When I was writing my TED talk about grief, I kept trying to work a line in there about how grief is for more than just death.
If that sounds like an informercial tagline, that’s because my father wrote informercials for a living and I was his copyeditor by age 12, sitting at the kitchen table with a printed script making suggestions like “buns is a gross word that no human woman would ever use. Stop saying buns.”
He did not stop saying buns.
The point of this message is not weight loss infomercials (although I’ve been working on a project about that for years), the point is that grief really is for more than just death.
We grieve whatever we loved and lost: people, pets, identities, careers, relationships.
When I was writing that TED talk, a person I love was going through a divorce after over a decade of marriage, and it was a torturous unweaving of lives. They wanted me to know that of course, their loss was not the same as mine: they were leaving a spouse, and mine had been ripped from me.
And of course it isn’t the same, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t count.
The effects of divorce reverberate through people’s lives like any other form of loss, rippling out from the center of the blast radius.
And while divorce has been a footnote in several stories on Terrible, Thanks for Asking over the years it has never been the center of the story until now, where it is actually the center of many stories across the Feelings & Co. universe.
Not every divorce is a tragedy, and not every divorce is a sad story, but even a compassionate, conscious uncoupling can be painful: how agonizing is it that two people who love each other deeply can still realize that they don’t belong together?
In this week’s episode, you’ll hear one side of the end of a marriage between two people who were fundamentally incompatible in ways they didn’t — couldn’t — realize when they said “I do.”
In two weeks, you’ll hear the other side. And it’s a doozy.
And in the meantime, we have a list of episodes for anyone who is broken-hearted from our sister show, It’s Going To Be OK. Every episode is under 8 minutes, designed to un-ruin your day and replace your doom scroll.
If you know Sophie Turner, please make sure she gets these. If you know Joe Jonas, make sure he does not.
Don’t Be Afraid, Just Feel The Pain - wise words from a child of divorce.
Just Two Options - if you’re in the middle of a worryfest
Meadow in the sky - on rebuilding a life you love after divorce.
Look, I’m Surviving! - on lowering the bar
A Fresh Start - on starting over, whenever.
The Beauty To Come - on trusting in the future.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to Terrible Reading Club, we’re dropping an episode on Sunday with Elizabeth Crane, the author of the INCREDIBLE divorce memoir This Story Will Change.
We’re also fervently working on more divorce content for our main feed and our Patreon, which is why I have these questions for the divorced:
-What (beyond your marriage) did you lose in the divorce?
-What did your marriage teach you?
-What do you wish you’d known —about yourself, life, the other person, the world, whatever — before marriage?
-What do you wish people knew about getting divorced?
You can comment, you can email terrible@feelingsand.co or you can call us, always: 612.568.4441.
xo,
Nora + Team Terrible
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I'm in the midst of a divorce. It was terrible for a long time. Highly contentious, which is still a surprised we became THAT couple. Now, I see the expansive possibilities of what's next and it excites me. The waves of grief still come, but I'm able to redirect my attention to the sunset instead of the waves.