Speaker 1: Pushkin. Well, Michael placed it very succinctly in my lap
Speaker 1: by texting me one day and he said, stop farting around, Messing.
Speaker 1: Life is short. We should be together and you're perfect.
Speaker 1: What are you going to do with that? I said, well,
Speaker 1: you could take it slow, and he said, yeah, we
Speaker 1: could take it slow, but I'm going to marry the
Speaker 1: fuck out of you one day, which is the way
Speaker 1: to talk to me about marriage, because the idea of
Speaker 1: marriage is a quarrant to me. I come from divorce.
Speaker 1: I had a divorce myself. It wasn't particularly interesting to me.
Speaker 1: And for some reason, his words, he is a writer,
Speaker 1: His words hit me and I bit. That's Susan and Messing.
Speaker 1: She's a comedian and an improviser who performs all over Chicago.
Speaker 1: Nine years ago, she married another comedian, Michael McCarthy, a
Speaker 1: beloved member of Chicago's Second City and a former writer
Speaker 1: for Saturday Night Live. Tragically, in twenty twenty, Michael passed
Speaker 1: away from a rare form of cancer. Michael had left
Speaker 1: Susan with fifty or so boxes of his writings and journals,
Speaker 1: and as part of her grieving process, Susan was intent
Speaker 1: on honoring his memory in his life as a writer.
Speaker 1: So she started to sift through the boxes he had
Speaker 1: left behind for her. I did start discovering this guy
Speaker 1: who was not for me, not for the world, for
Speaker 1: the world, he was exactly who he was. But for
Speaker 1: my personal relationship. I was getting the sinking feeling of oh,
Speaker 1: the saint, the guy I thought he was. On today's
Speaker 1: episode a story of what happens when you opened Pandora's box.
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Maya Schunker. I'm a cognitive scientist who studies
Speaker 1: how and why we change. On this show, you'll hear
Speaker 1: from people who've navigated extraordinary change in their lives, and
Speaker 1: my hope is that you'll leave each episode thinking differently
Speaker 1: about change in your own life. This is a slight
Speaker 1: change of plans, a show about who we are and
Speaker 1: who we become in the face of a big change. So, Susan,
Speaker 1: you and Michael had known each other for twenty five
Speaker 1: years before getting together, and I'm wondering what led you
Speaker 1: to finally date. I had seen Michael in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six or seven. He was teaching at Chicago. He
Speaker 1: had taken a job as a radio host on a
Speaker 1: morning show, a comedy show, and I had asked my
Speaker 1: friend Kate, I said, what's up with Michael mccarth and
Speaker 1: she said, Oh, he's going through a divorce. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pull. But
Speaker 1: because I wouldn't, because after a divorce, that's when people
Speaker 1: are bitter and shitty, and you don't want to be
Speaker 1: a part of that, at least in any solid sense.
Speaker 1: But I always used to flirt with him, and I
Speaker 1: had always thought Michael was out of my league. He
Speaker 1: was way too smart and kind and funny, and way
Speaker 1: too attractive for me. He's a hot silver fox. I
Speaker 1: was smitten when he decided to put his attentions toward me.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'd be an idiot not to be
Speaker 1: with this human. I'm curious to know what happens when
Speaker 1: two comedy writers get together and get married. I would
Speaker 1: have loved to be a fly on the wall at
Speaker 1: your wedding. What was that like? We're people in stitches
Speaker 1: over your vows. Michael's vows to me were just insane.
Speaker 1: He's the writer in the family, I'm an improviser, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm a talk vomit. And then you have to kind
Speaker 1: of discover what was for breakfast. Michael would write and
Speaker 1: rewrite and then flip it around and then say, if
Speaker 1: this joke was easier, you know, I mean, he was
Speaker 1: very tactical about that, and so, I mean, we pretended
Speaker 1: to do a flip who went first, but honestly I
Speaker 1: had to open because Michael was the headliner. Absolutely. Do
Speaker 1: you remember any specific vows that he shared? Yeah? He
Speaker 1: Oh boy, he's beautiful. First of all, he promised me
Speaker 1: his undying fidelity, not fidelity when it was convenient, not
Speaker 1: French fidelity, which big laugh. He promised that he would
Speaker 1: do anything to take care of me, whether he had
Speaker 1: to be a Walmart reader or work in development in NBC,
Speaker 1: which was big for the writers. They all got a
Speaker 1: chuckle out of that. He said, whoever, fox with you?
Speaker 1: Fox with me? Oh, he's just so glib and charming,
Speaker 1: so charming, and I couldn't believe I was marrying such
Speaker 1: a charming man. So and what did you promise him?
