October 11, 2021 • 40 mins
Susan Messing and Michael McCarthy were a beloved couple in the Chicago comedy scene. Michael passed away from cancer in 2020. As part of Susan’s grieving process, she began to sift through the 50 or so boxes of his writing that he had left behind for her. What followed was a complicated grief.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. Well, Michael placed it very succinctly in my lap
by texting me one day and he said, stop farting around, Messing.
(00:37):
Life is short. We should be together and you're perfect.
What are you going to do with that? I said, well,
you could take it slow, and he said, yeah, we
could take it slow, but I'm going to marry the
fuck out of you one day, which is the way
to talk to me about marriage, because the idea of
marriage is a quarrant to me. I come from divorce.
I had a divorce myself. It wasn't particularly interesting to me.
(01:00):
And for some reason, his words, he is a writer,
His words hit me and I bit. That's Susan and Messing.
She's a comedian and an improviser who performs all over Chicago.
Nine years ago, she married another comedian, Michael McCarthy, a
beloved member of Chicago's Second City and a former writer
(01:21):
for Saturday Night Live. Tragically, in twenty twenty, Michael passed
away from a rare form of cancer. Michael had left
Susan with fifty or so boxes of his writings and journals,
and as part of her grieving process, Susan was intent
on honoring his memory in his life as a writer.
So she started to sift through the boxes he had
(01:41):
left behind for her. I did start discovering this guy
who was not for me, not for the world, for
the world, he was exactly who he was. But for
my personal relationship. I was getting the sinking feeling of oh,
the saint, the guy I thought he was. On today's
(02:02):
episode a story of what happens when you opened Pandora's box.
I'm doctor Maya Schunker. I'm a cognitive scientist who studies
how and why we change. On this show, you'll hear
from people who've navigated extraordinary change in their lives, and
my hope is that you'll leave each episode thinking differently
(02:23):
about change in your own life. This is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change. So, Susan,
(02:47):
you and Michael had known each other for twenty five
years before getting together, and I'm wondering what led you
to finally date. I had seen Michael in two thousand
and six or seven. He was teaching at Chicago. He
had taken a job as a radio host on a
morning show, a comedy show, and I had asked my
friend Kate, I said, what's up with Michael mccarth and
(03:09):
she said, Oh, he's going through a divorce. And I'm like, oh,
I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pull. But
because I wouldn't, because after a divorce, that's when people
are bitter and shitty, and you don't want to be
a part of that, at least in any solid sense.
But I always used to flirt with him, and I
had always thought Michael was out of my league. He
was way too smart and kind and funny, and way
(03:33):
too attractive for me. He's a hot silver fox. I
was smitten when he decided to put his attentions toward me.
I was like, I'd be an idiot not to be
with this human. I'm curious to know what happens when
two comedy writers get together and get married. I would
have loved to be a fly on the wall at
your wedding. What was that like? We're people in stitches
(03:56):
over your vows. Michael's vows to me were just insane.
He's the writer in the family, I'm an improviser, I'm
I'm a talk vomit. And then you have to kind
of discover what was for breakfast. Michael would write and
rewrite and then flip it around and then say, if
this joke was easier, you know, I mean, he was
very tactical about that, and so, I mean, we pretended
(04:20):
to do a flip who went first, but honestly I
had to open because Michael was the headliner. Absolutely. Do
you remember any specific vows that he shared? Yeah? He
Oh boy, he's beautiful. First of all, he promised me
his undying fidelity, not fidelity when it was convenient, not
(04:40):
French fidelity, which big laugh. He promised that he would
do anything to take care of me, whether he had
to be a Walmart reader or work in development in NBC,
which was big for the writers. They all got a
chuckle out of that. He said, whoever, fox with you?
Fox with me? Oh, he's just so glib and charming,
(05:02):
so charming, and I couldn't believe I was marrying such
a charming man. So and what did you promise him?
I promised to love his special needs cat as if
it were my own. I promised that I would love
him unequivocally because I described him as a true gentleman
and said some nice words in that way. But My
(05:22):
promise to him was to love him unequivocally. That was
it simple. Can you take me back to the day
in twenty eighteen when Michael received a cancer diagnosis who
he had been having trouble beforehand. His left arm felt
like it was encased in ice water, and they discovered
(05:44):
a tumor, a glioblastoma in his spinal cord. They seek
gleoblastomas in brains. Everyone to three weeks. They see this
maybe every one to three years. It's a It's just
a bad tumor in a really bad place. And how
did that express itself? Well? He had to spend a
month in the rehab unit to simply really learn how
(06:06):
to walk again. After they went into his next simply
to get a biopsy. Within minutes of him coming home,
I had had lifts going from the downstairs to the
upstairs to our bedroom and to the basement where his
office was into downstairs. Like all of a sudden, we
were creating ways to navigate this, and I kept thinking,
(06:27):
what is going to make Michael feel like a real boy?
That was so important to me because I could see
this was a guy who used to bound upstairs and
now he could barely walk and we did it quietly.
We tried not to make it a big deal. You
don't want to be in a sick home when someone's sick.
I really was constantly conscious of what would make him
(06:51):
feel as normal as possible. What was his survival rate?
I think you buy time. I don't think you. I
don't think you. They said you might live ten years,
you might live dot but I don't I think they
said that to be nice. I don't think that you
feel you knew that kind of right away that they
were saying that to be nice. Or he worked so
(07:14):
hard in physical therapy to get better. You could see
him going from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane.
He even had a triumphant walk down Lincoln Avenue where
fifty people came and waved Michael signs and blue whistles.
And what I said to Michael as we bought time,
what do you want to do with it? And he
kept saying that all the time, we've bought time. And
(07:38):
again I did not want to deal with the fact
that Michael was handling his mortality while I was preemptively
grieving in my car. Every day I would go to
pick up my daughter at school and I would just weep.
And that's when I called my therapist. I said, m
guess what lot's happened since I've last spoken to you
about You know, seven years ago, I met a hot
silver fox. He is a tumor in his spinal cord,
(08:01):
and now I'm grieving in the car go. So that's
kind of the way I took it. I realized that
my strength at this point was admitting where I was
super weak and where I was week was I wanted
to be super present for my husband right now, and
I felt that I was planning his memorial in my
brain and that was just not okay for me. So
(08:21):
in addition to physically caring for him, one way in
which you expressed your care was to shelter him from
your own grief. Is that right? Yeah? We tried to
keep it light. We tried to keep it super super light.
What impact did his diagnosis have on your relationship? I mean,
in what ways did your dynamics as a couple shift?
Who Well, when you're the nurse, it changes, doesn't it
(08:44):
It changes a lot. Where you're going to have to
be responsible for urine samples and medicine and all sorts.
Of stuff, and I tried to keep it more wifely.
I pretended it was wifely, but I knew. I knew
it just shifted into nurse mode, full nurse mode, and
(09:06):
I would ask for support from people, and that that
was I can't begin to tell you how many people
helped us. Everyone loved Michael. Everyone loved Michael. He was
a good human being. That was probably what's that book
When Bad Things Happened to Great People. That was Michael.
