No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  It’s that anointing that has made weddings absolutely bonkers. Weddings come with enormous pressure to be beautiful, to be happy, to be a perfectly choreographed play performed in front of hundreds of people. If a day is special, shouldn’t you have all the mason jars you want? The extra covers for the rental chairs? At least a dozen friends and frenemies in coordinating dresses to do your bidding for months beforehand? I have attended very few weddings that don’t have a strong undercurrent of familial tension, or at least one crisis involving a hand-lettered chalkboard. For every big, fancy wedding I attend, I think, “This is so great!” and also, “I would never do any of this.”

  And yet, the day after Matthew’s sweet and confusing proposal, I was walking through the lodge at our resort planning a “small weekend getaway wedding” for 150 of our closest friends and family. Each invitee would rent a little cabin, and we’d spend the weekend brunching and lunching and marrying. It sounded simple enough, and planned far enough in advance that it wouldn’t be stressful or annoying. What would it cost? Who knows! But after two non-traditional weddings with Aaron, I was ready to bride out.

  Except, as the wedding inched closer, and our plans remained as vague as they were the day I booked the space, I realized two things:

  I had zero interest in planning, hosting, or performing a wedding.

  We had zero money to be hosting this kind of thing.

  Free advice: when you tell your fiancé that you think you should cancel the wedding, really think through your wording beforehand so it doesn’t sound like “I don’t want to marry you.” I did want to marry Matthew; I just didn’t want a wedding. I wanted a marriage. We could have both, but one version would cost us thousands of dollars and require people to spend their time and money witnessing something that would be nothing but pageantry. Matthew and I are raising four kids together in a house we bought. It seemed kinda silly for me to wear white and take a symbolic walk down the aisle to a life we’d already started.

  I didn’t want a wedding. I wanted a marriage. And health insurance.

  In late June, we invited some friends and family over for brunch. We’d had our house for almost a year, and a baby for seven months, and most of our friends and family hadn’t seen either because we were always carting the other three to extracurriculars.

  We billed it as a housewarming/meet-the-baby party, and sent out a Paperless Post invite. When our guests arrived in our backyard, we had a quick wedding ceremony, ate doughnuts, drank orange juice and coffee and champagne, and started our marriage. My sister was the officiant. Ralph was going to walk me down the aisle but instead he made me carry him. The day before, I found an orange jumpsuit at Banana Republic for $27, and it fit perfectly.

  We didn’t invite anyone from out of town, we didn’t tell anyone in advance aside from a few family members. That way, nobody would have to feel bad about missing it, right?

  Wrong.

  It turns out a lot of people have a lot of feelings about other people’s weddings. They would like a heads-up that they’re being invited to a wedding and not just a regular brunch that they’d skip in favor of a weekend at the cabin or their nephew’s soccer game. Not being invited to the wedding feels like a personal slight and incites a grudge they will never let go of. I can appreciate that feeling and validate it but also do not understand it at all. A wedding is just one day. One day in (hopefully) thousands that will make up a marriage. And while it’s beautiful to be there to witness these big happy days, a wedding is not the most important part of a marriage or a friendship or any relationship.

  Aaron and I were married on December 3, 2011. His funeral was on December 3, 2014. Both were attended by more people than either of us had anticipated. People we hadn’t seen since the wedding were there for the funeral. People who stood up as our wedding party disappeared from our daily lives.

  Between our wedding and Aaron’s funeral, we had over a thousand days together. Some of those days he had chemo or radiation, some of those days I came home to find him on the floor, having a seizure. Those were the special days that we navigated on our own. It was a sadder version of The Great Gatsby, because everyone knew Aaron was going to die and also Aaron wasn’t a fraud.

  We didn’t need people to show up for the wedding, we needed them to show up for life.

  I am not the most reliable person to show up for the traditionally special days. I send wedding gifts about two years after the ceremony not for my grandmother’s cynical reason but because I just forget. I have skipped my friends’ weddings because the travel was too expensive, or because I just didn’t want to go. And I don’t feel bad about it, because when life gets hard and real and you need someone? I’m pretty dang good at showing up.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  What I’ve Learned from Arguing on the Internet

  A list of things I’ve learned from arguing on the Internet:

  Please fill this out and mail it to me if you’ve learned anything, because all I’ve gotten from these arguments is an elevated heart rate.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Don’t Read the Comments

  My sister Meghan is nine years older than me, which is a detail I like to reinforce because she is in another decade of life and people often ask “Which one of you is older?” I blame that on their poor vision, and on the fact that I was a lifeguard for five years and the sun is the devil. Anyway, my older sister Meghan is, like many firstborn daughters, the one who keeps her shit together. Meghan blazed the trail for her three younger siblings. Even when she was in the midst of her many rebellious years, she was a high achiever who tempered things like dropping out of college at eighteen with being an eighteen-year-old with a full-time, salaried career managing people twice her age. She’d already gotten her nose pierced, been tattooed, and cohabitated before I was even out of high school, so there was hardly anything left for me to do that would irk my parents.

