Is it better to know?
Just look your best and get a mani.
A friend of mine just got married. At 40-something. To a guy she went to Homecoming with. She wore a maroon dress. She got married at City Hall and then hosted a weekend extravaganza with their reception as part of the fun.
That’s the instagram reel: her gorgeous wedding as the cherry on top of her life of moving to the Pacific Northwest with her high school sweetheart.
What you don’t see (right away) is her 1st marriage, her business, her ex-boyfriend… all ending in tragedies: divorce, failure, death.
When talking about her wedding photos and stories surrounding that weekend, I asked her “If someone were to whisper in your ear at your Homecoming dance that you were going to marry that guy, would you believe them?”
I highly recommend My Old Ass on Amazon. It’s the premise of getting advice or a hint at something coming… but not knowing much else surrounding that hint.
Their tagline is: What would you ask your older self? But it should also be: “What would you say if your “old ass self” told YOU something?”
What would my friend have said if someone said “You’re going to marry that boy some day?” I imagine she would have screamed over the Bell Biv Devoe playing at Homecoming: “WHAT? WHERE? HOW???”
Tell me more! You can’t just leave me with that! WHAT? WHERE? HOW?! Tell me MORE! Tell me when I marry him! And where do we honeymoon? And what song do we dance to for our 1st dance? How does he propose?
But what if you ONLY were given PART of the information. Full stop. You will marry that boy someday. You don’t know when (30 years later). You don’t know where (in the Pacific Northwest, ohh and you live there now). You don’t know what happens between that homecoming dance and whenever you get married (ughhh guuuurl so much!) Zero details, zero timeline, zero questions.
I think news like that would drive me bonkers crazy.
But how often do we say “I WISH I KNEW"!
What would she CHANGE if she knew? What would she change if she knew she WOULD eventually marry that boy? What would she change if she knew eventually that 1st guy wouldn’t work out? What would she change if she knew her business would eventually close? What would she change if she knew one of her boyfriends would not survive?
One of my best friends and I made a pact when we were idiot high schoolers: since we were best friends, we would probably know when the other one was going to get engaged. We shared an irrational fear that we wouldn’t have the perfect outfit on or that we wouldn’t have a manicure when our future dude got down on one knee. But we also wanted it to be a complete surprise. Irrational silly little high schoolers! We vowed to each other to say a code word if “something” was coming and then promised each other that saying the code word also meant “no more questions- look your best and get a mani”. Something was coming. When she went away to NYC for the weekend with her boyfriend, I said the code word on our phone call. They got engaged that weekend, and today they are married and have 2 kiddos.
My mom was diagnosed with the worst kind of cancer: pancreatic cancer. And yes, I’ll fight you on if it’s the worst. It’s the worst because the survival rate is very very short. It’s not a matter of “if”. It’s a matter of “when”. My mom, the math teacher, asked for specifics: what? when? how? Her doctor’s answer was the typical doctor answer: “everyone is different”.
When? Give me numbers. Give me statistics. "About 1/2 the people don’t make it past a year. The other 1/2 don’t make it past 2 years. There’s a sliver percentage of people who make it past 2 years, but not much past that. But, everyone is different.”
How? Will I be incapacitated? Will I be in pain? Will I be in a home? Will I be shitting my pants? I don’t want my kids changing my diapers! “Well yes, all of those things could happen. Or they might not happen. They might happen all at once in fast succession. But, everyone is different.”
And that’s when my mom would lose it. She wanted to know ALL the things - but knowing all the things SCARED HER. Her doctor did tell her a few ways her body and mind would taker a turn for the worst. But of course he couldn’t be for sure because… say it with me… “everyone is different”.
Your job is not to ask any questions. Your job is “look your best and get a mani.”
We did the best we could do knowing only a few pieces of the puzzle: 1 = you are eventually going to die, like soon and 2 = it will not be pretty at the end, probably.
Knowing this, my mom took on life in the most beautiful way: keeping her life as close to exactly what it already looked like… and ADDING in some big whopper moments.
“Look your best and get a mani”!
She kept teaching - virtually from chemo treatments. She took her grandkids to Disney World! My mom and I went on a group tour to Italy. And months later to Paris! She was shopping at new stores (for her) like Zara and J.Jill! Move over Kohls! She was treating herself to pedicures every month! She loved connecting with people about cancer because it was her thing… and she needed all the stories to feel in control of her life.
That’s the instagram reel. She leaned into her last years so beautifully! You know something is coming so “look your best and get a mani”. Do the best YOU can knowing something is coming.