And Michael started writing these beautiful essays on Facebook. He
(09:29):
called them beloveds where they were kind of garrison keeler
folksy musings on life and cancer and all that. And
he actually helped a lot of people during that time
where he himself was struggling, you know, and I just
tried to remain in the background. Did you expect him
to be so open and vulnerable and public about his
(09:53):
cancer diagnosis? First of all, I don't think there'd be
any way to hide it. He was profoundly disabled. And
this is a guy who had gotten a black belt
in taekwondo at age fifty three. So this was a
really active, vibrant human being who was all of a
sudden hunched over like an old man with a puffy
(10:15):
steroid face. And Michael always said he was put on
this planet to help a few people and learn a
few things. So I think he used this as an
opportunity to kind of address his mortality in a way
that was less scary for other people and ultimately for himself. Yeah,
(10:36):
was there a very definitive moment where you realized my
husband is about to die? Had you been holding onto
some hope before? Then? As I'm watching him every day,
even though he's animated and his mind was completely all there,
I noticed him getting weaker and weaker. There was one
point where he was standing up in between the bars
(11:00):
and he walked with help with like two or three people,
and I thought, we're going backwards. In the meantime, doctor
and a social worker walked into Michael's room and said,
we invite you to consider strongly hospice. And Michael let
out a sound that I'll never forget because it sounded
(11:21):
like he thought, oh shit, this is the end of
the line. And I said, no, honey, no, no no, no, no,
I'm sorry. We don't have to go into hospice. We
can stand palliative. Because it was the word hospice that
all of a sudden it resonated with him, and so
I went in the car and I called up doctor Fran,
a friend of ours, and I said, Michael still wants
to fight. Fran insisted that there was a possibility at
(11:44):
another hospital, but as we're getting ready to get him
out of the hospital, he said to me, well, when
we go to the hospital, can I go on a gurney?
And I turned to and I said, Michael, I don't
think we can do that, sweetheart. I think you have
to be strong enough. This is a pandemic and people
aren't going to treat you until you're stronger. So I
used the word stronger, but I knew he was going backwards,
(12:05):
and so we got him home and after that I
knew this was the road down. And he died two
and a half weeks after he came home. He was
completely The sounds so weird, but thank goodness, he was
completely paralyzed when he died, because he did feel no pain.
He mentioned that Michael was fully paralyzed at his passing,
(12:26):
but his brain was very much still alive. What were
those final moments like, Well, I would say the last
conversation that anybody would consider Ah, that's sweet or profound
or whatever. As I said to Michael, how will I know?
How will I know that you're with me? And he said,
(12:47):
you'll feel me around you. And then I said why
did you choose me? And he said you are awesome?
You are awesome beyond words, and I thought, God, damn it,
you sweet writer right till the end. Good job, that's
a punch gut wow. Wow. How do you process that moment?
(13:09):
I think I had worked very, very hard on my
grieving beforehand, but for me, I was simply sad. I
was simply sad, and I don't think I've ever lived
in sadness like that before. You said earlier that Michael
(13:35):
had left you with fifty boxes of his writings, and
I can't imagine how raw and vulnerable you must have
felt in the days and weeks following his death. So
did it take you some time to muster up the
strength to open up that first box? I mean, what
was that process? Like? No? I kind of started it
pretty quickly because I guess Michael was so organized, and
(13:57):
I really wanted to honor his possessions. I didn't want
to just throw them and dumpster and say to hell
with it. Now. If Michael had said to me, Susan,
I got fifty plus years of journals and all this crap,
just get rid of it, I would have. But he
was a word hoarder. He was a writer, and he
needed to see. Even when he was sick and he
was working on a four books, every time he even
(14:19):
made changes, he would print them up and fan them
in a beautiful, pleasing OCD way on his coffee table.
And so I thought, this guy takes the stuff seriously,
even though I don't. That doesn't mean I can't be
incredibly respectful. So I kind of started it with an
idea of, oh, I'll just go through the boxes. And
(14:40):
then I started reading his journals. And as I'm reading
his words, which he entrusted me with, I'm starting to
feel sad because it seems to me that he struggled
more than I thought. Issues with sex and with debt
kept coming back again and again, and I don't you know,
(15:00):
it seemed that he struggled with addiction. And he was
an alcoholic who was twenty plus a year sober. But
it's that porn and debt are right next door to that,
and he struggled with that and I never knew of that,
so as I'm reading it, I'm kind of thinking to myself,
what the hell like? This is very new to me.
(15:23):
And not only that, he had told me that two
important relationships he had they had cheated on him. And
I thought, well, I'll never cheat on you. And you
also promised your dying fidelity, not fidelity one's convenient, not
French fidelity. So I thought to myself, oh, well, I'll
never cheat on you, so this is not an issue.
But what I discovered was Michael was constantly scrambling. He'd
(15:44):
break up with somebody after he started dating someone else,
so I guess the kids call it cheating. I did
start discovering this guy who was not for me, not
for the world. For the world, he was exactly who
he was, but for my personal relationship, I was getting
this sinking feeling of oh, this the same the guy
(16:08):
I thought he was. But then again, if Michael had said,
don't read my word, Susan for all him out there,
you know, I would have absolutely followed his directive. But
because my friend Paula said to me, while Susan, I
think he wants you to know, I thought to myself, no, well,
no matter how confusing this is or maybe even hurtful,
I am going to have to plod through this in
(16:29):
waiters and I'll slog through the mud. Because Paula thought
that he would want me to know him totally, because
otherwise she thought he would have cleaned up his side
of the street. Right. And so one day, when I
was going through the boxes, I found an old list
of passcodes and I looked at them and there was
(16:50):
one number three to four zeven zero, and I thought, well,
that's not the Jewish New Year, that's a couple of
decades ago, that's not his mom's birthday. It just was
sitting there. It didn't say phone password. And I'm thinking
to myself, the one password I have not gotten from
my husband is his phone password. It was not on
the spreadsheet which somebody had filled out for me of
(17:13):
all of his passwords. Because I knew I needed, ultimately
to deal with Sears warranty and Anderson Past Control or
whatever the case may be, the bills that he paid online.
I wanted to make sure that was taken care of.
So I just put it in the phone and it
opened up, and when it opened up, I was so
grateful because I thought to myself, Michael has friends who
(17:34):
are not of my generation that might not have known
about his death and all the accolades and the oh bits,
and they hadn't seen that. So there were people that
I thought to myself, I can tell them now that
he's dead and feel good about that. So I opened
it up in the top. The top thread was with
(17:56):
a woman named Meredith, and it started March thirty first,
and he died on April eighth. And he said, how's everything.
I have profound neuropathy and it's making it hard to type.
I love you. And then she said, baby, baby, baby,
I love you so much. Prayer hands, prayer hands, hearts, hearts, hearts.
(18:18):
And then she said, baby, could you send me fifty
dollars for childcare? I hate to ask, baby, baby, baby hearts, hearts, hearts,
and I thought childcare, and I'm like, does he have
another child I don't know about, Like what's going on here?
And then I keep scrolling down and she says, baby,
thank you so much. Baby. What would I do without you? Baby? Babies, babies,
(18:42):
And I'm staring at this and this horrible sinking feeling
comes over me as I'm doing this. This is slow motion,
and I still alone in this basement about ten feet away,
and said, oh no, because as the days went on,
she asked for more and more money, and I'm I'm
the keeper of the flame, and I'm thinking, well, that's
(19:03):
the day he stopped eating, and that's the day that
pills went into liquids, and that's the day he died.
You're still asking for money on the day that he died.
