PORTLAND, Maine — When Hospice of Southern Maine holds a conference next week with the theme “Dying Matters: Conversations about End of Life and the Emotional Honesty that Follows,” Nora McInerny will deliver one of the keynote speeches. She’s a woman with a deep, intimate experience with loss and grief.
In 2014, as the holidays were approaching, McInerny suffered a miscarriage. Five days later, her father succumbed to cancer. Six weeks later, her husband died of brain cancer. She was 31 years old.
“Why have just one terrible thing happen when your whole world instead could just fall apart piece by piece?" McInerny asked rhetorically.
As a successful writer and host of the “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” podcast, McInerny now spends a lot of time helping others navigate their way through heartache and grief. She doesn’t consider herself an expert on loss, only on her own loss.
“Grief is so personal that it can’t replicated,” she says. “It’s one of those things that you don’t get until you get it.”
It’s been nearly a decade since her world came apart, and McInerny hasn’t “moved on” from her grief but she has “moved forward.” She and her second husband have four kids in their blended family, and most of the time when people ask how she’s doing she replies that life is good.
“I don’t advocate for sort of spilling out all your current or past traumas on strangers,” she said. “Small talk is small talk for a reason.”
She paused, then added a final thought. “But I will say that among my close family and friends, we do not ask how you are unless we are ready to hear the truth. And we never say ‘fine’ if we don’t mean it.”