It's Okay to Laugh (4 page)

But my father doesn't skip a beat. He tells us about struggling to pull the body of a fallen marine onto a helicopter during heavy fire, how one of his friends stepped forward to help and was instantly killed by a bullet that would have instead ripped through my father's own skull.

Mark lowers his head, unable to meet my father's earnest gaze. The bell rings, but nobody stands up until my father dismisses them.

After class, I follow him out into a bright, hopeful Minnesota afternoon to play hooky for a daddy-daughter lunch. I don't ask him about anything he just told me and a bunch of other teenagers; I just settle into the passenger side of his black Lincoln with all his ghosts.

JUST A FEW MONTHS AFTER
their deaths I struggle to recall the details of these favorite tales from my husband and my father. Was it fourth or fifth grade when a strange boy at the playground asked to see Aaron's basketball, then kicked it across the highway? How possible is it that I could find that boy today, now an adult male close to forty, and kick his ass? What was my father's company, again? First Battalion, Alpha Company? First Recon Division? The Hawks? No, that's a sports team. No, it's an animal.

Today I went to another funeral. As a Catholic, funerals are both ritual and social engagement. Today's funeral was for a high school friend, a man my age named Eddie, married just a month ago, who died of the cancer that killed Aaron. The Basilica is
the
basilica, the first in our country, an imposing Beaux Arts building just under the freeway, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. In
its one hundred years the Basilica has seen many thousands of graduates and brides and baptized babies. Fifteen years ago, the class of 2001 lined up in these pews, in front of a massive marble altar, under the open arms of the Virgin Mary, and officially matriculated into adulthood. Now we are here to bury our classmate, and I cannot begin to list all the ways that this is not okay.

The day was two parts funeral, one part high school reunion, so I was glad to arrive at the Basilica of Saint Mary with cystic acne and baby boogers on the shoulder of my J.Crew swing coat to really show my high school classmates I was doing a-okay, even if I didn't live up to being voted Most Likely to Have a Talk Show. Also, I'd like to see the statistics on how many people did live up to what they were voted to be in their senior yearbooks. Although our Most Likely to Succeed is a dentist, so good for her/why am I such a failure?

We all remember differently, and that may never be more apparent than when you see people you haven't seen in over a decade. It is obvious, standing with a group of cute high school boys who grew into handsome men, that the truth is a multifaceted object, that it is slippery and subjective. Zach remembers me as pretty, his ultimate crush, and I am simultaneously flattered and totally incredulous because I remember spending all of high school convinced that I was the ugliest person alive. I think the polite and appropriate thing to do when someone is effusing over your past beauty is just to nod and give a sincere thank-you. But if you're wondering how joking that “hey, I'm single now” would go over in a church, after a funeral, in front of people you haven't seen for over a decade, four months after your husband's death, let me just save you the trouble and say . . . not great? Work on the punch line and revisit it in a few months.

After I killed the vibe at a funeral, my classmates and I joined everyone else in the massive church basement for lunch. This
basement is filled with so many people that I do not know: people who Eddie went to college and grade school with. His cousins and his coworkers. We all lead many lives that rarely intersect. It's so uncomfortable for me, watching another person's worlds mix together; I can't imagine how I'll feel watching my own funeral as a really beautiful ghost.

People are uncomfortable with the idea of a microphone, and it's been a slow trickle of those brave enough to stand up and tell a story, when Eddie's cousin takes the mic.

“Please,” he says, “if you knew Eddie in a different way than I did, tell me a story now.” He is soft and ruddy-cheeked, with small eyes made smaller by crying. “Tell me anything,” he says, before sitting back down to lunch. “Give me a way to hold on to him.” I had said almost the same thing to a group of friends after Aaron died, when all my memories of him were occluded by the horror of the past month. “Help me remember him,” I texted, and they filled my phone with funny photos and stories until he came back to me as he'd lived, not as he'd died.

I want this for Eddie's cousin, though I am too embarrassed to stand and speak. I want to tell him about how Eddie got drunk on prom night, in the block of hotel rooms our friend's parents had rented for all of us, because we were such good kids and probably, a little bit, because their daughter had fought serious complications from cystic fibrosis her whole young life and deserved to have a dream prom, complete with an unsupervised post-prom party. We'd all ditched our expensive dresses for basketball shorts and sweatshirts and sometime in the middle of the night (or, more realistically, about 11:00
P.M
.), Eddie stumbled drunk into the room where I was Frenching my boyfriend and decided my prom dress must be the bathroom. That memory tended to get lost somewhere for me, pushed out by trivia from the
Real Housewives
franchise and too many tweets, but Eddie brought it up every time I saw him over the years.