And so I wrote her on Michael's phone, which I
can only imagine how jarring that is. And I just
wrote to her, I said, who are you? My husband
is dead. We'll be back in a moment. With a
(19:30):
slight change of plans. Susan had discovered that her husband, Michael,
was not the person she thought he was, and that
he'd been communicating with another woman through his final days,
a woman named Meredith. Susan desperately needed answers, so she
(19:54):
texted her. I said, who are you? My husband died
of cancer. And then I went to his computer. It's
the first time I've ever done that, plugged in his
password and he had pretty much scrub to his computer,
but he found a couple of choice moments from twenty
seventeen which means he was doing this before he was sick,
(20:18):
and one of them was super porny and the other
was from Michael where he's like, I guess I'm going
to have to erase some of our videos. Ha ha ha.
I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, this is not happening.
The worst case scenario is happening. It's happening, and it's
(20:41):
happening to me. I just nursed him to his death
and he's and now I'm grieving in an international pandemic
and it's happening to me. And now this woman isn't biting.
She's not going to say anything because now I went
into his Chase account and found that she had sent
him a significant He had sent her a significant amount
of money from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty when he died,
(21:04):
and I'd pretty much quit my life to care for him.
I had been teaching for I Owe the Annoyance the
Second City University of Chicago school at Steppenwolf DePaul University
and around the world, and performing as well in different
theaters every single week, and I just said I'm done.
And it was easy to say I'm done, because when
(21:25):
the shit hits the fan. It's very easy to say,
this is your priority. Very easy. So when Meredith would
not bite, because why would she, because I was scaring
the shit out of her from a dead man's cell phone,
I said, look, I'm so sorry if I scared you,
I bring you peace. I simply need to know answers
(21:48):
because I don't have answers and I can't ask him anymore.
So I was wondering if you would speak to me,
and she bit, she bit, and I appreciate it. I
appreciate it. She was very brave. So I spoke to her.
And she's a single mother in Hawaii, and no, he
(22:10):
is not the father of her daughter. And I said,
what did he say about us? First of all, she
apologized up and down in sideways. She pretty much fessed
up to being a petty grifter because I had also
by then found porn threads of theirs that you know,
I was like these for being such a good writer,
you're a shitty porn writer, Michael, God bless. But she
(22:32):
became very human to me, very quickly, very human to me.
And she said that he told her that I was
bisexual in an open marriage, and I was like shit,
I'd be getting laid right now if that were true,
you know, right like in no, it's not my thing.
And by the end she sort of tried to meet
to it by saying that Michael promised to get her
a writing agent, and then he said, no, let's write
(22:56):
a porn novel together because we'll make a lot of
money and help our families. And I, again, I just
tried my best to keep up with her. I recorded
it like a bad podcast. It was over three hours.
I felt like good cop, bad cop because I kind
of tried to tell her, you know, ask her the
same question in seven different ways. And I guess she
(23:19):
felt that the truth would set her free, and so
I appreciated it. And after we spoke, I texted her
that she was really brave because she was because it's
hard to admit when you make choices that you know
somewhere in your recesses aren't okay too. They're just not
(23:41):
okay because she was using him and he was using her.
And I said to her, I think you guys canceled
each other out. You know, why do you think Michael
didn't work to hide all of this from you before
he passed away. He could have just asked you throughout
these boxes, throughout the passwords. You know, I think sometimes
(24:04):
maybe I don't know because I haven't died before, but
I don't think men think they're going to die sometimes
times I see, I don't think I was also asking
you to throw those away. Maybe psychologically, was him surrendering
to his death right. Yeah, that's a good way to
put it. Good semantic adjustment. Good enow' I'm just postulating here.
(24:25):
It's a good postulating. Take it. Look, I'm coming to
you for as much clarity and healing as as as
this story is bizarre and salacious, and I was compelled
to read because I needed to know his truth. I
needed to know his truth, and so I put the
most vulnerable, the most I don't even know what the
(24:47):
adjective is at this point, but the hardest stuff went
into one box and I called that the box of doom.
And it was just in my cold storage, near his ashes.
And a friend said to me, you don't want this anymore.
You don't want this anymore. So I borrowed my neighbors
Sola Stove. I hope you get like some sort of
(25:08):
endorsement from her soulas Stove and I burned them all,
and I actually one of the few things I actually
put on social media was I said, what no longer
serves you? You already need to know what you know.
It was an indication to my friends who did know
the story that I was not going to keep the
weight of his physical words anymore, because again, if I
(25:29):
wasn't going to use them against him, and I already
knew everything I needed to know, there was no reason
to keep them anymore. Yeah, at one point, when I
was snarky and shitty, I actually had to give his
ashes to his niece for safekeeping for a while because
I was afraid that I would dump them in an
alley and promptly forget which alley it was, or I
would put them in an overhead compartment in a plane
(25:52):
with no identifying information to fly away. And I was like, no,
you're an asshole, Susan. You can't do that. So I
kept So I did take them back, and then I
gently brought him over to Montrose Harbor on Lake Michigan
early in the morning, and that same day that I
and stuff, I also gently released him into the lake.
I'd forgotten that I had the right as the keeper
(26:15):
of that to respectfully release him. I mean, I think
what you've described is textbook definition of what it means
to have complicated grief and trying to put myself in
your shoes, I'm thinking. You know, death of any kind
presents so many unexpected changes for a person, Right, Yes,
(26:38):
we have to ask ourselves all sorts of questions, like
how are we going to live without this person? How
will we feel day to day? How will we change
in their absence? Right? Will we become different people? Right?
Our lives have morphed together, and it's hard to imagine
layering on top of all of that, this change, this revelation. Yeah,
(26:59):
I'm not just grieving my husband during the age of COVID.
I'm grieving the guy I thought he was so it's
too headed. And I remember touching his ashes one day saying,
I just want to remember. I'm trying to remember that
I love you. And Michael and I used to talk
right after he died. Then he kind of disappeared for
(27:19):
a while, and he said, very clearly, you do remember,
That's why you're sad, because there was so much joy
and so much heartache, and the only people who really
saw me lose it and kind of keep spiraling. Were
my best friends, and they were they were magnificent in
(27:40):
reminding me to reframe a lot of this and to
not blame myself. That was the thing that they worried
the most about, was that I would blame myself for it. Yeah.
A common refrain we hear when there's betrayal of some
kind is did I even know who this person was?
(28:03):
And the truth is, I imagine you probably did know
a lot about who Michael was, right. I imagine there
were many moments of genuine honesty that you shared. But
I wonder like, are you able to appreciate or are
you able to see that complexity, that potential complexity against
the backdrop of such a large deceit? Yes, because the
(28:27):
minute you understand the duality and people and why they
are the way they are, I mean, is that right?
Is it possible to have that duality and both are true?
Because I am not black and white in my thinking,
and I've always gone toward the gray. And even in
figuring him out, we have a banner over our front
(28:49):
door that says do hard things, and I was like, well,
this isn't going to be easy, but I'm going to
do hard things, And so I go toward the danger,
and I go toward what's difficult to understand and try
to make sense out of it. And again, I did
not want to vilify or to mean my husband, even
at my worst with my best friends. And he was
an asshole, you know what I mean? Because he wasn't.
(29:12):
He was a guy who did feel profound struggles in
his heart and in his brain and in his actions.
