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Hi guys, if you miss Terrible Thanks for Asking, you might need a reminder that we are making a short daily show every weekday called It's Going to Be Okay. It's kind of exactly what it sounds like, a little five to eight minute episode to get you through the day in a world that is, I don't know, kind of falling apart, guys. It's

Anyway, I'm putting this episode of It's Going to Be Okay into your feed because it feels quite TTF-ish, and I hope you like it.

This episode is brought to you by The Hartford, a leading provider of employee benefits and income protection products that is dedicated to standing behind U.S. workers to help them pursue their goals and get through tough times. For more information about The Hartford, visit thehartford.com slash employee benefits. We've also got a link in our show notes. I'm Nora McInerney, and it's going to be okay.

I am asked often about my tattoos because people assume that there must be a special meaning behind all of them, but most of them are just things that I liked in the moment, and I do tend to treat my body a bit like a Pinterest board. But there is one tattoo, not my first one, but one of my first tattoos that does have a special meaning.

And to tell the story of it, I thought I would actually read an excerpt from my first book. It's okay to laugh. Crying is cool too. Because eight years after this book came out, this book is eight years old. People are still reading it and it is still in print, which is nuts. And yes, I also read the audio book, which I was really nervous about.

So this is from chapter two, which has the same name as this episode. And I'm not going to read the whole chapter because that would be so long, but to get you caught up, I have just found out, we have just found out that my boyfriend Aaron has

brain tumor. He had a seizure. He was hospitalized. They did a bunch of tests. And I am having what I now know is a panic attack, imagining this horrifying future of suffering and death. Fun, right? Here we go. It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Aaron is sleeping beside me. And so I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me.

sneaking out of our hospital bed to wash my hot, tear-soaked face with cool water and look into my own tired eyes in the tiny, beige-tiled, fluorescent-lit en suite bathroom in his hospital room. There are two tiny soaps that you know will instantly turn your skin into sandpaper, plain toothbrushes with bristles so weak it's like brushing your teeth with baby hair, and a small bottle of lotion that smells like gasoline.

If you had a really excellent imagination and a really bad sense of what a hotel experience should be, you could almost pretend you were at a cheap motel, though even those don't have ball-chain cords next to the toilet to pull in case of emergency. Aaron was where I'd left him, sleeping on his side in a hospital bed built for one, leaving space for me. You cannot do that again, I tell myself. You cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive.

So I didn't. I fought the urge to try to feel things before they happened and instead tried to feel what was actually happening. I think this is called being present or living your life, but it was a really new concept for me, okay? And it blew my mind the same way discovering that Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast is voiced by Jerry Orbach from Law and Order or realizing that Drake was Jimmy on Degrassi.

Aaron had brain surgery and got discharged from the hospital, and we went to Target, as is customary. He was diagnosed with brain cancer, and we decided to get married. Like, immediately. Cancer be damned. We didn't spend time reading about brain tumors or bothering with statistics because fuck it, we had several HBO series to watch, and that didn't leave a lot of time for worrying.

We got so good at being alive and in the moment that I think a lot of people in our lives forgot Erin was sick. And honestly, I think we actually sometimes forgot that Erin was sick and that an incurable cancer meant an improbable future. But who needed the future?

Until we would have to wake up at 6 a.m. for an MRI or go see his oncologist, we were just a regular young couple who had more chemo than food in their cupboards and were on a first-name basis with the radiation staff. A day before our wedding, I had one small word tattooed in cursive inside my right wrist. It was my something new for our wedding day and a reminder to myself that nothing good ever came from time travel.

It's just one tiny word that helped me do the biggest things in life, like getting married and buying a house and having a baby or getting my ears pierced at age 32. I look at it every day to remind me what time it is. It says now. I'm Nora McInerney. This is It's Going to Be Okay, and we are here every weekday to bring you the opposite of a doom scroll.

You can submit your okay things. We have all the instructions in our show description. We also have a link to this book in the show description as well in case you want to read or listen to the whole thing. We're an independent podcast, so thank you for being here and sharing it with people. Our company is called Feelings & Co., and we bring you feelings. That is what we do. This episode was produced by Claire McInerney, written and recorded by me, and engineered by Amanda Romani.

The rest of our team is Marcel Malakibu and Grace Berry. And our theme music is by Secret Audio.

When's the last time you thought about your employee benefits? I know you probably don't want to think about that right now, but they're important because you are important. Because people matter and so does technology, which is why The Hartford is so committed to providing a benefits experience like no other. Putting care and compassion into the technology behind benefits to create a better benefits experience for everyone. Learn more at thehartford.com slash benefits.