No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  But now Aaron was gone. My dad was gone. And the only person whose eyes I could look into anymore were Ralph’s. Ralph was only two when all this happened, so he thought I was good at everything. It’s a true blessing that a toddler doesn’t know when you’re swimming in a sea of self-doubt. They don’t know when you’re at the end of your rapidly fraying rope or when you are duct-taping your world together and hoping it holds for another day. Ralph didn’t know that I was unemployed. He didn’t know that I was making it up as I went, and neither did most people. I really had felt ready for anything with Aaron, because his bravery made me look so much braver than I actually was. I didn’t have to do the brain surgeries, or the chemo. It wasn’t my body being radiated. It wasn’t my life ending. We had each other, and the threat of Aaron’s death to inspire us to keep pushing forward. I didn’t feel that way at all anymore after he was gone, but I learned to do a good job faking it. The conditions weren’t perfect, but they were still better than most. I had a dead husband and a lot of debt and a child, but I am also white and middle class and educated and American. As far as I fell, there was still always going to be something below me to break the fall.

  Here is what my dad was right about: there is not a right time for everything, or anything really. I know that because I have lived the reality, and have seen others live the same way. Here is what my dad didn’t say: that it’s easy to accept that notion when you’re a good, safe distance from the difficult experience you’re living through. It’s easy to say “everything happens for a reason” when you’ve already found your reason. It’s easy to say that timing is irrelevant when you’re looking back at the hardest things in your life. It’s a lot damn harder when you’re in the thick of it, when you can’t even see where your next step is. I wanted the comfort and safety of perspective. I wanted to open my eyes and be five years into the future, to know that whatever happened next was going to be different from my current reality, that even if Matthew’s arrival was terribly timed, it didn’t matter anyway.

  It didn’t matter if I saw Game of Thrones spoilers on Twitter. I still wept for every Stark. It didn’t matter that I knew how Aaron’s stage-four brain cancer would eventually end. It doesn’t matter for you that I married Matthew, and had his baby, and the six of us live in a house in the suburbs of Minneapolis. (There’s your spoiler.) A spoiler may ruin the surprise, but it can’t save you from the shock, and it can’t prepare you for what’s next. What’s next is unknowable, but one thing is certain: it doesn’t care about what you want, or what you’re expecting. It doesn’t care whether a psychic tipped you off at a birthday party in fourth grade or if it catches you completely off guard. It’s coming for you, ready or not.

  Chapter Ten

  Smile

  I guess I looked too sad for a widow. I definitely didn’t look happy enough for the drunk man who was swaying in front of me. His opening line was a bold one.

  “I’ve been watching you all night,” he slurred, and I felt my face contort into the shape that every woman instinctively knows to make in this situation: a stiff smile that says “Okay, I acknowledge your presence but can this exchange be over now?” I turned away from him, and signaled to my friend to cover for me, but he leaned over her, because he wasn’t done talking.

  “Look,” he tried to whisper, “I know you’re a nice person, but you don’t look very nice tonight.” At that second, I sent daggers flying out of my eyeballs toward him while he closed his eyes as if in prayer to the Gods of Drunken Wisdom. Then, he said it. “You should . . . smile.” He smiled for me, nice and big, demonstrating how exactly to turn the corners of my mouth up. I contemplated the consequences of punching him at a nonprofit fund-raiser.

  Oh, yes. Some context. This wasn’t a bar scene. This entire exchange took place at the folding table where I had been standing for hours representing Still Kickin, the nonprofit I started in honor of my dead husband. Now, this wasn’t a fancy affair. We don’t do big, sit-down dinners with cold chicken and silent auctions. We just provide financial support to people going through the worst in life, and raise the money through sales of our apparel, all of which proudly proclaims to the world that you’re still here, Still Kickin. It’s work that means a lot to me, even if it doesn’t pay me anything, because it means I get to be there for other people the way they were there for me and Aaron and Ralph. It also means a lot of public crying, which is what I had been doing that entire night. I listened to people tell me about their dead moms and their dead dads. About a sister struggling with drug abuse, and a sick nephew who was going to spend his entire short life in the hospital. I hadn’t spent the whole night frowning, I had spent it crying with people who needed to cry and raising money to help people who needed help.

