It's Okay to Laugh (9 page)

Cry.

Punch a pillow.

Punch a wall. Gently. You don't need a cancer patient
and
a person with a broken hand; that's just foolish

Break something (not your hand; please see above). From my experience, bottles are satisfying, but I've heard fantastic things about lightbulbs as well.

Fantasize about breaking something bigger. Something that you can take a hammer to. Something you can hack apart with an ax.

Love them hard.

Love them the way they need to be loved, however that is. It is sometimes gentler than what you want to give them, because your natural inclination will be to want to squeeze them so hard their bones crack, to crawl inside them like a pod person so you never have to be apart. They may not be super into that.

Leave a note on the counter before you leave for work in the morning. Hide another in their wallet. Actually, shit, you should be doing this even if they don't have cancer. This is just good relationship advice overall. Start doing this now.

Be there.

Go away.

Treat them real special, real nice. Send a jet for them tonight because they can have whatever they liiiiiiiiike. They can have whatever they liiiiiike. If you don't believe that T.I. is a poet after listening to that song, I cannot be of further assistance to you.

Treat them like a normal person. Because cancer isn't an excuse to leave your clothes right next to the hamper when there is a perfectly good basket just waiting to be filled with dirty clothing, and the garbage still needs to be taken out. It smells. It's garbage.

There's not a right thing to do or a wrong thing to do, and sometimes there is nothing to do at all.

Okay, there is one wrong thing to do and that is Googling it. Don't Google it, okay? The Internet is good at so many things, but reassuring someone that their cancer-stricken wife/husband/son/brother/best friend is gonna be a-okay just
isn't one of them.

The Internet should recognize that and just focus on its strengths (Twitter, photos of baby giraffes, online shopping) but no, it insists on housing tons and tons of “information” that will fill you with anxiety dreams where the stairs fall out from beneath you as you're climbing to the top of a tall building.

Life will unfold as it will no matter what you type into that search bar, so just give yourself a break and Google something more useful, like photos of nineties supermodels.

There aren't any right words to say or wrong words to say. Except for “God has his reasons.” For the love of Pete, never say that unless you want to get kicked in the throat because no, my God is, like, “Oh, man, this sucks” while holding her hands up and shrugging. She doesn't have a reason.

You can be sad.

You
will
be sad. This is fucking sad; don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

You can be strong.

You
will
be strong. You are fucking strong; don't let your dumb brain tell you otherwise.

You will be whatever they need you to be, but more important, you will let them continue to be themselves. You will let them be sad. Or angry.

You will let them punch something (gently) or get a neck tattoo or run a marathon or just continue living their lives like average people because that is what they are.

They're not just statistics and pity cases and yellow rubber bracelets and Facebook statuses that you better share for just
one hour
to show your support, otherwise you're a cancer-loving sonofabitch.

They're people. Our people.

What do you do when the person you love gets cancer?

Your very best.

And you also cry.

M
y father's dying wish was for “generations of Catholic McInernys.” To be clear about the dying process, nobody asks you if you
have
a dying wish, but it's generally understood that anything you say when you are making your exit from this world to the next should be taken as explicit instructions for your children. So when the priest, wrapping up the last rites, asked my father if there was anything else he wanted to pray for, that was his answer. And while my three siblings looked at one another nervously, I felt as smug and superior as one can feel while standing at her father's deathbed, because Ralph was the only grandchild out of five who had been baptized.

We were standing in the room that had been my father's office until he went to the hospital with more chest pain than usual and ended up in the ICU. While he was lying in a hospital bed, my siblings and I had dutifully packed up the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with his beautifully bound copies of everything from diet books to Faulkner. We dismantled the desk where he sat every
day, writing the infomercials that would sell millions of dollars' worth of vacuum cleaners and weight loss solutions. We sanded and painted and made his dim little office a good room to die in. The paint was barely dry when the ambulance brought him home for hospice this evening and now our father is lying in a loaner hospital bed where his bookcases ought to be.

