We’re Supposed to Be Four
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It is very rare that I actually get to interview guests in person. Usually it's online, obviously because there's COVID, but even before COVID, it would just be way too expensive, way too time consuming for me to be flying all over the United States talking to people. This is public radio. So

That's what makes the conversation that I had with today's guest such a treat because Jose is basically my neighbor. And so he got to come over on a beautiful sunny day. I know they're all beautiful and sunny here in Phoenix this past summer. And yes, we had to turn off the air conditioner because it's too noisy. And yes, my dogs interrupted us about a thousand times, but we also got to crack some sparkling waters and talk like old friends.

But when I first met Jose, he was not yet a friend and he was not yet a guest. He was just a guy at the airport. I was flying to Austin for a random, like, leave the city trip because my girls were in a spending summer vacation with their aunt. And I was in line getting ready to board and I saw you...

fumbling around with your backpack, trying to board. And in my head, I was like contemplating on if I should go up to you or not. And I just said, fuck it. I did not understand what my ticket said. So another man had helped me and he was like, you're A1. I was like, cool. And he was like, you're the first. I was like, what? He's like, get up there. Like, he was so concerned. He was like, get up there now. Get into the front. I was like, okay. Like you came up, I was like, this guy's going to tell me I'm in the wrong spot.

Well, what's funny is that I had rescheduled my flight the night before. And then I was like, you know what? Like, whatever. So I scheduled it back to my original 5 a.m. flight, which was stupid. So stupid. It was a dumb time to fly. So dumb. I feel so sick that early in the morning. It's just so gross. And then we sat next to each other and we got a Diet Coke and cried.

Sounds about right. Yeah, that's pretty much my life now. Same, same. Jose and I have three things in common, possibly more, but this is what I know for sure. One, we're both tall. Two, we both like Coke, not Diet Coke, a full-on Coke. And three, we both lost a spouse. That's really what bonded us. Jose's wife, Jessie, the mother of their two daughters, Mazzy and Luna, died in 2020. That's what he tells me while we stand in line waiting to board our flight.

What prompts Jesse to go to the doctor? We started noticing that Jesse's period would be off. It'd be weird. Like, we would get intimate, and then all of a sudden her period would start. At least that's what we thought it was. And then one morning, she wakes up and runs to the bathroom. And she is calling for me while I'm in bed. And she's like, babe, something's wrong.

And she says that she's bleeding into the toilet, like as if she were urinating. That's how much is coming out. So I gather up the girls. I take her to the emergency room. And what's weird is that a couple days before we had scheduled her yearly checkup because we knew something was weird because of like the random periods and the bleeding and stuff. So she had an appointment on Monday and this was Sunday and

took her to the emergency room. They stopped the bleeding and they said, "Since your appointment is tomorrow, just go ahead and go to your appointment and see what they say." Jesse insists on going to that Monday appointment alone, and her doctor runs some tests, takes a biopsy, and by Wednesday, the results are in. So we went to her appointment. We're sitting in the room and they said the biopsy came back and she has cervical cancer. It's a tumor.

When you say that, like, you're living this quote-unquote perfect life of, you know, family of four, you know, we didn't have the white picket fence, but we lived the suburb life, you know, she had a great job, I was starting to move up in my career, and then you hear those words and your whole world comes crashing down. What's going on is that Jesse's cervical cancer is stage 1B on a scale of 1 to 4, which doesn't sound too bad, right?

The doctors tell Jesse she has options, which is also good. They may be able to scrape the cancer out. That is such a terrible visual. Just the word scrape out. Or she may have to do chemo and radiation. At that point, I don't think I was really feeling afraid. It was more of confusion. Because up until that point, everything was going the right way for us.

We would randomly get a promotion at work. We would randomly get a pay raise. We sold our first house on the second day it was on the market. Like, everything is working out for us. And this is the first hiccup and it's not supposed to be there. Like, it's not supposed to happen. Especially to us. This just happens to random folks, not us.

