Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful

by Stephanie Wittels Wachs

  Last year on my birthday, I invited friends to a tiki bar down the street, but we never made it. Tonight, some of those friends casually inform me that they’re going to the tiki bar later, and I can go, or not go, they don’t care. Either way, they’ll be there. After dinner, Dad offers to stay with the baby, and we decide to go even though I feel guilty about it. I didn’t intend to celebrate. But then we get in the car and it’s all ’90s music on the radio, and I sing along with volume and commitment in spite of myself.

  Once we’re there, scrunched into a booth in the back of the bar drinking colorful drinks out of shells that are lit on fire, all the negative noise fades away. I hold Mike’s hand and make filthy jokes and take photos of my friends and post them on Instagram. Surrounded by great people and Hawaiian decor, I feel like myself again. I feel like the person who inhabited my body before The Tragedy.

  After leaving the bar, we head to my friend’s for a nightcap. I sprawl out on a lounge chair on the deck and eat greasy potato chips out of a giant bag to the searing sounds of midnight burgers on the grill. We drink beers and listen to music and talk about moisturizer. I show my friends a YouTube video of a relatively thin woman completing the 72-ounce steak challenge twice in twenty minutes at this restaurant in Amarillo, Texas. She literally ate ten pounds of food and broke a world record.

  As Mike and I walk back to the car, I think, I’m tired of feeling shitty. I don’t want to feel this way anymore.

  When I get home, drunk, I say this out loud to Dad: “Dad, I want to live again.”

  “That’s progress,” he says.

  • • •

  Yesterday, we lit a Yahrzeit candle that sat on the kitchen counter and burned brightly in memory of you. We will light a Yahrzeit candle every year on this day. And every year, it will burn out on my birthday. And every year, that cruel juxtaposition will remind me that life is moving on without you.

  This is how it is now: equal parts joy and sorrow. Everything all at once.

  I have this vivid memory of driving with Iris to the grocery store last summer on a particularly dark day. It’s one of those seemingly insignificant moments that made a permanent mark. “You Are My Sunshine” shuffled onto Pandora Toddler Radio. Glancing at Iris in the rearview mirror, I was simultaneously overwhelmed with pure joy as I saw her singing and clapping along and sorrow that you would never get to see such a spectacular view.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

  You make me happy when skies are gray.

  You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  The other night dear when I lay sleeping,

  I dreamed I held you in my arms.

  When I awoke dear, I was mistaken,

  So I hung my head and cried.

  This song is so happy and sad at once. It’s what it feels like to be alive. It’s what it feels like to lose someone you love but still be surrounded by so much light.

  42

  Epilogue

  Change and movement is inevitable. Unstoppable. And tragedy can function like fuel.

  After surviving The Tragedy, I realized I didn’t give a shit about outcomes in the same way I used to give a shit about outcomes. Because when someone you love with all your being suddenly drops dead, it’s a reminder of a few things:

  1. We aren’t in control.

  2. Time is running out.

  3. Nothing matters.

  At first, the nothing matters was a sinking ship or a mound of quicksand or a pile of rubble where I sat, paralyzed, for months and months. There wasn’t much to do during that time except for the Irish keening and the crying and the occasional pounding of my fists on the floor. You read the book. But after 365 days of grief, my tears dried up long enough to lift my head and survey the damage, and I realized, I don’t have to sit here forever.

  It’s uncomfortable—even painful—to live on a pile of rubble. Not sustainable. Unsafe. Devoid of plumbing and pillows. And since nothing mattered anymore (see above), the stakes felt lower in a way. Like I could do anything I wanted to do and be anything I wanted to be. I could revise the script. I had to. Because I was no longer myself.

  My debilitating sadness started morphing into something empowering. Positive. A freedom and a courage that I’d never really felt to make the most of the time I do have.

  I started to look at all the things that were weighing me down even before Harris died, the stuff I’d shoved into overstuffed drawers and hidden in the part of my brain, heart, and gut that I was too tired and scared to acknowledge. And I slowly started to piece together a new identity, one that didn’t include Harris but was happening as a direct result of his absence. His untimely death was inspiring me to live.

  • • •

  As a kid, when I looked into my future, I saw a successful theater artist doing successful theater artist things. I was so certain of my career path at seventeen that I only applied to NYU because the internet said it was the best. And they took me! And even though I did well there and people seemed to believe in me, I gave up before I even tried. I got scared by 9/11 and didn’t want to take headshots because I felt ten pounds overweight and couldn’t figure out how to balance the drain of a day job with something more creative and meaningful. I had no energy for anything creative and meaningful because I was doing a daily commute of over an hour each way from Queens to the Upper West Side to wipe actual butts at a preschool for rich babies.

  Nothing was working, so I abandoned my plan.

  I left New York, moved back to Texas, and made smart and practical choices. I got a stable job teaching other people how to be creative, which looked great on paper, but after ten years was no longer fulfilling in a way that was enough. The loss of my passion and creativity was palpable and draining, and unfortunately, something I rediscovered once I started writing out of desperation for four, sometimes five, hours a night about the death of my brother. It’s fucked-up but true.

