No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

The world does break everyone—that is a damn guarantee. The world breaks everyone, and everything. Families are snapped apart by death, money, drugs, divorce, the wrong thing said at the wrong time to the wrong sibling who will never let it go. Many of us are stronger at the broken places, but many of us are just . . . broken. Not that you’d ever know it. We humans are experts at hiding our broken parts. We love to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. We absolutely insist that whatever didn’t kill us made us stronger, even if it’s all we can do to get ourselves out of bed in the morning. The broken places are scary, so we do our best to cover them up with big smiles and expensive handbags and well-lit Instagram posts.

I’m focused on doing as much as I can, with trying as much as I can, with kicking over as many rocks as I can in case there is a scrap of life that I haven’t yet lived. This is how I honor Aaron and my father: by making sure their deaths aren’t a black hole that sucked me in, but the spark I needed to be able to burn brighter.

Unlike death, the truly sad and devastating thing is avoidable and fixable. It’s spending our time here trying to avoid the depths of misery, and in the process, missing out on the climb to happiness. It’s spending our time in the middle, being alive without living. The cure comes from being pulled against our will from the comfort of a monotonous life.