No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

The version of me that Matthew got is slower and messier. She barely grocery shops, let alone cooks. She showers only when absolutely necessary. She’s fine, I guess. I’ve worried, since I met Matthew, that there’s just nothing in this relationship for him. What does he get out of being with this second-rate version of me?

The world does break everyone—that is a damn guarantee. The world breaks everyone, and everything.

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.

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.

We are lucky to have come through with broken parts, to have survived.

There are no perfect parents. Mostly, we’re all kinda failures, actually. Once you realize that even the best parents sometimes look at their kids and think “Why am I doing this?”, it takes a lot of the pressure off.

Your father was a non-renewable resource, and there is a part of me that is miserly about his death. That wants to keep it packaged up just for the two of us, a symbol of our apartness from the rest of the world. We are all that is left of that family of three, the only two who went through the dark together. Your dad’s deathaversary feels like a day that is just for us, so today I packed you into the minivan, kissed Matthew and the rest of the kids good-bye, and headed up to the Rum River.

“Mom,” you called out to me, “follow me! I’m here to show you the way to God.” It turns out you were showing me the way to a ravine you almost fell into while wearing Crocs. Almost-five-year-olds are subpar navigators.

Here is what nobody told me as a kid. Not in church, not at home. We have enough love to go around. We don’t always have enough clean towels, or Coca-Cola in those cute little bottles, or milk, but we have enough love. We have enough for everyone, and from everyone. Don’t confuse love with time, or attention, or anything else that can be quantified. Trying to measure it will never make you happier, will never give you a satisfying answer.

I know what love is not: it is not something that runs out, it is not something we hold over one another, or against one another. The only secret about love that you really need to know is that even when you feel like you’ve worn it out or used it all up, it’s always, always in your power to make more. Love is the truest magic we do for one another. There is no potion or spell for it, there is just the dazzling act of choosing to be there for one another, over and over again.

We knew, from a very young age, that one of our roles is to keep everyone comfortable, always at the expense of our own comfort.

I wasn’t seeing something new, I was seeing something that was always there, but that I’d been able to ignore because it didn’t affect me directly.

Ninety-nine percent of the feedback you get—or fear getting—is of no consequence. There are worse things in life than not being liked, or trying something and failing, and one of them is complacency. A world where we receive zero criticism is a world where we are not contributing, where we are living at the very baseline of our abilities. It is a world where I am not doing the work that fuels me. It is a world where I am smaller for the comfort of others, and for my own safety.

It’s always going to be shocking when someone dies, especially when they were planning to come over for dinner soon.

There’s something to be said for persistence. For small acts that can add up to something bigger.

When your husband dies, it feels like a ridiculous scene that has been thrust upon you by some obnoxious idiot, and it is. You did not get to choose this, but here it is, in all its horrifying glory. Yes is nothing but acceptance. And is where the good part happens. The good part is a conjunction? You bet it is. Because and is about possibility and opportunity. And includes what is and makes room for what could be. And doesn’t require you to love the situation, or to like the situation; it just requires you to live.

My expectations for what life and life with grief were supposed to look like put me constantly on the defensive: wanting to prove myself and my grief, wanting to hide it away. If and brings you possibility, but cuts it right off at the knees.

The change of three letters makes all the difference: in how that reads, in how it feels, in how it lives. Because but makes our hearts and possibilities so much smaller than they are. And is where it’s at.

And does not deny the past, or the pain. And makes room for it, in a way that but does not. And allows for the future, too.