Now

When Nora was about to marry her first husband Aaron, they were in the thick of his cancer treatment. So the day before the wedding, she got a small tattoo to remind her to stay in the present moment.

This was an excerpt from Nora’s first book, It’s Okay To Laugh (Crying is cool, too) which is available here.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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

I am asked often about my tattoos, because people assume that there must be a special meaning behind all of them. But most of them are just things that I liked, and I tend to treat my body a bit like a pinterest board.

But there is one tattoo – not my first but one of my first – that does have a special meaning.

And to tell the story of it, I thought I would actually read an excerpt from my first book: It’s Okay to laugh, crying is cool, too. Because 8 years after it came out, people are still reading it!! And it’s still in print, which is nuts. And yes, I do the audiobook.

It’s from chapter two, which has the same name as this episode. In it, my boyfriend Aaron, has just been hospitalized for a seizure and we’ve just found out he has a brain tumor and I am in having what I now realize is a panic attack, imagining a horrifying future of suffering and death. Fun, right?!!!

Here we go:

It is wrong to try on this fictitious sorrow for size when Aaron is sleeping beside me, and I drag myself from this imaginary hell into the real and present one in front of me, sneaking out of our hospital bed to wash my hot, tear-soaked face with cool water and look into my own tired eyes in the tiny, beige-tiled, fluorescent-lit en suite bathroom in his hospital room. There are two tiny soaps that you know will instantl turn your skin toi sandpaper, plain toothbrushes with bristles so weak it’s like brushing your teeth with baby hair, and a small bottle of lotion that smells like gasoline.

If you had a really excellent imagination and a really bad sense of what a hotel experience should be like, you could almost pretend you were at a cheap motel, though even those don’t have ball-chain cords next to the toilet to pull in case of emergency.

Aaron was there I’d left him, sleepin on his side in a hospital bed built for one, leaving space for me.

You cannot do that again, I tell myself, you cannot bury the man you love while he is still alive.

So I didn’t.

I fought the urge to try to feel things before they happened and instead tired to feel what was actually happening. I think this is called “being present” or “living your life” but it was a really new concept for me, and it blew my mind in the same way discovering that lumiere in Beauty and the Beast is voiced by Jerry Orbach from Law & order, or realizing that Drake was Jimmy on Degrassi. Aaron had brain surgery and got discharged from the hospital and we went to Target, as is customary. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and we decided to get married, like, immediately, cancer be damned.

We didn’t spend time reading about brain tumors or bothering with statistics because fuck it, we had several HBO serries to watch and that didn’t leave a lot of time for worrying.

We got so good at being alive and in the moment that I think a lot of people in our lives forgot Aaron was sick. And actually, I think we sometimes forgot Aaron was sick, and that an incurable cancer meant an impossible future. But who needed the future? Until we’d have to wake up at 6AM for an MRI or go see his oncologist, we were just a regular young couple who had more chemo than food in their cupboards and were on a first name basis with the radiation staff.

A day before our wedding, I had one small word tattooed in cursive inside my right wrist. It was my “something new” for our wedding day, and a reminder to myself that nothing good ever came of time traveling.

It’s just one tiny word that helped me do the biggest things in life, like getting married and buying a house and having a baby or getting my ears pierced at age 32. I look at it every day, to remind me what time it is: now.

Credits

I’m Nora Mcinerny, this is It’s going to be ok, and we are here every weekday to bring you the opposite of a doom scroll. We also love hearing your OK things, which you can share with us by emailing us at [email protected] or calling 612.568.4441.

We have a link to this book in the show description as well.

We’re an independent podcast, so thanks for being here and sharing with your friends. Our company is called Feelings & Co, purveyor of fine feelings since 1982. This episode was produced by Claire McInerny, written by me, Nora McInerny. And engineered by Amanda Romani. The rest of our team is Marcel Malekbu and Grace Barry, and our theme music is by secret audio.