Jose can be strong because Jesse is strong, even when the doctors tell her that surgery is no longer an option. You know that image in Spider-Man, the first one with Tobey Maguire, where he stops the subway? That was Jesse blocking all of us in that subway. And we took it for granted because she was so strong at that point. And they told us it's going to be three sessions of chemo,

And like 40 something sessions of radiation and then five sessions of internal radiation. So we start chemo. She doesn't lose her hair. It's a very low dose. Radiation is probably the worst part because, you know, it's going around her region down there and it's messing up her stomach and all that good stuff. And never complained. Just took it in stride. The only time she complained is when she was feeling nauseous after chemo. And...

Even for internal radiation, you know, sticking 17 tubes, devices in her vagina. And it's like, I'm with her every day, holding her hand. And that was the first time I saw her cry because it was painful. Just six months after being diagnosed, Jessie is told that she's cancer-free. Her scans are clear. There are no more tumors in sight. It wasn't the same after that.

There was this cloud that hung above our family. That is honestly a regret that I have is because we never really talked about it afterwards. We did occasionally, but there was never that deep conversation of, okay, what's next? Because I thought everything was going to go back to normal. Everything is going to be just like how we planned. Yes, this was a minor thing.

bumping the road, but now we're back on track and let's go have some fun. And that's what we did. We decided, you know what? We're going to take those vacations. The four of them, Jose, Jesse, Mazzy, Luna, go to San Diego and Legoland. They buy their forever home. And the cloud that Jose mentioned, it remains too. Because what happened with Jesse, as brave as she was trying to Toby McGuire stop that train from hitting her family,

it still affected all of them. After Jesse was done with her treatments, I got sick. Like, I came down with, like, crazy, like, cold, flu, something. And at the time, my primary care doctor knew what I was going through. And when I was sick and I went to go see him, he's like, this is probably not medically, like, something, but I think it's your body just saying, like, okay, give yourself a rest. And so I remember one morning saying,

where I was out like I just was not feeling good and the back of my mind I'm like well if Jesse can go through freaking cancer treatment I can go through a flu like the whole man flu thing I didn't want to be that guy but I was pretty close being that guy and then Mazzy comes in my room and I'm like on the bed and Jesse's like in the living room hanging out with Luna and Mazzy comes in and was like daddy are you feeling better are you sick like mommy and

And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I need to get up. I can't do this. And that's what made me realize, like, she knew something was different about being sick with mommy. Being sick with mommy was different. In December 2019, Jose has a business trip to London for two weeks. He tries to get Jesse to go with him, but she can't get away from work. While I'm over there, obviously I talk to her every day, multiple times a day, to the point where...

This is the first time we've been away from each other that long. And add that on top of me being away from my kids, I'm a mess. Like, I called her crying one night because I missed her so much. And she's like, you know, I miss you too. We miss you. But you know what? This is a once in a lifetime experience. Yeah, get a life. Yeah. Yeah. Why are you crying to me, you little wuss? Yeah.

One night, Jose FaceTimes Jessie and the girls, and Jessie mentions she has a knot in her back, which doesn't sound like the biggest deal. I'm pretty sure a lot of us have knots in our back, and Jessie does have two young girls that she has to lug around everywhere. And she's like, it just feels so weird. I think I just slept wrong. I'm like, okay. And then a couple days later, she's like, it's not going away. And I think she ends up going to a chiropractor, and she's like, it doesn't

feel right. I'm like, okay, she's sending me pictures of it, you know, video chat showing me and I'm like, wow, that's a big knot. I'm not nervous because I'm an idiot and I think it's a knot. She's nervous because she knows it's not a knot. And I get home, they pick me up at the airport and they're facing one way and I actually come out the other door and

Instead of Jessie being like, "Oh my God, you're home!" She goes, "Shit! I was trying to make it all cute, and the girls run to you, and then you come up behind me!" I'm like, "Alright, well, I'm happy to see you too." But, you know, we go have dinner, and one thing I noticed about Jessie when we were eating, and it instantly put me back into her first cancer fight, she couldn't sit still. She was constantly bouncing her leg.

And that's when I knew something was up. And then she had a cough that was just lingering and just would never go away.

