It's Okay to Laugh
Page 10
First, let me say that I am so fucking sorry. I wish I had something better to say, widow to widow, but I don’t. I am so fucking sorry, and sometimes that’s the only thing to say.
As you may have surmised, the cost of admission for our club is one husband. That fee is nonnegotiable and nonrefundable, a large price to pay for a club you never wanted to join in the first place. Somehow, that hasn’t really affected our membership base. We do understand there has been some amount of displeasure about our fee structure, but we cannot amend it, so please direct your complaints to the Universe, God, or the friends who aren’t tired of hearing you talk about your dead husband.
We do our best to make this shitty club somewhat palatable. For example, we’ve discovered many benefits that are available to you upon admission. These lifelong perks include making people uncomfortable in casual conversations by announcing your marital status, eliciting pity from complete strangers, and a loneliness that your friends and loved ones cannot begin to comprehend. It also includes a free pass for behaviors like crying suddenly in public places when you hear Puff Daddy and Faith Evans sing a song about losing Biggie, rage at having to fill out the “In Case of Emergency” line with a friend or parent’s name, and one Widow Card, to be played only in extreme situations (e.g., “I’m sorry I was speeding, Officer. It’s just . . . my husband is dead.”).
Membership is for life, though you may not always be young or hot, and you may even fall in love again. We understand that.
We are unlikely to ever meet in real life, but if we do, there will be hugging.
MEET OUR FOUNDING MEMBERS
A collection of widows who promise to never ask “How are you?”
MARY
Member since: 2010
Widowed by: Brain Cancer
Mary would argue that she doesn’t belong in this club, being over fifty when her husband died of brain cancer. But Mary doesn’t make the rules—I do—and I say she’s in, whether she likes it or not.
I skipped my first date with Aaron to attend Mary’s husband’s funeral. Marshall had just died of glioblastoma, a disease that was crouching somewhere inside the brain of a boy I’d yet to kiss, but would someday love and marry and lose slowly and painfully, just like Mary did her husband of so many years.
I didn’t know then—neither of us did—that the very thing that stole away Mary’s husband was growing within Aaron, that a year later I’d be sitting in Mary’s living room drinking a glass of milk and forming an indelible bond that only comes from shared disaster or shared blood.
In the three years that Aaron was sick, Mary never told me what to feel or what to do, she just led by example: a steadfast and strong woman who kept putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how many times the path led her right off a cliff.
Mary has the uncanny ability to pop up in my inbox or on my doorstep when I most need her. She has a trial attorney’s gift with words: a verbal clarity I aspire toward, while I stutter and curse my way through the tangled thoughts in my head.
It’s been five years since she lost Marshall and she is starting to date. It is complicated, because dating is always complicated.
“I believe we have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our losses,” she tells me. “It’s a bitch, though.”
SAM
Member since: 2014
Widowed by: Suicide
Sam’s husband hung himself in the woods near our homes in northeast Minneapolis, right before he was supposed to meet her for lunch. She was a stranger to me, but our neighborhood is a small town, and a fund-raiser for her and her toddler son had been filling my newsfeed since Sam’s father and uncle found her husband down by the Mississippi.
You would not know by looking at her, sinewy and tattooed, with the hair and fashion sense that gives away her profession as a hairstylist, that just a few months ago she was destroyed, crumpled on the floor of the bedroom she’d shared with a man who’d suddenly and irrevocably decided this world was just too much for him, that his wife and child were better off alone.
“You better get up!” her father had shouted at her the day after Joseph died, as Sam lay on the floor of their bedroom. “This man left you in a world of shit, so you gotta grab a shovel!”
So she did. She sold her house a few days after his funeral and went back to work full-time. She bought a pop-up camper she named Big Bertha and takes her little dude on weekend adventures, where she is teaching him to fish while she wears plastic surgical gloves because she’s severely allergic.
“My dad was right,” Sam tells me one night, filling my wineglass while I feel sorry for myself. “You gotta get off the fucking floor and get yourself a shovel.”
