It's Okay to Laugh (18 page)

A
s humans in a Western society that prizes efficiency and resiliency and general get-the-fuck-over-it-ness, I'm afraid that I'm contributing to the notion that happiness is just about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and taking a deep breath when life delivers a Chuck Norris throat punch right to your esophagus.

“You make it look easy,” my sister told me one day while I fell apart in the front seat of her car, wiping my nose on my jacket sleeve and rambling incoherently about how nobody gets it, and everybody thinks I'm totally fine when I can't hear that Wiz Khalifa song from
Furious 7
without crying over my dad and Aaron and Paul Walker.

It's easy to make it look easy because I learned from the best. I complained more about my period than Aaron ever did about having brain cancer. Even when the tumor was pushing through new
parts of his brain, shutting down his left arm and eventually his left leg, he was really chill. He laughed and smiled and made me stay up later than 10:00
P.M
. watching
Buffy
on Netflix. It wasn't easy, I know. I was there to see him sleep twenty hours a day, to help button his shirts for him, to hold Ralph up to his face for hugs and kisses when he could no longer lift him. If he never felt sorry for himself, how could I feel sorry for me?

The thing is, it
is
easier for me than it is for some people. I know that even though I miscarried a baby and my dad and husband died a few weeks later, I'm a privileged person. Even grief is a privilege. Some women don't get to quit their jobs and write a book when their lives explode, they just have to turn up to work the next day and hope they find the time to pick up the pieces of their old lives at a later date.

Grief is weird, guys. Most books talk about it in nature terms, like it is a churning ocean, with waves and riptides and eddies that can pull you under. But mine is more like an expert stalker, adept at sneaking up on me undetected and strangling me from behind. He's too slick for most people even to notice, but he's there in the shadows, lurking at the edge of my happy Instagram photos, waiting to choke me out.

People
want
me to grieve. Sort of. They want me to be sad, but not so sad that I get drunk and cry at a stylish bar downtown. They want me to be happy, but not so happy that I go on a date with a man in public and maybe let him kiss me. They want me to move on, but not too quickly, and with one eye trained on the rearview mirror. They want me to grieve, but they don't want me to be a downer. Like, be mostly happy and, if it's not too much to ask, compartmentalize and schedule my grief for convenient times, like, perhaps from 7:00 to 9:00
P.M
. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings.

“Be kind,” we post on Facebook, “for everyone you meet is facing
a hard battle.” We attribute that quote to everyone from Aristotle to Marilyn Monroe, and then we go about our business doing our best not to look at the hard things. Unless they're already over, in which case they're not a hard thing anymore, they're an obstacle overcome, an enemy vanquished. Now it's a success story with a happy ending! People want it to look easy. And I don't blame them, because it's exhausting to watch someone struggle. Ask Lindsay Lohan. People don't want to see you falling out of a cab without your underpants on, they want to see you pretending to be twins who want their parents to get back together.

I had a habit of always, always choosing the subway car that would inevitably serve as a makeshift theater for a doo-wop band, an evangelist from the Deep South who believes he will make a difference in the world by screaming about sin in a crowded train, or a run-of-the-mill panhandler.

But one day, the crowds parted as if they'd seen a leper. Close enough. It was a man who was so badly burned his face was little more than a skull with a thin layer of pink skin, rippled and ridged, stretched tight across. I only knew he was a man because his beat-up cardboard sign held photos of him before his accident, smiling and normal, with all his facial features. He didn't say a word, just jangled the coffee can he used to collect money as he made his way through the car. I didn't have any money with me, because I prefer to deal only in the imaginary funds of credit cards, but when he made his way to my end of the car, I temporarily broke my concentration on the idiotic matching game I'd been laboring over for months and looked him in the eye.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I meant because I didn't have any money. And because this was the shitty deal he got out of life: shuffling through train cars begging for cash from strangers who didn't want to see him.

I have it easier than a guy who got his face burned off and now begs for pennies on the F train, I know that. My life is hard, but just being alive can be hard. Even I need a reminder of that, especially when people on Facebook are complaining about seasonal allergies like they were just diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer. It's harder than it looks for everyone.

If you ask me how I am, I'll tell you reflexively that I'm okay. And it's true, for the most part.

And when you tell me the same thing, I'll know that it's mostly true for you, too. Because you're working hard to be that way. Not because it's easy.

B
ecause my son is a walking cliché of a toddler, he loves Curious George, bananas, and saying no. He says it even when he means yes, like when I ask if he has pooped his pants or if he needs a nap or if he likes ice cream. No, no, no.

