It's Okay to Laugh (11 page)

I
'm so glad you asked!

First things first, marry someone funny.

No, wait. Marry someone who thinks
you're
funny, especially when you're really, really trying to be. There's nothing worse than teeing up a really great joke and having a person who
allegedly
loves you give you nothing but a polite chuckle when you were aiming for a guffaw.

Marry someone who wears your clothing size—double your wardrobe, even if there's a stack of off-limit T-shirts from his high school days that he gently explains are so precious he doesn't want you
stretching out the arms
. Laugh about that later.

Marry someone who likes the same things, sure, but, more important, hates the same things. Someone who will catch your eye in the middle of the conversation to telepathically let you know,
Yes, I heard that jackass at Starbucks try to brag to this
poor barista that he is personal friends with The National and that he lives in Brooklyn like it's some far-off exotic land. We will laugh about it later until one of us pees. And that someone will be you, because you just had a baby and things are still a little out of control down there.

Marry someone who has seen you ugly-cry.

Marry someone you like. Someone you'd want to sit next to on a cross-country Greyhound trip with no bathroom or air-conditioning, because he's the only person who could somehow make that fun and also, he's the kind of person who would have packed a snack for you.

As a rule, I don't advise people to “marry their best friend.” I'm generally wary of people who tell me that their spouse is their best friend, because what happened to their actual best friend? You know, the one who prank-called boys with them in middle school and poured a beer over another girl's head in college for looking at her wrong? Did she suddenly and tragically die, or did she just get left in the dust once you found the partner of your dreams? I cannot stress this enough, folks: You are going to need to have an actual best friend because sometimes the person you marry won't agree with your DVR choices. Or, even worse, he will click on the wrong Hulu ad experience and you'll be stuck watching commercials about bone density medication when you could have been watching a commercial about lotion featuring your future best friend Jennifer Aniston. And who will you run to then? Who will you text? The animal who disregarded everything you hold dear with the click of a mouse?

Marry a person you'd marry in a church or in an art gallery. On a boat or in an abandoned factory in Russia. Someone you'd marry with the biggest blood diamond money could buy, or with a little piece of string tied around your finger. Marry someone who doesn't
care about table settings or wedding favors unless
you really care about those things,
in which case, it's opposite day. Just be on the same team. Especially on your wedding day.

Marry someone brave. “For better or for worse” means promotions and babies and cancer and loss. It means having the bathtub leak into the basement because
one of you
didn't know you aren't allowed to fill a bathtub to the very top because that little metal thing on the side? That's an emergency drain. And it's broken.

Marry someone who holds his breath in every tunnel your car drives through, even when the old lady ahead of you is driving perilously slow, just so you can each make a wish that you never tell to one another
because then it might not come true
.

Marry someone who always chooses to sleep in the hospital bed with you, no matter the fact that you're both too tall for a twin-size bed even on your own.

Marry someone your parents like. Marry someone with parents who
you
like. Really, this matters, and when you're all having Thanksgiving together as a giant group and you see all of their smiling faces, you'll be glad you took my advice. Also, if your families don't get along, and you both think you were spawned from garbage people, who cares? You're making your own family, fuck 'em.

Marry someone patient. Let's face it, you're not always a walk in the park. And when you throw a fit because you can't find your keys and he says did you check your purse? and you say of course I checked my purse, do you think I'm a moron?? and then you really check your purse, and there are your keys, you want a person who will just shake his head and smile, and call you an idiot under his breath. But lovingly.

Marry a person who is perfectly imperfect, because if you've ever watched a true crime show you should know that the “perfect” spouse
always murders you in the end.

Marry someone you admire, but more important, who admires you. If you are like me, you spent much of your twenties pursuing people who needed convincing that you were awesome. I am sorry to say that was a waste of our collagen-rich, blazing-metabolism years and that those people were never worth our time. Not when there was someone out there who would wake up every day thinking,
Fuck yeah, I married this human!

You are worth a “fuck yeah” every day. Even (and especially) if you are still wearing your high school retainer to bed. That means you are dedicated and also frugal, two very good qualities for a person to have.

Marry a person who loves you a lot, but more important, loves you best, because quality beats quantity any day.

I
went to Disney World for the first time as a twenty-nine-year-old woman. I mistakenly referred to it as Disneyland on the flight to Florida, and my husband corrected me quickly, absolutely horrified that I didn't know the difference. For those of you whose parents also didn't love you enough to take you as a kid, Disneyland is in California and Disney World is in Florida. Apparently Disney World is larger, but you still have to go to Florida to visit it, so I'm not sure that's really a selling point.