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Jesse goes in for a scan on December 23rd. She's told they won't get the results until after the holidays. On January 2nd, Jesse's doctors confirm with a couple already know. The cancer is back, and it's really bad. Jesse has 13 tumors. The cancer has spread to her lungs, her liver, and her kidneys. And her doctor asks her, Do you want to know how much time you have left? And...

When you hear those words, it's like selfishly myself, my whole life flashed before my eyes. And I'm crying, uncontrollably crying, sobbing. And Jessie's fine. You know, I look at her and I'm like, do you want to know? And she's like, no, I don't want to know how much time. And so she gives us a game plan. This is what we're going to do. We're going to start chemo. And then after that, we leave her office. And I just break down everything.

in the hallway of this medical building next to the elevators, just crying my eyes out because I know eventually that this fairy tale that I've been on with my wife is going to be over. But Jessie's fine. She's like, we'll be okay. We'll get through this. My sisters will help us. I want you to just, let's just face it. A week later, Jessie starts treatment again.

And her doctor also recommends a clinical trial for immunotherapy. Some of their patients are seeing amazing results and they're hoping Jesse will too. I kept telling myself, I can't go through this again. I can't do it. But internally, I was like, that's selfish of me. You know, it's not my battle. So if Jesse's ready to do this, then all right, let's do it. And so we started chemo. She ended up losing her hair around her birthday, which

We actually shaved her head, I want to say like the day before. And that was the hard one because we told the girls that mommy was sick again, but we didn't tell them what the ultimate outcome was going to be. And the night Jessie shaved her head, I asked her, like, do you want the girls to see? And she's like, yeah. So myself, Mazzy and Luna are just sitting on the floor watching Jessie get her hair cut.

And kids have a hard time explaining how they're feeling. All I remember, I mean, Mazzy was crying because mommy was losing her hair. Mommy didn't look like a princess. Like her hair's not long anymore. Luna just was like, daddy, my stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts. And Luna's always had such a sensitive stomach. And she's like, daddy, my stomach hurts. I need to go to the bathroom.

And so I try to take her to the bathroom, but she can't go. And Jessie, once again, is like there to save the day. She's like, babe, she's just really nervous. She doesn't know how to handle this. Nobody knows how to handle this. It's now March 2020 and COVID-19 is fast becoming the pandemic we now know it will become. Being part of this immunotherapy trial means Jessie has to stay in the hospital for a month.

Do you remember how scary everything felt in those first few weeks when there was still so much we didn't know? People were more or less being told, do not go to a hospital unless you're dying because hospitals are danger zones. Jesse and Jose feel that, that same fear coupled with the fear that they have to enter that danger zone in order to try to save Jesse. Typically for this trial, a partner or a family member would go with or at least visit regularly.

But now hospital protocols have evolved and Jessie has to go alone. She enters the trial just after their ninth wedding anniversary. She's in this place alone. And when your wife calls you from a hospital room when she's all alone, she's high on whatever the hell that they gave her. And you can't have a conversation with her because she's falling in and out of sleep.

And she's having these video chats with her daughters that she can't even recognize because she's so high. And my girls are scared because this is the first time that they've been away from their mommy for this long. And it's not because of a vacation. It's because mommy is sick. And the questions are, what's mommy doing now? Can we call mommy? Like, no, we can't. Like, we have to wait for her to call us. And you have no idea what is going on with your wife.

Because you're not there. You don't know if things are going right. You don't know if things are going wrong. I was supposed to receive a call from her at this time. Why haven't I received it? Like, what's happening? And then, you know, her doctor started texting me to start giving me updates. Yeah, it made me feel a little bit more at ease, but it's still not the same. This period of time is hard for everyone. It's hard for Jose, who is used to being by his wife's side.

It's hard for Jesse's two older sisters, Janae and Michelle, who take turns isolating themselves in their homes in LA and Albuquerque so they can safely come into town to help Jose with the girls. But it's especially hard on Jesse. At one point, she retains so much water from the chemo and immunotherapy treatments that she gains more than 40 pounds in just a few days and doesn't hearing that just make your body hurt? And she's doing all of it alone.

