It's Okay to Laugh (15 page)

M
y siblings and I are suddenly feral children. This would be more sympathetic if we were actual children, but we are all over the age of thirty, with offspring of our own.

Grief strips you skinless. Skin is important not just for looks, but because without it, you are just a walking pile of exposed nerve endings. That's really the only way to describe our family right now, a bunch of skinless freaks brushing up against our memories just to feel the pain.

This sucks because we used to be a lot of fun. It's pretty typical for my siblings and I to laugh so much at one another's jokes that 1) our dad use to threaten us with physical violence and/or 2) our significant others completely remove themselves from the situation and form their own social gathering in another room without us even noticing.

But lately, something has been off. Namely, our skin. And also, our vibe. We're awkward and strange around one another, our jokes
are more pointed, and none of us has a sense of humor anymore. My brother has recently taken offense to us referring to his “serape” as a “shawl.” I'm no longer entertained by any jokes about my loosey-goosey parenting. Actually, I'm just not entertained by anything at all, period.

My mother invited us all over for Sunday breakfast. We thought we'd make it a tradition, a way to make sure that our busy schedules always have time for us as a Family with a capital
F,
even if we are conspicuously two fewer every time we meet. Our children are playing in the “clubhouse,” a big, light-filled room off my mother's kitchen that used to be a dark, one-stall garage and is now a page out of a Martha Stewart photo shoot, with floor-to-vaulted-ceiling bookshelves. She doesn't mind that her five grandchildren stand on her beautiful sofa and rub their greasy hands on the beautiful rug, so we let them govern themselves while my siblings and I sit around the dining room table and let our mother wait on us.

Our mother is standing over the griddle she's had since the eighties. It's made it to five different basements since then, where it's hauled out for occasions like this: when a skillet and a stove just can't keep pace with the kind of pancake consumption that's about to take place.

I woke up yesterday feeling more bruised than usual. I canceled all my plans. I gave away the tickets to the Sleater-Kinney concert that Aaron and I had bought for each other months before he died. They would be playing on Valentine's Day, their first tour in a decade or so. I drove my car through our city, haunted with memories, and cried so hard that when I stole a glance at the car next to me at a red light, they gave me the sort of tentative smile I imagine you'd give a total serial killer if he happened to pull up next to you.

But my siblings don't know that, because it's not the kind of thing you tend to exchange in a family text message.

My miscarriage, my father's death, my husband's death have all compounded inside me. It is grief on grief on grief. Grief to the third degree. It is grief, with interest. And that's not even taking into account their grief, because I am too selfish to care about that right now.

I had looked around the room in the ICU when our father was dying and felt a flood of gratitude for each of my siblings, followed by a flood of panic for my only son. The death of a parent is agonizing, but was made more bearable by each of them. Or maybe not more bearable. Not at all, actually. It was a comfort to have them, but grief is not a set weight to be distributed equally. It cannot be portioned and divided.

It's hard for me to be around my family—Aaron's family, too—and this is why. Grief is lonely, no matter how many other people feel it. They are different, each one, because we've lost different people, different versions of the same men. We are each carrying our own load, and it is ours alone to bear.

My siblings and I are all so busy licking our own wounds that we've forgotten how damaged we all are, so consumed are we by our own individual grief. We are trying, though, like a group of aliens trying to pass as humans by aping the behaviors we've observed in others. We hug hello, we try to laugh and joke the way we always have: at the expense of one of us. It is forced and awkward, and I know I should have stayed home today because I am not in a mood for pretending everything is okay when it is not.

Since I've arrived, thirty minutes late and unshowered, I've been sitting cross-legged at the table idly staring at my phone, mindlessly scrolling through feeds that show me what people I barely know are thinking and watching and eating, silencing my own thoughts like some terrible scene from a Ray Bradbury novel, half listening to anything. My siblings are arguing over our
impending family vacation in early June, which my mother has arranged for us at a lodge in northern Wisconsin. My little brother, Patrick, is insisting that his family can't make it, and somehow he brings up the topic of our last family vacation.

Our family had never taken a vacation together, not all four children and both parents, not ever. But we gave it a go last summer, spending the week before Labor Day at an aging resort in northern Minnesota. It was cold and rainy most of the time, and Aaron lay in bed in the back of the A-frame cabin, my father across the hall, both of them pretending they weren't dying. They kept their Dopp kits side by side in the bathroom, and I knew next year that shelf would be empty, that neither of them would be here with us. My father and Aaron stuck it out on those rickety cabin beds and sofas as long as they could. We left for the city the morning after Patrick, his wife, and their baby finished their four-hour drive to the resort.

