Führen wir Dialoge über Themen, die wirklich wichtig sind, ob hier im Podcast oder
als Gesellschaft.
Genau wie du, suportet Douglas im Pride Month, die LGBTQIA-Plus-Community auf ihrem Weg
in die Freiheit, weil wir mit genug Solidarität alles erreichen können.
Douglas meint, Beauty is Love und hat für dich jede Menge Statementlucks für den
Pride Month-Parad.
Das ist, wie wir prägt, auf Douglas DE.
Das ist, wie wir prägt, auf unser Leben.
Ich glaube, es ist kompliziert.
Hi there!
Es ist ein paar Brauchen, aber nicht für uns.
Wir sind auf der anderen Seite making more episodes of Terrible thanks for asking.
Wir haben neue historien hier in den Feed für dich in ein paar Wochen,
im Zeitpunkt an sweater und dieses Ziel irgendwie zu Hause neוכan fictional.
Wir werden auch gemacht tonight und dann kann es alles gut essen.
Und immerhin auf ttfa.org, Please watch on the
Next week of August, when we will be back. See you soon.
A quick warning that this episode contains references to suicide.
Okay, picture this.
You're driving down the road,
and it's just a scrape now.
You're with your sister, you know, you're just gonna hang out and have fun.
Und dann, dann you see someone and something really scary.
And you realize that you have been put in this place
and you need to help this girl.
This is your reality right now.
What are you going to do?
Make a decision.
I'm Nora Macknerney and this is Terrible.
Thanks for asking.
If you've ever laid in bed just obsessing over a situation
from your past, this is the episode for you.
Laying in bed rehashing the past is actually one of my favorite pastimes
and I've been doing this since I was a child so I'm pretty good at it.
I was a worried child.
I was consumed by what ifs.
And my father would tell me,
well, Nora, what if the moon were blue?
I think that he was trying to quiet my anxiety
and that had the opposite effect.
It was a very cerebral and dismissive,
I got to say, dad, way of saying it is what it is
and worrying about it isn't going to change reality.
Now, it is what it is.
Happens to also be one of my least favorite sayings.
Even if it's true, it's only technically true.
It's just true because it's so vague, it can't be disputed.
Like, yes, it is what it is.
I suppose, but even so,
you're still allowed to think about what is
or about what could have happened.
So show me a person who hasn't worried
over the many possibilities
and hypothetical results of their life decisions
and I will show you a baby,
a baby who is lying.
Charlotte's career was built around hypotheticals.
Charlotte was an operating room nurse,
so she chose to spend her days working with people in trauma
and for every if, she had a then.
Her job was this semi-controlled chaos
that gave her energy and adrenaline.
She was saving lives.
She was at her best helping people through their worst.
No matter what happened, she knew exactly what to do.
She was trained for it.
She was trained to anticipate what was next
and to act accordingly swiftly and decisively.
I love the technical stuff in the OR
and the rushing around and getting things
and really just the structured chaos.
You have your checklist of things,
even if I can be complete craziness
and chaos that you're going through,
but you are just doing that checklist
of what you need to do as fast as you can to get it done.
That sense of structured chaos was an illusion, of course.
The world is out of our control,
which is easy to forget
because in general we've done a good job of hiding the chaos
with functional roads, indoor plumbing,
Netflix.
We give ourselves routines.
Routine's so predictable, I don't know about you,
but I can easily drive home from these studios
in St. Paul all the way to Minneapolis where I live
and have no recollection of my entire drive,
as if my brain and my body just went on autopilot
for a 40-minute commute.
But regardless of all we've done to tame
this unruly universe of ours,
every so often a big, huge if happens,
an if that we're not prepared for,
an if that is not on any checklist.
You make one different decision.
You stay at home, you go out,
you leave five minutes early or late,
you drive a new route,
and everything changes.
Everything is different.
Suddenly you're on your own.
No checklist,
no protocol,
no best practices.
And that's what happened to Charlotte.
It was a Wednesday night.
It was beautiful.
It was unseasonably warm for November in Kansas.
And it was Charlotte's little sister's birthday.
We had planned to just chill out,
get a pizza and hang out.
We're pretty much homebodies.