Speaker 1: I promised to love his special needs cat as if
Speaker 1: it were my own. I promised that I would love
Speaker 1: him unequivocally because I described him as a true gentleman
Speaker 1: and said some nice words in that way. But My
Speaker 1: promise to him was to love him unequivocally. That was
Speaker 1: it simple. Can you take me back to the day
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen when Michael received a cancer diagnosis who
Speaker 1: he had been having trouble beforehand. His left arm felt
Speaker 1: like it was encased in ice water, and they discovered
Speaker 1: a tumor, a glioblastoma in his spinal cord. They seek
Speaker 1: gleoblastomas in brains. Everyone to three weeks. They see this
Speaker 1: maybe every one to three years. It's a It's just
Speaker 1: a bad tumor in a really bad place. And how
Speaker 1: did that express itself? Well? He had to spend a
Speaker 1: month in the rehab unit to simply really learn how
Speaker 1: to walk again. After they went into his next simply
Speaker 1: to get a biopsy. Within minutes of him coming home,
Speaker 1: I had had lifts going from the downstairs to the
Speaker 1: upstairs to our bedroom and to the basement where his
Speaker 1: office was into downstairs. Like all of a sudden, we
Speaker 1: were creating ways to navigate this, and I kept thinking,
Speaker 1: what is going to make Michael feel like a real boy?
Speaker 1: That was so important to me because I could see
Speaker 1: this was a guy who used to bound upstairs and
Speaker 1: now he could barely walk and we did it quietly.
Speaker 1: We tried not to make it a big deal. You
Speaker 1: don't want to be in a sick home when someone's sick.
Speaker 1: I really was constantly conscious of what would make him
Speaker 1: feel as normal as possible. What was his survival rate?
Speaker 1: I think you buy time. I don't think you. I
Speaker 1: don't think you. They said you might live ten years,
Speaker 1: you might live dot but I don't I think they
Speaker 1: said that to be nice. I don't think that you
Speaker 1: feel you knew that kind of right away that they
Speaker 1: were saying that to be nice. Or he worked so
Speaker 1: hard in physical therapy to get better. You could see
Speaker 1: him going from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane.
Speaker 1: He even had a triumphant walk down Lincoln Avenue where
Speaker 1: fifty people came and waved Michael signs and blue whistles.
Speaker 1: And what I said to Michael as we bought time,
Speaker 1: what do you want to do with it? And he
Speaker 1: kept saying that all the time, we've bought time. And
Speaker 1: again I did not want to deal with the fact
Speaker 1: that Michael was handling his mortality while I was preemptively
Speaker 1: grieving in my car. Every day I would go to
Speaker 1: pick up my daughter at school and I would just weep.
Speaker 1: And that's when I called my therapist. I said, m
Speaker 1: guess what lot's happened since I've last spoken to you
Speaker 1: about You know, seven years ago, I met a hot
Speaker 1: silver fox. He is a tumor in his spinal cord,
Speaker 1: and now I'm grieving in the car go. So that's
Speaker 1: kind of the way I took it. I realized that
Speaker 1: my strength at this point was admitting where I was
Speaker 1: super weak and where I was week was I wanted
Speaker 1: to be super present for my husband right now, and
Speaker 1: I felt that I was planning his memorial in my
Speaker 1: brain and that was just not okay for me. So
Speaker 1: in addition to physically caring for him, one way in
Speaker 1: which you expressed your care was to shelter him from
Speaker 1: your own grief. Is that right? Yeah? We tried to
Speaker 1: keep it light. We tried to keep it super super light.
Speaker 1: What impact did his diagnosis have on your relationship? I mean,
Speaker 1: in what ways did your dynamics as a couple shift?
Speaker 1: Who Well, when you're the nurse, it changes, doesn't it
Speaker 1: It changes a lot. Where you're going to have to
Speaker 1: be responsible for urine samples and medicine and all sorts.
Speaker 1: Of stuff, and I tried to keep it more wifely.
Speaker 1: I pretended it was wifely, but I knew. I knew
Speaker 1: it just shifted into nurse mode, full nurse mode, and
Speaker 1: I would ask for support from people, and that that
Speaker 1: was I can't begin to tell you how many people
Speaker 1: helped us. Everyone loved Michael. Everyone loved Michael. He was
Speaker 1: a good human being. That was probably what's that book
Speaker 1: When Bad Things Happened to Great People. That was Michael.
