No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  “For fuck’s sake, Nora,” he nearly shouted at me over the phone, “say it! It will change your life. It changed mine.”

  Tyler, a relentless bachelor who was constantly pursuing a new beautiful, enigmatic creature, had recently dropped the L-word to a beautiful, kind woman who was refreshingly not trying to rip his heart from his chest. I had never heard him so happy, so settled, so domestic. The boy who never thought about marriage was thinking about proposing.

  That night, lying in bed with Aaron, I stuttered that I had something to tell him. He looked at me as if I were about to reveal a third nipple and laughed out loud when I told him I loved him.

  “I love you, too, dummy.”

  I called Tyler the night that Aaron was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Everyone around me was telling me how okay it was going to be, how the brain tumor wouldn’t be cancerous, and life would go on as planned. Not Tyler.

  “It’s going to be bad, Nora. Whatever it is, it will be bad. And it will change your life. So, I just need you to brace yourself for it.” Tyler waited patiently on the phone while I found an empty conference room in the hospital and shut myself inside. He was still on the line after I’d screamed out loud and knocked over several chairs. “I love you,” he said, “you can do this.”

  After Aaron’s death, friends were either extremely gentle with me, or extremely absent. Tyler was as close as he could be from a time zone away, and 0.0 percent gentle with me.

  “Are you in therapy yet?” he’d text me.

  Every. Single. Day.

  The answer was always no. I wasn’t in therapy. I didn’t need therapy! I was FINE. Sure, I’d lost a pregnancy and a parent and a spouse within six weeks of each other. Yes, I’d spent three years caring for my husband and was now a widowed mother. Absolutely, those were sad things that happened to me. But could therapy cure sadness?

  I listed out the things I did for myself: manicures, massages, meditating with the Oprah app! I ate organic. I exercised every day!

  “You’re an idiot.” He’d reply.

  Every. Single. Time.

  I hated the word caregiver. I wasn’t a caregiver. I was a wife. I was living my vows, down to the letter. In sickness and health, ’til death do us part. For three years, I made sure that Aaron took his chemo pills on time, made it to radiation, had all the red Gatorade he could drink until his taste buds changed and all he wanted was Lemonade Vitamin Water. I woke up thinking of Aaron, I fell asleep listening to the beat of his irregular heart. I’ve never eaten lobster because it freaks me out to think about breaking an exoskeleton to get to some weird, puffy meat that needs to be soaked in butter in order to seem appetizing, but I’ve often heard an anecdote about cooking them. If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water, they’re acutely aware of their suffering. They scream. They panic. But place a lobster in a pot of cool water and raise the temperature slowly, and they don’t even realize they’re being boiled to death.

  I was the second kind of lobster. And the first kind.

  Aaron’s brain cancer diagnosis was like being thrown into a pot of boiling water. We struggled and thrashed and tried our best to get out of it. But somewhere over the next three years, we just got used to it. A rolling boil of stress was my normal. It was comfortable to me. I couldn’t even feel it.

  But Tyler could.

  “You’re not okay,” he’d say to me, “there’s no way you’re okay.”

  I bristled. Of course I was okay. I said I was okay! I was so okay that I was writing a book! And I had built a pretty good freelance career out of nothing! I was so good that I was not sleeping, like ever. Sometimes, if I were talking to a healthy man who was anywhere near my father or Aaron’s age, I would watch their healthy faces fade into wan, dead faces while we were sitting together in a conference room. See? I was FINE!

  “I have to tell you something and I don’t want to be interrupted,” he said when I picked up the phone one night. Before I could interrupt, he laid it out for me. “You need to see somebody. You need to go to therapy. Your fucking husband just died. Your dad died. You lost a pregnancy. Quit being a fucking idiot.”

  With that, the phone call was over.

  Tyler was the first person I called after my doctor’s appointment. “I’m seeing someone this week,” I told him.

  His naturally irritated voice softened. “Good,” he said. “I love you, idiot.”

  I’d sent my therapist some reading materials in advance. A link to my blog, the obituary Aaron and I had written together, and related news articles. It seemed fair to give her a head start, a sense of what she was up against. She made me a cup of tea and showed me into her office, which was warm and worn, with an overstuffed couch that I naturally curled up into, kicking off my shoes and crossing my legs.

  “So,” she said. “You’ve had quite a year.”

  I opened my mouth to agree with her, but I was already crying.

  An hour later, I was back in my car, calling Tyler.

  “I’m in therapy,” I told him. “You were right.”

  “No shit I was right!” he barked into the phone. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: puffy-faced, red-eyed, greasy-haired. I looked like I felt: like total hell, and the best I’d been in months.