It showed up again and again in his writing. Yeah,
you know, your story makes me reflect on how much
each of us values knowing the truth and life. Would
(29:32):
you have preferred to just remained ignorant of all this?
If you could go back, would you not have opened
the boxes? Tell me, tell me more about that. Part
of my honoring him was honoring his directive. But in
order to honor his things, I had to make sure
that I looked at his things. Yeah, but's Susan, I mean,
(29:53):
you're you're you're talking about still wanting to honor, to
honor him and honor his boxes. In my view, he's
not deserving of that honor right now. And so I
want to know from your perspective, from Susan's psychological perspect active,
was it better for you to have known that this
was the case. People fall on different parts of the
(30:14):
spectrum in terms of seeking truth versus protecting their own
sanity and psychological well being. So I'm just wondering where
you fall on this spectrum. I was betrayed in my
first marriage, and I was told I was a crazy
pregnant woman, and I was told I was postpartum. I'm like,
I don't feel like a crazy pregnant woman. I don't
feel postpartum. And then in this marriage again, the same
(30:37):
thing happened, and the common denominator is me. So for me,
when they say the truth will set you free, in
my case, it's only going to help me traverse a
future path of honesty and listen to my red flags.
Because I was right. I'd love to have been crazy,
but I wasn't. I was right both times, and I
(30:59):
was the common denominator you're saying. When you raise concerns
with Michael, he would say, oh, you're just being crazy, Susan.
He would be as dismissive in that way. So you
were led to believe you were the problem. Absolutely, And
now I'm starting to understand why certain behaviors in our
marriage made no sense to me. Sex was really hard
(31:21):
for me to talk about, and said, what happened to
our sex life? And this is a man who courted
me with sex and coach bags. I don't know why
the coach bags. By the way, I have plenty if
he'd like some. You can really only use one purse
at one time. But that I had said, what happened
to our sex life? But again, I wanted to be
super gentle with Michael because this is a man of
(31:42):
a certain age, you know, I thought to myself, testosterone changes.
Men are visual creatures. I'll go back to boot camp.
But I wish I could have given you a SoundBite.
But because he couldn't give me one, I just kind
of thought, oh well. And then he got sick in
twenty eighteen, and I thought, you're an asshole, Susan. He
was sick the whole time. You're just an asshole. I
(32:05):
always put it on myself. I always wanted to make
sure that he never felt less than I had to
always be very gentle with him because his father was
so critical of him growing up that I felt I
don't want to add to his plate. I'm his wife.
I want to be one of the good guys, not
one of the bad guys. So at the very least
(32:28):
I wasn't crazy, And at the most I got to
understand a man in death that I didn't get the
opportunity to understand in life. And yes, I could have
been pithy and just stopped fighting around messing life as short.
We should be together and you're perfect, And it could
have been at the end, you're awesome. You're awesome beyond words.
But that's a story he wrote, and that isn't the truth.
(32:50):
And I do appreciate the truth, no matter how difficult
it is to hear or to discover. How have you
changed through this process? I tend to remember that people
who on the surface might seem rude or inconsiderate or whatever,
(33:16):
that they are going through something that I don't know about.
And I've usually pretty much given people the benefit of
the doubt. But now I really give people the benefit
of the doubt. I really do. I'm just interesting because
you could equally imagine someone it's likely to imagine someone
who no longer gives people the benefit of the doubt
(33:39):
because you had given Michael the benefit of the doubt
and then you were betrayed. I was reminded though. I
was doing a zoom call to China and I knocked
over by mistake all these office supplies in a box,
and I was like, are you kidding me? I'm going
to start off my day like this, goddamn it, you know.
And then I looked and there's this little piece of
paper and it was in with Michael's office supplies, which
(34:02):
he had a myriad of, and it says, husband, I
love you. And it was a note for me which
I had left him all over the damn house. And
I thought I had burned all of them in the fire.
I thought there's nothing left to discover. And what I
discovered was husband, I love you. So you know, dummy,
it all ends up with love. And maybe I grieve,
(34:23):
and maybe I'm angry because I loved him, And yes,
I kept my side of the street clean as best
I could through our marriage. And I would have liked
to know of a set of rules that that involved
me that I was not apparently privy too, so that
can hurt. But now the way I love is and
(34:47):
maybe he taught me this because he didn't have the
ability to love freely and honestly. Now I love freely
and honestly, so he gave me a real gift. His
betrayal gave me a really big gift. And this is
my discovery in this moment that it was a gift. Sorry,
I'm just gonna get a tissue now, of course. So beautiful, Wow,
(35:14):
tell me, can you just tell me about your new love.
I've loved my friend about Fisher for thirty years. He's
been a great friend, and something changed and now he
looks at me the way I feel about him, and
it's a super honest and candid love. And sometimes I
have to be super careful when I answer a question
(35:35):
only because it's never been asked of me before. You know,
I've never been asked those kind of questions, questions everything
from well, I mean, one of the first things I
said to him was once we started dating, was what's
your greatest shame? Like? Because I was like, what are
(35:55):
you going past words? Oh? He point blank said, this
is my debt, this is what's on my desk. Feel
free to look through all of it. Here's the people.
I mean. He couldn't have been more honest with me
because our friendship has he's felt he has felt very
responsible for the choices that he's made in his life,
good and bad. He's felt very responsible for them, and that,
(36:19):
to me, honesty and truth is sexy. Yeah, it's super sexy.
So I'm there now. Oh I love that so much.
It fills my heart with warmth. Final question, why did
you decide to share the story with me now? I
am sharing this now because I feel like it will
(36:42):
support my healing and perhaps support others. Secrets are toxic
and they eat at you, and there is always someone
who will listen. And when you bring darkness into the light,
it is no longer dark, and you have red flags
chase that because your gut is right. So and I'm
(37:05):
also your poster child because also I'm healing on the
other side, and I can be your poster child of
hope because if I can love again after going through
a real shit storm, I think anybody can. So when
you say people become bitter after their divorces, I say, no,
they become smarter. And I'm not saying that you're not
going to go through a bitter path, but all these
(37:27):
feelings are temporary, and I have to have learned something
that I can pass on to make somebody else's path
a little easier. Well, here's my question. Is it so
(37:57):
unique to find out after someone's dead of their betrayal.
It really isn't, although it would have been nice to
find out during the time he was sick that it
had happened because my friend, he said, you could just
call up Meredith and go, girl, come get your boyfriend.
He is sick. You know what I mean? Like we again,
(38:18):
My friends are awesome. Hey, thanks for tuning in. I
wanted to let you know that next week we're going
to be mixing things up a bit. Recently, I had
to confront an unexpected change of my own. It's a
deeply personal story, one I never planned to share so publicly,
(38:38):
but then I realize that's kind of what this show
is all about. So I asked my producer to turn
on the mic and interview me. My heart sank. I
was like, you have got to be kidding me. How
is this happening again? Like on exactly the same day
as last time? Like it just it didn't make any sense.
(38:59):
Tune in next week to hear about when life threw
me my own Slight Change of Plans. A Slight Change
of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me
Maya Schunker. The best part of creating this show is
(39:21):
getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This
includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor,
Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek, our associate producer,
and Mia Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our
delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
(39:42):
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there. Thanks also to Laurie Santos,
Michael Lewis, Ramsay Cabaz and Scott Menki who have been
wonderful friends and incredible supporters of this show, and of
course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can
follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor
(40:03):
Maya Schunker, and please remember to subscribe, share and rate
the show to help get the word out. Seeing next
week
Pushkin. Well, Michael placed it very succinctly in my lap
by texting me one day and he said, stop farting around, Messing.
