We Were Three: Short Review of a Short Series
It's not just a Covid story, even though it looks like one
Was I ready to hear a story about the depths of Covid despair? Could I handle it, and was I ready to see something new here?
These were the questions I asked myself when I first came across We Were Three, a 3-part podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times, produced and narrated by Nancy Updike, along with Jenelle Pifer, her first project as a new hire.
My first answer, quite honestly, was no.
But this story offered, hinted, without saying much more, that this story was going to offer more than the standard Covid vibe. And I was curious enough that I dove in.
In a Longform podcast interview, my suspicions were confirmed: This was a Twitter story, sprung from Rachel McKibbens, a writer and poet, after this post went viral in October of 2021:
Two weeks later, she posted an update: Her brother had also died of Covid, and that he had died alone.
It was these 60-odd words that took on the Covid-Internet, at a moment that turned out to be one of the inflection points of the pandemic.
For a narrative series, it’s a fairly efficient three episodes, under two hours in total listening time. Nancy Updike and Jenelle Pifer take on this story with rigid journalistic inquisitiveness but managed to do this with deep care.
The piece opens with a gut-wrenching discovery that her father had died…the message sent across the country by way of text message, hours after the fact, from her brother.
Was it from a “co-morbidity,” I wondered, to use the parlance of 2021. But not so fast.
As I settled into Part 1, I wondered if these two men, the two Peters, became radicalized by online propaganda, and if so, how? I feel like I’ve read that before, but never heard it.
Halfway through the first episode it steered out from the oncoming traffic, and went down an alternate road.
Truthfully, I’ve actually tried to steer away from these stories in the last two years, and I was a bit perplexed why Serial would take this kind of story on. When I realized that negative attention and the radicalization around Covid have actually helped to fuel that movement in the opposite direction, through algorithms, I began to be very studious about what I clicked on and whom I interacted with online. All attention could become ‘good attention,’ not in the direction you intended, if you clicked on those links that led to places you didn’t really want to go to in the first place. Avoidance, unfollow and block became my chosen pathway around these issues.
But then by the end of the first episode, I realized this series had other plans.
Part 2 veered into layers of despair and dysfunction…but somehow managed to tell the story with love and commitment. It questioned without judgment. It concluded without periods at the end of the sentences.
There was so much subtlety in the narration:
“Rachel once told me that she felt with a Covid, her father and brother fell overboard, and then swam to the bottom.”
To do this, and say these things, without sounding heavy-handed, or trying to avoid saying things by avidly crumb-dropping, is an art form. Much harder with a story like this one, which is anything but subtle. It all looms rather loudly. To turn this story of personal grief and tragedy into a story that others could identify with took vision. And I’m guessing a whole lot of trust.
What began as a Covid story about a daughter and a sister dealing with her grief, became a much broader definition of what it means to grieve the loss of your family when your family is, well, complicated.
How does one grieve the loss of someone who at times has treated you horribly, while always remaining the definition of love and stability in your life?
And then if we thought there were no more turns in the road, Part 3 takes a few more, meets a long-lost quasi-mother figure, and ends in poetry. It’s a series that turned grief into an elegy, and loss into a concept worth exploring. It dug down under all the layers and folds that are part of a complicated family.
It allowed an entry point into a history that’s loud and angry, while at the same, paradoxically loving and vivacious.
This story made me feel emotionally wrought. It was built with a wide lens, which it needed, to take in all of the layers of family, alongside the other layers of grief and loss, amid the general confusion of how the hell we’ve all managed to keep it together in these last few, tricky, kind of ugly, years.
My overriding thought was: This must have been an extremely difficult story to report. It’s a family story, for one, so as an outsider, there’s a lot of distance to cover. There were lots of people who didn’t want to contribute to this story (as reported along the way).
But it’s also a story about the most intimate thing you can go through—grief. No two people experience grief the same way. Explaining this is nearly impossible, and then rationalizing and placing it inside a narrative structure is complex beyond measure.
Yet Nancy Updike manages to find a way to tell a story in a way that feels like it’s sharing the story, not speaking-for the story.
She does this in short ways, like describing scenes like this:
In a few days, Rachel is going to find that chair in the kitchen, soaked in urine.”
When I heard that detail, I thought about how Rachel might have said it. And then imagined how if I saw something like that myself, and then had to describe it to someone else, I’m not sure I would want to complete that sentence.
And then I thought about the dignity of it. The detail is visceral, which is why it’s included. But having someone else utter those words might help to strip away some of the physical feeling that would likely be triggered in Rachel, as she described the horror of what she uncovered inside the empty house that was once her family home, to a reporter.
Maybe having someone else share the grimmest details of your story is actually emancipating.
A good series will leave you with a question that you can’t answer right away.
This story made me really consider, long and hard, how to tell someone else’s extremely personal story.
Could, or even should, this story have been narrated, by the subject herself? Was this an option that was considered?
There are so many examples of narrated personal histories, told by the living relative, that they have almost a sub-genre of their own. The audio storytelling world has exploded with these in recent years.
We forget that maybe sometimes a story can also be reported. And that sometimes this allows some objectivity and distance from a story that’s challenging enough all on its own.
I realized I had this question lurking in my mind because I heard myself asking: Would Rachel McKibbens say it that way?
And then, as a producer, asking myself: How did [Nancy] manage to get Rachel’s support to tell her story? Because it must have been a winding road to get there.
Building that level of trust with someone who has agreed to share their story, one that reaches into these many corners, is one thing. But then finding the words, and the tone, to tell this story without sounding like you’re over-talking the original story, is a whole other level. I am both baffled and in awe of this.
I wondered if the maybe producers also asked themselves this question, deep into the edits, because they came right out and said it.
Near the end of Part 2, Rachel speaks quite vulnerably about how she was trying to figure out what had happened to her…openly wondering how she was going to make sense of this whole trauma she had been through..when she quips that, not to worry: “A nice white gingery lady [Nancy] will help me figure it out.”
And then there’s the most honest and vulnerable editing choice to be made: an uncomfortably long silence after Rachel says:
“It’s unnatural, unusual to be interviewed while you’re still figuring it all out…”
The pause, I gathered, was left there for us to decide our own answer to her question. It is unnatural, and unusual?
And maybe that’s the point that we are left to consider: This uncomfortable place that journalists find themselves in quite often; where stories are tasked with finding meaning and purpose inside of another life, told through a mixture of personal observations and facts, is done so that we might find some meaning in our own lives.
And that connection, or that lack of connection, is what keeps steering us back to these stories over and over.