We ordered the pizza,
and we decided we'd go pick it up just to get out of the house.
And so I drove there,
we got the pizza, it was fine.
And on the way back,
I drove a different way back than what I normally would.
So on the way back I took the little shortcut through the town
and we were just chatting and whatnot
and came over,
that's just a small overpass.
So we were driving over that.
Maybe she wouldn't have noticed
if she'd taken her normal route,
but she saw it.
Just out of the corner of my eye,
I just saw like a glare of light.
So it was a very, very dark night.
Like it looked like a white light is what it looked like.
And I remember just immediately knowing
that that was a face,
a girl,
a teenage girl,
on the overpass.
And there is a fence,
and it's not a tall fence or anything,
but she was on the other side of that fence.
So imagine this.
You see a girl,
a teenager,
on the wrong side of a guardrail,
on an overpass,
above a highway.
What do you do?
You're driving,
you're going to be off the bridge in a matter of moments.
You could just keep going, you could head home.
Maybe you didn't even see what you thought you did.
Maybe it was just a light from the highway.
Maybe it was just a trick of your eye.
Maybe you'd rather just not think about it.
So what do you do?
For Charlotte,
there isn't a choice.
And I just knew
that it was a person.
So I just flipped the car around.
It took like 30 seconds to turn around and go back.
I mean, it was really quick.
The overpass is one lane each way.
There's a small sidewalk
and then that low guardrail along the edge.
It was obvious that she was on the other side of that guardrail
for one reason.
She was facing me
and she was holding on
with her hands
and she would kind of lean back
and then pull forward
and she did that a couple times.
So I opened my car door
and I got out of my car.
I just left the car door open
and I stood like in the middle lane.
And the first thing I said was
you were not going to do this.
And looking back,
I really thought that this was something I could handle.
Charlotte is an OR nurse.
So she's used to emergencies.
But she sees her patients
after a trauma.
Not when there's still a chance to prevent it.
She was looking at me
and said, go away.
She was flat out.
She said, go away.
That's when I turned to my sister
and I said, call my mom right now.
She takes off down the street
to look at the street side.
And so I'm standing
in the other lane.
My car's on.
It's still running.
Door's open.
If this were the OR,
Charlotte would know exactly
what to do next.
She'd have a protocol to follow.
But right now,
she's just making it up.
Charlotte and this girl
are only about 10 feet away from each other.
And I just said,
think about the people that love you.
And she said,
nobody loves me.
And I just kind of lost it
and I said,
no, you know,
I love you.
I don't even know you.
You know what?
What do you need?
What do you want?
You know,
do you want my car?
You know, I was just thinking,
get it in my car.
I'll take you wherever you want to go.
But she was just a little girl.
You know?
And she was 16, 17 at the time.
So I thought if I got closer,
then, you know,
maybe she would just do it,
you know, just let go.
My next thought was,
I'm going to have to grab her.
There's just no other way.
But what if the girl's startled
and she lets go before Charlotte can get to her?
Where are the police?
Where is anyone else?
At that point,
I don't know how much time passed.
Long enough for me to realize that
there is just like 20 cars behind my car.
And there's a car like right,
like a foot away from me with the lights blessed.
Nobody gets out of their car.
Nobody says anything.
Charlotte's a little closer now.
And she's got a plan.
The plan is to grab this girl,
to pull this girl over the fence,
back to safety,
call this girl's parents,
get this girl some help,
and then just go home.
Go home to her own family,
eat cold pizza,
and celebrate her sister's birthday.
And as soon as Charlotte thought she had a plan,
as soon as she thought
that things were in control.
She said to me,
here comes the semi.
And you know,
I took that as a positive sign
because she had such a flat affect.
Like nothing.
Like she barely noticed anything,
really around her,
except for what I mean talking.
She never looked around or anything.
Just straight ahead.
And when she said that,
I turned and looked.
And I saw the semi.
And I was like,
yes, there is a semi.
You know, good.
We're getting maybe somewhere.
But when I looked back,
she wasn't there.
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At first, I was like,
oh, God, oh, she's off.
She's off the bridge.
She went back to where the bridge
meets the land.
And there's grass.
And I looked there,
and she wasn't there.
And then I looked over the bridge.
And at first, I didn't see her.
