Summary
When someone close to you dies, it can be a struggle to feel normal again – and to have people TREAT you normally again. When T.J.’s long-time partner died suddenly in 2017, she found a sense of normalcy and healing from strangers in the r/Widowers community on Reddit.
Full transcript and more information about this episode at: http://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2019/06/14/shipwrecked
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Produced by the iLab at WBUR Boston. |
| 0:07.0 | Hey, just a heads up. This episode deals with the topic of death in a pretty detailed way. |
| 0:13.7 | If that's not for you, maybe take a listen to something else from our catalog. |
| 0:18.2 | I guess it's like the idea of like going through like a dark tunnel. You can kind of see |
| 0:26.8 | the light at the end of the tunnel, but like you don't know where the tunnel ends. And so |
| 0:31.5 | you just keep going through the tunnel until you get to the other side and you don't really |
| 0:37.4 | know when that will be. But you just have to keep the otherwise you're stuck in the middle |
| 0:41.5 | of the tunnel, right? |
| 0:45.4 | This is TJ. She's a redditor. |
| 0:48.2 | And I'm a journalist. I'm 31 and I live in Brooklyn. |
| 0:52.2 | I follow a ton of different subreddits from food to memes to RuPaul's Drag Race. And I'm |
| 1:02.4 | a part of a couple different feminism communities. I have a feminism tattoo on my middle finger. |
| 1:08.7 | It's the Venus symbol. And I use that to flip off the patriarchy whenever I can. |
| 1:15.6 | I know TJ because we both used to work for the same radio station in New York. And when |
| 1:20.2 | I ran into her about a year ago, she told me a story that practically knocked me over |
| 1:25.2 | about something that happened a few years back that has changed her life completely and |
| 1:30.7 | how that change has played out on Reddit. |
| 1:33.8 | Can you take us back to late 2016? What did your life look like then? |
| 1:40.7 | Yeah, late 2016, I was living with my partner. We had been together at that point just a |
| 1:49.4 | little over six years. TJ doesn't want to use her partner's actual name. We talked about |
| 1:55.0 | giving him a pseudonym, but considering the circumstances of all this, that felt pretty |
| 1:59.5 | weird too. So we're just going to call him her partner. |
... |
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