Speaker 1: And Michael started writing these beautiful essays on Facebook. He
Speaker 1: called them beloveds where they were kind of garrison keeler
Speaker 1: folksy musings on life and cancer and all that. And
Speaker 1: he actually helped a lot of people during that time
Speaker 1: where he himself was struggling, you know, and I just
Speaker 1: tried to remain in the background. Did you expect him
Speaker 1: to be so open and vulnerable and public about his
Speaker 1: cancer diagnosis? First of all, I don't think there'd be
Speaker 1: any way to hide it. He was profoundly disabled. And
Speaker 1: this is a guy who had gotten a black belt
Speaker 1: in taekwondo at age fifty three. So this was a
Speaker 1: really active, vibrant human being who was all of a
Speaker 1: sudden hunched over like an old man with a puffy
Speaker 1: steroid face. And Michael always said he was put on
Speaker 1: this planet to help a few people and learn a
Speaker 1: few things. So I think he used this as an
Speaker 1: opportunity to kind of address his mortality in a way
Speaker 1: that was less scary for other people and ultimately for himself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was there a very definitive moment where you realized my
Speaker 1: husband is about to die? Had you been holding onto
Speaker 1: some hope before? Then? As I'm watching him every day,
Speaker 1: even though he's animated and his mind was completely all there,
Speaker 1: I noticed him getting weaker and weaker. There was one
Speaker 1: point where he was standing up in between the bars
Speaker 1: and he walked with help with like two or three people,
Speaker 1: and I thought, we're going backwards. In the meantime, doctor
Speaker 1: and a social worker walked into Michael's room and said,
Speaker 1: we invite you to consider strongly hospice. And Michael let
Speaker 1: out a sound that I'll never forget because it sounded
Speaker 1: like he thought, oh shit, this is the end of
Speaker 1: the line. And I said, no, honey, no, no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. We don't have to go into hospice. We
Speaker 1: can stand palliative. Because it was the word hospice that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden it resonated with him, and so
Speaker 1: I went in the car and I called up doctor Fran,
Speaker 1: a friend of ours, and I said, Michael still wants
Speaker 1: to fight. Fran insisted that there was a possibility at
Speaker 1: another hospital, but as we're getting ready to get him
Speaker 1: out of the hospital, he said to me, well, when
Speaker 1: we go to the hospital, can I go on a gurney?
Speaker 1: And I turned to and I said, Michael, I don't
Speaker 1: think we can do that, sweetheart. I think you have
Speaker 1: to be strong enough. This is a pandemic and people
Speaker 1: aren't going to treat you until you're stronger. So I
Speaker 1: used the word stronger, but I knew he was going backwards,
Speaker 1: and so we got him home and after that I
Speaker 1: knew this was the road down. And he died two
Speaker 1: and a half weeks after he came home. He was
Speaker 1: completely The sounds so weird, but thank goodness, he was
Speaker 1: completely paralyzed when he died, because he did feel no pain.
Speaker 1: He mentioned that Michael was fully paralyzed at his passing,
Speaker 1: but his brain was very much still alive. What were
Speaker 1: those final moments like, Well, I would say the last
Speaker 1: conversation that anybody would consider Ah, that's sweet or profound
Speaker 1: or whatever. As I said to Michael, how will I know?
Speaker 1: How will I know that you're with me? And he said,
Speaker 1: you'll feel me around you. And then I said why
Speaker 1: did you choose me? And he said you are awesome?
Speaker 1: You are awesome beyond words, and I thought, God, damn it,
Speaker 1: you sweet writer right till the end. Good job, that's
Speaker 1: a punch gut wow. Wow. How do you process that moment?
Speaker 1: I think I had worked very, very hard on my
Speaker 1: grieving beforehand, but for me, I was simply sad. I
Speaker 1: was simply sad, and I don't think I've ever lived
Speaker 1: in sadness like that before. You said earlier that Michael
Speaker 1: had left you with fifty boxes of his writings, and
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how raw and vulnerable you must have
Speaker 1: felt in the days and weeks following his death. So
Speaker 1: did it take you some time to muster up the
Speaker 1: strength to open up that first box? I mean, what
Speaker 1: was that process? Like? No? I kind of started it
Speaker 1: pretty quickly because I guess Michael was so organized, and
Speaker 1: I really wanted to honor his possessions. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to just throw them and dumpster and say to hell
Speaker 1: with it. Now. If Michael had said to me, Susan,
Speaker 1: I got fifty plus years of journals and all this crap,
Speaker 1: just get rid of it, I would have. But he
Speaker 1: was a word hoarder. He was a writer, and he
Speaker 1: needed to see. Even when he was sick and he
Speaker 1: was working on a four books, every time he even
Speaker 1: made changes, he would print them up and fan them
Speaker 1: in a beautiful, pleasing OCD way on his coffee table.