During these 30 days, Jesse's doctors communicate with Jose through text messages, and they eventually arrange to sneak him into the hospital where she's in a separate ICU, far from the COVID patients. So we get to her room, and they're like, oh, don't go in yet. Let me go talk to her. And so they leave the door cracked, and the nurses are checking on her. And all I hear is like,

He's here? He's here? How do I look? Like, that girlish, high-pitched voice of excitement just crushed me. But, like, crushed me in a good way. Jessie is drugged up, but she sees me. And she's just like, hi, babe. Hi. You came. And she tried so hard to stay awake. And she wasn't making any sense because she had a lot going on.

But, you know, I was just trying to make sure that she was comfortable. And she's like, no, I'm okay. I'm okay. And then she just falls asleep. And I just hold her hand in silence to what ends up being five hours. Not saying anything, but just holding her hand. And the nurses come in around six o'clock and go, it's time to leave. And I didn't want to. I couldn't. But they're like, it's time to go. We can get in a lot of trouble. Like, okay.

But I leave and I just cry the whole way home. And I know she's going to be okay, but you never know something could go wrong. And I'm at that point where everything is going to go wrong for us. But the next day, you know, Dr. Reesey calls me and was like, we've never seen Jessie perk up this much. She's walking now. And I just go back because what if this stupid pandemic wasn't going on and I was there for her? Like how much would it have changed?

We get the thumbs up to go visit her a couple days before she leaves the hospital. And we take our girls, but the girls can't touch her. The girls can't see her. We're communicating through tinted windows and a cell phone with signs. And Mazzy is trying so hard to touch her. Luna is trying so hard, but they can't. All they can do is see her through the window.

When Jessie is finally released from the hospital, the scans show that her tumors have shrunk by 1 to 2 centimeters. This is great news, but it doesn't last long. Because within weeks, Jessie is extremely weak, and when she goes in for more scans, the tumors have already grown back. Her doctors offer one more round of what Jose calls "sympathy chemo," because it's clear by now that nothing will fix this.

Nothing will stop Jessie's cancer from spreading, let alone put her back in remission. But Jessie agrees. She says yes. We go for our first treatment and she holds my hand the whole drive over and she just looks at me and goes, "Babe, I'm tired." She's like, "I'm just really, really tired. I'm tired of being poked. I'm tired of random fluids. I'm tired of random medicine."

And selfishly, I was like, don't say that. Don't tell me that right now. So we get to the doctor's office. I can't go in there with her. They come with a wheelchair to pick her up because she's too weak to even walk two steps. They take her up. They draw her blood from the port. They do tests before they do chemo. And then I get a phone call from her doctor. And her doctor's like, hey, Jesse's in here with me.

Just want to let you know that her body's too weak to handle chemo. And I was so confused because I was like, okay, great. What's next? And Jesse goes, babe, I can't. Normally, a couple would receive this crushing news together. They'd be able to hold hands and hold each other. But instead, Jesse and Jose are alone. Her in the hospital, him in his car. She can't because of course she can't.

On that last drive home from the hospital, Jesse tells Jose, I've accepted this. I can leave you with the girls because you've got this. But Jose, he doesn't have it. I can't. I couldn't. What am I going to do without my wife? What am I going to do without saying, hey, babe, I really don't feel like cooking. Okay, I'll do it. Or let's go out to eat. What am I going to do when...

My daughter comes up to me and says, "Can you braid my hair?" I can't because Jessie would. What am I going to do about periods? What am I going to do about crushes, first loves? I'm not the typical, you know, machismo, you're not going to date. Like, no, my family did that to me. And now I'm talking about it in therapy. I don't want to do that to my kids. And Jessie, I told her this and she goes,

You have my sisters. She's like, do not be afraid to call them for anything. On Jesse's first night in hospice care, Jose sleeps on the floor next to his wife. She wakes up to receive some medicine, and she tells Jose that she loves him. He's there by Jesse's side when she starts coughing up blood. He calls the nurse. And I'm begging her not to leave me. Right around 5.15, 5.20,

I tell Michelle and Janae to go get our girls. And we wake up our girls and they sit on my lap, both of them, and we just hold mommy's hand. You know, a week before we told them, like, mommy's medicine didn't work. So she's going to die. I thought we had a few more months. It's me, Luna, and Mazzy are just holding mommy's hand all at once. And we just watch her die. And at 5.23 a.m. is when Jesse passed away.