Father Gillespie, the closest thing the Archdiocese of Minneapolis–Saint Paul has to a beloved celebrity, has led us through last rites. It is the second time my father has received the sacrament, though he didn't count the first one earlier today. That priest was a free agent, some sort of hippie who floats from hospital to hospital anointing the sick. He was wearing a knit beanie when he'd parted the dark curtains of my father's room in the ICU, and I don't think my father believed a man who was dressed like he just came from an REI sale could possibly be a priest.

At any rate, Father Gillespie is here to do it right.

Steve tries to sit up and pray with us, but the effort is too much. Father Gillespie soothes him like a child, commending his effort with a quiet
shhhhh,
a firm hand on his shoulder. On Sunday mornings I would stand next to my father in church, embarrassed at how loud he sang, how loud he prayed. I kept my voice quiet—it was hard to remember all of the words. I could never sing along with the cantor's faux-opera register, even as my father tapped his finger along the lyrics in the hymnal.

Now, Steve is moving his lips quietly beneath his breathing mask and my siblings and I are left to pick up the slack. We are awkward and self-conscious through the Hail Mary, not wanting to go too fast or too slow, not wanting to be the one to say the wrong words out loud. This is probably a residual fear from the fact that the Church recently changed the responses, a move that I believe was only done so they could see who was paying attention and
who had only been to mass once since last Christmas. I've been caught every time confidently saying “AND ALSO WITH YOU!” while everyone around me is saying “AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT” and judging me for not keeping up with the hot news coming out of the Vatican. Last year I'd been ambushed outside of mass while heading to a funeral. The local news wanted to interview Catholics about how they felt about the pope retiring. I was described as a “local Catholic,” because they didn't really have enough space on screen to add “goes to mass for holidays and funerals, still considers herself somewhat Catholic but has problems with patriarchy, child sex abuse, and discrimination.”

When he's led us through a series of Hail Marys so long it becomes a meditative chant, Father Gillespie turns to me and my siblings and asks if there are any prayers we'd like to say ourselves. In moments like this, it's vitally important to say the right thing. Your father will only die once, after all. Which is why I say, after several beats of what feels to me like unbearable silence, “We're not good at that. We don't know how to do that.”

What I mean is that Catholic school did not prepare me for this moment. What I mean is that decades of going to mass, where a guy in front tells you what to say and when to say it, while standing on an altar that clearly tells you who is in charge and who's zoning out and thinking about the doughnuts in the basement, we literally
don
'
t know what to say.
We just said all the prayers we knew, like, a hundred times. We are not cut out for freestyling. That's
your
job, Father!

My awkward comment hangs in the air, right over our dad's body. We are for sure, one hundred percent, letting this guy down. And if he could talk right now, that's what he'd be telling us.

Up until just a few months ago our family dinners were characterized by my father shouting, “For God's sake, we're all in the
same room, can you keep your
goddamn voices down
?” But now that our father has collapsed back onto the bed after struggling to sit up and pray the Our Father with us, Father Gillespie gently anointing his forehead and hands with oil, we are speechless.

Father Gillespie assures me that there is not a wrong way to do it, and though my father is unable to speak, I know in his heart he is thinking, How the hell did you get through twelve years of Catholic school without knowing how to PRAY, GODDAMMIT?!

So I go for it. And I tell my dad everything I've already told him before, on Sunday afternoons as he rocked my baby to sleep, on teary phone calls from my college dorm room, on long car rides to and from college or the golf course or the grocery store. That I love him. I love him I love him I love him. That he is a good father and the best gift he has even given us is how much he loves my mother, that their happy and stable marriage has set the standard for what a loving partnership means for their four children. I am not crying. My head is clear and my voice steady. I feel like I am delivering a very important message. I am, I think, finally learning what a prayer is. It is just a thank-you.

“I love you,” I tell him again and again, stroking his forehead the way he would touch my fevered head as a child. “You were such a good father to us.”

“Really?” he asks me, childlike and incredulous.