Speaker 1: And so I thought, this guy takes the stuff seriously,
Speaker 1: even though I don't. That doesn't mean I can't be
Speaker 1: incredibly respectful. So I kind of started it with an
Speaker 1: idea of, oh, I'll just go through the boxes. And
Speaker 1: then I started reading his journals. And as I'm reading
Speaker 1: his words, which he entrusted me with, I'm starting to
Speaker 1: feel sad because it seems to me that he struggled
Speaker 1: more than I thought. Issues with sex and with debt
Speaker 1: kept coming back again and again, and I don't you know,
Speaker 1: it seemed that he struggled with addiction. And he was
Speaker 1: an alcoholic who was twenty plus a year sober. But
Speaker 1: it's that porn and debt are right next door to that,
Speaker 1: and he struggled with that and I never knew of that,
Speaker 1: so as I'm reading it, I'm kind of thinking to myself,
Speaker 1: what the hell like? This is very new to me.
Speaker 1: And not only that, he had told me that two
Speaker 1: important relationships he had they had cheated on him. And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, I'll never cheat on you. And you
Speaker 1: also promised your dying fidelity, not fidelity one's convenient, not
Speaker 1: French fidelity. So I thought to myself, oh, well, I'll
Speaker 1: never cheat on you, so this is not an issue.
Speaker 1: But what I discovered was Michael was constantly scrambling. He'd
Speaker 1: break up with somebody after he started dating someone else,
Speaker 1: so I guess the kids call it cheating. I did
Speaker 1: start discovering this guy who was not for me, not
Speaker 1: for the world. For the world, he was exactly who
Speaker 1: he was, but for my personal relationship, I was getting
Speaker 1: this sinking feeling of oh, this the same the guy
Speaker 1: I thought he was. But then again, if Michael had said,
Speaker 1: don't read my word, Susan for all him out there,
Speaker 1: you know, I would have absolutely followed his directive. But
Speaker 1: because my friend Paula said to me, while Susan, I
Speaker 1: think he wants you to know, I thought to myself, no, well,
Speaker 1: no matter how confusing this is or maybe even hurtful,
Speaker 1: I am going to have to plod through this in
Speaker 1: waiters and I'll slog through the mud. Because Paula thought
Speaker 1: that he would want me to know him totally, because
Speaker 1: otherwise she thought he would have cleaned up his side
Speaker 1: of the street. Right. And so one day, when I
Speaker 1: was going through the boxes, I found an old list
Speaker 1: of passcodes and I looked at them and there was
Speaker 1: one number three to four zeven zero, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's not the Jewish New Year, that's a couple of
Speaker 1: decades ago, that's not his mom's birthday. It just was
Speaker 1: sitting there. It didn't say phone password. And I'm thinking
Speaker 1: to myself, the one password I have not gotten from
Speaker 1: my husband is his phone password. It was not on
Speaker 1: the spreadsheet which somebody had filled out for me of
Speaker 1: all of his passwords. Because I knew I needed, ultimately
Speaker 1: to deal with Sears warranty and Anderson Past Control or
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be, the bills that he paid online.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure that was taken care of.
Speaker 1: So I just put it in the phone and it
Speaker 1: opened up, and when it opened up, I was so
Speaker 1: grateful because I thought to myself, Michael has friends who
Speaker 1: are not of my generation that might not have known
Speaker 1: about his death and all the accolades and the oh bits,
Speaker 1: and they hadn't seen that. So there were people that
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, I can tell them now that
Speaker 1: he's dead and feel good about that. So I opened
Speaker 1: it up in the top. The top thread was with
Speaker 1: a woman named Meredith, and it started March thirty first,
Speaker 1: and he died on April eighth. And he said, how's everything.
Speaker 1: I have profound neuropathy and it's making it hard to type.
Speaker 1: I love you. And then she said, baby, baby, baby,
Speaker 1: I love you so much. Prayer hands, prayer hands, hearts, hearts, hearts.
Speaker 1: And then she said, baby, could you send me fifty
Speaker 1: dollars for childcare? I hate to ask, baby, baby, baby hearts, hearts, hearts,
Speaker 1: and I thought childcare, and I'm like, does he have
Speaker 1: another child I don't know about, Like what's going on here?
Speaker 1: And then I keep scrolling down and she says, baby,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. Baby. What would I do without you? Baby? Babies, babies,
Speaker 1: And I'm staring at this and this horrible sinking feeling
Speaker 1: comes over me as I'm doing this. This is slow motion,
Speaker 1: and I still alone in this basement about ten feet away,
Speaker 1: and said, oh no, because as the days went on,
Speaker 1: she asked for more and more money, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: the keeper of the flame, and I'm thinking, well, that's
Speaker 1: the day he stopped eating, and that's the day that
Speaker 1: pills went into liquids, and that's the day he died.
Speaker 1: You're still asking for money on the day that he died.