(00:37):
Life is short. We should be together and you're perfect.
What are you going to do with that? I said, well,
you could take it slow, and he said, yeah, we
could take it slow, but I'm going to marry the
fuck out of you one day, which is the way
to talk to me about marriage, because the idea of
marriage is a quarrant to me. I come from divorce.
I had a divorce myself. It wasn't particularly interesting to me.
(01:00):
And for some reason, his words, he is a writer,
His words hit me and I bit. That's Susan and Messing.
She's a comedian and an improviser who performs all over Chicago.
Nine years ago, she married another comedian, Michael McCarthy, a
beloved member of Chicago's Second City and a former writer
(01:21):
for Saturday Night Live. Tragically, in twenty twenty, Michael passed
away from a rare form of cancer. Michael had left
Susan with fifty or so boxes of his writings and journals,
and as part of her grieving process, Susan was intent
on honoring his memory in his life as a writer.
So she started to sift through the boxes he had
(01:41):
left behind for her. I did start discovering this guy
who was not for me, not for the world, for
the world, he was exactly who he was. But for
my personal relationship. I was getting the sinking feeling of oh,
the saint, the guy I thought he was. On today's
(02:02):
episode a story of what happens when you opened Pandora's box.
I'm doctor Maya Schunker. I'm a cognitive scientist who studies
how and why we change. On this show, you'll hear
from people who've navigated extraordinary change in their lives, and
my hope is that you'll leave each episode thinking differently
(02:23):
about change in your own life. This is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change. So, Susan,
(02:47):
you and Michael had known each other for twenty five
years before getting together, and I'm wondering what led you
to finally date. I had seen Michael in two thousand
and six or seven. He was teaching at Chicago. He
had taken a job as a radio host on a
morning show, a comedy show, and I had asked my
friend Kate, I said, what's up with Michael mccarth and
(03:09):
she said, Oh, he's going through a divorce. And I'm like, oh,
I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pull. But
because I wouldn't, because after a divorce, that's when people
are bitter and shitty, and you don't want to be
a part of that, at least in any solid sense.
But I always used to flirt with him, and I
had always thought Michael was out of my league. He
was way too smart and kind and funny, and way
(03:33):
too attractive for me. He's a hot silver fox. I
was smitten when he decided to put his attentions toward me.
I was like, I'd be an idiot not to be
with this human. I'm curious to know what happens when
two comedy writers get together and get married. I would
have loved to be a fly on the wall at
your wedding. What was that like? We're people in stitches
(03:56):
over your vows. Michael's vows to me were just insane.
He's the writer in the family, I'm an improviser, I'm
I'm a talk vomit. And then you have to kind
of discover what was for breakfast. Michael would write and
rewrite and then flip it around and then say, if
this joke was easier, you know, I mean, he was
very tactical about that, and so, I mean, we pretended
(04:20):
to do a flip who went first, but honestly I
had to open because Michael was the headliner. Absolutely. Do
you remember any specific vows that he shared? Yeah? He
Oh boy, he's beautiful. First of all, he promised me
his undying fidelity, not fidelity when it was convenient, not
(04:40):
French fidelity, which big laugh. He promised that he would
do anything to take care of me, whether he had
to be a Walmart reader or work in development in NBC,
which was big for the writers. They all got a
chuckle out of that. He said, whoever, fox with you?
Fox with me? Oh, he's just so glib and charming,
(05:02):
so charming, and I couldn't believe I was marrying such
a charming man. So and what did you promise him?
I promised to love his special needs cat as if
it were my own. I promised that I would love
him unequivocally because I described him as a true gentleman
and said some nice words in that way. But My
(05:22):
promise to him was to love him unequivocally. That was
it simple. Can you take me back to the day
in twenty eighteen when Michael received a cancer diagnosis who
he had been having trouble beforehand. His left arm felt
like it was encased in ice water, and they discovered
(05:44):
a tumor, a glioblastoma in his spinal cord. They seek
gleoblastomas in brains. Everyone to three weeks. They see this
maybe every one to three years. It's a It's just
a bad tumor in a really bad place. And how
did that express itself? Well? He had to spend a
month in the rehab unit to simply really learn how
(06:06):
to walk again. After they went into his next simply
to get a biopsy. Within minutes of him coming home,
I had had lifts going from the downstairs to the
upstairs to our bedroom and to the basement where his
office was into downstairs. Like all of a sudden, we
were creating ways to navigate this, and I kept thinking,
(06:27):
what is going to make Michael feel like a real boy?
That was so important to me because I could see
this was a guy who used to bound upstairs and
now he could barely walk and we did it quietly.
We tried not to make it a big deal. You
don't want to be in a sick home when someone's sick.
I really was constantly conscious of what would make him
(06:51):
feel as normal as possible. What was his survival rate?
I think you buy time. I don't think you. I
don't think you. They said you might live ten years,
you might live dot but I don't I think they
said that to be nice. I don't think that you
feel you knew that kind of right away that they
were saying that to be nice. Or he worked so
(07:14):
hard in physical therapy to get better. You could see
him going from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane.
He even had a triumphant walk down Lincoln Avenue where
fifty people came and waved Michael signs and blue whistles.
And what I said to Michael as we bought time,
what do you want to do with it? And he
kept saying that all the time, we've bought time. And
(07:38):
again I did not want to deal with the fact
that Michael was handling his mortality while I was preemptively
grieving in my car. Every day I would go to
pick up my daughter at school and I would just weep.
And that's when I called my therapist. I said, m
guess what lot's happened since I've last spoken to you
about You know, seven years ago, I met a hot
silver fox. He is a tumor in his spinal cord,
(08:01):
and now I'm grieving in the car go. So that's
kind of the way I took it. I realized that
my strength at this point was admitting where I was
super weak and where I was week was I wanted
to be super present for my husband right now, and
I felt that I was planning his memorial in my
brain and that was just not okay for me. So
(08:21):
in addition to physically caring for him, one way in
which you expressed your care was to shelter him from
your own grief. Is that right? Yeah? We tried to
keep it light. We tried to keep it super super light.
What impact did his diagnosis have on your relationship? I mean,
in what ways did your dynamics as a couple shift?
Who Well, when you're the nurse, it changes, doesn't it
(08:44):
It changes a lot. Where you're going to have to
be responsible for urine samples and medicine and all sorts.
Of stuff, and I tried to keep it more wifely.
I pretended it was wifely, but I knew. I knew
it just shifted into nurse mode, full nurse mode, and
(09:06):
I would ask for support from people, and that that
was I can't begin to tell you how many people
helped us. Everyone loved Michael. Everyone loved Michael. He was
a good human being. That was probably what's that book
When Bad Things Happened to Great People. That was Michael.
