I Will Do Better feat. Charles Bock
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Hi guys, it's Nora. If you like what we've done here on Terrible Thanks for Asking, you might want to check out our YouTube channel. We have two new videos going up every week over at youtube.com slash at feelings and co that's feelings and co there's a link to it in our show description. So see over on YouTube if that's what you're into. What a sales gal I am.

It's a tale as old as time. Man moves to New York City to be a novelist. Man falls in love with a free-spirited woman he meets at a party in Brooklyn. Man and woman fall in love and have a baby, even though the man is like, I don't want to have a baby. You can have a baby. But I want to write a book.

But the man and the woman have a baby and life is pretty wonderful. And then the woman gets cancer and the man takes care of her. And then the woman dies and then there is just the man. And the baby he didn't really want to have and is now solely responsible for. And so much grief. And stress. And chaos.

Maybe this is not a tale as old as time, but it is a tale that is at least 10 years old at this point, and it is a tale that belongs to Charles Bach, the author of the memoir, I Will Do Better.

Parenting is difficult even in the very best of circumstances. Even if the baby of your dreams arrives easily and happy and healthy and you have all of your needs met, you are still embarking on the uncharted journey of raising a human being that you have never before raised and who has never before been raised by you. There are a million unforeseen variables even if everything on paper goes right.

I was drawn to this story because it is so starkly different from other grief narratives where the bereaved person steps up to the plate and does the right things at the right time. Charles is, and I'm sure he would agree with this, he's not the hero you want him to be in this story. The title is a mantra to himself and a promise to his daughter that takes time for him to live up to. And while parts of this book made me cringe several times, that's what I liked about it.

I liked the honesty of a deeply flawed and reluctant parent admitting to his many, many missteps because people don't do that enough. And I think that when one person can bring their darkness into the light, it lightens the load for everyone. Many of us are not the parents that we want to be, at least not all of the time. And while it's easy to beat ourselves up about it, there is no changing the past. All that we can do is commit to ourselves and our children to do better.

So there's a million places that I could start, but I want to start by asking you about Diana. I want to hear the story of how you met and what she was like. That's a great question. That's a nice question. That's a nice way to start. And thank you again for having me. Diana Colbert...

was a tall she was about 5 11 and she was raised in Memphis and I met her at a mutual friend was having a party and with time the person was throwing this was like there's someone who's coming I want you just want you to meet and Diana when I met her she was a licensed massage therapist

who had just got her business cards printed up. She was excited to give me a card. She was, like I said, a tall woman with multicolored hair. We were both, I guess, mid-30s, mid-30s, or early 30s, and immediately open. And when I watched her with other people, what was striking to me was everyone was glad to see her.

People liked her. And immediately she seemed encouraging and nice. And at the same time, the more you talk to her, that openness was not naive, even though people could easily kind of think she was naive or take her kindness for like in New York,

If you're not shrewd, people immediately might think that you're easy to be taken advantage of or they might take you for granted. But she wasn't someone to be taken for granted. And we met at this party in Williamsburg and she didn't drink, I didn't drink, and she had another party to be at and she was like, do you want to go with me? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. So...

We bounced around. When we left that first party and got into it, we're going to get into a cab to go to the next place. There was a feeling of like one door maybe shutting and one door opening. And we were together a number of years. She converted to Judaism, basically, so my parents would be happy. So my mom would go to come to the wedding. Just a lovely, lovely person. And the thing that she really had wanted was

She wanted to be a mom very badly and at the point where that decision was really approaching or not approaching where my where I sold my first book where we had to make some really commit or not commit. She was around turning 40 around the time that was happening.

But thank you for asking about it. Yeah, I love hearing all of that. And I love stories of how people met. And I really wanted to hear that after reading the book, too, and to hear it in your own voice. But her desire to be a mom was not... You didn't share that same desire for parenthood. And I appreciated your honesty around that. Yeah, I was not someone who...

had ever thought of myself as a parent. My parents have been together for 50 years. They worked seven days a week next to each other in a pawn shop in downtown Las Vegas. And they were kind of the dragon eating its own tail kind of marriage. They were together

And they couldn't be apart. But I don't know that you would say immediately the first word you would come to your mind would be a happy, happy, satisfied lives. Something that we always heard in the pawn shop was we're doing this so you don't have to do it. And, yeah.

And I wanted to write. I had worked on this book that no one ever thought I was ever going to finish. And then somehow, by some miracle, it got published and it got a little bit of stardust around it. And I wanted to run with that. It wasn't that I was against babies, but I hadn't spent any of my real adult life around kids and I wasn't motivated to kind of live in that way.