MARNIE
Member since: 2014
Widowed by: ???
Marnie’s husband isn’t dead. Not officially, at least. You can’t get a death certificate when you don’t have a body, but she knows she’ll never find him. “He doesn’t want to be found,” a psychic told her, though she couldn’t explain why, on a sunny summer day, Marnie’s husband parked his work truck by the river and ended up in the middle of the rushing water, just above the falls in downtown Minneapolis. It must have been an accident. It had to be an accident. They were going to meet for lunch that day; he had just texted her about it, right before a stranger saw him flailing and thrashing in the middle of the mighty Mississippi.
At the search for her husband’s body, Marnie locked eyes with a tall, handsome friend of a friend of a friend who had heard about the search and decided to lend a hand. Months later, when a crew showed up to rake her leaves and clean the gutters, he was there. She kissed him, on the front steps of the house she shared with her missing husband, and now she is in love with two men: one who vanished without a trace, and one who tried to find him.
Her new boyfriend goes out to dinner and drinks with Marnie and her husband’s family, he picks her children up from school, he reaches out to her friends when the waves of love she feels for him are overcome by the waves of grief for her lost husband.
Their love feels hopeful because it is so inconvenient and unexpected, the way love tends to be. Maybe, I think when I see them together, I could have that again.
NORA
Member since: 2014
Widowed by: A Radioactive Spider Bite (and Brain Cancer)
I joined our club on November 25, 2014, around 2:45 P.M. I thought I was ready to say good-bye to Aaron. It had been three years of radiation and chemo and brain surgeries, and even though he was dealing with an incurable form of cancer, he insisted on being as normal a husband and father as he could possibly be, considering the circumstances.
“It’s okay,” I told him, rubbing his head the way I always did, “I’ll be okay.” Every labored breath was truly work for his body, which pressed on because that is what bodies want to do, against all odds. We are built to want to live.
I laid next to him in a hospital bed, the same kind we had become engaged in three years before, listening to his lungs and heart slowly wearing themselves out, each random and halted breath a surprise to me. And then, he didn’t breathe in again. That was it. It was over. I’d seen the train coming from miles away, but it still tore me apart when it hit, the same way it tore all of these other women apart, to have the natural order of things so rudely disrupted.
This isn’t much of a club, really. It’s an invisible network of Internet and real-life strangers I’ve collected and turned into personal friends, each a reminder that I am not special, that this path has been worn by many women before me. Some of them know each other, and some of them don’t. The logistics are simple: When you’re in the club, you’re in. And we’ll find you, because we will remember how it felt to feel the earth yawn open under our feet, to have time stop and fast-forward all at once. To have people ask, “How are you?” when they damn well know the answer is “Well, dummy, my husband just died.” We are not the first widows, nor the last; we are just walking this path together, keeping it
clear for the many that have no choice but to follow in our footsteps.
On behalf of our worldwide network of members, I regretfully welcome you to the club. Please remember to check your email regularly, as we will be ordering T-shirts, and I’ll need to know what size you want.
Love,
Nora McInerny Purmort
President and Founder,
Hot Young Widows Club
Chapter 22
A Letter to the Recruiter Who Emailed My Husband a Month After His Death
Dear Francine,
Thank you so much for reaching out to my husband for the senior art director position on December 8. Aaron is more than qualified for this position, and would be a great candidate for your client.
Quick question: Does this position require the candidate to be alive? I ask only because my husband has been dead for several weeks, but I don’t want that small detail to overshadow his many qualifications and take him out of consideration for the job.
Please confer with your client and let me know. I can, of course, provide excellent references for my husband, though they were all from positions he held when he was alive. I’m not sure if equal opportunity laws apply to situations like this, but I can’t help but think that it would be discrimination to reach out to a dead man about a job and then rescind your interest based solely on the fact that he is not currently alive. I’m not a lawyer, but it smells like a lawsuit to me.
Thanks in advance for all of your help, and have a great day!
Best,
Nora McInerny Purmort
*Please note that I did not actually send this because I knew it would ruin her day.
