151. Aaronfest

Nora loves to honor her dead husband, Aaron, exactly as he loved to be celebrated when he was alive: with big birthday celebration.

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INTRO MUSIC

I’m Nora McInerny and it’s going to be okay.

This August we celebrated my dead husband’s 44th birthday.

And I’m sorry if that sentence was a little much for you, but I don’t know how else to put it. Late husband makes it seem like he’s tardy and he was actually pretty punctual. First husband makes it seem like he lives a few miles away from me and we swap our kid in a grocery store parking lot on Sundays. 

If he were here, he would be 44 years old, not any kind of milestone, kind of a nothing birthday like 27 or 38. But he is forever 35, and I am now older than he will ever be.

I am not a birthday lover, because my birthday is December 28, that no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year’s where nobody wants to do anything or go anywhere and honestly neither do I!

But Aaron loved birthdays. When I met him in 2010, he told me that he had just learned all of his friends’ middle names, and was now on a mission to know everyone’s birthdays by heart.

He celebrated his own birthday with Aaronfest, usually held at his Grandfather’s land in central Minnesota, where friends from every area of his life would convene for a few days of tubing, drinking, camping, drinking, dancing and drinking. The magic of Aaron was that he made everyone feel like they belonged, like the party couldn’t have happened without them. And when I tell you that everyone was invited to Aaronfest, I mean that his mother, his friends from growing up, and his coworkers would all be there. Imagine a Venn diagram of people from all parts of your life, spending a weekend together? That’s my version of hell. And that’s Aaronfest.

 At the time I was a party girl but even I couldn’t party this hard and I remember going to the tent to read and Aaron being worried that I was upset but I was just like, very overwhelmed and don’t function well if I don’t get very good sleep and I’d been sleeping in a tent on very boggy land. A moist land. 

The land and Aaron are both gone now, and even though his face is in my mind and his name is on my lips every day I was always worried that I wasn’t remembering him right. I wanted to build him a pyramid, but all I have are words and a horrible sense of scale and proportion. I wanted to hold the right space the right way.

So we keep Aaronfest going.

We have done it in different ways, but some things are the same: Cheesecake, Aaron’s favorite dessert, which is tough to choke down when it’s over 100 degrees outside. Family. Taco Bell and Mountain Dew. Stupid presents for the kids — they MUST receive something they want but DO NOT NEED — in the spirit of a man who lived to treat himself and those around him.

Last year we saw a superhero movie and took the kids to Hot Topic but the point is that we have made our own holiday, that we celebrate him in a way that feels close to his life, that we will keep the party going for our favorite party guy.

So is this a pep talk? No, I completely misled you, bamboozled you, hoodwinked you. But maybe it is? Maybe today we don’t need to stress about everything, because someday we will be dead and all that anyone will really remember are the parties we threw (or grudgingly attended), the foods we loved, and the way we made them feel: like our middle names and our birthdays were worth remembering. Like we deserved our own holiday.

OUTRO MUSIC

CREDITS