And Michael started writing these beautiful essays on Facebook. He
(09:29):
called them beloveds where they were kind of garrison keeler
folksy musings on life and cancer and all that. And
he actually helped a lot of people during that time
where he himself was struggling, you know, and I just
tried to remain in the background. Did you expect him
to be so open and vulnerable and public about his
(09:53):
cancer diagnosis? First of all, I don't think there'd be
any way to hide it. He was profoundly disabled. And
this is a guy who had gotten a black belt
in taekwondo at age fifty three. So this was a
really active, vibrant human being who was all of a
sudden hunched over like an old man with a puffy
(10:15):
steroid face. And Michael always said he was put on
this planet to help a few people and learn a
few things. So I think he used this as an
opportunity to kind of address his mortality in a way
that was less scary for other people and ultimately for himself. Yeah,
(10:36):
was there a very definitive moment where you realized my
husband is about to die? Had you been holding onto
some hope before? Then? As I'm watching him every day,
even though he's animated and his mind was completely all there,
I noticed him getting weaker and weaker. There was one
point where he was standing up in between the bars
(11:00):
and he walked with help with like two or three people,
and I thought, we're going backwards. In the meantime, doctor
and a social worker walked into Michael's room and said,
we invite you to consider strongly hospice. And Michael let
out a sound that I'll never forget because it sounded
(11:21):
like he thought, oh shit, this is the end of
the line. And I said, no, honey, no, no no, no, no,
I'm sorry. We don't have to go into hospice. We
can stand palliative. Because it was the word hospice that
all of a sudden it resonated with him, and so
I went in the car and I called up doctor Fran,
a friend of ours, and I said, Michael still wants
to fight. Fran insisted that there was a possibility at
(11:44):
another hospital, but as we're getting ready to get him
out of the hospital, he said to me, well, when
we go to the hospital, can I go on a gurney?
And I turned to and I said, Michael, I don't
think we can do that, sweetheart. I think you have
to be strong enough. This is a pandemic and people
aren't going to treat you until you're stronger. So I
used the word stronger, but I knew he was going backwards,
(12:05):
and so we got him home and after that I
knew this was the road down. And he died two
and a half weeks after he came home. He was
completely The sounds so weird, but thank goodness, he was
completely paralyzed when he died, because he did feel no pain.
He mentioned that Michael was fully paralyzed at his passing,
(12:26):
but his brain was very much still alive. What were
those final moments like, Well, I would say the last
conversation that anybody would consider Ah, that's sweet or profound
or whatever. As I said to Michael, how will I know?
How will I know that you're with me? And he said,
(12:47):
you'll feel me around you. And then I said why
did you choose me? And he said you are awesome?
You are awesome beyond words, and I thought, God, damn it,
you sweet writer right till the end. Good job, that's
a punch gut wow. Wow. How do you process that moment?
(13:09):
I think I had worked very, very hard on my
grieving beforehand, but for me, I was simply sad. I
was simply sad, and I don't think I've ever lived
in sadness like that before. You said earlier that Michael
(13:35):
had left you with fifty boxes of his writings, and
I can't imagine how raw and vulnerable you must have
felt in the days and weeks following his death. So
did it take you some time to muster up the
strength to open up that first box? I mean, what
was that process? Like? No? I kind of started it
pretty quickly because I guess Michael was so organized, and
(13:57):
I really wanted to honor his possessions. I didn't want
to just throw them and dumpster and say to hell
with it. Now. If Michael had said to me, Susan,
I got fifty plus years of journals and all this crap,
just get rid of it, I would have. But he
was a word hoarder. He was a writer, and he
needed to see. Even when he was sick and he
was working on a four books, every time he even
(14:19):
made changes, he would print them up and fan them
in a beautiful, pleasing OCD way on his coffee table.
And so I thought, this guy takes the stuff seriously,
even though I don't. That doesn't mean I can't be
incredibly respectful. So I kind of started it with an
idea of, oh, I'll just go through the boxes. And
(14:40):
then I started reading his journals. And as I'm reading
his words, which he entrusted me with, I'm starting to
feel sad because it seems to me that he struggled
more than I thought. Issues with sex and with debt
kept coming back again and again, and I don't you know,
(15:00):
it seemed that he struggled with addiction. And he was
an alcoholic who was twenty plus a year sober. But
it's that porn and debt are right next door to that,
and he struggled with that and I never knew of that,
so as I'm reading it, I'm kind of thinking to myself,
what the hell like? This is very new to me.
(15:23):
And not only that, he had told me that two
important relationships he had they had cheated on him. And
I thought, well, I'll never cheat on you. And you
also promised your dying fidelity, not fidelity one's convenient, not
French fidelity. So I thought to myself, oh, well, I'll
never cheat on you, so this is not an issue.
But what I discovered was Michael was constantly scrambling. He'd
(15:44):
break up with somebody after he started dating someone else,
so I guess the kids call it cheating. I did
start discovering this guy who was not for me, not
for the world. For the world, he was exactly who
he was, but for my personal relationship, I was getting
this sinking feeling of oh, this the same the guy
(16:08):
I thought he was. But then again, if Michael had said,
don't read my word, Susan for all him out there,
you know, I would have absolutely followed his directive. But
because my friend Paula said to me, while Susan, I
think he wants you to know, I thought to myself, no, well,
no matter how confusing this is or maybe even hurtful,
I am going to have to plod through this in
(16:29):
waiters and I'll slog through the mud. Because Paula thought
that he would want me to know him totally, because
otherwise she thought he would have cleaned up his side
of the street. Right. And so one day, when I
was going through the boxes, I found an old list
of passcodes and I looked at them and there was
(16:50):
one number three to four zeven zero, and I thought, well,
that's not the Jewish New Year, that's a couple of
decades ago, that's not his mom's birthday. It just was
sitting there. It didn't say phone password. And I'm thinking
to myself, the one password I have not gotten from
my husband is his phone password. It was not on
the spreadsheet which somebody had filled out for me of
(17:13):
all of his passwords. Because I knew I needed, ultimately
to deal with Sears warranty and Anderson Past Control or
whatever the case may be, the bills that he paid online.
I wanted to make sure that was taken care of.
So I just put it in the phone and it
opened up, and when it opened up, I was so
grateful because I thought to myself, Michael has friends who
(17:34):
are not of my generation that might not have known
about his death and all the accolades and the oh bits,
and they hadn't seen that. So there were people that
I thought to myself, I can tell them now that
he's dead and feel good about that. So I opened
it up in the top. The top thread was with
(17:56):
a woman named Meredith, and it started March thirty first,
and he died on April eighth. And he said, how's everything.
I have profound neuropathy and it's making it hard to type.
I love you. And then she said, baby, baby, baby,
I love you so much. Prayer hands, prayer hands, hearts, hearts, hearts.
(18:18):
And then she said, baby, could you send me fifty
dollars for childcare? I hate to ask, baby, baby, baby hearts, hearts, hearts,
and I thought childcare, and I'm like, does he have
another child I don't know about, Like what's going on here?
And then I keep scrolling down and she says, baby,
thank you so much. Baby. What would I do without you? Baby? Babies, babies,
(18:42):
And I'm staring at this and this horrible sinking feeling
comes over me as I'm doing this. This is slow motion,
and I still alone in this basement about ten feet away,
and said, oh no, because as the days went on,
she asked for more and more money, and I'm I'm
the keeper of the flame, and I'm thinking, well, that's
(19:03):
the day he stopped eating, and that's the day that
pills went into liquids, and that's the day he died.
You're still asking for money on the day that he died.