It must have been maddening for him, and exhausting for his baby. And disappointing. But right here? In this moment, just three months after the death of a husband who will never take another vacation with me again? I. Don't. Care.

I look up from my phone just long enough to tell him that: I don't care how disappointed he is with the last trip we took. We left because Aaron was dying, doesn't he get that? Doesn't he know that's the last trip I'll ever have with my husband, who would do anything to sit in a car and head up north again, even if just for a night?

I deliver this bitingly, though hardly looking up from my phone, where my pointer finger scrolls, scrolls, scrolls, the faces of old acquaintances and perfect strangers flying by while my brother pulls my daggers out of his chest.

I believe Elizabeth Kübler-Ross would call this the anger phase of grief, but in my heart I fear it is something worse: that without
the spell of Aaron's love, the ugly Nora Beast I thought was gone has returned.

Even as a small child I was always easily wounded, quick to anger, and slow to let go of a grudge. My father always told the story of Leo French, some man who insulted my grandfather's suit during the Depression, a trespass so grave that my grandfather, delirious in his old age, would go on and on about “that damn Leo French.”

“Let it go,” my dad would say when I would rage on about any and all perceived slights from classmates, teachers, or siblings, “This is your Leo French.”

Everything
was my Leo French. (And Mr. French, if your ancestors are reading this, I hope they know you were a real bastard for insulting my prince of a grandfather.) In fifth grade, I wrote entire diary entries about why I didn't love my mother. Among other failings, she always took my brother's side, never believed in me, didn't love me at all, and always took my brother's side. That final point was so important it was listed multiple times. I would scream and cry and throw tantrums so crazed that my family would just stare in disbelief at the rabid child before them and say, “Nora, don't throw a fit and fall in it,” which most child psychologists agree is definitely the correct thing to say to a child dealing with complex emotions.

I had a lot of feelings as a child, and a lot of empathy. I'd cry sometimes, alone in my room, out of sadness for the old man with Parkinson's who seemed so embarrassed by his condition in mass. We always sat a few pews behind him, and as the months passed and the shaking became more apparent, he'd graduated from using his good arm to brace the wild one to just sitting on his shaking hand and I'd stare at the back of his head and say, “I love you,” in my head like that had special healing powers. But I was also cruel and biting. Sometimes in ways I learned from watching
cliques of cool girls form around me, and sometimes in ways I innovated myself. Maybe all children are like this: a tender little heart wrapped in barbed wire. I was a razor blade in an apple. If an apple was a taller, uglier fruit that wasn't as popular as an apple, but wanted to be. So, maybe a banana? Clever and well-read and ugly is the perfect combination if you're trying to make a Swiss Army knife of a girl with any number of ways to protect herself and cut a person down.

Time helped me to soften these sharp edges, to grow a shell that prevented me from absorbing every hurt, and prevented me from slicing into people without thinking twice. But Aaron's love and Aaron's sickness and Aaron's death had helped form me into a new person, a new Nora. Today I don't feel like the old Nora or the new one. I don't feel like Nora at all.

It is true that grief is lonely. It is true that nobody can do this for me, that I must grieve my grief alone. It is true that when you type the word “grief” this many times, it starts to lose its meaning completely and starts to look like it is always spelled wrong. But it is also true that grief cannot be measured, that I have assigned a higher value to my own sorrow than I have to that of the people who love me most, that I have allowed my own feelings to invalidate theirs. It is not a contest you can win: Who here has the most dead people? Me! I do! Because we all lost Aaron and our father but only I lost
her
. I'd decided—we'd decided, Aaron and I together—that it was a girl I was carrying. She felt different from Ralph right away, a little feminine force developing inside of me. I am the only one left here to mourn her, and I didn't get a chance to, not really, because my father and Aaron followed her so quickly into the everywhere.

I have never felt more tenderness for any of my siblings than I did on November 25, when each of them was there to hold me
and Aaron, to hug his mother and his sister, to pour me a glass of wine and put my son to bed. I'd picked out everything for Aaron to wear to his cremation except his socks—a huge oversight for a man whose sock collection took up an entire bureau drawer—and my two brothers labored over this point with the same attention to detail that Aaron would have brought to the situation, holding different pairs of novelty socks up against his J.Crew button-down and sweater until they found the perfect complement. They folded his hands over his chest. They stayed in the room, their hands resting on his shoulders, as if he still needed comfort. That tenderness has calloused over, and today I cannot feel for anyone but myself and my own exposed nerves.

