Nora McInerny - The Hot Young Widows Club: Lessons on Survival from the Front Lines of Grief

Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2019 by Nora McInerny

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

TED, the TED logo, and TED books are trademarks of TED Conferences, LLC.

First TED books hardcover edition: April 2019

TED BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of TED Conferences, LLC.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

For information on licensing the TED Talk that accompanies this book, or other content partnerships with TED, please contact .

Interior design by MGMT. design

Jacket design by MGMT. design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-0998-1

ISBN 978-1-9821-0999-8 (ebook)

For Moe, and all my Hot Young Widows

What this book is not:

A collection of bummer stories.

A definitive guide to sadness.

A competition between you and me and everyone else to see who has the Saddest, Worst, Most Tragic Story of All Time.

That last one is important.

If we all took our personal tragedies and lined them up for comparison, we would find that someone always has it worse, and someone always has it better than us. Wed quickly find ourselves ranking our losses against one another, deciding who deserves more sympathy, more compassion. Ive heard a million times that comparison is the thief of joy. But its the thief of grief, too. And of empathy. Comparison is a dirty scoundrel who will snatch anything you leave hanging out of your pocket, so protect yourself with one of those little travel wallets that tucks up under your shirt and requires you to partially disrobe in order to pay for your lunch. OR, we can all just agree to suspend our reflex to compare, at least for the coming pages. Deal? Deal.

In my regular life, I host a podcast where I talk about peoples hardest life experiences. Ive spoken with rape survivors, people dying of cancer, people who have lost their hands and feet, people whose entire families have died. And Ive gotten thousands of emails from people who have survived or are currently trying to survive the death of their children, the trauma of abuse, or the loneliness and heartbreak of infertility.

When people reach out to me to share their stories, they often say, Now, this doesnt compare to... As a preemptive strike against my judgment, or the judgment of others, they take the biggest thing that has happened in their life and shrink its significance.

Why?

What does the size of someone elses loss have to do with the size of my own? What is this macabre contest, and who could possibly win?

At thirty-one, I was a widowed mother of one. Id just lost a parent (RIP, Dad), a husband (RIP, Aaron), and a pregnancy (RIP, Baby Deuce).

As many internet commenters have reminded me, there is nothing special about what happened to me, or what happened to Aaron. They are right, because people die all day, every day. And they are wrong, because it is all very special. Because it is ours, and it happened just to us.

I am the only woman who lost Aaron as a husband (I hope). And you are the only person who went through exactly what you went through, exactly how you went through it.

I will confess right now that I do not love when people compare them losing their pet bird to me losing my husband, but then... Ive never lost a bird.

There is no conversion chart that would help us quantify and weigh these losses, no yardstick we can use to measure them against one another.

Maybe you havent gone through anything hard yet. Maybe everyone you love is still alive, and the most difficult part of your life so far has been your middle school awkward phase. Well, just wait. Youll go through something eventually. A whole lot of somethings, actually. And what you have gone through, or will go through, doesnt compare to what Ive gone through, and never will. The good news is, it doesnt need to.

Grief is just one of the hard things youll experience in your life. Not just once, either. Youll get multiple servings, even when you raise your hands and say, Really. Thats enough now. Id like to try the Joy if its still available. At this point in the book, its probably easy to see why I have such a busy social life. Who wouldnt want to spend their time with a woman who is constantly reminding you that everyone you love will die and that each death will bring a fresh new brand of grief?

Grief has the ability to maroon us on our own little island of emotion. The rest of the world is pretending its still Tuesday, but you know the truth: that time has stopped completely, that ice cream will never taste good again, that you will never not feel the abyss inside your chest. Comparing our grief against some unknowable Grief Yardstick has the strangest effect. It takes the universality of grief and makes it so special, so unique, that our islands get smaller and more remote.

Its tempting, isnt it? To hold our losses up to the light like some kind of jeweler would, looking at all the things that make them so very unique? I knew for a fact that when Aaron died I didnt need anybody to help me through it. I scoffed at grief support groups. I bet youve never truly scoffed beforeits terribly pretentiousbut I actually did. I scoffed . I said aloud, What are they going to tell me that I dont already know? What they would have told me were their own stories. They would have told me my own story. The circumstances, the names, the details, those would be different for every person in the circle of folding chairs in the hospital conference room. But the feelingthat unsoothable achewould be the same in all of us.

They would have told me what I would like to tell you: that grief grants you admission to a club you had no intention of joining. Youre admitted whether the loss is yours your husband, your sisteror whether the loss is more tangential. Grief is a rock thrown into a still pondeven the smallest pebble ripples outward.

This book is a club of its own. Not just for those who have survived the death of a spouse, but for anyone who has loved someone who died, or who has loved someone who loved someone who died. Its for anyone who currently loves someone who will die, or who knows a person who loves someone who will die. For those whose grief is a hot fire burning through their lives, and those whose grief is a pile of ashes, embers glowing calmly. Some of the thoughts within are targeted to the griever, and some are targeted to the people trying to support the griever. Read it all. Because youll need it all. Eventually, the supporter is a griever. Someday, the griever becomes a supporter. Sometimes, youll be in both spots simultaneously, which is beyond rude and deeply unfair.

Today, you are here. And so am I.

...

My Tragedy Rsum reads as such:

Nora McInerny

Cancer Wife: 20112014

Chauffeur, personal chef, unlicensed nurse, and loving wife to Aaron Joseph Purmort.

Co-Founder, Hot Young Widows Club: 2014Present

First husband, Aaron, died of brain cancer on November 25, 2014.

Dead Dads Club: 2014Present