“Remember when I peed on your prom dress?” he'd say, laughing like it was just yesterday that I had to point his drunk teenage ass toward the actual bathroom while wringing out my prom dress into a hotel trash can.

I will never forget that story again, and I will need to dry-clean that dress before my imaginary daughter wears it to Prom 2032.

AARON AND MY FATHER HAVE
been gone for months now, and it hurts in a different way than it did at first. I feel sometimes like an archaeologist, discovering new ways to miss someone as I discover new things about them.

In Aaron's wallet, I find a small Post-it note, something I'd left behind on the counter as I left for work, right when he'd first started treatment.

        
Feel better. I love you. So much.

        
Love,

            
Nornia

Of all the notes I left him, this one made it front and center in his wallet, in front of all his credit cards. I will never know why this one was so special to him, but it is enough to know that it
was
special, that I did small things that meant a great deal to him, the way he did for me.

I did my best to memorize Aaron and my father, to know them by heart the way I knew my beloved childhood books, which I could recite from memory even when full pages went missing, but it was an impossible task. I know they will continue to come to me like this, in unexpected notes and memories, helping me to fill in the missing pages.

M
y siblings and I often communicate in nothing but movie lines. The sophisticated and mature all know that you can convey a lot of emotions through the scripts of
Tommy Boy,
Black Sheep, Dumb & Dumber,
and
Stepbrothers
.

I was just checking the specs on the endline for the rotary girder . . .

I know you just caught me Googling “burial at sea” when I was supposed to be looking up directions to the funeral home.

Just when I thought you couldn't get any stupider . . .

Could you not buy my two-year-old a singing plastic hamster?

You gave our dead bird to a blind kid?

You know you're an idiot, right?

Brothers don't shake hands, brothers gotta hug!

I know you're really scared and sad about your husband dying, but I am here for you. And I will still try to make you laugh until you pee your pants.

Having three siblings does have its downsides, like when you have explosive diarrhea and your sister is in the bathroom working on her mall bangs or your brother breaks your tailbone while you're wrestling for the remote control and you get sent to your room because you said the f-word. But there are upsides, too. Like having three best friends to take care of you while your husband enters hospice a few weeks after you all lost your father.

I expected that of Meghan, because Meghan has been like a mom to me. She's eight years older, which doesn't make her actually old enough to be my mother, but in the eighties it was totally socially acceptable for her to assume primary responsibility for me while our parents were busy. And she did a good job except for the time I launched my baby walker down the concrete steps while she was flirting with our neighbor boy.

As the oldest child, Meghan blazed the trail for all of us, but especially me. She was the first child to move out (at seventeen, with a full-time job and her own apartment). The first to get a tattoo, dye her hair pink, publish a book, get married, have a child, and become a notable figure in the Minneapolis business community. I'm basically a knockoff version of Meghan, in many ways. But I am taller.

Meghan was the first person I called when we knew the baby inside me was dead. I didn't need to say anything: she knew everything from the way I said her name. She picked me up early the next morning, sat with me in the waiting room with our sister-in-law, held my hand until they took me away to scrape the baby out of me. When I woke up, in a druggy haze, I told her I wanted to go to the mall to buy new panties. I'd always hated that word,
but I kept saying it, kept insisting that I needed new panties, that we must go to the mall to buy new panties. “Okay,” she said, as the nurse shook her head and silently mouthed the word
no
. At home, she tucked me into bed next to Aaron and handed me my credit card, where I promptly ordered thirty new pairs of underpants because a quasi-abortion really puts you in a weird head space. “I love you, Nor Nors,” she said, kissing me like I was her own child. She was there when Aaron was in hospice, perpetually cleaning my kitchen, raising my child, and giving me healthy pours of white wine to anesthetize me at night.

I expected a lot of Patrick, too. He's the youngest, and just two years younger than me, so I consider him “my” brother. We were raised as a pair, like Austin and Meghan were. Patrick has all the idiosyncrasies of an elderly man in a twenty-nine-year-old body. He “collects” cars, by which I mean his driveway is filled with automobiles in various states of functionality. He “is getting really into clocks.” He's “got a guy,” whether you need a vintage refrigerator door or a new deck built. His quirks are not studied and affected. Rather, they are the kind of genuine weirdnesses that eventually end up in the pages of Urban Outfitters catalogs. Things like handlebar mustaches and old cassette tapes and man buns. He is the kind of man who has an ironic tattoo inside his upper lip, and also spends a lot of his time on recreational birding.

