No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

There was a version of me that thought loving another person would somehow diminish the love I still felt for Aaron. A version of me that thought that if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore, and if I wasn’t sad anymore, then I guess I didn’t love Aaron as much as I said I did. Or maybe that my new happiness was ill-gotten, a well-made fake, something I swiped off the back of a truck when nobody was looking. This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds.

When bad things happen to you—a death, an illness, a divorce, a job loss—you quickly go from being a person to being just a sad story. I know from experience that nobody wants to be a sad story, and that no matter what you’ve been through, your story is always so much more than just sad. And your happy stories are more than just happy. Obviously, everything is more complicated than it appears on Instagram. But it is incredibly difficult to live with complicated. It is even more difficult for other people to deal with complicated.

couldn’t talk about my happiness without touching the uncomfortable truth that everything I have now is built on everything I lost.

Life is flexible and has long legs and a million different ways to kick you right in the chops. We lose the ones we love, but we also lose friends, jobs, and our sense of self. And then, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind.

I didn’t want to pretend to be a normal person with normal worries.

I’m happy but I don’t have my perfect Hollywood happy ending. Because it isn’t always happy, and it isn’t the end. This is life after life after life, in all of the chaos and contradiction of feelings and doings and beings involved. There will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy. There will be endings. But there will be no happy endings.

It’s cold and icy and dark and heavy. It’s the unmistakable knowledge that everything is as broken as you thought it was. Especially you.

“You tell her this: don’t should yourself. And don’t let anyone should on you, either.”

If should were a person, it would be that friend of a friend who always talks over you at parties.

Their lives were unfolding in the way they had expected, and mine had not. My discomfort made them uncomfortable. I was a living, breathing, publicly crying reminder that their own lives could go off the rails at any time.

Somewhere between our youngest years and our oldest years we learn to hide behind Shoulds and Woulds and Coulds, instead of feeling and facing what Is.

I am happy. And I’m really, really fucking sad. I don’t need to worry about anyone else shoulding on me. I’m shoulding all over myself.

I couldn’t access that sadness. I didn’t have the security clearance for it yet. I was removed from the world, and from myself.

After Aaron’s death, I found myself gravitating toward people who wore their miles proudly, who showed up with whatever they were carrying and just laid it out there. Not polite people, or perfect people. Just . . . people. The kind who tell you the truth when you ask how they are, who don’t even think about lying and telling you that everything is fine.

I lost my taste for fiction and devoured memoirs, soaking up the experiences of people who lived and felt deeply.

I am proud to be a widow. I am proud to have loved someone so much. I am proud to say I am still here, that I am getting through it. I am proud of the love I shared with Aaron, and who it made me today.

Even if they’re often heavy and unwieldy, our past lives are not baggage. They are not defects; they are features. Our past experiences—especially the hard ones—help us navigate the world around us and ahead of us.

But our love and his death are not a burden to me, and will not be a burden to the person who loves me next. Aaron’s love and Aaron’s death are my foundation. They’re my standard for love and marriage and strength and bravery. They are not a hurdle to overcome, they are the stable place I get to build from. This is what I know, what I’ve learned from life. I wish I could tell my teenage self that loving once makes you better at loving, and better at being loved. That whatever happens with each love, you can carry it all proudly.

Before these anniversaries show up as calendar reminders, my body remembers them. I’ll wake up stiff and aching, my body bracing itself for what happened years ago on that day. Even if my brain were wiped clean, my muscles, my organs, and especially my heart would always remember.

Your mind can try its best to forget, to avoid, but the body remembers.

My grief had so many layers that it had become an exoskeleton. It was a hard, crusty emotional shell that only I could see. It was ugly, but oddly comfortable, and I had pretty much planned on spending the rest of my life in it.

start. I was comfortable being on the move, between places, on my way to somewhere, but not quite there yet. In this period, my entire life was in between. I was heading somewhere but wasn’t quite there yet.

I don’t believe that God has an itinerary-like plan for everyone, that she’s sitting up there in a cloud, pointing at us like, “You get cancer! You get a fancy house! You get a fancy house and cancer!”

