No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds.

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.

If you read the fine print, you will find that life is subject to change without notice. I did not fill up my tragedy punch card with a dead husband, a dead parent, and a lost pregnancy. Tragedy is like a BOGO that never ends, for things you never wanted. It’s a terrible deal, but it’s not up for negotiating. The acknowledgment that when bad things happen they can just keep happening holds a lot of power. It can shut you down or open you up. Nobody would blame you for shutting yourself around your hurt, your loss. Nobody would blame you for making you or your life smaller, for rolling up like a threatened armadillo, which is my default reflex. A reflex, though, is not a choice. But the flip side of tragedy can be happiness. And that comes in waves, too. Thank God.

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.

All I wanted was to be able to flip to the last page of this part of my life, and know that whatever I chose to do next, things would turn out all right. That’s not the way books are intended to be read, and it’s not the way life can be lived.

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 knew that some very sad things had happened—I was sad about them, I swear!—but 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.

Unless you marry the person you met at age fifteen at high school orientation when you were shiny and new, everyone you meet will come to you in some other-than-new state: pre-owned, slightly used, refurbished. No matter how slick and shiny we look on the outside, we’ve all got some miles on us. And that’s not a bad thing.

I realized that, romantically, I needed someone who had been through some shit, too. Someone who had been to the dark places, who had walked through the fire. Someone who had suffered at the hands of love, and who was willing to do it again.

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.

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.

I want you to want me, but not need me. To be there for me without my asking, and to go away without being told. I want you to keep me company and keep your promises.

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. Even if I’d been kept in a locked room without access to a calendar, I’d have known that Aaron’s deathaversary was growing near. Your mind can try its best to forget, to avoid, but the body remembers.

It’s easy to say “everything happens for a reason” when you’ve already found your reason. It’s easy to say that timing is irrelevant when you’re looking back at the hardest things in your life. It’s a lot damn harder when you’re in the thick of it, when you can’t even see where your next step is.

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.

If every day was reserved for living in my past, when would I have time for the present?

Rich and full seems like a way to describe coffee, or wine, so imagine your life as a cup of wine or coffee. When you’re one hundred percent obsessed with your romantic partner, you become like a cup of hotel coffee: lukewarm, bitter, and a waste of time and resources. Is that extreme? Good!

Love is in these little things, in small acts of kindness, in the simple consideration of another person.

Mary Oliver’s book of poetry about her dead wife. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.

Never explain yourself The people who love you don’t need it The people who don’t will never believe you anyway.

Grief is a by-product of love. We don’t grieve what we don’t love. We may feel slightly bummed about losing something we liked, but we don’t grieve for it.

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.

I can do all of this on my own. But I don’t have to. I don’t need him, but I choose him. Happily.

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. That’s what your heart is there for.

if you want someone in your life to feel just how loved and seen they are? Write them a letter.

For millions of years, people have been trying to define love, and every definition is inadequate and unsatisfying, but 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.

Things change when people care enough to change them, and people can change, when they

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.