We're sitting beside her while she's laying there. And I'm trying to ask them again, like, do you guys understand what's happening? And they both go, yeah, mommy's gone. And it was so hard for them. And it was so hard for me to watch them in pain. But what killed me was Luna just looking at me and holding her hand, mommy's hand and saying, we're supposed to be four, dad, not three.

We're supposed to be four. And it's just like, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to her. All I can do is just hold her. And that's all she kept saying. And Mazzy is just like her mom. Because yes, Mazzy was crying, but you could tell that she was like, okay, all right, let's get through this. I mean, still to this day, Mazzy is like that. My little eight-year-old puts her hand on my cheek and tells me everything is going to be all right.

and says, "Daddy, I'm worried about you being lonely." Like, what? Do I need to pay you instead of my therapist? Like, what is happening? You can't afford Mazzy, actually. Her rate would be... sick. Yeah. There is... nothing I could give or just whatever to bring her back. I've asked myself, would I go through this all over again? Honestly? Yeah. Just so I can be with her again. Do I wish for a different outcome? Of course.

But in some weird way, the pandemic helped because we spent so much time with her. Jessie did not cry to me during that whole time until the end. You know, we had our talks before she passed away. She told me that she wished she could have been a better wife. And I'm like, no, you were perfect. We're going to take a quick break.

That's the story of Jessie's death. And her death is a part of their love story, but any story is so much more than how it ends. When I lost my husband Aaron in 2014, it felt like the only real thing was how he died. Everything else about him, about us, felt like it had just disappeared from my memory. I wanted so badly to remember that we were not just a sad story. We were a

So when I meet a person who shares a loss with me, who tells me that their mom or their sibling or their child or their spouse or their best friend is dead, I don't ask how did they die? I say, tell me about them. I say their name and I ask about them, about how they lived, about how you met, about what you want to remember, about what was real and what will stay with you forever.

So on the airplane, I asked Jose to tell me about Jessie. And once we landed and were texting, I knew I wanted him to tell you about her too. When Jessie meditated, she saw things. She saw a thing. A brown and white owl, wings extended, swooping, circling. Actually, Jessie...

And her whole family had just been very spiritual into crystal healing and just being in tune with what they know. Spirits surrounding Earth, all that good stuff. And Jessie was very great at meditating and just grounding herself. And when she would meditate, she would get to her safe space and be with people.

An owl, people make fun of it, but that's actually what she did. And she would just be safe there and ground herself. She explained to us how she would get to her safe space and her owl, you know, she described it to us like brown and white, would just swoop out around her and just hang out with her.

For years, that owl came to Jessie as she sat on the floor with her legs crossed, slipping out of her thoughts and out of her surroundings. She meditated when she was young and living in a crowded apartment, when she moved in with her future husband, when she became a mother to two girls, and always, the owl appeared. And it was something that I would just, you know, leave her alone, let her be.

And she would always get on me, like, let me show you how to do this. Let me show you. I'm like, ah, no, no, it's fine. I'm good. I'm good. Jesse and Jose met when they were both young, just 21 years old, living in Phoenix. And before they knew each other, they were living parallel lives. Each of them had moved to the city for a new start. Fascinating story, actually. Moved to Arizona recently.

On a whim, honestly packed my car and moved, called my brother and I told him like, I want to live there. And I stayed in his dining room and I worked for a company that Jesse's sister, Janae was working at. And she was my boss.

Jesse, his boss's younger sister, is Jose's future wife, but he doesn't know that yet. Really, there's a lot he doesn't know. He's young. He's trying to establish his independence. He does not have a five-year plan. He doesn't even know when he'll move out of his brother's dining room. And he definitely doesn't know that just a few buildings away is the love of his life. Also living with an older sibling. Also trying to figure out life. One day, my brother...

who I was living with and my sister-in-law, his wife, said, "Hey, can you help move Jesse into her apartment?" And I was like, "Yeah, that's fine. I don't know who Jesse is, but whatever."