  Once I started writing and processing and dissecting my mountain of sadness, I realized it made no sense to be smart and practical if I was miserable. I knew now that I could die at any point, in an instant. Everyone knows that, but you don’t really know that until you see it up close in your own backyard. And it made me want to tear the walls down and build something new, to do something with my time that made me feel inspired and inspired others.

  So, I quit my job. And it felt good. For the first time in my life, I didn’t second-guess my decision.

  Around the same time, I partnered up with a friend who I’d sat down with ten years earlier to daydream about opening an arts space in Houston. It made little sense at the time since we were both basically children with no money. But right around the time I quit my job, he found the perfect space, and we decided to take the risk, to turn this dream into a reality. It’s important to note that it still made little sense since both of us are theater people with no prior experience either opening or running a business, but we did it anyway because nothing matters, remember? I understood it could be a disaster but truly didn’t give a shit. What’s the worst thing that happens? It fails? So what. That’s not the worst thing that could happen. I survived the worst thing that could happen. I can survive anything. I’m a fucking champion.

  So, I invested a portion of the money Harris left me in a space for comedians, musicians, dancers, actors, directors, podcasters, renegades, and artists of every kind to incubate, create, and work. In June 2016, we opened the doors to Rec Room, a multidisciplinary performance space and bar in downtown Houston. Six months later, we launched a nonprofit arts organization called Rec Room Arts that continues to support and provide space for both established and up-and-coming artists.

  The name is an intentional nod to Parks and Rec; the space, an homage to Harris. Without him, it wouldn’t exist. At the risk of crossing the line into hypersentimentality, Harris w
as my hero. Fear wasn’t part of his genetic makeup. He was a bona fide risk-taker who always followed his dreams. What better way to honor him than to follow my own?

  On Harris’s birthday, April 20, we partnered with 8th Wonder Brewery, owned and operated by Harris’s three childhood best friends, to launch the 1st Annual Harris Phest. Hundreds of people showed up. A Phish cover band played. Stand-up comedians performed. We ate a white sheet cake with white icing from the grocery store.

  Today, a framed needlepoint portrait of Harris with the caption We’re All Horrible and Wonderful and Figuring It Out hangs on the wall of the bar.

  He’s always with me there.

  Some other cool notable things happened too:

  After six exhausting months and literally fifty steps in the Texas Legislature, including committee hearings and nearly unanimous votes in both the House and Senate, the governor of Texas finally signed H.B. 490 into law on June 15, 2017. Effective September 1, 2017, hearing aids and cochlear implants for children under eighteen will be covered by insurance. In total, it took six years and three legislative sessions to make this happen. Like I said, fuel. Lots of fuel.

  I started a weekly parenting podcast called Hands Off Parents.

  I edited and edited and edited and finally finished this book.

  I put on eyeliner.

  I ate a salad.

  I went on vacation with my two favorite people, Mike and Iris, and we drove through the mountains with the windows rolled down, enveloped by the pine-scented air. I thought of my brother. I held him in my cells. I felt the vulnerability of the altitude and the winding road and the walls of rocks towering above us. I noted how small I was compared to the sky. I saw that the world is beautiful. I heard my daughter say, “Wow.” And I felt grateful.

  • • •

  Granted, I still have bad days. Sometimes I have really bad days. I often stand at the kitchen counter and shovel cold spaghetti down my throat. Because I still miss my brother. That never fades. And there are days when I’m teleported right back into the rubble, and it takes me hours, days, sometimes weeks, to climb back out. Also, as if I were a video game, opening a new business with no prior experience has unlocked a whole new level of stress and anxiety that feels impossible to beat. Quitting my job felt great initially, but businesses take time to grow, and now we worry about money, health insurance, and retirement constantly. I also worry about climate change and gun control and women’s rights and police brutality and political doom and nuclear war. I still worry about Iris’s hearing loss, albeit far more infrequently than I used to, but it’s still a frequency in my mind. And as the saying goes, raising an empowered woman means you have to deal with an empowered woman. My sweet child is now an empowered “threenager” who refuses to listen most of the time and tantrums her way through 50 percent of her life. And I miss the mark on responding to her in a positive way 50 percent of the time. Parenting is hard.

  But I’m doing the best that I can. We’re all doing the best we can. And while I can’t say the ending is a happy one that fits nicely in a gift-wrapped box, I can say that I’ve gotten to the point where the good days outweigh the bad, and that’s something. I didn’t stay in the rubble. I climbed out, and I moved forward.

  A huge part of what helped me move forward was writing this book. When the pain was too much to bear, I wrote it down, and it kept me going. When I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about what I was writing or whether it would be published or who would read it or how it would be received. I just wrote from the bottom of my guts about everything that was going on in this nightmare of a moment. I wrote the truth. And, often, the truth is ugly. This is why Instagram has filters.

