Nora McInerny

I am fully aware that all day, every day, all around the world, terrible things are happening.

All the time.

Like I said, fun person.

But ...

like 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, with a 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.

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, another birthday party?

Get over it.

Like, yeah, we get it, he's five.

Wow.

But grief is kind of one of those things, like falling in love or having a baby or watching The Wire on HBO,

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.