This is something that you only do in your twenties, by the way. You're like, someone needs help moving. Yeah, I got them. Yeah. Got it. In your thirties, you're like, I would rather fall down a flight of stairs than help you move. But in your twenties, you're like, yeah, yeah. And now I got two free hours. So yeah, we, uh, walked two, three buildings over and, uh,

I helped move a couch in her one bedroom apartment and I saw her. It sounds totally cheesy, but honestly, it really is like what I felt. I saw her and it was like, oh, like this little glowing light around her. And like, wow, she's she's pretty hot. And that was that. And then the next day I go to work and I was like, hey, Janae, I met your sister and

She's like, oh, cool. Well, how? And I was like, oh, I helped her moved in. And she's like, oh, great. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. And I told Janaye, I was like, by the way, she's really, really hot. Thinking like, oh, yeah, let me hook you up. No, no, Janaye goes, I know. And that's it. And just moves on about her day. And I'm like, all right, well, I'm just going to go over here and work. Jose has seen his dream girl literally glowing at the top of a staircase.

He knows two people who would love to set them up. It's a no-brainer, but it doesn't happen. And it doesn't happen because of Jose, honestly. He moved out of his brother's house and he has his own apartment, but it is a big stretch to make rent every month. His furniture is as follows. One folding chair, one mattress, one PlayStation console. If you were not this man...

In your 20s, you either knew him or dated him. He's just broke. So when his boss, Janae, says, hey, come hang out with me and my sister, he always finds a way to avoid it. He's busy. He has plans. But really, he just doesn't have any money. This means almost an entire year passes before he finally accepts an invite to a local hip hop club.

Are you nervous because you know she's going to be there? How are you feeling? What do you wear? How do you prepare? Actually, I wasn't nervous because it was more on that friend level. And the other thing is Jesse was dating someone else. And, you know, I'm not that kind of guy. I would never interfere or whatever. So it was totally like we're friends.

And I just took it as is, just hung out with them. They were, they're so great to hang out with. Like, Janae is always the life of the party. And Jesse just tags along and is just like, you know, this is, this is cool. This is chill. And for that first time, Jesse's boyfriend at the time wasn't into the same music that we were. And so he didn't go.

Jesse and Jose enjoy each other's company. They click. The conversation is easy. And Jose's new apartment is right across the parking lot from Jesse's new apartment. My balcony can see her balcony, and vice versa. This is a beautiful rom-com. Oh, for sure. It really is. So when you are out on the balcony, do you go out on the balcony just to be like, what if she saw me? I better go out here and stand looking. At the time. At the time.

At the time, I was a smoker, right? I'd go outside and smoke my cigarette. As many as possible. Yeah, exactly, right? I'm over here like a chain smoker, like just to get a glimpse. And I would see her every now and then. At first, it was awkwardly like, hey, how you doing? Hey. Yeah, hi. Oh, yeah. It's here, smoking a cigarette and waiting to catch a glimpse of Jesse, that Jose sees something else.

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Hi, it's Nora with a little bit of an update. Terrible Things for Asking is on an indefinite hiatus, which means that for the foreseeable future, you won't see new episodes in the main feed. But if you want to support the work that we've done, get access to our entire back catalog with no ads, you can do that by clicking on the link in the description.

You can join us on Patreon at patreon.com slash ttfa or on Apple Plus. We are still making two episodes a month.

for subscribers, which is a sustainable workload for us emotionally and financially. There are still plenty of episodes here for free on the main feed, so no pressure. But if you want to join a community of Terribles, come over to Patreon. And if you just want more Terrible, join on Apple+. I'm outside smoking a cigarette, talking to my best friend on the phone who lives in El Paso.

And I'm just talking to him, telling him about what I've been up to. And I look over to Jesse's apartment and I see the boyfriend carrying bags out of the apartment. He goes back upstairs and starts getting more stuff. And I'm watching the breakup happen. And you're like... Yeah, secretly. In hindsight, I'm like... At the time, I'm like, oh man, that sucks, man. I hope she's okay now.