And so I wrote her on Michael's phone, which I
can only imagine how jarring that is. And I just
wrote to her, I said, who are you? My husband
is dead. We'll be back in a moment. With a
(19:30):
slight change of plans. Susan had discovered that her husband, Michael,
was not the person she thought he was, and that
he'd been communicating with another woman through his final days,
a woman named Meredith. Susan desperately needed answers, so she
(19:54):
texted her. I said, who are you? My husband died
of cancer. And then I went to his computer. It's
the first time I've ever done that, plugged in his
password and he had pretty much scrub to his computer,
but he found a couple of choice moments from twenty
seventeen which means he was doing this before he was sick,
(20:18):
and one of them was super porny and the other
was from Michael where he's like, I guess I'm going
to have to erase some of our videos. Ha ha ha.
I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, this is not happening.
The worst case scenario is happening. It's happening, and it's
(20:41):
happening to me. I just nursed him to his death
and he's and now I'm grieving in an international pandemic
and it's happening to me. And now this woman isn't biting.
She's not going to say anything because now I went
into his Chase account and found that she had sent
him a significant He had sent her a significant amount
of money from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty when he died,
(21:04):
and I'd pretty much quit my life to care for him.
I had been teaching for I Owe the Annoyance the
Second City University of Chicago school at Steppenwolf DePaul University
and around the world, and performing as well in different
theaters every single week, and I just said I'm done.
And it was easy to say I'm done, because when
(21:25):
the shit hits the fan. It's very easy to say,
this is your priority. Very easy. So when Meredith would
not bite, because why would she, because I was scaring
the shit out of her from a dead man's cell phone,
I said, look, I'm so sorry if I scared you,
I bring you peace. I simply need to know answers
(21:48):
because I don't have answers and I can't ask him anymore.
So I was wondering if you would speak to me,
and she bit, she bit, and I appreciate it. I
appreciate it. She was very brave. So I spoke to her.
And she's a single mother in Hawaii, and no, he
(22:10):
is not the father of her daughter. And I said,
what did he say about us? First of all, she
apologized up and down in sideways. She pretty much fessed
up to being a petty grifter because I had also
by then found porn threads of theirs that you know,
I was like these for being such a good writer,
you're a shitty porn writer, Michael, God bless. But she
(22:32):
became very human to me, very quickly, very human to me.
And she said that he told her that I was
bisexual in an open marriage, and I was like shit,
I'd be getting laid right now if that were true,
you know, right like in no, it's not my thing.
And by the end she sort of tried to meet
to it by saying that Michael promised to get her
a writing agent, and then he said, no, let's write
(22:56):
a porn novel together because we'll make a lot of
money and help our families. And I, again, I just
tried my best to keep up with her. I recorded
it like a bad podcast. It was over three hours.
I felt like good cop, bad cop because I kind
of tried to tell her, you know, ask her the
same question in seven different ways. And I guess she
(23:19):
felt that the truth would set her free, and so
I appreciated it. And after we spoke, I texted her
that she was really brave because she was because it's
hard to admit when you make choices that you know
somewhere in your recesses aren't okay too. They're just not
(23:41):
okay because she was using him and he was using her.
And I said to her, I think you guys canceled
each other out. You know, why do you think Michael
didn't work to hide all of this from you before
he passed away. He could have just asked you throughout
these boxes, throughout the passwords. You know, I think sometimes
(24:04):
maybe I don't know because I haven't died before, but
I don't think men think they're going to die sometimes
times I see, I don't think I was also asking
you to throw those away. Maybe psychologically, was him surrendering
to his death right. Yeah, that's a good way to
put it. Good semantic adjustment. Good enow' I'm just postulating here.
(24:25):
It's a good postulating. Take it. Look, I'm coming to
you for as much clarity and healing as as as
this story is bizarre and salacious, and I was compelled
to read because I needed to know his truth. I
needed to know his truth, and so I put the
most vulnerable, the most I don't even know what the
(24:47):
adjective is at this point, but the hardest stuff went
into one box and I called that the box of doom.
And it was just in my cold storage, near his ashes.
And a friend said to me, you don't want this anymore.
You don't want this anymore. So I borrowed my neighbors
Sola Stove. I hope you get like some sort of
(25:08):
endorsement from her soulas Stove and I burned them all,
and I actually one of the few things I actually
put on social media was I said, what no longer
serves you? You already need to know what you know.
It was an indication to my friends who did know
the story that I was not going to keep the
weight of his physical words anymore, because again, if I
(25:29):
wasn't going to use them against him, and I already
knew everything I needed to know, there was no reason
to keep them anymore. Yeah, at one point, when I
was snarky and shitty, I actually had to give his
ashes to his niece for safekeeping for a while because
I was afraid that I would dump them in an
alley and promptly forget which alley it was, or I
would put them in an overhead compartment in a plane
(25:52):
with no identifying information to fly away. And I was like, no,
you're an asshole, Susan. You can't do that. So I
kept So I did take them back, and then I
gently brought him over to Montrose Harbor on Lake Michigan
early in the morning, and that same day that I
and stuff, I also gently released him into the lake.
I'd forgotten that I had the right as the keeper
(26:15):
of that to respectfully release him. I mean, I think
what you've described is textbook definition of what it means
to have complicated grief and trying to put myself in
your shoes, I'm thinking. You know, death of any kind
presents so many unexpected changes for a person, Right, Yes,
(26:38):
we have to ask ourselves all sorts of questions, like
how are we going to live without this person? How
will we feel day to day? How will we change
in their absence? Right? Will we become different people? Right?
Our lives have morphed together, and it's hard to imagine
layering on top of all of that, this change, this revelation. Yeah,
(26:59):
I'm not just grieving my husband during the age of COVID.
I'm grieving the guy I thought he was so it's
too headed. And I remember touching his ashes one day saying,
I just want to remember. I'm trying to remember that
I love you. And Michael and I used to talk
right after he died. Then he kind of disappeared for
(27:19):
a while, and he said, very clearly, you do remember,
That's why you're sad, because there was so much joy
and so much heartache, and the only people who really
saw me lose it and kind of keep spiraling. Were
my best friends, and they were they were magnificent in
(27:40):
reminding me to reframe a lot of this and to
not blame myself. That was the thing that they worried
the most about, was that I would blame myself for it. Yeah.
A common refrain we hear when there's betrayal of some
kind is did I even know who this person was?
(28:03):
And the truth is, I imagine you probably did know
a lot about who Michael was, right. I imagine there
were many moments of genuine honesty that you shared. But
I wonder like, are you able to appreciate or are
you able to see that complexity, that potential complexity against
the backdrop of such a large deceit? Yes, because the
(28:27):
minute you understand the duality and people and why they
are the way they are, I mean, is that right?
Is it possible to have that duality and both are true?
Because I am not black and white in my thinking,
and I've always gone toward the gray. And even in
figuring him out, we have a banner over our front
(28:49):
door that says do hard things, and I was like, well,
this isn't going to be easy, but I'm going to
do hard things, And so I go toward the danger,
and I go toward what's difficult to understand and try
to make sense out of it. And again, I did
not want to vilify or to mean my husband, even
at my worst with my best friends. And he was
an asshole, you know what I mean? Because he wasn't.
(29:12):
He was a guy who did feel profound struggles in
his heart and in his brain and in his actions.
It showed up again and again in his writing. Yeah,
you know, your story makes me reflect on how much
each of us values knowing the truth and life. Would
(29:32):
you have preferred to just remained ignorant of all this?