  I, on the other hand, was born a people pleaser. It’s not a diagnosis that doctors typically include in your medical records, but I bet if you went back in time to Hennepin County Medical Center in 1982, you’d see a giant baby just trying to make everyone as comfortable as possible, just laying there not crying or making a fuss, apologizing for needing a diaper change, the usual. I kept journals throughout my childhood, a continuous documentation of the ways I feared falling short of the expectations of my parents, teachers, family members, or even complete strangers.

  I just feel like I could be doing more with my life.

  —DECEMBER 28, 1992

  A fun note about that excerpt is that it was written on my tenth birthday, when I treated myself not only to the customary birthday can of Coca-Cola Classic, but to an unflinching evaluation of my decade on Earth.

  That diary entry could just have easily been pulled from my current journal, which is why I was so appalled when my sister told me that she wished she were more like me because I “just do whatever I want and don’t care what anyone thinks.”

  I know she’s nine years older than me and moved out of our family house before I was done with middle school, but have we met? I have spent over thirty years caring deeply about what people think of me, even if their opinions are not worth thinking about.

  One of the coolest things about being a person who creates things for a living is that each time you put a piece of yourself out into the world, you are holding it up for the criticisms of other people. And one of the coolest things about being a person who creates things for a living in this digital era is that these criticisms are widely available to you. You don’t need to wait for some professional critic to catch wind of your book or podcast or blog, you just need an internet connection and enough self-hatred and free time to actually read the comments.

  You don’t even need to be a creative to be treated to this. No matter what you do in this world, our culture and our technology means that we are treated to a nonstop barrage of “feedback,” which is a sanitized way of saying “opinions,” which is a nice w
ay of saying “trolling.” Maybe it will come in the form of a not-compliment from an acquaintance on Facebook, who liked your old haircut way better. Maybe your local newspaper will cover the event you’ve been working hard on for months, and the people with whom you share a ZIP code will unleash a torrent of “just an opinion, but . . .” all over your work. Most of the comments will be positive, but it doesn’t matter. Because you will absorb the one negative comment, commit it to memory, marinate in it for a few long hours, and take it as the gospel truth.

  I cannot tell you what any of the positive reviews of my book or podcast say. But I can tell you that one of the people who gave my book a three-star rating on Amazon gave five stars and a glowing review . . . to a snowbrush. My book about my dead husband? Three stars. A snowbrush? Five.

  There is no need for me to know the contents of her other reviews, or to know her name (Lisa D.). But I do.

  Here is the thing about the bad reviews. They didn’t like my book and that hurt my feelings. Here is the thing about everything bad anyone has ever said to you or about you: they didn’t like you or the thing you made and that hurt your feelings. You could have been someone else, or made something else, something more to their liking, and you know what? Someone else would have had something to criticize about it. You cannot escape.

  I love my first book, but not everyone does. I love my podcast, but not everyone wants to listen to a podcast about the worst things that can happen in a life. I love myself, but not everyone wants to be friends with me or agrees with my politics. Not everyone will like you! And that’s okay!

  I think I understand where my sister was coming from in her envy of my devil-may-care lifestyle. The fear of “feedback” kept me from trying things for ages. If I couldn’t guarantee my own perfection, then why try something new? Reading internet comments or Amazon reviews now is like opening up the imaginary hell that used to keep me from trying new things. Just the idea of having someone openly dislike me or my work held me back. It kept me in a cubicle writing tweets for brands, tweets that nobody would ever know came from my brain and my fingers. It kept me from sharing my ideas or striving for anything at all.

  That is harder for me to know than the fact that my book did not live up to Lisa D.’s expectations. I am going to let you in on a secret that my past self could have really used: it doesn’t matter. I know your mom told you this a million times in the past, but she was right and so am I, plus, I’m a mom now. So I’m double right.Ninety-nine percent of the feedback you get—or fear getting—is of no consequence. There are worse things in life than not being liked, or trying something and failing, and one of them is complacency. A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety. So Lisa D. didn’t love my book. So your mother doesn’t like the way you parent your children. So your friend in the mom group thinks your new hair color is just wrong. Okay! Their opinions are valid representations of their own experiences. You can take them for what they are worth, and not take them on as your personal motto.

  My sister and I own matching necklaces that say Zero Fucks. These are aspirational necklaces for each of us, because as I have explained to you, I give so many fucks. I’m unlikely to ever go from giving all the fucks to giving zero fucks, and I’m okay with that. I just want to be a person who can be judicious with her fucks, and a person who swears less so I’m going to write frick from now on because Ralph starts kindergarten soon and he knows way too many four-letter words. Whatever your personal Amazon review is, I invite you to not read it. I heretofore invite you to the Zen practice of not reading the comments. I invite you to not give equal weight and consideration to all the “feedback” that is made available to you, however tempting it is to reinforce your core belief that you are a talentless pile of garbage. I invite you to consider the feedback of people who challenge you and respect you, and not confuse criticism of your work as criticism of who you are. I invite you to get a C+ on something and say “Well, I tried!” And then try again later.