Should I reach out to her? Yada, yada, yada. Right. I could go for now or like 30 minutes. I don't know. What's the timeline? How, how much longer? Um, but oddly enough, a couple of days after that, she texted me and was like, Hey, I need to go buy a new TV. Can you help me? Like what? Okay. Can you help me financially? Would you mind buying it for me?

She was like, well, you're all into this tech stuff, so you can help me buy a TV. And I was like, yeah, totally. And that was the first time we had hung out alone. And I remember exactly what she was wearing. A brown, like, spaghetti strap tank top thing. A jean skirt. Never seen her wear a skirt up until this point. She had an anklet on. And then she had, like, a brown plaid-type jacket.

flip-flops. And Jessie had this walk that every time I saw her walk, I was like, you know, the knuckle bite? That's, yep, that's what I would do. A classic 2009 outfit. Very period-appropriate. Belongs in a time capsule. Absolutely perfect.

So Jose helps Jesse bring her new TV upstairs, and she asks if he'd like to grab some lunch. But again, he has zero dollars to his name. So even though, yeah, he does want to eat lunch with this girl every day, forever, he says no. And he goes back to his apartment and his sad little folding chair. But luckily, they're in the same friend circle. So they see each other the very next day and again shortly after that. It starts this trend of like, yeah, we're hanging out with all of our friends now.

But they're not there, if that makes sense. It's just Jesse and I. And the casual friend conversation starts turning into flirting. And we start texting more. We start hanging out more. And flirting via text at this point is much more difficult. It's T9. Yes, T9. You have to press a button three times to get to the button. Okay. Predictive text is not good. You're like, why would I say that?

theirs is that kind of relationship that has a quick spark, but a very slow burn. There's an obvious crackling energy between them. They hang out a lot, but always kind of as friends, but also everyone knows they're into each other. And Jesse's nephew, Isaiah lives in her sister's building nearby. So Jose gets to know him too. And the three of them hang out together like a little family. Uh, so we're watching TV and then all of a sudden, um,

Jesse gets a phone call and she answers it on speaker and it's Jesse's mom. And she's like, Hey honey, how you doing? She's like, Oh, nothing. Just hanging out with a whole set and Isaiah. And her mom says something along the lines of like, I'll say, have you told him that you liked them? And Jesse jumps up and runs out of the room.

And, you know, I have to kind of pretend like I didn't hear it, but I kind of, you know, was so happy that I heard it. And then the movie Speed Racer, the live action one, came out. I was a huge Speed Racer guy growing up. And so I was super excited about the live action. And then myself, Isaiah, and Jesse went to the movies, and I tried to sit down next to Jesse, and Isaiah goes, nope, I want to sit next to my auntie Jesse. So...

He's in the middle of us. And Jesse's laughing because she knew. Like, I tried to sit next to her, but now I'm stuck to this snotty-nosed kid while they're enjoying popcorn that I can't because this kid's all coughing on me. So then we, you know, go home. And I stop the car. I walk her and Isaiah to the door, even though we're building away from each other. And we had this awkward, like, stare. And it was like, all right.

for the fun night. And I gave her a hug and I walked away like all sad and weird and, you know, and so I get my house. I sit there and then I T9 text her and say, I really wanted to kiss you. And she's like, I wanted you to. And then I still didn't walk out there to go do it. I mean, that would have been the perfect rom-com moment, right? Truly. She was probably on the balcony. Like, yeah. She's like looking out the window. Yeah. Yeah.

So then we schedule it. Sexual. I like this. This is hot. Okay. Oh, yeah. Do you send like an outlook invite? Jesse and Jose are coupled up officially. And within just a few months, Jose is moving out of his sad, empty apartment and into Jesse's place across the parking lot where he can save money and get on his feet financially.

And when they've been together for two years, he asks her sister's permission for her hand in marriage and he proposes and it's all just so beautiful. Oddly enough, we actually found out we were pregnant exactly on our one-year anniversary. We went to Disneyland for our one-year anniversary and she was not drinking. She just was getting sick. So we kind of suspected, but then we took the test on the 23rd of April and found out she was pregnant.