You know those episodes of
Hoarders
where they're trying to get a woman to let go of a room full of legit garbage and she's like, “I don't see the problem,” while a stranger is literally shoveling out piles of dead cats and old magazines? That's me, collecting all my sorrows, mooning over my ghoulish collection, completely oblivious to the people around me who want to help shovel some of this shit out, or at least organize it into piles.

Here!
I want to say.
Take it! The floor is about to cave in and I'm going to start peeing in a bucket at any moment!
But I can't say that, because we aren't talking anymore, any of us. My little brother packs up his diaper bag and zips his daughter into her snowsuit and leaves the house. My mother follows him outside. Nobody says another word to me, not for days, so I keep it all to myself.

R
eally, you are. I know it doesn't feel that way because everyone you know seems to be doing a better job at life than you are, but they're
not
. They're just really good at posting happy things to Facebook and Instagram.

You're doing a good job at work, even though your boss sends you douchey emails at 11:00
P.M
. with entire paragraphs in the subject line and even though your coworkers do annoying things like cc'ing the whole team on emails in which they basically throw you under the bus, but use emoticons to lessen the feeling of the tires crushing your spine. Remember that work is just work, it's not your entire life. It's just a thing you do during the day that helps finance your real passion for sitting on the couch watching Bravo and eating string cheese. You're good at what you do—great, really—so if these clowns can't see that, you can just dust off the old résumé and find somewhere new to work.

You're doing a good job of being a parent, unless you're
not
a parent, in which case, if you ever choose to be a parent, you'll probably end up being pretty good at it, I'd guess. If you are a parent, like I said, you're doing a pretty good job! Sure, you may have carried your baby wrong, Ryan Reynolds, but big deal! Who doesn't do that?! Who has ever done parenting exactly right? Who hasn't accidentally hit their son's head on the car door while trying to wrestle him into a car seat? Who hasn't given her child a penny to keep him occupied, and then discovered he has stored it in his cheek for safekeeping? Big deal! Your kids are growing up to be fine, wonderful humans because you did or did not put them in baby yoga already and they already do or do not speak two languages. Statistically speaking, you only need to worry about them being a mass murderer or orchestrating the financial meltdown of our nation if you're raising a white male, so don't sweat it too much.

You're doing a good job at friendship, even if you unfollowed most of your friends on Facebook because they complained about having a cold as if they had just been diagnosed with incurable brain cancer, and even if you insist on making a huge deal out of your birthday after age twenty-one. I love you, but you do need to stop with the birthday shit, guys. I get that you're excited about being alive but nobody gets a birthday
month,
and your friends are only pretending to tolerate it. You were born like everyone else on this planet, so stop acting like you're the first one to do it. Just buy yourself something expensive that you don't need, post a thank-you for all the “HBD” wishes on Facebook, and then quietly lament the quick passing of your one precious life, like the rest of us.

You're doing a good job at being a grown-up, too. I know it doesn't feel like it because you recently overdrew your checking account and woke up hungover at 2:00
P.M
. on a Sunday, but seriously, you are crushing it. I don't even know if people say “crushing
it” anymore, but that's the only way to describe what you're doing. You've mostly paid your bills on time, you're in a reasonably good relationship or you're single because you just cannot be tamed right now, and you may or may not be a parent. Who is doing a better job at life than you are? The only person who comes to mind is my two-year-old son, and only because he can threaten to wipe his butt on me and somehow make it cute. Otherwise, you're probably tied for first place with him.

The only reason nobody else has told you how good of a job you're doing is because they're all so nervous
they
'
re
not doing a good job that they can't even see what a good job you're doing. Just out of frame of those perfectly staged Instagram photos are the same piles of unopened mail and dirty dishes and the same crushing sense of doubt that's sitting on your chest right now, you just can't tell because of the filter. My personal fav is Valencia. It makes me look competent and hides my acne.

Being alive is really hard sometimes, and all we want is a little bit of credit. So here: As long as you never offer to take me to lunch and then try to recruit me for your pyramid scheme—I'm sorry—
network marketing opportunity,
trust me, you're doing a good job.