It's Okay to Laugh

For Aaron.

Us.

For Steve.

Semper Fi.

This is a collection of stories about my life, told the way I remember them, after losing a couple hundred brain cells. I changed some names, but not all of them. If you remember these stories differently, good for you!

Y
ou are holding a book by another youngish white woman who had a pretty charmed life until her father and husband died of cancer a few weeks after she miscarried her second baby. That's just the truth: 2014 sucked pretty hard, but for most of my life, things were easy. I have three siblings and we are all (currently) on speaking terms. I was voted Most Likely to Have a Talk Show in high school. My parents mostly loved and respected each other, even if my dad referred to my beautiful, thin mother as Large Marge. My grandparents died when they were old, so I was sad but okay with it. I got to go to private school from kindergarten to college and I don't even have student loans to pay off. Seriously, how much do you hate me right now?

But easy as things were, I was always certain that I was somehow wasting time, that everything was slipping through my fingers and I was never going to do anything with my one wild and precious life. I kept waiting for someone else to tell me how to do it. It seemed like everyone else always knew what they were doing . . . but how? How did they know who to marry and how to get a car loan, or what
number to put for their tax deductions so their parents wouldn't end up paying their income taxes during their first year of “adulthood”? Where was the life syllabus, and how did I miss it?

Now I am a thirty-two-year-old widowed mom and I don't have time to worry about whether or not I'm doing it right, because I
know
that my one wild and precious life is indeed slipping through my hands. If I want to do something Big and Important, I have to do it before five o'clock because day care is strict about pickup time. I'm not so worried anymore, because now I know
nobody
knows what they are doing in life, and
nobody
knows what to do when bad things happen, to themselves or to other people. We make it up as we go, and sometimes we are big and generous and sometimes we are small and petty. We say the wrong things, we obsess over all the ways we got it wrong and all the ways that other people did, too. The only thing I know for sure is that it is okay not to know everything, to try and to fail and to sometimes suck at life, as long as you try to get better.

I'm not writing this book to bum you out, although parts of it are for sure a bummer. I'm thinking specifically about the parts where my dad dies, or my husband dies, or I miscarry a baby. I don't need your pity—I have plenty of my own, and I spend it creating sad stories about old men I see alone at the bus stop. I am writing it because bad stuff is like good stuff: it just happens.

People really expect that huge life events will make you older and wiser, and in some ways, they do. I now have a will! I don't give all the fucks about what people say about me on the Internet! And in some ways, I came out of these events like any other person: a little irritated at how many people complain about cold and flu season like they were just diagnosed with Stage IV brain cancer, and a little preoccupied with how flat my butt looks since I had a child.

I'm writing a book about it—the good stuff and the terrible stuff—because I know I'm not special. This stuff happens to everyone. I'm not an expert on grief or parenting or even writing (maybe I Googled “How to Write a Book,” maybe not; who's to say?). I am just another dummy with a blog and a collection of Most Improved awards from her days as a mediocre high school athlete, trying every day to get better at life. Not every life lesson comes from death and tragedy: sometimes it comes from flipping off your high school principal because he was illegally driving in the carpool lane.

This is for people who have been through some shit—or have watched someone go through it. This is for people who aren't sure if they're saying or doing the right thing (you're not, but nobody is). This is for people who had their life turned upside down and just learned to live that way. For people who have laughed at a funeral or cried in a grocery store. This is for everyone who wondered what exactly they're supposed to be doing with their one wild and precious life. I don't actually have the answer, but if you find out, will you text me?