  Could I be doing more with my life? The answer at age ten was yes, because I wasn’t doing much. The answer at age thirty-five is also yes, even though I’m doing a lot. You can always do more. But your goal shouldn’t be to have the longest to-do list, or the longest been-done list, but to have a list of things you feel good about doing. The goal should be to do things you would do whether or not anyone was going to comment on them.

  I have been a writer since I could hold a pencil, long before we documented our entire existences on tiny computers we stored in our pockets. I filled notebooks and floppy disks with my words; I littered the internet with blogs that never even had one reader. Some of my best writing is in places that nobody else will ever see, notebooks I scribbled in just after waking up, or before falling asleep, or in the notes app on my phone while the plane was taking off and I wasn’t allowed to be on my laptop.

  They’re words that were written for nobody else, written just the way I lived them. You don’t have to like them or give them a good review. And I don’t have to read the comments.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  35

  I have never loved my birthday. Birthday people—the kind who insist on celebrating for a week or a month, who drag groups of friends who have never co-mingled out for a celebratory dinner where the check is split thirty-six different ways even though three of those people drank like ten cocktails and ordered steak, and five of them drank water and ate side salads—those people confuse me. And they annoy me, honestly. I may love you deeply and truly, but I am not devoting a month of the calendar to celebrating your birth. Even if I gave birth to you, it’s excessive.

  My birthday is three days after Christmas—the celebratory no-man’s-land where everyone you know is burned out from the holidays but also trying to conserve their energy to thrash on New Year’s Eve. When your birthday falls over Winter Break in Minnesota, you know that your invites are going to have a twenty percent RSVP rate, tops. Even if my birthday had fallen in a great month—September, for example—I’d have still hated it. Birthdays meant presents and opening them in front of people made me sick. I was so afraid I wouldn’t seem grateful enough that I couldn’t even enjoy the act of opening a gift. I can’t even remember to buy my best friend a birthday card. I have been best friends with Dave Gilmore, Jr. since 2001, and I have never remembered his birthday. I’ll call him on any other day, buy gifts for him for no reason, but if the only successful measure of a friendship was getting a card in the mail within even a week of his special day? Our friendship would be an abject failure.

  Aaron loved his birthday. All birthdays. He prided himself on knowing his friends’ birthdays, on finding them excellent gifts, on celebrating the crap out of them. He knew I hated my birthday, but he didn’t hate it. He loved it, because he loved birthdays and he loved me. When I turned thirty, Aaron was in the hospital recovering from his second brain surgery. I was almost nine months pregnant, and we were passing his time in the hospital the way we always did: laying together in a tiny hospital bed built for one, watching shows on his laptop. When the scheduler called to let him know that his surgery would take place early in the morning on December 26, Aaron hung up the phone, dejected, and then threw it across the room. I’d never seen him angry, and I assumed he was afraid. “It’s okay,” I whispered into his chest, gripping him close to me, “you’ll be okay.” “I’m going to miss your fucking birthday. I’ll be in the fucking hospital,” he choked out, wiping fat tears from his giant green eyes. I assured him I didn’t give a shit about my birthday, but he shook his head. “I give a shit about your birthday,” he insisted. I was planning on having my ideal birthday in the hospital with him. But on my birthday a few friends showed up to join us and Aaron insisted that they take me out for dinner. I didn’t want to leave him, but he was pushy,
so I went, promising to be back soon.

  It wasn’t dinner they were taking me out for. It was to a movie. And an entire theater filled with our friends and family, and a screening of my favorite movie, Dumb & Dumber. “NORA IS 30,” screamed the marquee. “Do you like it?” he texted me. “I love it.” I replied.

  I haven’t celebrated my birthday since Aaron died. Time takes on a new meaning when you lose someone you love, especially if that person was young. Each birthday has brought me closer to the age that Aaron was when he died, each birthday reminds me how he is frozen in time, forever thirty-five.

  Now, I am thirty-five. I am thirty-five. I am thirty-five. I am the age Aaron was when he died.

  How would it feel to know this was my last year on Earth? To look at our son and know that I wouldn’t be there to watch him grow up? To know that my life was ending, surely and painfully? These thoughts have always been too hot to touch, but to avoid them forever seems gross, like a privilege I haven’t earned.

  I am currently in the midst of my midlife crisis. I’m not trying to be cute about it, either. My dad died at sixty-four, so I could very easily be over fifty percent through my run on this planet. Both my father and Aaron were talented and generous humans who died with a lot of unrealized dreams and potential still tucked away inside of them. Unlike our souls, or all of the things that end up in our estate sales, that potential does not live on; it evaporates into nothingness. My father’s passion wasn’t to write fitness infomercials. In my office, I have a box of all the writing he wanted to do. There are piles and piles of half-written manuscripts and brilliant ideas scribbled on scrap paper, an entire box of unrealized dreams. Aaron’s Best Life wasn’t sitting through a status meeting about a website for a brand-new, highly innovative livestock feed. He loved to make things just to make them—posters and T-shirts and logos for companies I never started. I don’t know what more they would have done, like what the famous Pinterest quotes ask of us, if they knew they could not fail. I don’t know what they would have created if they’d only had the time, or the money. I just know that the only way to honor these two men and their too-short lives is to make the most of mine.