And we were both excited. And Jessie was just one day like scrolling through baby names. She presented some to me and then she was like, what about Mazzy? And I was like, ooh, I like that. And she's like, do you know Mazzy Star? And I was like, no, I don't. And then she played me the song and I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I do, I do. And basically we named her after Mazzy Star after that song Fade Into You. And it just stuck. And the great thing about that

is we were scheduled to be induced, and we live like 10 minutes away from the hospital, and Fade Into You came on, on the drive to the hospital. We look at each other, and we're all, yep. She picked her name. Yep, this is it. 22 months later, Mazzy gets a little sister, Luna. I will never say she's an accident baby, because she's not, but we just were not expecting. She was surprising. Yeah, very surprising. And she was actually born on Halloween, which was surprising as well.

The foursome life was great because whenever Jessie was overwhelmed with work or anything like that, she would take one of them out to go do errands and stuff. And in hindsight, it wasn't because she needed to do errands. It was because she wanted to spend time with them. And at that point, she spent a lot of time with Mazzy. And she wanted me to create that bond with Luna and

just in case, you know, she's stuck at work and all that good stuff. And we would go do fun activities like Butterfly Wonderland and random aquariums. And we would go visit Janae and go visit Jesse's family in New Mexico. Like, it was just fun. I mean, road trips were hard. But you know what? I don't remember the hard parts. I remember the funny parts of those road trips. So...

Part of this is the shock, maybe. And part of it is that the magic of love, of death, is that it can diffuse the light of our memories, contextualize them. Because really, a screaming kid in the back of the car, stressing out over what to eat for dinner, or whose mom said what, or fuming over an email from a coworker, those little things feel so insignificant in the light of what was.

A family, a partnership, the impossibility and inevitability that two people would move to the same place, would cross paths over and over, would find their way to one another, would turn on the radio to hear the song they named their daughter after. They were supposed to be four. It's been 10 months since Jesse's death when Jose and I meet in line for a flight, when we sit together during that flight and just cry together.

By the time this episode airs, it will have been more than a year. And a year is no time at all in all the time in the world. And in that time, Jose and Mazzy and Luna have had to learn how to become three. Can you braid hair now? Not the best. Not the best. It's gotten to the point where Mazzy's like, Dad, just stop. But you know what? I'm trying. The world sucks with single dads, I'll tell you that much. Family restrooms need to be more of a thing.

When a person we love dies, some of us, if we're lucky enough, still see and feel them in our lives long after they're gone. We see them in our children, in the way our kids walk, or in the scrunched up face they make when they get mad. We feel them in the fall wind as the leaves crunch beneath our feet. And for Jose and his girls... Owls pop up now. There are times when we're having just a rough day, you know, as grievers have.

an owl would just show up in our backyard. And it's so welcoming when the girls walk out there quietly to not disturb it. And you just hear them ever so slightly. Hi, mommy. You know, a couple months after Jesse passed away, our dog passed away that we've had for 12 years. And so the girls were very hurt about that. And there's two owls. And you know, they're like, that one's mommy, that one's wicked. And I was having a hard time one night. And

A nice cool breeze comes by and then there's the owl. Easter, we're all just hanging out. We have our close friends over who absolutely love Jesse and Jesse loved them. There's the owl. The first time I saw the owl show up randomly when I needed her, I laughed because in my mind I could hear Jesse saying, I told you so.

This is Terrible. Thanks for asking. I'm Nora McInerney. Our production team is Marcel Malakibu, Jordan Turgeon, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, and Megan Palmer. Jose, you are such an angel, such a wonderful man. Thank you so much for sharing Jesse and your love with us. I am so, so glad that I flew on that plane and that you tapped me on the shoulder and I didn't snap at you.

Because I was ready to. I really was. I was ready to be like, oh, my God, what? What? What now? OK. Terrible Things for Asking is a production of APM Studios at American Public Media. Executive producer and editor Beth Perlman. Executives in charge Lily Kim, Alex Schaefer, Joanne Griffith.

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