  Chapter Three

  Don’t Should Yourself

  My friend Hans, who also likes to be identified as the senior producer of our podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking, visits his grandmother in the nursing home once a week. I’m telling you this because he would never want to brag about what a solidly good person he is, so I have to do it for him. And I’m telling you because I’ve been the beneficiary of Hans’s good-hearted visits to his aging grandmother.

  I hate the way we stereotype old people as “cute” or “wise.” Old people are just people who have been on this earth for a long time, and calling them cute is demeaning, like they are human accessories, which they are not. Babies are cute little human accessories that we dress up. Old people are usually wise though, because you don’t get through multiple decades on this earth without learning a thing or two, and you don’t reach your seventies unless you’ve been dosed with a healthy spoonful or two of Not Giving A Crap Anymore. The older the person, the more likely I am to trust their opinions,* because they are so often no longer burdened by social norms or even basic manners. My mom is only sixty-seven, and she’s already very comfortable telling me “how it is,” especially when “how it is” is that my hair looked better long, or that my sweater looks like I got it at a thrift store but not in a good way.

  One Sunday, Hans was visiting with Grandma and mentioned his friend Nora. I wasn’t there for the conversation, but I assume it went something like this:

  “Nora’s great,” he probably said, “she’s just the best. Oh, and like you, her husband is also dead!” Grandma thought for a while, probably about how great I sounded, and gave Hans this advice to give to me. “You tell her this: don’t should yourself. And don’t let anyone should on you, either.”

  Hans’s grandma. How did you know that we all needed this urgent message tattooed into our brains? Because you are WISE, that’s how.

  I am a master of should. I have always had the gift of knowing what other people should do, and the charming habit of either giving them my unsolicited point of view or being irrationally upset with them for not living up to my unspoken expectations. I have should all over people my entire life, but especially on myself. My obsession with my shoulds had me living my life as if it were a shared Google doc. I was paralyzed by the idea of what I should do, always turning to friends, family, and complete strangers at the nail salon who look like they have it together to see what they thought about my potential next steps in life. My own opinion has often come last, or not at all. I went to college right after high school not because I had a plan, or a passion to pursue, but because I thought I should go. I arrived at that expensive school directionless, and left the same way, probably because I spent those four years becoming the
person that other people thought I should be. Freshman year: preppy Abercrombie model. Sophomore year: Paris Hilton party girl. Junior year: serious student who will start smoking because a boy she likes is a smoker. Senior year: wannabe grown-up who owns a closet full of “professional” clothing from Express. I then spent five years in New York, a city I didn’t love, because, duh! You should love New York! I stayed with boyfriends I was incompatible with because I thought I should have a boyfriend. I accepted jobs that I should have wanted and built an entire career I was never meant to have, and a life I never meant to live.

  If should were a person, it would be that friend of a friend who always talks over you at parties. If it were a software, it’d be a PowerPoint that advances automatically, or a locked pdf document that you can’t fill out until you pay to update the software. That’s comforting in some ways. Should offers you a direction to take and eliminates the stress of having to make any decisions yourself. But that clear direction has a price: it eliminates possibility and wonder from your life. There is no room for want or drive or your own humanity when should arrives, because should already has a plan.

  Should happens (sorry). And when your life falls apart, should happens even more. When my husband Aaron died, should was everywhere I went. I was being should on by family, friends, and strangers on the internet who had access to a keyboard, an opinion, and a few scant facts about my life.

  “You should refrain from making any decisions for at least a year,” said people who didn’t realize that not making any decisions is

  a decision and

  impossible when you’re the only parent to a small child relying on you to make decisions like where he’ll go to preschool, or where you’ll live together. Children quite rudely insist on growing and changing exponentially each year. Kids will not pause for grief, even if you ask them nicely.

  Besides, when you’ve spent years making actual life-and-death decisions for the person you love, any other decision is a vacation. Whether or not you sell a car or a house is nothing compared to deciding whether or not to continue chemo, or to pursue alternate therapies.

  “You should move out of that house,” said people who didn’t realize that our house was haunted by Aaron, and that I still needed his ghost. I could see him out of the corner of my eye so often I could sometimes forget that he had died. I could tell myself, sitting in the basement and watching TV, that he’d just gone upstairs for a moment. Maybe to grab me a sparkling water or some snacks. I kept his spot open on the couch.

  “You should stay in the house,” said people who didn’t realize that on the flip side, when Aaron’s loss hit me, I wanted to light a match and burn the entire place to the ground. Some nights, walking into our empty bedroom was so difficult that I’d fall asleep on the couch, or in Ralph’s Big Boy Bed, a twin from IKEA I’d dubiously assembled for him. Our house had been where we lived, and where Aaron died. It was the set for our major life scenes, and my brain would revisit them without my consent. Often and painfully.