Speaker 1: And so I wrote her on Michael's phone, which I
Speaker 1: can only imagine how jarring that is. And I just
Speaker 1: wrote to her, I said, who are you? My husband
Speaker 1: is dead. We'll be back in a moment. With a
Speaker 1: slight change of plans. Susan had discovered that her husband, Michael,
Speaker 1: was not the person she thought he was, and that
Speaker 1: he'd been communicating with another woman through his final days,
Speaker 1: a woman named Meredith. Susan desperately needed answers, so she
Speaker 1: texted her. I said, who are you? My husband died
Speaker 1: of cancer. And then I went to his computer. It's
Speaker 1: the first time I've ever done that, plugged in his
Speaker 1: password and he had pretty much scrub to his computer,
Speaker 1: but he found a couple of choice moments from twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen which means he was doing this before he was sick,
Speaker 1: and one of them was super porny and the other
Speaker 1: was from Michael where he's like, I guess I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to erase some of our videos. Ha ha ha.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, this is not happening.
Speaker 1: The worst case scenario is happening. It's happening, and it's
Speaker 1: happening to me. I just nursed him to his death
Speaker 1: and he's and now I'm grieving in an international pandemic
Speaker 1: and it's happening to me. And now this woman isn't biting.
Speaker 1: She's not going to say anything because now I went
Speaker 1: into his Chase account and found that she had sent
Speaker 1: him a significant He had sent her a significant amount
Speaker 1: of money from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty when he died,
Speaker 1: and I'd pretty much quit my life to care for him.
Speaker 1: I had been teaching for I Owe the Annoyance the
Speaker 1: Second City University of Chicago school at Steppenwolf DePaul University
Speaker 1: and around the world, and performing as well in different
Speaker 1: theaters every single week, and I just said I'm done.
Speaker 1: And it was easy to say I'm done, because when
Speaker 1: the shit hits the fan. It's very easy to say,
Speaker 1: this is your priority. Very easy. So when Meredith would
Speaker 1: not bite, because why would she, because I was scaring
Speaker 1: the shit out of her from a dead man's cell phone,
Speaker 1: I said, look, I'm so sorry if I scared you,
Speaker 1: I bring you peace. I simply need to know answers
Speaker 1: because I don't have answers and I can't ask him anymore.
Speaker 1: So I was wondering if you would speak to me,
Speaker 1: and she bit, she bit, and I appreciate it. I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. She was very brave. So I spoke to her.
Speaker 1: And she's a single mother in Hawaii, and no, he
Speaker 1: is not the father of her daughter. And I said,
Speaker 1: what did he say about us? First of all, she
Speaker 1: apologized up and down in sideways. She pretty much fessed
Speaker 1: up to being a petty grifter because I had also
Speaker 1: by then found porn threads of theirs that you know,
Speaker 1: I was like these for being such a good writer,
Speaker 1: you're a shitty porn writer, Michael, God bless. But she
Speaker 1: became very human to me, very quickly, very human to me.
Speaker 1: And she said that he told her that I was
Speaker 1: bisexual in an open marriage, and I was like shit,
Speaker 1: I'd be getting laid right now if that were true,
Speaker 1: you know, right like in no, it's not my thing.
Speaker 1: And by the end she sort of tried to meet
Speaker 1: to it by saying that Michael promised to get her
Speaker 1: a writing agent, and then he said, no, let's write
Speaker 1: a porn novel together because we'll make a lot of
Speaker 1: money and help our families. And I, again, I just
Speaker 1: tried my best to keep up with her. I recorded
Speaker 1: it like a bad podcast. It was over three hours.
Speaker 1: I felt like good cop, bad cop because I kind
Speaker 1: of tried to tell her, you know, ask her the
Speaker 1: same question in seven different ways. And I guess she
Speaker 1: felt that the truth would set her free, and so
Speaker 1: I appreciated it. And after we spoke, I texted her
Speaker 1: that she was really brave because she was because it's
Speaker 1: hard to admit when you make choices that you know
Speaker 1: somewhere in your recesses aren't okay too. They're just not
Speaker 1: okay because she was using him and he was using her.
Speaker 1: And I said to her, I think you guys canceled
Speaker 1: each other out. You know, why do you think Michael
Speaker 1: didn't work to hide all of this from you before
Speaker 1: he passed away. He could have just asked you throughout
Speaker 1: these boxes, throughout the passwords. You know, I think sometimes
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know because I haven't died before, but
Speaker 1: I don't think men think they're going to die sometimes
Speaker 1: times I see, I don't think I was also asking
Speaker 1: you to throw those away. Maybe psychologically, was him surrendering
Speaker 1: to his death right. Yeah, that's a good way to
Speaker 1: put it. Good semantic adjustment. Good enow' I'm just postulating here.
Speaker 1: It's a good postulating. Take it. Look, I'm coming to
Speaker 1: you for as much clarity and healing as as as
Speaker 1: this story is bizarre and salacious, and I was compelled
Speaker 1: to read because I needed to know his truth. I
Speaker 1: needed to know his truth, and so I put the
Speaker 1: most vulnerable, the most I don't even know what the
Speaker 1: adjective is at this point, but the hardest stuff went
Speaker 1: into one box and I called that the box of doom.