“Really. I'm grateful for everything you did for us. I'm so proud to be a McInerny.”

I know he hears me because his eyes are wide and he responds, his voice occluded by the respirator. I am sure that he says, “You'll always be a McInerny.” Aaron hears, “But you're
not
a McInerny.” One is a heartfelt, movie-worthy line and one is an ongoing joke about my being adopted/being Aaron's problem now. And you know what? Either is perfect. Because either is perfectly Steve.

Faith is a complicated thing. My father's gave him comfort and purpose. It helped that he was also in AA, which really backs you up on the whole Higher Power thing. I've learned, over the years, to cherry-pick from a lot of different areas and build my own sort of belief system. To be clear, my father was not a proponent of that. He called it Cafeteria Catholicism, and meant it as an insult. I call it Cafeteria Catholicism, and I mean it as an example of how clever I am. “Take all you want, but use all you take,” my father used to say when we dished up our plates. So that's what I do. There's a lot I don't love about Catholicism, but I'll keep that out of this book to maintain important relationships with my family members. But I love the ritual of Catholicism. I love that when I step into a church in Florence, Kentucky, or Florence, Italy, it is all the same (give or take a pair of jorts). I love rows of children in identical uniforms. I love the idea of treating people well, of examining your own behavior, of trying to improve. I love the idea of a cadre of saints watching over us, just a prayer away should we lose our keys or lose our way entirely. I love that, at its best, faith gives people a specific thread to connect them through space and time, that the prayers my father said with us at bedtime were the same ones his father said at bedtime, and his father before him.

Every night at bedtime, Ralph tucks his face between my neck and shoulder and breathes me in as I draw his curtains and say, “Good night, world.” We cuddle up and read books, his surprisingly elegant little toddler fingers pointing at every Spider-Man villain as he gasps, “No! Oh, no!” We say our prayers: one Our Father, one Hail Mary. Or I say the prayers and he folds his hands and says, “Prayers prayers prayers,” which is a fair response to someone saying, “Let's say our prayers.” We say good night to Grumpy and Papa. “Papa!” Ralphie shouts, leaning back from me with a huge smile and placing his hand over his torso. “He's in my heart!”

Dear [Former Boyfriend],

Remember me? Okay, don't delete this.

I hope you're doing well! That's a weird thing to write because obviously I can just stalk you online and tell you're doing pretty well, but probably no better than you were when you were my boyfriend. I'd say you're doing reasonably well, considering you once dated me.

You're probably wondering why I'm writing. No, I didn't join a pyramid scheme (yet). It's just that [length of time] has passed since our relationship ended, and I find myself reflecting on what we had. Ick, no, I don't want you back. I'm just trying to clear the air a little.

I know that I said that you were to blame for our breakup because you [smoked too much pot/didn't have a job or a savings account/had a secret girlfriend] but recently I've begun to see that I contributed to our demise through my [obsessive jealousy/passive aggression/reading your emails].

The more I think about it, maybe you weren't a terrible boyfriend. Maybe I was actually a terrible
girlfriend,
because I [always made fun of you in front of your friends/definitely was flirting with the friend of mine you were so jealous of/tried to turn you into someone you weren't by pressuring you to stop wearing hoodies every day].

You don't need to reply to this email to confirm anything, by the way. I am already pretty sure how you feel about me since we haven't spoken since I [broke up with you while we were riding bikes/broke up with you via email/broke up with you, but still took your air conditioner].

I'll always remember our [week at Burning Man/afternoon bike rides/trip to Mexico] with [some confusion and drug-addled flashbacks/affection/fondness except for the part where you yelled at me for getting food poisoning and having explosive diarrhea].

I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me for [throwing out all your muscle tees while you were at work/breaking up with you over email/telling people you peed the bed when you got drunk/going on a date with your best friend] and I wish you a lifetime of happiness with [your vaporizer/whatever crust punk came after me/your wife, whatsherface].

Sincerely,
                      

Nora