  “You should go back to work to get your mind off things,” said people who thought my beloved dead husband was just an unpleasant thought I could banish to the back of my mind with mindless corporate busyness. There are not enough PowerPoints in the world to distract you from this kind of loss, and my body refused to keep a schedule that would be compatible with any desk job. I was often up all night long. I rearranged our kitchen cupboards at three a.m., started movies at midnight. Read through the most mundane of Aaron’s emails, just trying to soak up any scraps of himself he had left behind.

  “You should quit your job,” said people who didn’t know that Aaron and I had crawled deeply into debt over the course of his sickness. My career hadn’t been a passion of mine, but it wasn’t a hobby, either. It was a necessity. As crazy as this sounds, neither my mortgage lender nor my credit card issuer had realized that for me, Earth had stopped rotating on November 25, 2014. Both of those wacky entities still wanted me to pay my bills. On time. With money.

  The people who were quick to offer me a comforting should were people who had never been in my position. They had living husbands to help them raise their children, dads they could turn to for advice. Partners who helped them with a second income. They were on their second healthy pregnancy, ready to deliver at any moment. 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. What happened to us deviated from should and rejected the natural order of things. Truly, a father shouldn’t die at age thirty-five from a horrible cancer. His wife shouldn’t have a miscarriage right before then. That’s not something that should happen! These shoulds that were so kindly offered to me assumed that chaos can be managed, that every problem has an answer, that tragedy can be managed if you just follow The Plan of the Should. The people offering me these shoulds were trying to provide comfort. Not just for me, but for themselves. If I could be fixed, if I could be okay again, get back into the natural order of things, then their comfortable lives didn’t feel so precarious.

  After Aaron’s death I developed a bad habit of starting any book I was reading by flipping to the last page. Out of context that page made no sense, but as the story progressed, remembering those last three hundred words or so made me feel safe. This was all going somewhere. It would be resolved. 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. I could have followed any of those shoulds, or none of those shoulds, and the result would have been the same. I’d still have the same gaping hole in the middle of my soul. Aaron would still be dead. I would still have to live my life without him.

  That meant that every piece of advice, every should, was worthless. Because of all the people offering me some navigational assistance, none of them could actually do these things for me. The only person responsible for my life—the only person who could and would live it—was me. No matter what kind of Steering Committee formed around me, I had to do the work.

  Personal responsibility is such a bummer.

  Without Aaron, I’d fallen back into being the kind of girl I’d been before I knew him, consumed by what I should do, with what was expected of me. Some friends of Aaron’s come for dinner and I feel like the sad orangutan at the free zoo in Saint Paul. I can never stand to stop in front of the enclosure, and watch how bewildered she seems by all of the attention. How the hell should she know how an orangutan should act? She lives in a zoo!

  It’s a painfully silent dinner and I feel their eyes on me constantly, searching. They do not know what they are looking for, and neither do I. They are just here to observe me, to see a wild widow up close, to say they were here.

  I get the sense that they are disappointed in the visit. That I am neither sad enough nor happy enough. I do not meet their expectations.

  I want desperately to please everyone, to show them whatever version of me they are seeking. Which Nora would you like to see today? Sad Nora? Inspirational Nora? Numb Nora?

  Plenty of people told me that I should give my child stability and routine, but I knew that the thing Ralph needed more than a schedule was a mom who wasn’t just going through the motions. Children, like the very elderly, are not beholden to the law of should. When Ralph needed to cry, he cried. When he was angry, he screamed. I didn’t love that second one when I was trying to buckle him into a car seat in a crowded parking lot, but I had to respect it. He wasn’t hiding anything. 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.

  What is . . . is this: I am a young widow who has fallen in love again. I am pregnant with this new love’s baby. The shoulds in this version of my life are compounding quickly with all of these facts. And thes
e facts are good. Love is good. Kids are good. Life is good. But should it be?

  I am a widow, so I should be sad and depressed. I am also a published author who met Jennifer Weiner at a party and whose first book was read by Mandy Moore, so I should be very happy and grateful. I am in love again, with a man who has two fantastic children of his own, children who have fully embraced Ralph and me as a part of their lives. I should be doubly grateful for that. Triple, quadruple grateful. I should not be on antidepressants and having panic attacks in my car! I should be showing off beautiful Phoenix feathers, preening publicly about my rise from the ashes. I should be the poster child for what it means to move on, to get over it, to live your best life!