And I was like, oh, you know,
hopeful,
and this is all in a matter of seconds.
So,
and then I looked back over the bridge,
and I see her.
And then a car,
like in front of her body,
had stopped.
The semi was down the road,
and it was pulled off
on the side of the road.
And there was another car
down there that had pulled off.
The person that was just,
like, a foot away from me,
with their headlight shining on me,
they rolled down the window
and said,
did you know her?
And I just,
I didn't even respond.
I think I just said, no.
And then ran down there,
the car directly behind me.
She got out,
and yelled down
over the guardrail,
and she yelled,
check her poles.
And
that makes me very angry,
that that person sat there
and didn't do anything
when they could have,
you know,
they couldn't have helped me,
helped her.
They wouldn't.
They didn't try to help me
or help her.
And then after the fact,
you're going to yell.
Now you got advice?
Yeah.
To check her poles.
And I'm like, there's no...
Well,
I ran down there,
and a car had stopped.
And a man,
just out of nowhere,
jumped in front of me,
and put his arm out.
He said, it's done.
It's done.
It's done.
And I was just crying,
couldn't catch my breath.
He wouldn't let me go to her,
that man.
He said he was an
off-duty police officer,
and they actually checked her poles,
and she was just laying on her side,
and she looked like she was asleep.
I remember turning around
and looking up,
and seeing my sister
on her way down.
And I was just like, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
You can't.
You can't see this, you know?
I just stopped her,
and I just screamed at her.
Do not look.
Do not look.
The man told Charlotte,
it's over.
It's done.
And once the police did come,
and took Charlotte's statement,
it was done,
but it wasn't over.
Charlotte and her sister
had told her husband and her kids
they were stepping out to get pizza.
They'd be right back.
This was not the plan.
So we get back in the car,
and I have to go back
the way that I drove there in the first place.
And I remember being like,
why didn't I drive back home this way?
Why?
That is so weird.
Why didn't I do that?
You know?
And we both were just
at this point where
we didn't even know what to say to each other.
We get back to my house,
and my husband knows
at this point because she called him.
And we just sit there.
We have this pizza.
We open the box.
She picks up a piece,
and I do two,
and then she takes a bite,
and nobody's talking,
and then she puts it down,
and she says,
I'm going to go home now.
I say, okay.
And then she leaves,
and I go into the bathroom,
and I'm in there,
and I'm in there forever,
and just sobbing,
and I just remember saying,
no, no, no, no, no.
No, and even now,
I'm like,
no, why did that happen?
No, that shouldn't have happened.
You know, this, no.
So, we're going to take a little break,
and we'll be back.
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It's true, and I feel really lucky
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You weepy little creature.
Hey.
How are you?
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
Oh no.
How long?
Two weeks.
Come on.
It's getting faster.
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So, we are back.
And Charlotte just witnessed a young girl's suicide.
She's crying in the bathroom.
And we get it.
Right?
Like, of course this is what happens.
Of course you cry.
But at some point,
that level of understanding stops at some point,
we expect each other to go back to normal,
even though everything is different.
And for Charlotte,
everything is different.
I just couldn't take it as me.
Just a coincidence.
I felt like there had to be something more to it than that.
Good God.
It changed me.
It changed my life.
I couldn't sleep anymore.
I wake up in the bathroom at the toilet thinking I'm going to vomit.
I can't breathe.
I can't swallow a pill to help me sleep,
because I'm so scared I'm going to choke to death on it.
You know, it's screaming in my sleep,
waking up in my husband every single night, screaming.
Everything is different,
but also nothing is different,
because this is a different kind of trauma.
Charlotte wasn't this girl's mother or sister or best friend.
She didn't even know her, but she was there.
Charlotte was the last person who spoke to the girl when she was alive.
Charlotte is the emotional collateral damage.
And that's not really something that the world stops to acknowledge
or makes space and time for.
I mean, the world barely makes time for any grief.
Like, I think most American companies give you five days
if you lose your own kid.
Now, if you see a kid die,
there's not an HR policy for that.
There is not a card for it.
There's not a social norm for it.
And Charlotte's friends and family,
they don't know what to do with it.
The first few months,
it was just trying to get through life,
like trying to do things like dress the kids
and get them ready for school.