It’s hard to sit with someone’s pain and allow it to make you uncomfortable. It’s much easier to try to fill that hole in the conversation with small talk, or hand the person a tissue instead of offering them your shoulder. It’s much easier to implore them to see the bright side than to be in the darkness with them.

What he may have thought was a light flirtation, or good-natured small talk, is actually an exhausting part of being a woman. I can count the number of times I’ve told a man to smile on zero hands, because I’ve never done it. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told to smile, because math doesn’t go that high. And for every man (and there’s always one) who is like, “hey, this happens to men, too!” . . . hush. The women are talking now and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’re the kind of guy who is perplexed when you tell someone to “smile,” “relax,” or “calm down” and find those words have the exact opposite effect.

Here’s a newsflash, my male friends. “Smile” is not a way to actually cheer a person up. It’s a way to tell them “please adjust your face to my preferences.” And it isn’t expected of men the way it is of women. No matter how mainstream feminism may be now, the message that girls owe the world is that the appearance of happiness is everywhere.

Notice that men who don’t constantly smile have faces, and women who don’t constantly smile are afflicted with “Resting Bitch Face,”

a year of firsts: 365 days where you can say “last year, we were . . .” The blank is filled in with everything from the monumental to the mundane:

It’s an entire calendar year of emotional landmines, every single day loaded with meaning.

Jesus seemed pretty cool, but all the stuff around him felt like some real bull crap.

God had not done this. “What does God have to do with this?” I wanted to shout at every person who tweeted their #thoughtsandprayers to me while Aaron’s body wasted next to me.

What kind of a God is listening, but not doing anything? I envied people who could believe like this, and I resented them for assuming that my own discomfort could be eased with the same balm that soothed them when our pain was so different.

Our family didn’t need God. We had each other. And we had a community of people who showed up when God had failed to.

Sometimes, she explained, she pictured God as an ocean. Standing on the edge, she could throw in her worries, and watch them be swept out to sea. I liked that.

I had been so angry about what God hadn’t done that I’d missed everything that people had done for us.

God is people. God is the best of them, and the worst of them. And the path to God does not start in a Church. It doesn’t even need to wind through one. You have a direct line to God, and you don’t need to make a Sunday appointment to see Her. God is here, whether you like her or not. Whether you need her or not. Whether or not you believe in her. That there is no magic spell to invoke, no special code to learn, no door that must be opened to you. You are the code and the secret and the door. You are God. Don’t get a big head about it, though.

death is loss compounded. You lose your son, or your husband, and then what do you lose? More people. Lots of people. Not to death itself, but as the emotional aftermath.

When I come to in the morning, before I’m fully awake, I have this vague, weighty sense of unease, as if there is something radically wrong with the world, and I don’t quite know what it is. Then I remember.

Grief is a by-product of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love.

The grief that I had tried to skate through was catching up with me. And it was complicated. It was complicated because there was just so much of it!

But being Midwestern, I kept those expectations to myself, and quietly tallied how often they were not met.

My self-isolation reinforced my belief that I was alone in this, that nobody could possibly understand. Nobody could possibly stand to be with all of this pain.

I would love to feel just happy at happy times, and sad only at sad times. I would love to have clear delineations between my feelings. But as it is, they are all strands in a thread, all tangled up with one another.

You cannot bubble wrap and protect your heart from life, and why should you? It is meant to be used, and sometimes broken. Use it up, wear it out, leave nothing left undone or unsaid to the people you love. Let it get banged up and busted if it needs to.

Every day your body performs a series of complete and total miracles to keep you alive, and then your body does amazing things like creating another human, or running a mile, or getting to work on time, and to pretend like that isn’t noteworthy is absurd. You are worth staring at in the mirror and capturing with whatever medium you have at your fingertips.

Love changes us, and so does loss. There’s something about having

The best thing that our bodies do is just exist. They show up and carry us through this world.

Telling our kids that love is easy and effortless is a disservice to them. Because love challenges us and stretches us.

In short, being a child totally sucks and nothing is in our control.

We are both trying to find our footing in this new life we built, and we both know that we built this life with the wreckage of our old ones.