who are only in my life
because I had Aaron
and because I lost Aaron.
He’s present in my marriage to Matthew,
because Aaron’s life and love and death
made me the person
that Matthew wanted to marry.
So I’ve not moved on from Aaron,
I’ve moved forward with him.
(Applause)
We spread Aaron’s ashes
in his favorite river in Minnesota,
and when the bag was empty –
because when you’re cremated,
you fit into a plastic bag –
there were still ashes
stuck to my fingers.
And I could have just put my hands
in the water and rinsed them,
but instead, I licked my hands clean,
because I was so afraid of losing more
than I had already lost,
and I was so desperate to make sure
that he would always be a part of me.
But of course he would be.
Because when you watch your person
fill himself with poison for three years,
just so he can stay alive
a little bit longer with you,
that stays with you.
When you watch him fade from the healthy
person he was the night you met
to nothing, that stays with you.
When you watch your son,
who isn’t even two years old yet,
walk up to his father’s bed
on the last day of his life,
like he knows what’s coming
in a few hours,
and say, “I love you. All done. Bye, bye.”
That stays with you.
Just like when you fall in love,
finally, like really fall in love
with someone who gets you and sees you
and you even see, “Oh, my God,
I’ve been wrong this entire time.
Love is not a contest
or a reality show – it’s so quiet,
it’s this invisible thread of calm
that connects the two of us
even when everything is chaos,
when things are falling apart,
even when he’s gone.”
That stays with you.
We used to do this thing –
because my hands are always
freezing and he’s so warm,
where I would take my ice-cold hands
and shove them up his shirt …
press them against his hot bod.
(Laughter)
And he hated it so much,
(Laughter)
but he loved me,
and after he died,
I laid in bed with Aaron
and I put my hands underneath him
and I felt his warmth.
And I can’t even tell you
if my hands were cold,
but I can tell you
that I knew it was the last time
I would ever do that.
And that that memory
is always going to be sad.
That memory will always hurt.
Even when I’m 600 years old
and I’m just a hologram.
(Laughter)
Just like the memory of meeting him
is always going to make me laugh.
Grief doesn’t happen in this vacuum,
it happens alongside of and mixed in
with all of these other emotions.
So, I met Matthew, my current husband –
who doesn’t love that title,
(Laughter)
but it’s so accurate.
(Laughter)
I met Matthew, and …
there was this audible sigh of relief
among the people who love me,
like, “It’s over!
She did it.
She got a happy ending,
we can all go home.
And we did good.”
And that narrative
is so appealing even to me,
and I thought maybe
I had gotten that, too, but I didn’t.
I got another chapter.
And it’s such a good chapter –
I love you, honey –
it’s such a good chapter.
But especially at the beginning,
it was like an alternate universe,
or one of those old “choose your
own adventure” books from the ’80s
where there are two parallel plot lines.
So I opened my heart to Matthew,
and my brain was like,
“Would you like to think about Aaron?
Like, the past, the present, future,
just get in there,” and I did.
And all of a sudden,
those two plots were unfurling at once,
and falling in love with Matthew
really helped me realize the enormity
of what I lost when Aaron died.
And just as importantly,
it helped me realize
that my love for Aaron
and my grief for Aaron,
and my love for Matthew,
are not opposing forces.
They are just strands to the same thread.
They’re the same stuff.
I’m … what would my parents say?
I’m not special.
(Laughter)
They had four kids,
they were like … frankly.
(Laughter)
But I’m not, I’m not special.
I know that, I’m fully aware
that all day, every day,
all around the world,
terrible things are happening.
All the time.
Like I said, fun person.
But terrible things are happening,
people are experiencing deeply formative
and traumatic losses every day.
And as part of my job,
this weird podcast that I have,
I sometimes talk to people
about the worst thing
that’s ever happened to them.
And sometimes, that’s the loss
of someone they love,
sometimes days ago or weeks ago,
years ago, even decades ago.
And these people that I interview,
they haven’t closed themselves
around this loss
and made it the center of their lives.
They’ve lived, their worlds
have kept spinning.
But they’re talking to me,
a total stranger,
about the person they love who has died,
because these are the experiences
that mark us and make us
just as much as the joyful ones.
And just as permanently.
Long after you get your last sympathy card
or your last hot dish.
Like, we don’t look
at the people around us
experiencing life’s joys and wonders
and tell them to “move on,” do we?
We don’t send a card that’s like,
“Congratulations on your beautiful baby,”
and then, five years later, think like,
“Another birthday party? Get over it.”
(Laughter)
Yeah, we get it, he’s five.
(Laughter)
Wow.
(Laughter)
But grief is kind of one of those things,
like, falling in love or having a baby
or watching “The Wire” on HBO,
where you don’t get it
until you get it, until you do it.
And once you do it,
once it’s your love or your baby,
once it’s your grief
and your front row at the funeral,
you get it.
You understand what you’re experiencing
is not a moment in time,
it’s not a bone that will reset,
but that you’ve been touched
by something chronic.
Something incurable.
It’s not fatal, but sometimes
grief feels like it could be.
And if we can’t prevent it in one another,
what can we do?
What can we do other than try
to remind one another
that some things can’t be fixed,
and not all wounds are meant to heal?
We need each other to remember,
to help each other remember,
that grief is this multitasking emotion.
That you can and will be sad, and happy;
you’ll be grieving, and able to love
in the same year or week, the same breath.
We need to remember that a grieving person
is going to laugh again and smile again.
If they’re lucky,
they’ll even find love again.
But yes, absolutely,
they’re going to move forward.
But that doesn’t mean
that they’ve moved on.
Thank you.
(Applause)