Speaker 1: And it was just in my cold storage, near his ashes.
Speaker 1: And a friend said to me, you don't want this anymore.
Speaker 1: You don't want this anymore. So I borrowed my neighbors
Speaker 1: Sola Stove. I hope you get like some sort of
Speaker 1: endorsement from her soulas Stove and I burned them all,
Speaker 1: and I actually one of the few things I actually
Speaker 1: put on social media was I said, what no longer
Speaker 1: serves you? You already need to know what you know.
Speaker 1: It was an indication to my friends who did know
Speaker 1: the story that I was not going to keep the
Speaker 1: weight of his physical words anymore, because again, if I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to use them against him, and I already
Speaker 1: knew everything I needed to know, there was no reason
Speaker 1: to keep them anymore. Yeah, at one point, when I
Speaker 1: was snarky and shitty, I actually had to give his
Speaker 1: ashes to his niece for safekeeping for a while because
Speaker 1: I was afraid that I would dump them in an
Speaker 1: alley and promptly forget which alley it was, or I
Speaker 1: would put them in an overhead compartment in a plane
Speaker 1: with no identifying information to fly away. And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: you're an asshole, Susan. You can't do that. So I
Speaker 1: kept So I did take them back, and then I
Speaker 1: gently brought him over to Montrose Harbor on Lake Michigan
Speaker 1: early in the morning, and that same day that I
Speaker 1: and stuff, I also gently released him into the lake.
Speaker 1: I'd forgotten that I had the right as the keeper
Speaker 1: of that to respectfully release him. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: what you've described is textbook definition of what it means
Speaker 1: to have complicated grief and trying to put myself in
Speaker 1: your shoes, I'm thinking. You know, death of any kind
Speaker 1: presents so many unexpected changes for a person, Right, Yes,
Speaker 1: we have to ask ourselves all sorts of questions, like
Speaker 1: how are we going to live without this person? How
Speaker 1: will we feel day to day? How will we change
Speaker 1: in their absence? Right? Will we become different people? Right?
Speaker 1: Our lives have morphed together, and it's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: layering on top of all of that, this change, this revelation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not just grieving my husband during the age of COVID.
Speaker 1: I'm grieving the guy I thought he was so it's
Speaker 1: too headed. And I remember touching his ashes one day saying,
Speaker 1: I just want to remember. I'm trying to remember that
Speaker 1: I love you. And Michael and I used to talk
Speaker 1: right after he died. Then he kind of disappeared for
Speaker 1: a while, and he said, very clearly, you do remember,
Speaker 1: That's why you're sad, because there was so much joy
Speaker 1: and so much heartache, and the only people who really
Speaker 1: saw me lose it and kind of keep spiraling. Were
Speaker 1: my best friends, and they were they were magnificent in
Speaker 1: reminding me to reframe a lot of this and to
Speaker 1: not blame myself. That was the thing that they worried
Speaker 1: the most about, was that I would blame myself for it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A common refrain we hear when there's betrayal of some
Speaker 1: kind is did I even know who this person was?
Speaker 1: And the truth is, I imagine you probably did know
Speaker 1: a lot about who Michael was, right. I imagine there
Speaker 1: were many moments of genuine honesty that you shared. But
Speaker 1: I wonder like, are you able to appreciate or are
Speaker 1: you able to see that complexity, that potential complexity against
Speaker 1: the backdrop of such a large deceit? Yes, because the
Speaker 1: minute you understand the duality and people and why they
Speaker 1: are the way they are, I mean, is that right?
Speaker 1: Is it possible to have that duality and both are true?
Speaker 1: Because I am not black and white in my thinking,
Speaker 1: and I've always gone toward the gray. And even in
Speaker 1: figuring him out, we have a banner over our front
Speaker 1: door that says do hard things, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: this isn't going to be easy, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: do hard things, And so I go toward the danger,
Speaker 1: and I go toward what's difficult to understand and try
Speaker 1: to make sense out of it. And again, I did
Speaker 1: not want to vilify or to mean my husband, even
Speaker 1: at my worst with my best friends. And he was
Speaker 1: an asshole, you know what I mean? Because he wasn't.
Speaker 1: He was a guy who did feel profound struggles in
Speaker 1: his heart and in his brain and in his actions.
Speaker 1: It showed up again and again in his writing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, your story makes me reflect on how much
Speaker 1: each of us values knowing the truth and life. Would
Speaker 1: you have preferred to just remained ignorant of all this?