If you could go back, would you not have opened
the boxes? Tell me, tell me more about that. Part
of my honoring him was honoring his directive. But in
order to honor his things, I had to make sure
that I looked at his things. Yeah, but's Susan, I mean,
(29:53):
you're you're you're talking about still wanting to honor, to
honor him and honor his boxes. In my view, he's
not deserving of that honor right now. And so I
want to know from your perspective, from Susan's psychological perspect active,
was it better for you to have known that this
was the case. People fall on different parts of the
(30:14):
spectrum in terms of seeking truth versus protecting their own
sanity and psychological well being. So I'm just wondering where
you fall on this spectrum. I was betrayed in my
first marriage, and I was told I was a crazy
pregnant woman, and I was told I was postpartum. I'm like,
I don't feel like a crazy pregnant woman. I don't
feel postpartum. And then in this marriage again, the same
(30:37):
thing happened, and the common denominator is me. So for me,
when they say the truth will set you free, in
my case, it's only going to help me traverse a
future path of honesty and listen to my red flags.
Because I was right. I'd love to have been crazy,
but I wasn't. I was right both times, and I
(30:59):
was the common denominator you're saying. When you raise concerns
with Michael, he would say, oh, you're just being crazy, Susan.
He would be as dismissive in that way. So you
were led to believe you were the problem. Absolutely, And
now I'm starting to understand why certain behaviors in our
marriage made no sense to me. Sex was really hard
(31:21):
for me to talk about, and said, what happened to
our sex life? And this is a man who courted
me with sex and coach bags. I don't know why
the coach bags. By the way, I have plenty if
he'd like some. You can really only use one purse
at one time. But that I had said, what happened
to our sex life? But again, I wanted to be
super gentle with Michael because this is a man of
(31:42):
a certain age, you know, I thought to myself, testosterone changes.
Men are visual creatures. I'll go back to boot camp.
But I wish I could have given you a SoundBite.
But because he couldn't give me one, I just kind
of thought, oh well. And then he got sick in
twenty eighteen, and I thought, you're an asshole, Susan. He
was sick the whole time. You're just an asshole. I
(32:05):
always put it on myself. I always wanted to make
sure that he never felt less than I had to
always be very gentle with him because his father was
so critical of him growing up that I felt I
don't want to add to his plate. I'm his wife.
I want to be one of the good guys, not
one of the bad guys. So at the very least
(32:28):
I wasn't crazy, And at the most I got to
understand a man in death that I didn't get the
opportunity to understand in life. And yes, I could have
been pithy and just stopped fighting around messing life as short.
We should be together and you're perfect, And it could
have been at the end, you're awesome. You're awesome beyond words.
But that's a story he wrote, and that isn't the truth.
(32:50):
And I do appreciate the truth, no matter how difficult
it is to hear or to discover. How have you
changed through this process? I tend to remember that people
who on the surface might seem rude or inconsiderate or whatever,
(33:16):
that they are going through something that I don't know about.
And I've usually pretty much given people the benefit of
the doubt. But now I really give people the benefit
of the doubt. I really do. I'm just interesting because
you could equally imagine someone it's likely to imagine someone
who no longer gives people the benefit of the doubt
(33:39):
because you had given Michael the benefit of the doubt
and then you were betrayed. I was reminded though. I
was doing a zoom call to China and I knocked
over by mistake all these office supplies in a box,
and I was like, are you kidding me? I'm going
to start off my day like this, goddamn it, you know.
And then I looked and there's this little piece of
paper and it was in with Michael's office supplies, which
(34:02):
he had a myriad of, and it says, husband, I
love you. And it was a note for me which
I had left him all over the damn house. And
I thought I had burned all of them in the fire.
I thought there's nothing left to discover. And what I
discovered was husband, I love you. So you know, dummy,
it all ends up with love. And maybe I grieve,
(34:23):
and maybe I'm angry because I loved him, And yes,
I kept my side of the street clean as best
I could through our marriage. And I would have liked
to know of a set of rules that that involved
me that I was not apparently privy too, so that
can hurt. But now the way I love is and
(34:47):
maybe he taught me this because he didn't have the
ability to love freely and honestly. Now I love freely
and honestly, so he gave me a real gift. His
betrayal gave me a really big gift. And this is
my discovery in this moment that it was a gift. Sorry,
I'm just gonna get a tissue now, of course. So beautiful, Wow,
(35:14):
tell me, can you just tell me about your new love.
I've loved my friend about Fisher for thirty years. He's
been a great friend, and something changed and now he
looks at me the way I feel about him, and
it's a super honest and candid love. And sometimes I
have to be super careful when I answer a question
(35:35):
only because it's never been asked of me before. You know,
I've never been asked those kind of questions, questions everything
from well, I mean, one of the first things I
said to him was once we started dating, was what's
your greatest shame? Like? Because I was like, what are
(35:55):
you going past words? Oh? He point blank said, this
is my debt, this is what's on my desk. Feel
free to look through all of it. Here's the people.
I mean. He couldn't have been more honest with me
because our friendship has he's felt he has felt very
responsible for the choices that he's made in his life,
good and bad. He's felt very responsible for them, and that,
(36:19):
to me, honesty and truth is sexy. Yeah, it's super sexy.
So I'm there now. Oh I love that so much.
It fills my heart with warmth. Final question, why did
you decide to share the story with me now? I
am sharing this now because I feel like it will
(36:42):
support my healing and perhaps support others. Secrets are toxic
and they eat at you, and there is always someone
who will listen. And when you bring darkness into the light,
it is no longer dark, and you have red flags
chase that because your gut is right. So and I'm
(37:05):
also your poster child because also I'm healing on the
other side, and I can be your poster child of
hope because if I can love again after going through
a real shit storm, I think anybody can. So when
you say people become bitter after their divorces, I say, no,
they become smarter. And I'm not saying that you're not
going to go through a bitter path, but all these
(37:27):
feelings are temporary, and I have to have learned something
that I can pass on to make somebody else's path
a little easier. Well, here's my question. Is it so
(37:57):
unique to find out after someone's dead of their betrayal.
It really isn't, although it would have been nice to
find out during the time he was sick that it
had happened because my friend, he said, you could just
call up Meredith and go, girl, come get your boyfriend.
He is sick. You know what I mean? Like we again,
(38:18):
My friends are awesome. Hey, thanks for tuning in. I
wanted to let you know that next week we're going
to be mixing things up a bit. Recently, I had
to confront an unexpected change of my own. It's a
deeply personal story, one I never planned to share so publicly,
(38:38):
but then I realize that's kind of what this show
is all about. So I asked my producer to turn
on the mic and interview me. My heart sank. I
was like, you have got to be kidding me. How
is this happening again? Like on exactly the same day
as last time? Like it just it didn't make any sense.
(38:59):
Tune in next week to hear about when life threw
me my own Slight Change of Plans. A Slight Change
of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me
Maya Schunker. The best part of creating this show is
(39:21):
getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This
includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor,
Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rostek, our associate producer,
and Mia Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our
delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals.
(39:42):
A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there. Thanks also to Laurie Santos,
Michael Lewis, Ramsay Cabaz and Scott Menki who have been
wonderful friends and incredible supporters of this show, and of
course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can
follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor
(40:03):
Maya Schunker, and please remember to subscribe, share and rate
the show to help get the word out. Seeing next
week
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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