It's Okay to Laugh (2 page)

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

—MARY OLIVER

U
mm, I don't know, Mary. I'm not great at planning, can't I just go with the flow? Honestly, this little quote stresses me out sometimes. It's like YOLO for women with Pinterest.

My life is wild and precious. I only have one. What am I going to do with it? Well, for starters, I'm going to do so many things I never wanted to do. I'm going to play sports I don't even like just because I'm tall. Even as a grown-up, years after my last game, I will say “yep” when old men ask if I play basketball just because I don't want to disappoint them. I'm going to be mean just to fit in. I'm going to tip waitresses 20 percent even when they are mean to me. I'm going to live with a thin little skin, where I let every insult
wound me and every compliment slide right off my back. I think I am doing this wrong.

I will be stressed to the max, Mary. Even when I'm a kid. I'm going to be certain that every paper I write will be the one that determines my future.

In the summertime, I will go to Lake Superior with my brother and my cousins. I will float in the icy water and imagine I am a tiny pebble. I will swim until my lips are blue.

I will play the saxophone for a whole year and nobody in my family will remember. This will annoy me because who lies about playing the saxophone?

I will forgive my uncle when he calls me, a seven-year-old, impersonates Goofy, and tells me I've won a trip to Disneyland.

I will go to Disneyland—as an adult. My husband and I will watch the haggard couples screaming at each other over their strollers. We will hold the sweaty little hands of our niece and nephew and purchase overpriced souvenir ears and limp salads. That night, in the dark of our hotel room, we will decide to have a baby together. Cancer be damned, whatever it takes.

I will say the f-word even after I'm sent to my room for shouting it when my little brother breaks my tailbone in a wrestling match for the remote control when we are both in high school. One day, while I am changing his diaper, my two-year-old son, Ralph, will smile, look me right in the eye, and say, “Oh, fuck!” And I will laugh.

I'm going to make sure I spend most of my college experience stumbling drunk through the streets of Cincinnati. Or, better yet, being pushed around in a stolen grocery cart. I will know I am wasting this opportunity, so I will try to keep that feeling quiet. I will try to starve it away, or push it down with hours in the gym. I will let my jeans slide on and off without unbuttoning them. I will count my ribs with my fingers at night.

I will spend years mimicking the fashion stylings of Britney Spears: pierced belly button with a hot pink jewel, tanning-bed tan, and chunky highlights. When she and Justin Timberlake break up, I will cry in my dorm room and wonder if love is even real.

I will listen to a friend tell me about having sex in the basement of a party with a senior. When I repeat the story to my boyfriend, who is halfway across the country at a small liberal arts college where he takes women's studies and plays football, he will say, “That's not sex, that's rape,” and I will know he is right but not what to do about it.

A very important thing to do with your wild and precious life is to get a job, so I will do that. I will sit in a cubicle, I suppose. And then another cubicle. I'd always imagined a really stately office with lots of books, but this beige little pen will do just fine. It comes with a wastebasket! And a little sorter thing for all my folders, which I will never use because that's what a computer does now. I will make a lot of PowerPoint documents about very important “strategies” for things like how a “consumer” can “connect” with a fossil fuels brand on Twitter, because you know what? That's all people want to do these days. They're just opening up Twitter hoping to start a dialogue with the guys who put the gas in their SUVs. And I can say I helped make that happen, Mary. Isn't
that
something?

I will sometimes hate-read blogs written by people I despise, just to make my blood boil. You probably don't hate-read anything because you have a sparkling mind that has not been pecked to death by the incessant information assault that is the Internet. But seriously, Mary, how many lifestyle blogs does the world need? How many photos of coffee? How many hashtags do we need on one photo and can't we just have a brunch without labeling all the beverages with small chalk signs, Mary?? Can't we?

Sometimes I will read Twitter right when I wake up, when only one of my eyes opens fully. I will follow hashtags that make me want to punch someone. I'm talking about you, #notallmen, #meninism, and #alllivesmatter.