Patrick and Aaron shared a special bond. They loved comic books and superhero movies and making fun of me for having lived in New York. “Oh!” they'd say to each other. “Did you know that Nora used to live in
New York
?! I mean,
wow
.” I'd always wanted the man I loved to love my family the way I do. Aaron and Patrick loved each other perhaps more than either of them loved me, and I was okay with that.

But I had basically no expectations of my brother Austin. Austin is seven years older than me, and he was always Meghan's brother. Whereas a much older sister will mother you, a much older brother will ask you to please stop coming down to the basement and interrupting his Dungeons & Dragons game or he'll fart on your head.

My father always insisted that Austin was our mother's favorite child, because he most closely resembles her. I think he is her favorite because he is a cipher. He doesn't give much away, you have to draw it out of him, or just search through his dresser drawers while he's at school. He is quiet and contemplative, right-handed, and has an Ivy League degree. Which in a family of loud, obnoxious lefties makes you a total black sheep.

Austin's slipperiness just made me more intrigued by him, and I followed him around like something that is more annoying than a puppy, while he swatted me away for years and years. For a few years when we were both on the East Coast, we'd visit each other by train and spend the weekends smoking pot and watching
It's Always Sunny,
and every time I made him laugh I would think to myself,
My cool brother finally loves me!!!
while outwardly trying to play it cool. But when he moved to Seattle, the years and distance pulled us apart again.

The night that Aaron entered hospice, Austin came to our house and spent the night on my couch, away from his own wife and child. He took a leave from work and spent every day just being there. Austin had just moved back to Minneapolis, and he and Aaron had barely gotten to know each other, but he showed up. Like, really showed up, which is more important than just physically being there. It is hard to die with dignity, because the dying process does everything it can to strip you of it, day by day. I did what I could do myself, but I needed help, and Aaron knew it. Who was okay to see him like this, I asked, who could help me do these very
personal things? “Just you and my brothers,” he told me in his fading, scratchy voice. Patrick and Aaron had called each other “brother” since the day they met, but Austin became Aaron's brother when it mattered most. And both of them made sure that Aaron died as well as he could, wearing a button-down shirt because he liked to look like a damn gentleman.

Patrick read comic books aloud to Aaron, and Austin sat with him for hours in the room that was our office, holding his hands. My slippery brother was there, every day. No longer a mystery to me, but a constant reassurance in the face of death and loss. When I woke up, he was in my kitchen. When I went to bed, I heard him saying good night to Aaron. “It's okay, buddy,” he told him, “I'll take care of them. You did good. You did real good.”

We learn as we get older to appreciate the people we love for who they are, and for how they love us. I realized that my dad was never going to be Danny Tanner, and I loved him for the way he
could
love me, which was sometimes a little too sarcastic for a child to understand. My mother is not my best friend, but I can appreciate her own unique brand of love, even if I sometimes want to kill her. Patrick and Meghan always loved me the way I love them: out loud and aggressively. It is completely normal for us to get into screaming fights, or laugh until we pee our pants. Sometimes at the same family dinner.

Austin will always be quiet and contemplative, and his love for us will always be a steady and reliable force even when the floor gives way beneath us. But maybe it has always been this way. My mother loved to tell us how Austin would come home from school when I was a baby, creep into my nursery, and carry me downstairs, claiming I'd already been awake, to have a chance to play with me. And wasn't it Austin who told me to study abroad during college, to not be afraid of leaving behind my boyfriend and exploring the
world? Maybe that was actually my dad, but I do remember Austin running to a neighbor's house to get a pair of scissors when my shoelaces got caught in my bike gears, which meant at one point, he had taken his little sister out for a bike ride. Because he did like me, at least a little bit. And he maybe even loved me, in his own quiet way, while I was just too damn loud and obnoxious to hear it.

I don't have to chase Austin around anymore, I know. He's going to be there for me for the rest of my life, whenever I need him, as long as I promise never to go through his drawers again. In the immortal words of John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell in the critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning movie
Stepbrothers:

“Did we just become best friends?”

“Yup!”