Speaker 1: If you could go back, would you not have opened
Speaker 1: the boxes? Tell me, tell me more about that. Part
Speaker 1: of my honoring him was honoring his directive. But in
Speaker 1: order to honor his things, I had to make sure
Speaker 1: that I looked at his things. Yeah, but's Susan, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're talking about still wanting to honor, to
Speaker 1: honor him and honor his boxes. In my view, he's
Speaker 1: not deserving of that honor right now. And so I
Speaker 1: want to know from your perspective, from Susan's psychological perspect active,
Speaker 1: was it better for you to have known that this
Speaker 1: was the case. People fall on different parts of the
Speaker 1: spectrum in terms of seeking truth versus protecting their own
Speaker 1: sanity and psychological well being. So I'm just wondering where
Speaker 1: you fall on this spectrum. I was betrayed in my
Speaker 1: first marriage, and I was told I was a crazy
Speaker 1: pregnant woman, and I was told I was postpartum. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like a crazy pregnant woman. I don't
Speaker 1: feel postpartum. And then in this marriage again, the same
Speaker 1: thing happened, and the common denominator is me. So for me,
Speaker 1: when they say the truth will set you free, in
Speaker 1: my case, it's only going to help me traverse a
Speaker 1: future path of honesty and listen to my red flags.
Speaker 1: Because I was right. I'd love to have been crazy,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't. I was right both times, and I
Speaker 1: was the common denominator you're saying. When you raise concerns
Speaker 1: with Michael, he would say, oh, you're just being crazy, Susan.
Speaker 1: He would be as dismissive in that way. So you
Speaker 1: were led to believe you were the problem. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: now I'm starting to understand why certain behaviors in our
Speaker 1: marriage made no sense to me. Sex was really hard
Speaker 1: for me to talk about, and said, what happened to
Speaker 1: our sex life? And this is a man who courted
Speaker 1: me with sex and coach bags. I don't know why
Speaker 1: the coach bags. By the way, I have plenty if
Speaker 1: he'd like some. You can really only use one purse
Speaker 1: at one time. But that I had said, what happened
Speaker 1: to our sex life? But again, I wanted to be
Speaker 1: super gentle with Michael because this is a man of
Speaker 1: a certain age, you know, I thought to myself, testosterone changes.
Speaker 1: Men are visual creatures. I'll go back to boot camp.
Speaker 1: But I wish I could have given you a SoundBite.
Speaker 1: But because he couldn't give me one, I just kind
Speaker 1: of thought, oh well. And then he got sick in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, and I thought, you're an asshole, Susan. He
Speaker 1: was sick the whole time. You're just an asshole. I
Speaker 1: always put it on myself. I always wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure that he never felt less than I had to
Speaker 1: always be very gentle with him because his father was
Speaker 1: so critical of him growing up that I felt I
Speaker 1: don't want to add to his plate. I'm his wife.
Speaker 1: I want to be one of the good guys, not
Speaker 1: one of the bad guys. So at the very least
Speaker 1: I wasn't crazy, And at the most I got to
Speaker 1: understand a man in death that I didn't get the
Speaker 1: opportunity to understand in life. And yes, I could have
Speaker 1: been pithy and just stopped fighting around messing life as short.
Speaker 1: We should be together and you're perfect, And it could
Speaker 1: have been at the end, you're awesome. You're awesome beyond words.
Speaker 1: But that's a story he wrote, and that isn't the truth.
Speaker 1: And I do appreciate the truth, no matter how difficult
Speaker 1: it is to hear or to discover. How have you
Speaker 1: changed through this process? I tend to remember that people
Speaker 1: who on the surface might seem rude or inconsiderate or whatever,
Speaker 1: that they are going through something that I don't know about.
Speaker 1: And I've usually pretty much given people the benefit of
Speaker 1: the doubt. But now I really give people the benefit
Speaker 1: of the doubt. I really do. I'm just interesting because
Speaker 1: you could equally imagine someone it's likely to imagine someone
Speaker 1: who no longer gives people the benefit of the doubt
Speaker 1: because you had given Michael the benefit of the doubt
Speaker 1: and then you were betrayed. I was reminded though. I
Speaker 1: was doing a zoom call to China and I knocked
Speaker 1: over by mistake all these office supplies in a box,
Speaker 1: and I was like, are you kidding me? I'm going
Speaker 1: to start off my day like this, goddamn it, you know.
Speaker 1: And then I looked and there's this little piece of
Speaker 1: paper and it was in with Michael's office supplies, which
Speaker 1: he had a myriad of, and it says, husband, I
Speaker 1: love you. And it was a note for me which
Speaker 1: I had left him all over the damn house. And
Speaker 1: I thought I had burned all of them in the fire.