  Did the world need another nonprofit? No. Did it need a nonprofit run by two women, my friend Lindsay and me, with absolutely no experience in the nonprofit world? I assure you, it did not.

  But you can blame Aaron for that. This was all his idea.

  It was inspired by his favorite T-shirt. His cancer. His big, generous heart and creative spirit. His wish to give other people what the world had given us: the ability to be seen without pity. And money. Money is super helpful when your life is falling apart. Aaron had the idea but ran out of time. All I had to do was usher this idea across the finish line, to make my husband’s dying wish into a reality.

  Aaron’s favorite T-shirt was a threadbare cotton shirt in a faded kelly green. There is no tag, no size. Just two faded and cracked words printed across the front: STILL KICKIN. He bought it at a secondhand store in the heyday of the ironic T-shirt era. While other people were sporting faux-aged JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY shirts, Aaron was amassing a collection of weathered little league, family reunion, and novelty tees from Minnesota’s thrift stores. The green Still Kickin one was a favorite and part of a small collection I wasn’t allowed to borrow. As a very hygienic and good-smelling person, Aaron’s main concern was that I was overly sweaty and would permanently pit-stain it, which was fair. As a naturally thin person, his secondary concern was that I may stretch it out. In the arms. This was also a fair concern, though I would like to tell any straight man reading this that there are better ways to tell a girlfriend that your shirt is off-limits.

  This favorite T-shirt was the one he was wearing on the day he had that first seizure and was rushed from the floor of his cubicle to the local hospital. That silly, faded T-shirt, with its crackled letters, wasn’t as funny as it had been when Aaron wore it in ironically good health. Now it was meaningful and important. We hung it in Aaron’s closet like it was a tuxedo and busted it out for chemo and radiation appointments. It made the nurses laugh, and it made us feel safe and strong.

  Our fellow patients would shuffle or be wheeled in, and you would know instantly that you were looking at a shadow of what they had once been. Aaron’s full-time job came with insurance that covered the medications that some of our brain cancer comrades had to petition and beg for. They’d eye Aaron’s T-shirt and give him their version of a smile and a thumbs-up, and we’d step into the unknown of Aaron’s appointment feeling fortunate, no matter what was coming our way in the next twenty minutes.

  Aaron’s idea was this: replicate that thrift-store T-shirt, sell it online, and give the money to . . . somewhere! Brain cancer research made a lot of sense, because it’s underfunded. It also felt worth acknowledging that there are countless ways for life to kick you in the gonads, and for anything related to Aaron to be unconventional and big-hearted and unique. Aaron died just after the shirt launched, and those two words then took on a life of their own. People set up an online fundraiser and helped me pay off our medical debt and cover Aaron’s funeral expenses. His funeral was a sea of green Still Kickin shirts, and people kept buying them. Not because they knew Aaron personally, but because those words meant something to them. They bought them to celebrate the struggles and successes we all eventually experience. I knew that Aaron had been right: this deserved to be its own thing.
And I knew I had been right, too: it didn’t need to be about brain cancer. Or cancer. It didn’t need to be about any specific thing, other than plain old surviving this crazy world.

  All of my work revolves around the hard things in life. I have made it my actual job to just think and write and talk about the crappy things in life that other people don’t want to talk about, and to listen to them, too. That last part is important because it’s a hard thing to do. It’s hard to sit with someone’s pain and allow it to make you uncomfortable. It’s much easier to try to fill that hole in the conversation with small talk, or hand the person a tissue instead of offering them your shoulder. It’s much easier to implore them to see the bright side than to be in the darkness with them. I get it. I’ve done it. I still do it. Being a tragedy connoisseur does not make me a tragedy expert, and I still fuck it up sometimes.