But there’s this part of her story too: She was in the hospital for days with extreme dehydration and dangerous blood pressure. She accidentally overdosed on morphine and had a meltdown when her nurse suggested that someone else be in charge of her meds. She lost a friend, to cancer. She took a step away from teaching… for good. She lost her husband on Father’s Day, 9 months to the day that my mom died. She missed his funeral services because she was in the hospital, again. She was no longer driving. She was no longer leaving the house. Her brother told her he didn’t care about masks or an “autoimmune disease”, he wasn’t coming to Thanksgiving. And neither were his kids. But after her diagnosis, he changed his attitude because… cancer. Her sister offered to clean my parent’s house (and even enlisted her kids to come along to help as surprise guests!) but then stopped cold turkey because she didn’t feel enough recognition for doing that task for her dying sister. Things changed when my mom actually looked like Death. My mom was told that her only option was a clinical trial. When that failed, she was told, the only option is hospice. Until you die.
Knowing is a blessing (god I hate that word.) Knowing CAN be an amazing thing. How much do you really know when you “know”? Knowing EVERYTHING can be the biggest mind fuck. When you know “something”, try to do the best you can with the information at hand.
There was a Black Mirror episode about this exactly. The premise of the episode is that in this future world, when you’re single, you have a device that tells you a vital part of your story: how long you will spend time with the person you’re going on a date with: 4 hours, a year, a lifetime. And NO MATTER WHAT, you are required fulfill the time on the device. You have the option to find out, but ONLY if your date chooses to find out too. Both of you have to agree to either see one part of the future or not. So do you find out… or not?
It’s only one piece of the puzzle. In what ways would knowing that one thing change the way you live?
The episode gave the examples: a girl who finds the guy super hot, and when they check the device, they only have 24 hours together. Lean into that saucy night - you only have that one night together! Another couple decide to check their devices which tell them both: 5 years. They end up falling in love, getting married and falling out of love… at the 3 year mark. As the device works, they are required to live out the time they were given: 5 years. So it was a bit time of horrible behaviors and hurting each other but then turned into “let’s be cordial until this is over” behavior. A nice tweak to their time in “purgatory”.
You wonder what you would change if you knew…
You wonder how you would have felt if you didn’t know anything and the inevitable inevitably happened…
You wonder which is… better?
Jen, your Mom is going to die one day. Soon.
Tell me WHEN! Tell me HOW! Tell me everything!!!
Wait, I thought you said “that would drive you crazy”?
And it DID. Knowing my mom was going to die was both the best gift and the worst gift. I got a chance to do absolutely everything I wanted: the trips, the midnight conversations holding hand in the “blue bedroom” at Lake Wisconsin, the trip we booked to Florida 24 hours before we left, singing in the car at the top of our lungs to Bon Jovi, watching our favorite movies eating Baskin Robbins ice cream on a Tuesday at 9am… I showed up in the best way I could for my mom, and myself.
I also said terrible things in the worst tone at the worst time to family members and friends. I ended friendships. I missed events. I stopped dating. I stopped going to my kickboxing gym. I stopped cooking. I started eating out all the time. Or just not eating. I took a step down and pay cut at my job. I had an attitude when things weren’t aligning with how I wanted them to. I took things out on the wrong people: a telephone operator at my credit card company, the guy who I was dating when I broke my arm, the manager at Athleta who refused to take my return outside the return window.
Jen, you’re going to survive losing your mom. And your life as you know will burn to the ground. Sizzling embers of what life looked like: your sassiness. You cute figure. Your attraction to making things better and more elevated: your jobs and your BFs. Your obsession with fulfilling the title of “best daughter”. And “best auntie”. And “best sister”. Best everything. It’s all going to be gone.
You’re still in there. But you have this project now: to rebuild on that same land. Take parts of you that you love. Build on those. Leave the parts you hate about yourself out of the new place. No no no no don’t even think about bringing those bad habits into this new life.
“Dress up and get a mani” = go to therapy. Ask for help. Check in how you feel. Go to retreats. Buy cool gemstone crystals. Spend more time with that friend. Spend less time with that other friend. Give your brother space. Create a new tradition, that you can change at any time. Go on an adventure for Christmas. And buy yourself the things your mom would buy for you (when she would secretly purchase the thing while you “weren’t” looking). Cook. Put on music while you’re cooking. Dance, it’s cool, nobody is watching. Write. WRITE JEN. Do the things to prepare yourself for the truest and most beautiful life.
I’m still in survival mode, surviving without my mom. But I’m also attempting to live parts of my life a little more dressed up, a little more aware. And obviously with a mani, that I did myself. Because I perfected the self-mani while my mom was sick. And I did it quietly on the couch in the living room while she was napping. And she never knew.
Because if she did, she’d kill me. I KNOW at least that.
~Jen