It's Okay to Laugh Read Online Free Page B

social engagement. Today’s funeral was for a high school friend, a man my age named Eddie, married just a month ago, who died of the cancer that killed Aaron. The Basilica is the basilica, the first in our country, an imposing Beaux Arts building just under the freeway, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Inits one hundred years the Basilica has seen many thousands of graduates and brides and baptized babies. Fifteen years ago, the class of 2001 lined up in these pews, in front of a massive marble altar, under the open arms of the Virgin Mary, and officially matriculated into adulthood. Now we are here to bury our classmate, and I cannot begin to list all the ways that this is not okay.
    The day was two parts funeral, one part high school reunion, so I was glad to arrive at the Basilica of Saint Mary with cystic acne and baby boogers on the shoulder of my J.Crew swing coat to really show my high school classmates I was doing a-okay, even if I didn’t live up to being voted Most Likely to Have a Talk Show. Also, I’d like to see the statistics on how many people did live up to what they were voted to be in their senior yearbooks. Although our Most Likely to Succeed is a dentist, so good for her/why am I such a failure?
    We all remember differently, and that may never be more apparent than when you see people you haven’t seen in over a decade. It is obvious, standing with a group of cute high school boys who grew into handsome men, that the truth is a multifaceted object, that it is slippery and subjective. Zach remembers me as pretty, his ultimate crush, and I am simultaneously flattered and totally incredulous because I remember spending all of high school convinced that I was the ugliest person alive. I think the polite and appropriate thing to do when someone is effusing over your past beauty is just to nod and give a sincere thank-you. But if you’re wondering how joking that “hey, I’m single now” would go over in a church, after a funeral, in front of people you haven’t seen for over a decade, four months after your husband’s death, let me just save you the trouble and say . . . not great? Work on the punch line and revisit it in a few months.
    After I killed the vibe at a funeral, my classmates and I joined everyone else in the massive church basement for lunch. Thisbasement is filled with so many people that I do not know: people who Eddie went to college and grade school with. His cousins and his coworkers. We all lead many lives that rarely intersect. It’s so uncomfortable for me, watching another person’s worlds mix together; I can’t imagine how I’ll feel watching my own funeral as a really beautiful ghost.
    People are uncomfortable with the idea of a microphone, and it’s been a slow trickle of those brave enough to stand up and tell a story, when Eddie’s cousin takes the mic.
    â€œPlease,” he says, “if you knew Eddie in a different way than I did, tell me a story now.” He is soft and ruddy-cheeked, with small eyes made smaller by crying. “Tell me anything,” he says, before sitting back down to lunch. “Give me a way to hold on to him.” I had said almost the same thing to a group of friends after Aaron died, when all my memories of him were occluded by the horror of the past month. “Help me remember him,” I texted, and they filled my phone with funny photos and stories until he came back to me as he’d lived, not as he’d died.
    I want this for Eddie’s cousin, though I am too embarrassed to stand and speak. I want to tell him about how Eddie got drunk on prom night, in the block of hotel rooms our friend’s parents had rented for all of us, because we were such good kids and probably, a little bit, because their daughter had fought serious complications from cystic fibrosis her whole young life and deserved to have a dream prom, complete with an unsupervised post-prom party.