Once we’re there, scrunched into a booth in the back of the bar drinking colorful drinks out of shells that are lit on fire, all the negative noise fades away. I hold Mike’s hand and make filthy jokes and take photos of my friends and post them on Instagram. Surrounded by great people and Hawaiian decor, I feel like myself again. I feel like the person who inhabited my body before The Tragedy.
After leaving the bar, we head to my friend’s for a nightcap. I sprawl out on a lounge chair on the deck and eat greasy potato chips out of a giant bag to the searing sounds of midnight burgers on the grill. We drink beers and listen to music and talk about moisturizer. I show my friends a YouTube video of a relatively thin woman completing the 72-ounce steak challenge twice in twenty minutes at this restaurant in Amarillo, Texas. She literally ate ten pounds of food and broke a world record.
As Mike and I walk back to the car, I think, I’m tired of feeling shitty. I don’t want to feel this way anymore.
When I get home, drunk, I say this out loud to Dad: “Dad, I want to live again.”
“That’s progress,” he says.
• • •
Yesterday, we lit a Yahrzeit candle that sat on the kitchen counter and burned brightly in memory of you. We will light a Yahrzeit candle every year on this day. And every year, it will burn out on my birthday. And every year, that cruel juxtaposition will remind me that life is moving on without you.
This is how it is now: equal parts joy and sorrow. Everything all at once.
I have this vivid memory of driving with Iris to the grocery store last summer on a particularly dark day. It’s one of those seemingly insignificant moments that made a permanent mark. “You Are My Sunshine” shuffled onto Pandora Toddler Radio. Glancing at Iris in the rearview mirror, I was simultaneously overwhelmed with pure joy as I saw her singing and clapping along and sorrow that you would never get to see such a spectacular view.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy when skies are gray.
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
The other night dear when I lay sleeping,
I dreamed I held you in my arms.
When I awoke dear, I was mistaken,
So I hung my head and cried.
This song is so happy and sad at once. It’s what it feels like to be alive. It’s what it feels like to lose someone you love but still be surrounded by so much light.
42
Epilogue
Change and movement is inevitable. Unstoppable. And tragedy can function like fuel.
After surviving The Tragedy, I realized I didn’t give a shit about outcomes in the same way I used to give a shit about outcomes. Because when someone you love with all your being suddenly drops dead, it’s a reminder of a few things:
1. We aren’t in control.
2. Time is running out.
3. Nothing matters.
At first, the nothing matters was a sinking ship or a mound of quicksand or a pile of rubble where I sat, paralyzed, for months and months. There wasn’t much to do during that time except for the Irish keening and the crying and the occasional pounding of my fists on the floor. You read the book. But after 365 days of grief, my tears dried up long enough to lift my head and survey the damage, and I realized, I don’t have to sit here forever.
It’s uncomfortable—even painful—to live on a pile of rubble. Not sustainable. Unsafe. Devoid of plumbing and pillows. And since nothing mattered anymore (see above), the stakes felt lower in a way. Like I could do anything I wanted to do and be anything I wanted to be. I could revise the script. I had to. Because I was no longer myself.
My debilitating sadness started morphing into something empowering. Positive. A freedom and a courage that I’d never really felt to make the most of the time I do have.
I started to look at all the things that were weighing me down even before Harris died, the stuff I’d shoved into overstuffed drawers and hidden in the part of my brain, heart, and gut that I was too tired and scared to acknowledge. And I slowly started to piece together a new identity, one that didn’t include Harris but was happening as a direct result of his absence. His untimely death was inspiring me to live.
• • •
As a kid, when I looked into my future, I saw a successful theater artist doing successful theater artist things. I was so certain of my career path at seventeen that I only applied to NYU because the internet said it was the best. And they took me! And even though I did well there and people seemed to believe in me, I gave up before I even tried. I got scared by 9/11 and didn’t want to take headshots because I felt ten pounds overweight and couldn’t figure out how to balance the drain of a day job with something more creative and meaningful. I had no energy for anything creative and meaningful because I was doing a daily commute of over an hour each way from Queens to the Upper West Side to wipe actual butts at a preschool for rich babies.
Nothing was working, so I abandoned my plan.
I left New York, moved back to Texas, and made smart and practical choices. I