I will fall in love, quickly the first time, and slower every time after that. “I hope we are in love FOREVER,” I will write in my bubbly, high-school-girl handwriting.

I will say “I love you” when I don't exactly mean it, but “I love you” sounds better than “You are my best option at the time, though I know you have reached your full potential and I am destined for greater things, buddy.” That's okay, right?

I will choose the wrong man sometimes. All right, most of the time. Okay, every time except once or twice.

I will sometimes miss these men who were not right for me. I will think of them when I hear certain songs by long-lost indie bands, or smell marijuana in the summertime. I will always say it wasn't love, but it was. Love is not always perfect, is it, Mary? Isn't it sometimes awkward and bumbling?

I will move to New York for love. I won't have a job, or any money, but I will feel very alive and very special and cosmopolitan even though “date night” sometimes means eating at Olive Garden in Times Square, because I am dating a man who is comfortable enough to admit that his favorite kind of Italian food is “Italian food.”

I will learn the words to misogynistic rap songs, even though I am a feminist. I will always turn it down when my car rolls up beside an elderly person.

Sometimes I will be small and mean and ugly and jealous.

Sometimes I will be open and loving and generous.

I will do anything to avoid being lonely. I will wake up in beds where I do not belong, grab my things, and go.

I will pick my nose and hope nobody is looking.

I will judge other people, and find myself doing nearly all those things I judged them for. See: my giant, all-terrain stroller; handing my child an iPhone to keep him quiet when we are out to dinner and he is losing his mind; co-sleeping with him until he is thirty (fingers crossed).

I will choose the right man when it really matters. I will tell him once that it is my dream to be on the kiss cam, and at every sporting event, he will conspire to make sure we make out hardcore every time the Jumbotron camera passes by us. I will watch him die in my arms. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, I'm saying it because aside from pushing a live baby out of my hidey-hole it is the most meaningful thing I
have
done with this wild and precious life. I will tell our son that his papa is in his heart, and in mine. Like the word “fuck,” Ralph will remember that. He will remind me on gray spring days when I am wiping his lunch from the floor, where he's been so kind as to sprinkle it. “My papa loves you,” he'll say to me, with his crooked-teeth grin, “he's in my heart.”

I'll be quick to forget everything good I've ever done. I will replay every time I have ever been an asshole, and hate myself for every wrong thing I've ever said and done.

Yes, it stressed me out to be asked about my plans for my one—ONE—wild and precious life, but I will still like this phrase every time someone has turned it into art on Pinterest or Instagram. I will try not to let it stress me out. I will try to be better. I will try to bring more love to the world.

I
don't want to have cancer,” he whispers. We are curled up in his hospital bed, trying to go to sleep in the alternate universe we've found ourselves in. When we woke up this morning, we were just a regular young couple secretly cohabitating after a year of dating. But somewhere in the middle of the day, he'd had a seizure, ended up in the hospital, and found out he'd somehow grown a brain tumor without even noticing.

“You don't have cancer,” I tell him, because he doesn't. He has a tumor. And until they open up his head to take it out, that tumor could be anything: a conjoined twin absorbed into his skull at birth, a silver dollar, a handful of cotton candy.

But it's not cancer. Because I won't let it be, and in my twenty-eight years on this earth I've become goddamn used to getting whatever the hell I want. My first boyfriend, an A when I deserved a B in American history junior year of high school, my first job, the dimple in my right cheek. That's just a sampling of the things I've gotten through sheer willpower.

Whatever the nurse gave Aaron a few minutes ago is starting to work, and I can feel his body gently relax next to me. I'd asked if I could have a sleeping aid, too, but Nurse Neil just laughed and dropped his signature line, “I know, right?” so I'm left wide awake in the glow of my boyfriend's heart monitor. I keep my hand on his head and my head on his heart and in the glow of our new night-light I command the universe to keep going my way.

And then I am standing by his grave, having traveled at light speed from the present to the worst-case scenario. The priest is swinging incense over Aaron's body, I am kneeling next to his mother in a church pew, I am throwing a handful of damp earth onto his casket, shiny as a Cadillac.