And clean house.
I was just so lost in my head
that it was hard to concentrate
because it was just had so many questions
and I just didn't understand why this happened.
And there's just so many layers to it.
Charlotte is peeling the layers even months later,
even a year later.
There are just too many unanswerable agonizing unknowns.
There's the huge one.
Why?
Why would this girl have done this?
And then a million ifs.
What if I didn't stop?
But you've done it.
Was she waiting for someone to talk to her?
I mean, I don't know.
Was she waiting for someone to beg her not to?
Was she just waiting for the right moment?
Did I do it?
Did I do what I say to her?
Just make her even more upset
because no matter how many times someone tells me
that her mind was already made up
and you couldn't have changed it,
that will never be my reality
of what happened that night
because that night could have ended differently.
I'm not saying it's my fault,
but there are like a million possibilities
that just the fact that somebody
and it just happened to be me
saw her and turned around.
And what are the chances of that?
Now, we've all done this.
You're probably going to do it tonight.
You will stay up and replay something
the way I did as a child,
the way that annoyed my dad.
And it annoyed my dad because
it wasn't a matter of life and death
but for Charlotte, it is.
And that's what people don't understand.
People who know her and love her
who are spending their own nights replaying
whatever it is they're replaying,
they just don't get it.
Why Charlotte is still thinking about this night.
They weren't there.
They didn't almost save that girl.
So they don't have these same questions
and they don't get why Charlotte does.
They want to know why she's so obsessed with it.
Why she can't just stop thinking about it already.
It's over. It's done.
I guess it's all I wanted to talk about.
And I wanted to know...
I wanted to know what they would have done.
And so I would just straight up say,
okay, picture this.
You're driving down the road.
And I would just start to lay out the scenario
because I wanted to know what they have done.
They would just say, no, stop.
Just stop.
I know what happened to you Charlotte.
I know it's hard,
but you just gotta let this go.
I kept saying, hey, I didn't ask for this.
Hey, wait, no, I'm not obsessed with this
because I choose to be obsessed with this.
Don't you think that I want to put this all behind me?
Of course I do, but I never will be...
That is not gonna happen.
It's just something that happened in my life.
It changed everything in my life.
It changed me.
It changed my relationships.
It changed the way I looked at everything.
And I just have to accept my life as it is now
with that having have happened.
The only people Charlotte can think of
who might be able to understand
are the girls' parents.
So Charlotte reaches out to them,
thinking maybe it will help them to know
someone was there, that Charlotte was there,
and maybe meeting them will help Charlotte.
I wanted to tell them how it happened
and I can't imagine the pain.
And mine is not the same.
It's totally different.
They lost a daughter.
I can't imagine that.
So yeah, I wanted them to know that someone was there
and that hey, I tried to stop her.
I talked to her.
They asked me what was she wearing
and things like that that moms would want to know,
dads would want to know about their daughter.
Charlotte does stay in touch with the family for a while,
but it doesn't last.
They've all been traumatized in totally different ways.
They may have similar questions.
At one point meeting the girls' dad,
he asked Charlotte why Charlotte couldn't save his daughter
and then he acknowledges that she couldn't have.
So I mean similar questions, but no answers.
Even Charlotte's job is different.
Charlotte had gone back to work a few weeks after the girls' death
and it's the same job, but the job is not the same.
It used to give Charlotte a sense of control over the chaos
and now being in OR nurse just feels like chaos.
I was just really kept to myself, really quiet.
I was very distracted in my head,
but I didn't make any mistakes or nobody said anything to me.
Did you still love the work?
No.
No, I didn't.
I kind of went from being like, you know,
just loving that kind of environment
so needing something that was much, much more calm
and less things to think about or worry about.
These were all traumatic experiences and I just,
I had one really big, bad one and I don't need to know
that there are more. I don't need to be a part of that anymore.
I mean I know that I can if I needed to, but I choose not to.
This girl's life just barely intersected with Charlotte's
but her death changed everything.
Charlotte's job doesn't fit. Her friends, her family, they don't fit.
The town she loves doesn't fit.
She feels emotionally isolated, having gone through this thing
nobody can relate to.
So what now?