He's persistent and predictable and damn it, he is wise. No gets harder to say the older we get. We are too encumbered by the expectations of other people to offer them just those two letters as a reply. Instead, we say:

“I'd love to, but . . .”

“Oh, I can't right now, but . . .”

“Actually, I'd just rather not . . .”

No is good. No is valuable. I know all those articles people share on Facebook are all about “Seven reasons to say YES TO EVERYTHING!” But they are a lie. No was invented to protect us from ourselves and our natural inclination to want to be agreeable, to be like the Facebook posts that insist we should embrace everything with a nod and a smile.

No has your back. No prevents you from going on three dates with a guy you are barely interested in, and suddenly finding yourself in a year-long relationship because you didn't want to hurt his feelings and tell him you weren't interested after you watched him eat spaghetti.

No keeps you from joining a religious cult.

The first time my doorbell rang, we were new to the neighborhood and I assumed the woman on my front stoop was my neighbor from across our backyard, out on an evening walk. I'm terrible with names and not so great with faces, so when she introduced herself and invited herself in, I assumed her name had just disappeared into the ether, along with the names and faces of most of my friends and family.

But then she started asking me about God, and what I thought happened after we died, and I realized this might not actually just be a neighbor rolling out the Welcome Wagon. The more I looked at her, I realized she wasn't the carefree softball mom who had introduced herself over my garden bed in the backyard. This lady had longer hair, puffier bangs. She was wearing a longer dress. A dress with very long sleeves. She had a pile of booklets with her. I had seen these booklets before, in New York, when women who looked like her wandered through the F train passing out “literature” about all the ways you may end up in hell, which read like a comic book about my twenties.

Very slowly, I realized she wasn't my neighbor. She didn't want to stop by for a glass of water. She wanted me to join her cult.

I remembered, suddenly, that I had to pick my child up from day care even though it was a Saturday afternoon. I promised this stranger that I would read her brochures and I thanked her for her concern over my mortal soul as I locked the door after her.

Never again,
I thought,
never again.

She returned a few months later. She'd spotted me through the picture window as she walked up to our house, and I answered the door because not hurting the feelings of a cult recruiter was more important to me than actually enjoying my afternoon. My mind was thinking,
Lady, could you please leave me alone? I am not interested in joining your cult.
But my stupid mouth was saying, “Nice to see you! Would you like a cup of coffee?” We talked a little bit about the brochures she had left, but mostly just about life and being moms. After an hour, I realized that I had a cult recruiter curled up on my couch and that she was playing the long con, and again, I used my son as an excuse so I wouldn't hurt her feelings and have her gossiping to God about me.

Month after month she returned for coffee and casual conversation. Sometimes, I would try just casually to mention that I was not in the market for a new religion. “Oh,” I'd say, “my husband and I just went to a great meditation course. It was so open and accepting of different viewpoints.” Or, “Our son was baptized at the Basilica in my old baptismal gown, isn't that neat?” She'd nod and smile and leave some more brochures on my coffee table. When I wasn't home, she'd leave a Post-it on my door or tell my baby-sitter to let me know she had stopped by.

When she left me her cell phone number, I knew things had gone too far, that I'd let the wrong one in and I was in danger of being eaten alive by a vampire.

So I made it stop. Finally. Because I stood up for myself and did what I should have done right away, the first time she showed up trying to sell me a new religion the way people sell knives or magazine subscriptions.

I moved.

—MARY OLIVER

I
cancelled my first date with Aaron to attend a funeral.

I don't even know if it would count as a date, but we were supposed to attend an advertising awards event together. It would most certainly have involved my getting far too drunk, far too fast, and him pouring me into his tiny VW Golf, dropping me on the curb outside of my apartment, and never speaking to me again. It's that kind of event. And I was that kind of girl.

Instead, I drove across the river to St. Paul in a black dress and met my mother in an elegant museum lobby. It was my first evening funeral, and it was . . . chic and beautiful, with passed hors d'oeuvres and theater seating. My mother and I took a seat near the aisle, and squeezed each other's hands three times.

Marshall died of glioblastoma, a brain tumor that crawled out
from the center of his brain, snipping the wires that made him Marshall before destroying him completely.

His widow, Mary, went to grade school with my mother. At the funeral, Mary and her children were calm and peaceful in the face of a loss so big I could not comprehend it. Dads aren't supposed to die until their children are also old, when Dad is so old that you say, “Grandpa died,” and your also-adult children can agree that it's for the best and say he had a good life and wonder aloud who is going to get his watches.