We are young and in love, and my boyfriend is going to die.

He will die, I know it, and I go there, though I have no business doing so. Our human imaginations are woefully unprepared for predicting actual pain, but I hack away at it anyway, trying to form a scar before I am even wounded.

November has always been the cruelest month. November is gray and stark, each day growing shorter and shorter until December can plunge us into total darkness. November took my uncle and my grandmother and many years after we've laid them each to rest, when the sting of this month has become more of a dull ache, November is trying to claim Aaron.

As a child, I was always worried that my parents would die if I slept away from our home, because I was a very normal and happy child with no anxiety issues at all.

Sleepovers were rare, because my father was strict and old-fashioned and believed that a child belonged in her bed and not on the floor of some half-finished Minneapolis basement watching PG-13 movies and getting made fun of for her headgear, but
they did happen, and I'd always spend the night racked with insomnia, imagining the demise of my parents and my impending orphanhood.

One by one, my friends would drift off to sleep, and I would lay awake among them, imagining my older sister delivering the news when I walked into our home the next day with my sleeping bag under my arm, and calling out to our family, “Yoo hoo!” in imitation of our now dead mother. I pictured my siblings and myself lined up in the front row of the church, kneeling before our parents' coffins in coordinating all-black outfits. My brothers would offer me their handkerchiefs to dry my tears. My brothers would apparently have handkerchiefs.

There would be a custody battle, of course. We'd all be split among our godparents—that's what godparents do, right? Just take over when your parents die in a sleepover-related accident?—and that would be the end of our family. All because I needed to sleep at Catherine's house and chat on AIM with strangers.

My parents never did die (or, my dad did, but later, and of cancer, and that wasn't my fault, I wasn't at a sleepover) but I replayed these scenes all the time throughout my childhood, a way of trying on feelings and situations that didn't fit yet, that wouldn't for years to come.

But this is different. This is fucking wrong.

It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Aaron is sleeping beside me, and I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me, sneaking out of our hospital bed to wash my hot, tear-soaked face with cool water and look into my own tired eyes in the tiny, beige-tiled, fluorescent-lit en suite bathroom in his hospital room. There are two tiny soaps that you know will instantly turn your skin to sandpaper, plain
toothbrushes with bristles so weak it's like brushing your teeth with baby hair, and a small bottle of lotion that smells like gasoline. If you had a really excellent imagination and a really bad sense of what a hotel experience should be like, you could almost pretend you were at a cheap motel, though even those don't have ball-chain cords next to the toilet to pull in case of emergency.

Aaron was where I'd left him, sleeping on his side in a hospital bed built for one, leaving space for me.
You cannot do that again,
I tell myself.
You cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive.

So I didn't. I fought the urge to try to feel things before they happened and instead tried to feel what was actually happening. I think this is called “being present” or “living your life” but it was a really new concept for me, and it blew my mind in the same way discovering that Lumiere in
Beauty and the Beast
is voiced by Jerry Orbach from
Law & Order,
or that Drake was Jimmy on
Degrassi.
Aaron had brain surgery and got discharged from the hospital and we went to Target, as is customary. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and we decided to get married, like, immediately, cancer be damned. We didn't spend time reading about brain tumors or bothering with statistics because fuck it, we had several HBO series to watch, and that didn't leave a lot of time for worrying. We got so good at being alive in the moment that I think a lot of people in our lives forgot Aaron was sick. And actually, I think we sometimes forgot Aaron was sick, and that an incurable cancer meant an impossible future. But who needed the future? Until we'd have to wake up at 6:00
A.M
. for an MRI or go see his oncologist, we were just a regular young couple who had more chemo than food in their cupboards and were on a first-name basis with the radiation staff.

A day before our wedding, I had one small word tattooed in cur
sive inside my right wrist. It was my “something new” for our wedding day, and a reminder to myself that nothing good ever came of time traveling.

It's just one tiny word that helped me do the biggest things in life, like getting married and buying a house and having a baby or getting my ears pierced at age thirty-two. I look at it every day, to remind me what time it is:
now
.