went back to sleep for a bit, then started her own usual routine. T.J.: But I remember the alarm going off and I said, “Baby don't you have to get up?” And he said, “Yeah I'm getting up in a minute.”īen: T.J. And around nine o'clock he was like, “You know, my head is killing me, I’m gonna go to bed early.” And I was like, “OK, that's fine, sounds good.” I gave him some ibuprofen and he went up to sleep and the dog followed up with him.īen: The next morning, her partner’s alarm went off half an hour before hers, like it always did. We were watching Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is a show that we liked, and hanging out with the dog on the couch. Maybe you didn't sleep enough this weekend.” And, you know, I had made us dinner. T.J.: “Oh, I have this really bad headache.” And I was like, “Oh, that really sucks. T.J.’s partner went away with some friends for the weekend, and when he came home, he told her… But about six and a half years after it started, in January of 2017, something happened. says she liked his dry, slightly dark sense of humor. T.J.: Yeah we met, and we went on one date, and then we never were apart again.Īmory: In all the photos we’ve seen of him, T.J.’s partner has a kind of boyish grin stretching from ear to ear. And actually this whole story has to do with technology, because the way that my partner and I met - we met on, back when there was no app for it or anything. met near New York City, they really hit it off. He was like, I'm here to talk about the flowers.īen: So he was like The Lorax but for flowers?īen: When he and T.J. And it's funny because he hated golf he hated it very much. T.J.: My partner, he worked as a golf course superintendent. She says he got out and made something of himself. He was one of the only members of his immediate family who left and went to college. He grew up in pretty humble circumstances. describes her partner as being part of a big family from upstate New York. We had gotten him shortly after we relocated there.īen: T.J. We had a really cute two bedroom house with a literal white picket fence, a backyard. He had gotten a job and I had the ability to work from home and I kind of felt like, hey, I've never really lived outside of New York City or in the immediate surrounding area so I said, “Okay, let's do it, let's move upstate.” So we'd been living up there for about a year and a half. T.J.: I had relocated to upstate New York with my partner. So we're just going to call him her partner. We talked about giving him a pseudonym, but considering the circumstances of all this.that felt pretty weird too. doesn't want to use her partner's actual name. We had been together at that point just a little over six years.Īmory: T.J. T.J.: Yeah, late 2016 I was living with my partner.
And when I ran into her about a year ago she told me a story that practically knocked me over - about something that happened a few years back that has changed her life completely, and how that change has played out on Reddit.Īmory Sivertson: Can you take us back to late 2016? What did your life look like then? because we both used to work for the same radio station in New York. I have a feminism tattoo on my middle finger it's the Venus symbol and I use that to flip off the patriarchy whenever I can.īen: I know T.J. And I am a part of a couple different feminism communities. I'm 31 and I live in Brooklyn. I follow a ton of different subreddits from food to memes to RuPaul’s Drag Race. But you just have to keep going, otherwise you're stuck in the middle of the tunnel.īen Johnson: This is T.J.
And so you just keep going through the tunnel until you get to the other side and you don't really know when that will be. And you can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel but you don't know where the tunnel ends. Redditor: I guess it's the idea of going through a dark tunnel. The title of the featured piece is "Shelter/Consumer." Full Transcript This episode's artwork comes from Miles Johnston, aka u/Miles_ on Reddit and Miles_Art on Instagram.
The r/Widowers community: "A place for anyone who has lost a companion to share and heal." Artwork: u/GSnow's now famous passage about grief: " Shipwrecks" T.J.'s viral post on r/TwoXChromosomes (since deleted): " I am proud of me" And when a post about her late partner went viral, that community was there for support. As she rebuilt her life, she found healing in the r/Widowers community on Reddit. Shelter/Consumer by u/Miles_ TL DL (Too Long Didn't Listen)