But I also had been told by someone very bright that you can't tell a person who you love and are spending your life with that she can't have a baby. And so in my mind,

She wanted to be a parent. Great. I'll like strap up the Bjorn on weekends. I'll tell people, I'll use the plural, we're parenting. We're having a baby. We're pregnant. That's right. We're pregnant. That's right. I'm going to go get some chicken wings, you know, like, you know, but kind of that inclusive, except for the fact I'm not carrying the baby. I'm not. It's not just dating inside me for nine months. I do not have to deliver it.

I will keep writing. I will write operas in space. I will chase Kerouac's, you know, mis-metaphors that are all wrong about burning, burning, burning, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And you want to be mom? Great. That was really my plan. And of course, you know, man plans, God laughs.

The baby was six months old. Lily was six months old when Diana was diagnosed with advanced, a complex form of myocystic leukemia. And, you know, that changed everything and it was all hands on deck. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my situation is different. And, you know, I have to make this all about me, but like my husband was sick first and

really, you know, of course I wanted to be a mom. I was raised in the Midwest. Like what else can a woman do? Um, and he was just like born to be a dad. You know what I mean? Kind of like Diana. It's like, it would just be a crime for him not to be a dad. He was just made for it on our second date. He was like, I want, you know, two kids. I was like, well, I came from four. I think you always want whatever you had, you know, I was like,

Well, I come from four, so two's weird to me. Not enough. And he was like, fine, three, but I'll be a stay-at-home dad. And I was like, great, because I could not imagine myself doing that either. I was like, I want the vibe. I don't want all the stuff. But I knew because he had stage four cancer, I knew that I was signing up to eventually do it on my own. And when I think back to that amount of hubris to just be like, yeah, I can do that.

You know, like I can do that. I can do that. But I remember a friend of mine whose husband had also had cancer, had said like there are two kinds of cancer spouses. And one is the kind who's like, I'm going to research everything. I'm going to get basically a PhD in, you know, from WebMD and I'm going to know everything. And then there's the other kind, which was me. I was like, I'm going to, I'll be there. I will be so there. I'll be in it with you, but I can't.

And Aaron wasn't interested in this either. He was like, I don't want this to be my whole life. I want to like live a life. And there's that tension when someone is sick and you are still alive with them between like being realistic and being hopeful. And I always felt like I was living sort of like these parallel tracks where I was like, well, I'm going to live life.

try to be as present and alive with him as possible while also knowing somewhere inside of me that I can't quite touch because it's a little bit too hot that this is not going to end well.

Hi guys, it's Nora. If you like what we've done here on Terrible Things for Asking, you might want to check out our YouTube channel. We have two new videos going up every week over at youtube.com slash at feelings and co. That's feelings and co. There's a link to it in our show description. So see over on YouTube if that's what you're into. What a sales gal I am.

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I think because the baby was so young, because Diana had wanted motherhood so much,

And also because honestly, I was not-- because it was pretty obvious that I wasn't really capable of probably taking care of all this. We didn't deal with the end game. It was always, what can we deal with now? The first transplant, and then there was almost a year where it seemed like she was in remission. And then she started to get sick, and it was confirmed the cancer was back.

But we were always dealing with, like, what's in front of us. And big picture, like, we never... We didn't really have the conversations about what this is going to be. She wrote me a note. She wrote our daughter a note for when she was old enough to read it. We... But I... We didn't film a lot of her because I think it would have been an admission that this isn't going to work.

Right. And that that was we couldn't deal with that. And so that was very it's kind of a different thing. I do remember at a certain point.

saying even at the end where it was back and where she obviously wasn't well and you could see in her body and even Sloan Kettering was at a point where they're like, we can do maintenance, but we don't have any. There's no more big treatments for us to do here. And we were finding like a crazy off brand hospital that

with a guy who was going to try certain things, but where you feel it going a different direction and saying to the doctor, like, I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I don't know what we're going to do. And I could see on his face that he'd had too many people say that to him, you know, and that his job is the patient in front of him and everything he could do. And he was someone who was a

really lovely and generous and kind to her. And I'm getting a little choked up while even talking about it because when we had to tell him, "We're gonna try and go to this other hospital and we're gonna try this experimental technique and we're gonna try and do this." And Diana was just very regretful about it and like, "I'm sorry to leave you." And he was so classy. And he was this beautiful,

tall man, Australian man with great hair and he was like I will always be your doctor. He couldn't deal with that and the book you know the book starts coming back from the hospital after she's passed like that's the beginning of it and because it was the truth is it was unthinkable. It wasn't something I had planned for my my thinking had been something to the effect of

It can't go on like this because this is too hard and impossibly sad. But I don't want it to be anything else because I know what the alternative is. Like, right? There's no getting better is not going to happen. Like that's not on that's not in the deck of cards. So there's only a couple of cards that can be. Yeah.