When we'd beg to go to Disney World as kids, my mom would tell us we “just aren't Florida people,” as if it were a lifestyle choice and not an impossibility when you have four children. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but I knew it sounded better than hearing we couldn't afford it. Still, we held out hope that, like the kids in the Disney commercials, we'd wake up to a surprise trip someday.

And one day, I kind of did.

“Hello, McInerny residence, this is Nora speaking,” I answered. In second grade, I was finally allowed to answer the landline as long as I stuck to the script my father had made me memorize.

“Hullo, Nora! This is Goofy!”

“Goofy?”

“Yes, Goofy! From Disney World!”

“Really?”

“Really! I'm calling to let you know that you just won a trip to Disney World!”

My legs went weak. My vision blurred. It was all happening. I was going to get the trip I'd dreamed of my entire life. The script hadn't prepared me for this, so I held the phone out to my mother.

“Mom! It's Goofy! We're going to Disney World!” I shouted, handing her the receiver and rushing to hug my little brother, Patrick, who had appeared out of nowhere at the mere mention of the Magic Kingdom. Patrick and I held each other and screamed with joy, our minds melding into a mutual fantasy of sun, fun, and photo ops with life-size versions of our favorite characters. Florida! We were going to Florida!

“You son of a bitch,” we heard our mother growl into the phone, “What the hell is wrong with you? Nora, come here.”

I was instantly embarrassed. My mom really had no business speaking to Goofy like this. I'm sure he very rarely handed out free vacations, and would probably be happy to give the trip to another child, one whose mother wasn't verbally abusive.

My mother handed me the phone, and I held it to my ear excitedly, ready to hash out all the details of my dream vacay with an animated dog.

“Nora, it's Mo,” my uncle's voice said through the receiver, and my Florida fantasy vanished in front of me. “I was just joking! You knew that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice catching in my throat, “of course!”

My Disney World fantasies dried up after being catfished by my uncle, but twenty years later, I married Aaron. A guy who had been to Disney World—or as he called it, Disney, like he was on a first-name basis with the place—
so many times he had lost count.
He was appalled that I'd never been, and after we got married, we decided to arrange a trip to the Magic Kingdom with Aaron's sister Nikki and her two beautiful children. You know, a typical honeymoon.

It took fifteen minutes to realize that my mom was right and that I really wasn't a Florida person. Humidity grosses me out, and the entire state of Florida feels like you just stepped into the bathroom after someone else showered. Only instead of knowing the steam is from your little brother or your mom, it's just the bathwater vapors of an entire state of people sticking to your skin and making your hair go limp and stringy.

Aaron had just had a brain surgery, so his doctor said that it was okay to go to Disney World, but
not
okay to ride any kind of ride that went too fast, had sudden drops, or went upside down. That sounded fantastic to me, because I don't like paying money to feel like I'm about to die, but to Aaron it was a major bummer. His idea of fun was the roller-coasters with threatening names, not riding It's a Small World four times in a row.

In spite of the fact that Aaron couldn't actually have fun and the fact that I'd chosen to wear black tights under my cutoffs to protect my skin from sun exposure, I was having a pretty okay time at Disney World. We watched our chatterbox niece turn into a wide-eyed mute as she met her favorite Disney princesses, and we watched Cinderella expertly handle the middle-aged stalker in front of us who had a photo of him and Cinderella from his last meet-and-greet printed on his crewneck sweatshirt, with the words
FAIRYTALES CAN
COME TRUE.
He kept telling her how they were meant to be together and she kept nodding and smiling and welcoming him to the kingdom while shooting darts from her eyes to the security guards. I got to climb into the Swiss Family Robinson tree house and see the expert merchandising power of Disney up close as every ride ended with a walk through a coordinating gift shop, where I'd find myself looking for a Nora key chain even though that has never once been an option. I could definitely see why I'd dreamed of coming here as a child, and why my parents would have opted out of this even if we could have afforded it.

After 9:00
P.M
., the busiest place at Disney World was the hotel bar. We drank our iced teas and waters and watched the moms and dads around us down tequila shots and release all the stress of a long day of family fun. We'd let people think, all day, that our niece and nephew were ours. We kept them on our shoulders and sat beside them on every ride, and said thank you when people told us we were a beautiful family.

As we had left the park that day, we'd seen a woman literally foaming at the mouth while screaming at her husband to return their rental stroller as their two small children cried, clutching their souvenir mouse ears. Waiting for the bus to take us back to our 1990s hotel, we'd been the only couple without a small, weeping child in our arms. We
wanted
that.

“Aaron,” I said to him in the dark of our hotel room as we fell asleep, “let's have a baby.”

Hello, and welcome to the Hot Young Widows Club.

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