**But I still want to send it.
Chapter 23
Life Plans I’ve Made Since My Husband Died
Plan #1: Get in the car. Drive west. Perhaps stop at Culver’s and get a giant root beer float. Tell Ralph we’re starting over, probably in South Dakota. I’ve never been there, but it seems like the cure for grief is big, open skies and presidents carved into mountainsides. I can see us standing on the edge of some sort of rock formation, staring off into a sunset. We will start our new life out there. Nobody will know who we are, they will just accept this single mother into their small prairie community, and ask no questions. I’ll waitress—a job I’ve always wanted to have but could never get the guts to do because it seems like the wrong job for someone with a poor short-term memory. We’ll live in a spare apartment above the diner, which we will fill with thrift store furniture. It will always smell like hash browns.
Plan #2: Turns out that South Dakota is very cold and snowy in the winter, and I can’t actually even get to Mount Rushmore right now. Thanks, Obama. We’ll put a pin in that plan until spring. What we’re going to do is sell our house. Right now. Right this second. I found a tidy little brick one-and-a-half story just a few blocks from my mother. It’s a little overpriced, but I don’t care. I can see just how cute it will be with an extra $100K or so to put into making the kitchen and bathroom functional, evicting all the squirrels from the attic, and replacing all the windows, the roof, and the hot water heater. We can get backyard chickens as soon as I excavate the rotting silver maple that takes up most of the backyard. It’s perfect.
Plan #3: Okay, so apparently I don’t “have the money” to buy a house and also gut it. And also, realtors recommend looking at more than one house before buying one. Also, the bank is being really annoying about the fact that I don’t “have a job.” Fine. I can see when my imaginary money isn’t wanted. Ralph and I are headed west. No, not Mount Rushmore, dummies, it’s too snowy. We’re going to Scottsdale. Aaron’s sister lives there, and after visiting for two weeks in December, I can just see us there, full-time. I can see us becoming desert people. People who go hiking and drink white wine during the day. People who like cactuses. That could be us! And why shouldn’t it be? Arizona is routinely one hundred degrees warmer than it is in Minnesota, which is not even an exaggeration. What have I done in life to live somewhere there is an actual threat of losing your fingers while shoveling the two feet of snow from your walkway? Clearly, the lifestyle I deserve is sitting in the shade (adjacent to but not inside the sunshine), drinking white wine with my sister-in-law while our kids alternately play together and fistfight. We can punctuate that Real Housewives lifestyle with sunny hikes up Camelback Mountain, where we stop about two-thirds of the way up at what we call Quitter’s Point, but is more aptly described as a sensible place to stop hiking when you’re really high up and trying to navigate a trail that even Hobbits would have a hard time with.
Plan #4: Arizona is going to have to wait. I can’t possibly expose myself to that many UV rays. I developed skin cancer during my five years as a lifeguard at the public pool. I don’t know why my mother encouraged this wild Irish rose to take such a dangerous job, and I really do need to remember to blame her for this. But you’re black Irish, like your father, she’ll say when I tell her about the melanoma that originated in this small black dot, smaller than the tip of a pen, which has spread directly into my thigh, forming a tumor the size of a grapefruit that is expected to kill me in three to six months.
Plan #5: My dermatologist told that that I’m overreacting and that my skin cancer is actually “barely a freckle.” You know what that means? Arizona is back on the table! I spend my nights on my iPad, browsing real estate listings and dreaming of a little cinder-block midcentury house with an updated kitchen and a citrus tree in the backyard. I even go back, a few weeks later, just to look at different neighborhoods. “I’m looking for the Brooklyn of Arizona,” I tell Nikki, and I find myself asking anyone who looks remotely cool where they live. This makes for some uncomfortable situations with strangers, who apparently aren’t used to being asked for their ZIP code while they’re trying to enjoy a cup of coffee. It’s a fact that I hate the heat, but isn’t winter in Minnesota the same thing as summer in Arizona? It’s extreme weather—the kind that can kill you—so you just stay indoors, where the temperature in your home and your car is engineered specifically to keep you alive in spite of your chosen climate. Big deal.