And I thought I could keep writing. But while she was sick, my life was really dependent on getting her, taking care of her. And I wasn't like Dr. Google. I didn't want to check online for what they said. Whatever the doctors told me, whatever we needed to do, let me do the logistics of it. And let me keep notes on what's going on. And let me...

appeal to the insurance companies and all that stuff. Like, I'll do that stuff. Let me figure out sitters and be with the baby at night or who's the, you know, if the baby's going to be with my sister and I'll be with Diana in the hospital. Let me figure all that out. That was where I was at because the... And so then it was a switch to a whole new reality and

Three-year-old, wants to know where mommy's gonna be, has her birthday party coming up, and that's tactile. And that's all around the clock. - Do you think that, I always felt like babies have this magic power,

I really did think that our son kept Aaron alive for those. You know, I was pregnant for a year of his sickness. He died when Ralph was 22 months old. And I

I feel like the urgency of a child, you know, like they wake up at pretty much the same time they eat that sort of like routine, you know, like they really don't care if somebody is on chemo or radiation. They don't care. And they don't know. They'll go to the hospital, get in a bed, snuggle up, like gently like move around a port. Like they're so magical. And

I think that did keep me from sort of like veering into the despair and that sort of staying so, the requirement of being so present is like even the horrors of that experience had not sunk in quite as deep as when it was over. And that is when your book starts. When it is over, I loved that you started your book that way. And I loved that the things that seem so...

Will you please tell me how to say the word? Is it macabre or is it macabre? I'm not French. I don't know. I think it's macabre. I think it is too. But I don't know either. I don't know either for 100%. Every time I have to – yeah. But I would – if I was a betting man, which I am a betting man, which I am, I would bet on macabre. We're saying macabre. Okay. It's like just the things that feel so macabre, so gruesome to somebody are so normal that

to you in this moment. You are the frog that's been in the pot of boiling water. So you having a third birthday party three days after your wife dies is, I was truly, I was laughing, crying. I know that. I know. I know exactly why you did it. You had to do it. You have to do it. You have to do it. Well, there's so many, okay, a couple parts of things. One,

I'm sure that that child kept her alive. I'm sure-- 'cause she wanted to be at that third birthday party. And I'm sure that that impetus propelled her. And we have-- I don't have a ton of pictures and video, but every picture and every video I have of her and that baby, she is enraptured.

her mom is thrilled. Even when there's one and it's really at the end and it's the two of them just sitting there watching songs from The Wizard of Oz on our TV. And Diana's definitely diminished, but Lily's in her lap and Diana's wearing, like she's wearing a mask and staring out. And there's no doubt that the baby and the love and that maternal drive

moved her forward or gave her a focus and gave her a purpose. So there's that one part. And then the other part was also true that the numbness of that party, because it really was a bunch of people standing around exhausted, looking at each other like, oh my God, what has happened? And it was also a bunch of kids running through tunnels, eating, you know, trying to grab all the sugar they could and

playing with kids in corners and doing, you know, that life moving forward thing that because these kids, it's party and hooray. And Lily was in this beautiful gown, beautiful blue dress that I still have in my closet folded up.

bouncing from place to place, from person to person. Everywhere she looked was someone she knew or a friend she loved or someone who babysat her, except one per-- you know, and just one person missing. And it was surreal. It was an unreal situation. And yet, it was also-- there was no choice in it. Of course, she's going to have her party, and--

I also have to, you know, I'm also trying to figure out the funeral and the memorial and all that stuff. It was, it was simultaneous. I'm Nora McInerney, and you've been listening to Thanks for Asking. This is a listener-supported podcast. You can get the full episode ad-free in only one place, over on our Substack. The URL is always linked in the description, but it's noraborealis.substack.com.

This episode was produced by Marcel Malikibu and our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson.

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Hi guys, it's Nora. If you like what we've done here on Terrible Thanks for Asking, you might want to check out our YouTube channel. We have two new videos going up every week over at youtube.com slash at feelings and co that's feelings and co there's a link to it in our show description. So see over on YouTube if that's what you're into. What a sales gal I am.