Speaker 1: I thought there's nothing left to discover. And what I
Speaker 1: discovered was husband, I love you. So you know, dummy,
Speaker 1: it all ends up with love. And maybe I grieve,
Speaker 1: and maybe I'm angry because I loved him, And yes,
Speaker 1: I kept my side of the street clean as best
Speaker 1: I could through our marriage. And I would have liked
Speaker 1: to know of a set of rules that that involved
Speaker 1: me that I was not apparently privy too, so that
Speaker 1: can hurt. But now the way I love is and
Speaker 1: maybe he taught me this because he didn't have the
Speaker 1: ability to love freely and honestly. Now I love freely
Speaker 1: and honestly, so he gave me a real gift. His
Speaker 1: betrayal gave me a really big gift. And this is
Speaker 1: my discovery in this moment that it was a gift. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna get a tissue now, of course. So beautiful, Wow,
Speaker 1: tell me, can you just tell me about your new love.
Speaker 1: I've loved my friend about Fisher for thirty years. He's
Speaker 1: been a great friend, and something changed and now he
Speaker 1: looks at me the way I feel about him, and
Speaker 1: it's a super honest and candid love. And sometimes I
Speaker 1: have to be super careful when I answer a question
Speaker 1: only because it's never been asked of me before. You know,
Speaker 1: I've never been asked those kind of questions, questions everything
Speaker 1: from well, I mean, one of the first things I
Speaker 1: said to him was once we started dating, was what's
Speaker 1: your greatest shame? Like? Because I was like, what are
Speaker 1: you going past words? Oh? He point blank said, this
Speaker 1: is my debt, this is what's on my desk. Feel
Speaker 1: free to look through all of it. Here's the people.
Speaker 1: I mean. He couldn't have been more honest with me
Speaker 1: because our friendship has he's felt he has felt very
Speaker 1: responsible for the choices that he's made in his life,
Speaker 1: good and bad. He's felt very responsible for them, and that,
Speaker 1: to me, honesty and truth is sexy. Yeah, it's super sexy.
Speaker 1: So I'm there now. Oh I love that so much.
Speaker 1: It fills my heart with warmth. Final question, why did
Speaker 1: you decide to share the story with me now? I
Speaker 1: am sharing this now because I feel like it will
Speaker 1: support my healing and perhaps support others. Secrets are toxic
Speaker 1: and they eat at you, and there is always someone
Speaker 1: who will listen. And when you bring darkness into the light,
Speaker 1: it is no longer dark, and you have red flags
Speaker 1: chase that because your gut is right. So and I'm
Speaker 1: also your poster child because also I'm healing on the
Speaker 1: other side, and I can be your poster child of
Speaker 1: hope because if I can love again after going through
Speaker 1: a real shit storm, I think anybody can. So when
Speaker 1: you say people become bitter after their divorces, I say, no,
Speaker 1: they become smarter. And I'm not saying that you're not
Speaker 1: going to go through a bitter path, but all these
Speaker 1: feelings are temporary, and I have to have learned something
Speaker 1: that I can pass on to make somebody else's path
Speaker 1: a little easier. Well, here's my question. Is it so
Speaker 1: unique to find out after someone's dead of their betrayal.
Speaker 1: It really isn't, although it would have been nice to
Speaker 1: find out during the time he was sick that it
Speaker 1: had happened because my friend, he said, you could just
Speaker 1: call up Meredith and go, girl, come get your boyfriend.
Speaker 1: He is sick. You know what I mean? Like we again,
Speaker 1: My friends are awesome. Hey, thanks for tuning in. I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know that next week we're going
Speaker 1: to be mixing things up a bit. Recently, I had
Speaker 1: to confront an unexpected change of my own. It's a
Speaker 1: deeply personal story, one I never planned to share so publicly,
Speaker 1: but then I realize that's kind of what this show
Speaker 1: is all about. So I asked my producer to turn
Speaker 1: on the mic and interview me. My heart sank. I
Speaker 1: was like, you have got to be kidding me. How
Speaker 1: is this happening again? Like on exactly the same day
Speaker 1: as last time? Like it just it didn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: Tune in next week to hear about when life threw
Speaker 1: me my own Slight Change of Plans. A Slight Change
Speaker 1: of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me
Speaker 1: Maya Schunker. The best part of creating this show is
Speaker 1: getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This
Speaker 1: includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor,
Speaker 1: Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek, our associate producer,
Speaker 1: and Mia Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our
Speaker 1: delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
Speaker 1: A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: so big thanks to everyone there. Thanks also to Laurie Santos,
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis, Ramsay Cabaz and Scott Menki who have been
Speaker 1: wonderful friends and incredible supporters of this show, and of
Speaker 1: course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can
Speaker 1: follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor
Speaker 1: Maya Schunker, and please remember to subscribe, share and rate
Speaker 1: the show to help get the word out. Seeing next
Speaker 1: week