Plan #6: The Brooklyn of Arizona is my white whale. Ralph and I discuss it, and decide to put a pin in Arizona, right next to the pin we have for Mount Rushmore and for buying a new house in Minneapolis. Instead, we head to Northern California. It is clear after about two hours of temperate sunshine that this is where we are supposed to be. “Wow,” Ralph says, stepping out into another perfectly sunny day and commenting on the weather like any good middle-aged Minnesotan, “it’s perfect today.” We eat strawberries by the pound at the side of the road in Sonoma. The fruit is still warm from the sun, probably soaked in carcinogenic pesticides that will manifest themselves in a giant leg tumor, and we throw the stems on the ground and empty basket after little plastic basket of these little wonders. We sleep side by side in a tree house in far-Northern California, perched on the edge of a cliff, defying the laws of gravity and all common architectural sense. We marvel at redwood trees and we howl at the moon. This is perfect. Why doesn’t everyone live in California?
Plan #7: Just found out about the drought in California and I AM FREAKING OUT. There is no water! Why do people live here? Ralph and I are going to book a flight and GTFO. This is not an appropriate place for humans to live. I’d rather freeze to death in Minnesota than die of thirst. We’re going back to our house in Minneapolis, where we have enough water and no fault lines. We’re gonna live there, put down our roots. And grow.
Plan #8: Except, what about New York? I could just move back to New York. The last time I lived there, I was in my twenties and toddlers kind of grossed me out. They were always licking the subway poles or shouting loudly at breakfast (their lunch) while I was just trying not to throw up my coffee. Kids lack any kind of empathy for hangovers. But not my kid, my kid is cool. Wouldn’t it be neat to live there again, and haul an extra thirty to seventy-five pounds up and down the stairs of our walkup apartment and the subway? Wouldn’t that b
e cute? I could be like all of those Park Slope moms I always judged when they’d dramatically wave their arms around as my friends and I smoked cigarettes in Prospect Park.
Plan #9: Okay, my friend just told me how much she pays for a nanny in Brooklyn and it is literally five times the cost of what day care costs here in Minneapolis. Have you ever been to Colorado? I have a few girlfriends there and I’m thinking it could be a cool place to live.
Plan #10: Just emailed a friend in Portland. Can’t you totally see us living in Portland?
Plan #11: Oh my God, it’s finally spring. We’re heading to South Dakota.
Chapter 24
Quiet, Susan
Don’t you just hate silence?” I asked my mom, reaching for the stereo of our Subaru after basketball practice. It was at least a fifteen-minute drive from my high school in downtown Minneapolis to our house, and my mother and I hadn’t spoken since I got in the car three minutes earlier.
“No,” she said, “it’s nice to be alone with your own thoughts.”
I took that as a sign that she was, as I’d always suspected, totally defective, and turned on 101.3 KDWB, hoping she’d let me listen to some pop music instead of the “jazz and traffic” station she insisted on listening to, like it was a good idea to combine the two most stressful things I could imagine into one radio station.
I have never been good at quiet. My parents used to read me a book called Noisy Nora, about a little mouse whose entire family just wants her to shut up, because people in Minnesota are not at all passive-aggressive. I didn’t take the hint, and from the moment I could string a sentence together, I made sure to fill every moment with chatter.
In high school, I was the envy of at least three of my friends because I had my very own phone line and voicemail. It was a necessary safety precaution for the family, since nobody could ever get through to the house between the hours of 3:00 and 10:00 P.M., when I would take the cordless phone and spend hours curled up in my bed, talking to the friends I’d spent all day with in school, ignoring the call-waiting beeps entirely. Some mornings, I’d wake up to a dial tone, having fallen asleep talking to my boyfriend, who I also saw all day at school, but who loved to stay up talking about how cool it would be when we were grown up and married and wouldn’t have to sneak down to the creek after school to find a place to kiss.