Dad is most definitely not supposed to die before his children are even all through high school. That is simply unacceptable.

You are sad for many reasons at a funeral. You are sad for the person who has died, for all of the people who loved that person. And you are sad for you, and the fact that you have loved people who are no longer here, people whose ghosts decide to sit with you through the service. And you're sad for our weak little mortal bodies and the fact that someday we will just be atoms floating through space and nobody will even remember our best tweets.

I cried for each of these reasons, all of them added up, like I had been storing up my sadness and cashed it all in at once. I have always wanted to be the kind of woman who was prepared for anything, who had a handbag with tissues on hand for moments like this, but I am not that kind of woman and all that was in my handbag were loose receipts and lip glosses and credit cards so instead I just wiped my nose on my sleeve.

MY MOTHER STAYED IN BED
for weeks when her father died.

That can't actually be right, but that is how I remember that part of my childhood. The day our grandfather died, my little brother, Patrick, and I had had a very exciting afternoon with our own father. Outings with Steve were not regular occurrences. Dad
worked a lot, even in the nineties before smartphones and email made it necessary for you to be tethered to your advertising job at all hours. Steve spent his free time golfing, a good game for a contemplative introvert with marginal athletic skills and a house full of noisy children. Our daily lives were attended to by our mother, who also worked a full-time job in advertising, but somehow managed to pack our lunches, sign our report cards, and remember to pick us up from school functions 40 percent of the time.

The time our dad spent with us was always generous and intoxicating. That day, he took us to see
The Three Musketeers
at the nearby movie theater, an old-fashioned joint with plush red seats and popcorn covered in real butter. As usual, he sat between us and ate all the best, most butter-soaked pieces before we even had a chance, but he'd bought us each our own “ice-cold Coca-Cola Classic,” which is exactly how he insisted on ordering it at the counter, and a pack of Twizzlers to share. Afterward, we went to a local malt shop and washed our cheeseburgers down with a milk shake. I knew even in the moment that we were making a memory.

At home after the movie, my brother and I were high on life and refined sugar, reenacting scenes from the movie even though I was in fifth grade and right at the cusp of being too cool for that kind of thing. Patrick and I were engaged in a pretend sword fight, standing on his little twin bed wielding our paper towel tubes, when my father walked in and asked us to hold his hands and pray.

“Your grandfather just died,” he said, the same way you might tell a child that dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. Patrick and I sat down on either side of our dad and held his hands the way we did nearly every Sunday at mass.

“Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

Patrick, always so tender and open, wept against my father's shoulder until the prayer was done and Steve kissed us both and
told us to be good, that our mother was going to need us. When our father left the room, Patrick turned to me, still sobbing, and I hugged him for as long as I could stand it while a tennis ball lodged in my throat.

My grandfather had not been sick. He had been old, I suppose, but only in the way that all grandparents are old—they are simply born at age seventy-five and remain there until you are old enough to understand how age works. Certainly there were older people on earth. My father had explained, briefly, how he had died: not of old age, but of a stroke, or something with his heart. I had tried to listen, but my mind was too busy serving me snapshots of my grandfather: his legs, spindly as a crane's from a childhood bout with rickets, wading after us into the cold of Lake Roosevelt; his thick Irish cable-knit sweater; the ceramic pot my grandmother had thrown for him in her studio, in which he hid his Brach's caramels, a treat he would sneak to us if we were good. The last time I had seen him was summer, up at the cabin where he lived with my grandmother, three hours from the city at the end of a dirt road. “You get more beautiful every day,” he said to me when I got out of the car with a mouth full of crooked teeth and a boy's haircut.

Before I shut myself in my own bedroom, I snuck a peek down the hall toward the door of my parents' room. The afternoon light reduced everything in their room to its silhouette. There was the armoire, the big iron bed my parents shared, and the outline of my mother, under the covers, her back to the door. I could tell she was crying.

During that time, I don't remember my mother as anything but that silhouette. My father helped me pick out what to wear for the funeral.
The Addams Family
movie had recently come out, and I was hoping to wear something similar to Wednesday Addams's
signature look, but they didn't have anything like that at Gap Kids, so I opted instead for a denim shirtdress with a black velvet collar. It didn't seem appropriate, but my dad told me that “children wearing black to a funeral is bullshit” so I accepted the dress and added a black beret to somber it up a bit.

I was annoyed a little with my mother, lying in bed while our father made us yet another plate of goddamn poached eggs and toast for dinner. Didn't she care that we had just lost our grandfather, for Pete's sake?