Where does Charlotte go from here?
I came home from Mark and I said, I've got this great idea.
He's like, okay, what?
And I was like, listen, I'm just going to pull all my money out
and we're just going to move.
And he was like, you know, this isn't going to fix anything
and I'd be like, well, that's not why I want to do it.
You know, he hesitated because he knew why I wanted to move.
He knew that I was just trying to get away from all this
and that it wasn't going to go away.
But I didn't, you know, I denied that that's why I wanted to move at that time.
No, that has nothing to do with why I want to, what are you talking about?
He was like, you know what?
Okay, let's do it.
Where are we going to go?
Where they went is a town of about 1,500 people.
They moved.
They packed up their kids.
They left Charlotte's sister and their families.
Left their big town in Kansas to move.
To a little itty bitty resort town in Arkansas.
It's small, it's rural, it's beautiful.
I definitely peruse some vacation homes there after our interview.
But it's different.
Charlotte gets a new job.
She's still a nurse but she doesn't go to a hospital anymore.
Instead, she goes to see each of her patients.
It's like intimate work because before I didn't even talk to my patients.
I just took care of them while they were asleep, you know.
And so now I work in their home.
They let me in their home and allow me to, you know, provide nursing care.
I mean that, you can't get any more intimate than that.
You end up being a part of their weekly life.
You end up knowing all kinds of stuff and they tell you all kinds of things
and like you really take the time to get to know this person
and everything they do and say all of that matters.
And it's just, you know, like an honor to be let into their home.
And it's very different.
It's definitely not the person I was before this happened.
No more tragic emergency accidents.
It kind of sounds like everything turned out fine.
Like Charlotte's accepted everything.
She's moved on, closure, et cetera, et cetera.
But this is not a life that Charlotte would have chosen.
She has a job that she'd have never done in a town she would have never moved to.
And even her family is different.
If that night hadn't happened, if she'd only driven another way,
everything would be different.
I think I would have had another baby for sure.
We would have stayed definitely.
We would never have moved.
It would still be probably in the same home and the memories of that home and the town.
And yeah, I think it would have been totally different, maybe better,
but on the other side, maybe not.
Maybe not, because there are a million other things that could have happened.
I could have altered the course that Charlotte was on.
We don't get to pick what wrecks us, what changes us.
We don't get to pick what it is or when it happens.
It just is what it is.
Dang it.
See, it's just true.
Doesn't make it cut.
But if we could, if she could,
would Charlotte call for takeout?
Would she call for delivery?
Would she drive another way?
Would she still stop her car?
I'd do it again.
Because somebody has to try.
You know, I would hate for no one to have been there.
And then it happened anyway.
That's horrible.
But no, if I knew it was going to end bad,
I'd do it differently, but I wouldn't take a different route.
I would go the same way.
What would you have done differently?
You know, I've asked myself this a million times.
And I don't know what I would have done differently.
I don't know if anyone,
one thing I do know that I would have done differently for sure
is I would have told her it gets better.
Because when you're young like that, a teenager,
you know, you're having a crappy life
because we do my more teenagers
and to just have someone say, listen,
it's going to get better.
You have a whole life ahead of you.
Everything's going to be different.
And it'll get better.
That's what I would have done differently.
And I don't know if it would have worked,
but I definitely would do that next time.
If there was a next time.
She would still choose it.
That pizza, that route.
This life, unrecognizable in so many ways
from the one she had,
from the one she assumed she would always have,
she would still choose five years and counting
of unanswerable ifs,
of hypothetical, hypotheticals,
of a life that was reshaped by one face,
spotted out of the corner of her eye.
She would still do it.
Would you?
I'm Nora Macknerney and this has been terrible.
Thanks for asking.
You can find our show at ttfa.org.
We are a production of Feelings and Cow,
an independent podcast production company.
Our team is myself, Marcel Malikibu, Jordan Turgen,
Megan Palmer, and Claire Macknerney.
Our theme music is by Joffrey Lamar Wilson.
You can always get in touch with us by calling 612-568-4441
or emailing us,
terrible at Feelingsand.co.
We are working on new episodes right now,
and if you have an episode idea for us,
reach out, send us an email, call us,
or go to ttfa.org and submit your story idea.