Death, grief, and internet comments

You would think that having your beloved husband die in your arms would give you a deeper understanding of the world, and you’d be right, it does. I swear to everything that the moment he didn’t breathe in again, I saw the universe in its entirety, and my place in it.

There are, of course, bigger problems in the world. I’ve seen them. I’ve survived them. I watched my hilarious, healthy boyfriend go from a regular 32-year-old to a brain cancer patient in just a few weeks. I married him a month after his first brain surgery, I had his baby a year later. I took him to every blood draw and served him his chemotherapy pills on an actual platter. When he was too weak to walk, I carried him. And when he was done with this world, I was there. Life, I know, is short and precious, and death will come for us all, even if we eat 100% organic food and never ever smoke a cigarette. Why, then, was I spending a Tuesday evening engaged in the lowest form of Comment Warriorism? Because! Because my brain isn’t always as smart as my heart is, and because life is hard and sometimes, it’s easier to get real bent out of shape about a little thing than it is to look at what is really going on with you. It’s easier to face a small, imaginary problem than a big, real-life one. I am, if you haven’t picked up on it, basically neck deep in the anger phase of grief. It’s a pretty gross phase for lots of reasons, one being that you can legitimately find yourself in an Instagram comment war debating the rightful use of a hashtag, and then later share that story with many other people on the Internet as a cautionary tale of mixing grief with technology.

My husband’s default setting was tranquility and joy. Mine has always been more like heavy anxiety with a light sprinkling of humor. It’s always been easy, too easy, for me to be consumed by trivialities, to be eaten up by nothing. What a waste, right? What a circus. It’s my job, now, to plant my feet and wade out from this angry pool of grief, to remember, when the grief is too big and the world is too dark, how I saw the meaning of life the moment that Aaron died, and for those of you who are still looking, it is really simple: love as much as you can, as long as you can. The big problems – in your life and in the world – will never, ever be solved in the comments section. Editor's Note: get ready to cry a lot more when you read Nora's book "It's Okay to Laugh". It's wonderful.

You may also think that this deeper understanding of the world would stick with you always, like a Harry Potter-esque Cloak of Tranquility, something you could wear to protect you from being eaten alive by nothing, to protect you from your own brain and its obsession with trivialities. Nope. If that were true, I wouldn’t be cringing right now as I write about a particularly humbling evening on the Internet, where I spent upwards of thirty minutes engaged in a comment war with someone across the Atlantic Ocean who failed to understand why I didn’t want her to use the hashtag I use for my son on photos of her dog. I’m just going to let that scenario sink in for a moment because I have ancestors who survived the potato famine and close relatives who survived WWII. I’m a widowed mother of one precious child, and I spent unredeemable moments of my life arguing with a stranger over a hashtag. Not even arguing, really. I was full on Kanye up in the comments. I had my reasons and they were going to be heard. Or, read by a complete stranger who thought I was unstable at best. My adversary was unapologetic and failed to see how egregious her breach of Internet etiquette truly was, in part because of internet etiquette: 1. Maybe doesn’t formally exist 2. See #1 “I think there are bigger problems in the world,” she finally replied, and with that, she shut me and my stupid thumbs up.

There are, of course, bigger problems in the world. I’ve seen them. I’ve survived them. I watched my hilarious, healthy boyfriend go from a regular 32-year-old to a brain cancer patient in just a few weeks. I married him a month after his first brain surgery, I had his baby a year later. I took him to every blood draw and served him his chemotherapy pills on an actual platter. When he was too weak to walk, I carried him. And when he was done with this world, I was there. Life, I know, is short and precious, and death will come for us all, even if we eat 100 percent organic food and never ever smoke a cigarette. Why, then, was I spending a Tuesday evening engaged in the lowest form of Comment Warriorism? Because! Because my brain isn’t always as smart as my heart is, and because life is hard and sometimes, it’s easier to get real bent out of shape about a little thing than it is to look at what is really going on with you. It’s easier to face a small, imaginary problem than a big, real-life one. I am, if you haven’t picked up on it, basically neck deep in the anger phase of grief. It’s a pretty gross phase for lots of reasons, one being that you can legitimately find yourself in an Instagram comment war debating the rightful use of a hashtag and then later share that story with many other people on the Internet as a cautionary tale of mixing grief with technology.

My husband’s default setting was tranquility and joy. Mine has always been more like heavy anxiety with a light sprinkling of humor. It’s always been easy, too easy, for me to be consumed by trivialities, to be eaten up by nothing. What a waste, right? What a circus. It’s my job, now, to plant my feet and wade out from this angry pool of grief, to remember, when the grief is too big and the world is too dark, how I saw the meaning of life the moment that Aaron died, and for those of you who are still looking, it is really simple: love as much as you can, as long as you can. The big problems—in your life and in the world—will never, ever be solved in the comments section. [Editor's Note: get ready to cry a lot more when you read Nora's book "It's Okay to Laugh". It's wonderful.]

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