She must have been there, but I can't conjure her presence during that time, even at my grandfather's funeral. I had held my father's hand through the service, the skin tan and dry like fine-grit sandpaper, gripping mine like a vise during the Our Father.

I don't know when she came back to our world, just that one day she was there again, as if nothing had happened at all.

MY MOTHER LOOKS BEAUTIFUL AT
my father's funeral. She is lean and elegant from years of yoga and a recent foray into the world of powerlifting. She has actually been in the local newspaper, in a feature on strength training and women, described as “a grandmother who can deadlift 135 pounds.” Her record for deadlifts is actually 160 pounds, but we did not ask for a correction. Looking at her, with her cream-colored skin and her sky-blue eyes, her classic Diane Keaton style, I am reminded of the time my father told my high school boyfriend not to settle down with anyone (um, okay) until he'd taken a good look at her mother.

“Don't get too hung up on what she looks like now. If she's got a fat mom, there's no way around it, buddy, she's gonna get fat,” he said.

“Now, you know Mary,” he said of my grandmother, “I met her
when she was at least fifty, but she looked good. She still does. She doesn't look a day over eighty right now, which at her age is a big compliment.”

My boyfriend at the time had nodded in agreement about the raw sexuality of my grandmother. He was always a good sport.

Your father's post-funeral luncheon is the saddest meal you'll ever eat, wedged between your father's funeral and his burial. We have overwhelmed the church ladies, who were not planning on feeding so many people ham sandwiches on white rolls and sides of goopy potato salad served with an ice cream scoop. They had tried in vain to get the crowd, a mix of devout and fallen-away Catholics, total heathens and other Minneapolis ad folk, to say a prayer before the meal was served, withholding the food under layers of plastic wrap. Finally, my cousin Johanna, a floaty, free, Northern California spirit, got one of them to give up control of the microphone, into which she had shouted, “Hey! Time to eat!” in place of the Lord's Prayer. “Ladies,” she cooed to them as she returned the mic to its stand, “it's a funeral . . . relax.” They have not relaxed, though, and they serve up the luncheon with a side of passive aggression. I sense that it is the wrong time to ask these women if there are any gluten-free options, so instead I drink cup after cup of strong black coffee in a laughably small disposable cup. In my big hands, it looks more like a thimble.

Aaron is sitting at a big round table with a group of my childhood friends, pushing food around his plate. He is wearing the suit my father helped him buy for our wedding, the one that cost more than twice my off-the-digital-rack wedding dress. It took both of us to get him into it today, as his growing brain tumor snips away at all of the functions we take for granted. He's a good sport as I button his shirt and buckle his belt and work his arm into a soft black sling I bought at CVS. My dress does not have pockets, so Aaron has placed both
my lipstick and my phone into the small pocket in his sling. “I'm just here to look good and be your living purse,” he had said that morning as I adjusted his tie in the back of the church.

I've spent several hours pretending to know who I am talking to when they hug me and tell me how sorry they are for my loss, but most of these faces have meshed into one. Finally, there is one I know for certain, an old family friend who I am shocked to find has actually turned into an
old
family friend. He is handsome still, and older in the way they age movie actors in films where they need to play themselves in the future: like someone just drew some wrinkles on him with makeup and brushed some gray into his hair.

“Gosh,” he says, looking past my shoulder to cast a loving, wistful gaze at my mother, “I always had such a crush on your mother.”

After we bury my father, in a small plot among rolling acres of long-gone veterans, men and women whose lives are represented by identical white headstones, I go back to work. Everything at my little beige cube is exactly as I left it when I'd gotten a call from my sister the day before my father died telling me to leave work, now. My favorite mug is filled with a scummy layer of dried-up coffee, the highlighter I'd left uncapped is now dry. I spend the day staring blankly at my computer screen, getting hugs from coworkers who are very sorry to hear about my father, sitting in meetings and wondering how all of these people can carry on like this when there is such an obvious, gaping hole in the world. For days and weeks afterward, I pretend he is still alive, that he has left to spend the winter in Palm Springs as he had for years. I keep his number in my favorites, just in case I need to call him.

ONE SUMMER IN MY LATE
twenties, I went to a funeral with my father for a person who was too young to die. It was early evening when the service ended, and when we made our way from
the stony sadness of the viewing room to the outdoors, we found ourselves on a busy street with cars passing and late-summer sun shining and packs of young people, drunk on the feeling of being alive in the summer (and also beer), rushing down the sidewalk off to somewhere.

“That's the thing,” my father said to me, my arm looped in his, “the world just keeps spinning, doesn't it?”