  Just a few months after Aaron died, my cousin Tommy killed himself. He was the same age as my big brother, and I’d spent my childhood looking up to him. Tommy was clever and funny and cool, and sometimes he let me play with his action figures. As a grown-up, I knew that his life had turned out harder than mine, but I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t ask questions. At his funeral, I hugged his mother and father and then . . . I heard myself talking. Why was I talking? Why was I trying to explain the unexplainable? Why was I trying to pretend anyone could ever understand this, that what the family had been waiting for was an inexpert opinion from an emotionally distant cousin who had no experience in suicide or severe mental illness? Why had I instantly turned into everyone I had wanted to punch at Aaron’s funeral? Everyone who told me that it would be okay, or that he was at peace now?

  Because I was uncomfortable. If we struggle with what to say when someone dies of cancer, we’re absolutely dumbstruck when they die of mental illness. I wanted to make my aunt and uncle feel better, so that I could feel better. I didn’t want to be sad, even if that was what the moment called for. Accessing that feeling would mean accessing my grief for Aaron, and my dad, and the baby who should have been a month old by now.

  But back to that room. That fundraiser. That guy. I don’t know the motivations of the drunk man insisting that I smile while soaking up the traumas of strangers. I don’t know if he’s an operative for Big Patriarchy or just a run-of-the-mill buffoon. He’s probably a mix of both. And I think he’s also just a person who thought that he could smooth over the awkwardness of acknowledging my pain by pushing me to fake my own happiness for the sake of his own comfort.

  On any other day, in any other year, maybe I would have just smiled for him and then called him an asshole behind his back. But I was tired of smiling, and tired of pretending to be happy and okay. I’d spent almost a year pretending. I was exhausted. And even though my smile made everyone else more comfortable being around a young widow, that night, crying with a bunch of people in public? That was the most comfortable I’d been all year. I told him our conversation was over, and Lindsay tagged me out of the booth.

  Here’s the thing: even if I hadn’t spent the night knee-deep in the feelings of others, even if my husband was alive and well and at home with our two living children . . . I didn’t owe that guy a smile.

  What he may have thought was a light flirtation, or good-natured small talk, is actually an exhausting part of being a woman. I can count the number of times I’ve told a man to smile on zero hands, because I’ve never done it. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told to smile, because math doesn’t go that high. And for every man (and there’s always one) who is like, “hey, this happens to men, too!” . . .

  hush. The women are talking now and

  I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’re the kind of guy who is perplexed when you tell someone to “smile,” “relax,” or “calm down” and find those words have the exact opposite effect.

  Here’s a newsflash, my male friends. “Smile” is not a way to actually cheer a person up. It’s a way to tell them “please adjust your face to my preferences.” And it isn’t expected of men the way it is of women. No matter how mainstream feminism may be now, the message that girls owe the world is that the appearance of happiness is everywhere. Browse through the message tees in any retailer and notice how the word happy is a staple in any girls’ department, and completely absent from the boys’ department. Notice that men who don’t constantly smile have faces, and women who don’t constantly smile are afflicted with “Resting Bitch Face,” a curious physical ailment that seems to have spread of late like a case of foot and mouth does through a preschool class. Remember how Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with RBF for not smiling enough during the presidential debates, and alternately described as crazy, grandmotherly, or condescending when she smiled too much. It’s so much fun to be a woman!

  “Ugh,” a stranger commented on my Facebook post about this night, “now we can’t just want a woman to be happy?”

