Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words

by Michael Ausiello

What did a person get at Target the day after being told he had only a year to live?

My husband’s remarkable resilience was once again rearing its beautifully bald head at the darkest of times. Instead of a pity party, he was organizing an actual party.

“And don’t worry about heaven,” he added. “I’ll get it ready for us.”

And, with those prettily bitter, slightly cunty words, Kit sent me over the edge, as my laughing reached such an intensity that I was barely able to breathe.

What an ugly, horrible, insensitive, crass label to attach to something so heartbreaking. Kit would’ve loved it.

“He will go when he is ready to go. And if you’re not present, that means he wanted to spare you that moment.”

But there was another part of me that saw the installation as the defining metaphor for how Kit had confronted this entire year: with grace, courage, dark humor, and unquestionable fearlessness, right up until the end.

Before he was diagnosed, one of our favorite ongoing jokes involved untimely death. If we were out to dinner and one of our friends was in the bathroom a little too long, or was just running late, one of us, without missing a beat, would assume tragedy had struck and go, “Eh, he had a good life.” Some people were taken aback by the dark humor, but mostly, everyone got it. We got it, which is all that really mattered. So when you think of Kit, and the tragedy of his life cut short, and you’re feeling pain, may I suggest that instead of letting it bring you down, you look up and say, “Eh, that Kit Cowan, he had a good life.”