  My biggest fear in putting all of this out there is that I am dishonoring my brother and making him look bad by telling this part of his story. This is the last thing I’d ever want to do. It keeps me up at night. But people are flawed, and addiction is ugly, unflattering, and unapologetic. It’s a disease that has stolen hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, and the numbers are climbing. This is a story that starts with addiction and ends with grief. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. It’s what happened. And, ultimately, it’s the story I had to tell.

  However, I hope it’s also clear from the book that Harris was the most incredible person I’ve ever known. And everyone who knew him felt this way. Like I said in my eulogy, he made the rest of us look bad. He was the funniest. He was the coolest. He had the most creative, inventive, limitless mind that was perpetually working. He was a true and tremendous talent who accomplished more in thirty years than most people accomplish in a lifetime. This is the Harris everyone will remember. And this is why this story is so unbearably tragic.

  Mike and I are trying to have another baby. There’s nothing more hopeful than that, right? New life. When it happens, if it happens, we will name the baby after the boy who hung the moon: Harris.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you first and foremost to my supportive, thoughtful, selfless, wonderful, strange husband who loves me through it all—the horrible, the wonderful, and every (rarely) dull moment in between. I wouldn’t be me without Mike. He’s the one who sat me down one day and introduced me to a website called Medium where I could pour out all of my feelings. He actively encouraged me to start writing and has stuck with me through every idea, draft, and painstaking revision from that point forward. I love you, Mike.

  Thanks to Kate Lee at Medium for connecting me with my agent Rachel Sussman, without whom none of this would be happening. Rachel found an essay I’d posted, reached out to see if I had any desire to turn it into a memoir, and now many, many, many revisions later, here we are. I owe her a mountain of gratitude for guiding me through every step of this process. I am so fortunate to now have a stellar literary agent and an even better friend.

  Thanks to my editor Shana Drehs for her patience, collaboration, and endless support along the way. This book wouldn’t be what it is without her talent and insight. I am so grateful to Shana and everyone at Sourcebooks for seeing the potential in this story and taking a chance on me! Thanks also to Liz Kelsch for all of her help on the PR front!

  Thank you to my dear friends Chloe Gonzalez, Abby Koenig, and Jennifer Mathieu for reading drafts along the way and, more importantly, for always being in my corner.

  Thank you to Aziz Ansari, Sarah Silverman, Mike Schur, Louis C.K., Jeff Ullrich, and Sarah Rayne for allowing me to publish your words, but more importantly for the love you showed my brother. Thanks to Rob Schrab and Robyn Von Swank for the powerful images. Thanks to Kulap & Scott, Dave Becky, Susan Hale, Michael & Deanna, Paul & Lesley, Tig Notaro, Alan Yang, Matt Marcus, Taal Douadi, Armen Weitzman, Danny Molad, Annie Stein, and the one and only Johnny Smith for always being there for the Wittels family.

  Thanks to everyone in LA who showed up with boxes, packing tape, and love to help us pack up Harris’s house. It’s a kindness we will never forget.

  Thanks to NBC for the assistance along the way.

  Thank you to my wonderful in-laws, extended family, HSPVA family, and Rec Room family for all your love and support.

  Thanks to Ganny and Grandma, who are no longer here in body but always here in spirit.

  Iris once told me we have a bucket in our hearts, and that the people you love and who love you fill up your bucket. If that’s true, thanks to my amazing mom and dad for filling my bucket to the brim with a lifetime of unconditional love, support, laughter, and the courage to do what inspires me. Harris always used to say that we had great parents and that our childhood was perfect. It’s totally true. From the moment we opened our eyes, our parents pushed us to be authentically ourselves and to chase all of our crazy dreams. They paved the way, and I love them tremendously.

  A special thanks to my dad for bleeding red ink on every paper I ever wrote growing up. In response to the question you posed after you read something I’d written years ago, “Yes
, Dad, I do have to put an adjective before every noun.”

  Thank you to my hilarious, sweet, and mighty little girl, Iris. I don’t understand how all of that personality fits into such a tiny body, but somehow it does. You are so special, and I am so proud of you. Thank you for saving my life and giving me a reason again and again and again every single day. You are my hero, baby girl, and I love you so.

  And, finally, thank you, Harris, for being my brother. I won the sibling lottery when you were born. You are my favorite. Always have been. Always will be. Keep gettin’ down on that ice cream buffet…until we meet again.

  About the Author

  photo © Natasha Gorel

  Stephanie Wittels Wachs is a writer whose work has been featured on Vox, Longform, Huffington Post, Fatherly, Mamamia, Babble, and Medium. Other significant roles include mother, theatre artist, educator, and voice actor. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and went on to receive her master’s from the University of Houston School of Theatre and Dance. She is cofounder of Rec Room Arts, a nonprofit arts organization committed to developing innovative work across disciplines. Find her comedic musings on parenting (and life) on her weekly podcast, Hands Off Parents. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her family.

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