  Of course you can want us to be happy, fella! And you can help make us happy, too! You could start by insisting on pay equity, particularly for women of color. You could continue by hushing your sweet little mouth on topics like reproductive rights. You could believe survivors of sexual assault. And if it’s not too much trouble, smile? As for me, I’m Still Kickin. Keep it up, and I may just aim for your chin.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sophie’s Hot Dad

  People always want to know if Aaron and I talked about dating after he died, if he gave me his blessing to fall in love again, to build a new family. The answer is . . . sort of? Weirdly enough, while my husband was dying, I wasn’t really thinking about my romantic future. My romantic present—a husband being ravaged by brain cancer, and a toddler who would grow up without him—gave us both plenty to think about and talk about. One of the best gifts that Aaron and I gave each other was having hard conversations: we set healthcare directives and wills, we established power of attorney and talked about what our wishes were for end-of-life care. When Aaron died, I didn’t have to wonder about what he wanted: we’d written his obituary together, we’d talked about his funeral, and he’d told me where he kept his funeral playlist.

  I list those things off as if they’re a grocery list, but at the time they were gut-wrenching conversations. Because for me and most people, talking about our funeral is an abstract. But for Aaron, it was real. It was coming soon. Our best conversations about life and death happened the same way all our best conversations about anything happened: with a joke. His obituary started with the two of us in bed in choked-up silence, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. I went first.

  “Purmort, Aaron Joseph, age whatever, was murdered by his angry wife after forgetting garbage day for the third week in a row.”

  Aaron laughed his signature laugh, the one where his shoulders shimmied, and his nose wrinkled.

  “Purmort, Aaron Joseph, age whatever . . . died of complications from a radioactive spider bite.”

  “YES!”

  There it was. We riffed from there, my fingers flying over the keyboard while he rattled on, and when it was over, I read it aloud, and we both laughed and wiped tears from our faces.

  “There’s no way in hell they’ll print that,” he said, and I shrugged.

  My dad had died just a few weeks before, and he made sure that everything he said in those final weeks could be some unbeatable dying words. Sitting beside him in the ICU a few days before he died, my dad beckoned me closer.

  “When I die,” he whispered, “make sure you help your mom with her Match.com profile. I caught a glimpse of it and it’s not looking good.”

  My mom gasped, the joke entirely lost on her. The nurses froze in awkward silence. And my dad and Aaron busted out in laughter.

  A kindness that Aaron and I gave to one another was pretending that it was anyone’s guess which of us would die first. It made our hard conversations easier. I wasn’t just asking him to make a will, I was making one myself. I wasn’t just asking about his medical directives, I was writing my o
wn, too.

  I turned to Aaron and told him that if I were to die first, the only thing I would want was for him to be happy. Alone, and pining for me the rest of his life.

  He laughed and agreed to my terms.

  “Just don’t date anyone funnier than me,” he said. “Or who wears sweatpants. Or cargo pants. Don’t date any boring dads.”

  MY SISTER HAD INSISTED ON knowing the first and last name of the man I was going to dinner with, so she could do some preliminary Googling, and offer her opinions. Whatever she found after I texted her Matthew’s full name was important enough that she called me.

  “Nora!” she shouted, “you’re going on a date with Sophie’s Hot Dad!”

  It turns out the social circles Matthew and I frequented had another overlap: his daughter, Sophie, was in Girl Scouts with my niece Trixie. Sophie and Trixie had attended each other’s birthday parties. They were friends! And Matthew was Sophie’s Hot Dad, so named because of his obvious handsomeness and because it’s universally appealing to see a man take on the parental duties associated with Girl Scouts. My sister had only had a handful of conversations with Matthew over the past few years, but she insisted that he wasn’t just any dad, he was a really good dad. And yeah, he was hot. He had a brooding look to him, like he probably spent a lot of time in high school reading philosophy and listening to The Smiths, and not a lot of time going on dates, which I learned on our first date was an uncannily accurate description of his high school experience.

  There is nothing strange about comparing a new potential suitor to your former loves. I have done this on every single first date I’ve ever been on. It might not be fair, to expect someone new to meet or exceed a standard that another person had months or even years to set, but it’s practically inevitable. I did it when I met Aaron, flabbergasted at how easily he stepped over my very, very low bars for male interaction.