How to Host a 50th Birthday Party for Your Dead Husband with Whom you Have a Complicated Relationship

my relationship with my late husband is always going to be complicated which is why I'll never stop celebrating him and everything else that is also complicated

First of all, Hal would have loved this headline. Because he knew exactly how I felt about him in the months before his diagnosis (abhorrence) and in the last weeks of his life (adoration) and the farther away I get from his death, the more comfortable I am acknowledging the paradoxes of my grief without discounting the importance of every conflicting feeling. Including the way they have changed over the years.

And the thing he appreciated most of all was honesty. Something I ALSO appreciated but did not practice, at least not with him. (I wrote an entire book about this so I will not go into it, if you are new here, I was widowed six years ago by a man I was trying to leave. A man who joked, as he was dying, that he beat me to the punch. Because he knew I wanted out. Careful what you wish for, a memoir.)

The fact that, after everything, my husband still willingly tasked me to be his power of attorney — not only as he was dying but in the aftermath as the keeper of his memory, — a responsibility I did not necessarily want but absolutely signed up for as his wife and the mother of his children — has meant that I have had to find a way to honor his memory, my truth and my kids’ feelings all at once.

I hated him for a really long time and it consumed me in a way that made me feel trapped in a sort of paradoxical grief that didn’t know how to define itself.

And the loneliness I felt within that space was its own sort of prison — a thing I have been trying to write myself out of for years. Where does one put that anger? What does one do with a very specific kind of unrequited love?

I asked those questions for years but I don’t anymore.

When questions are unanswerable, one learns what it truly means to let go. The alternative is a spin that never ends. A pirouette in flip flops.

Unresolved feelings do not suddenly find themselves neatly packaged in resolution beneath a Christmas tree. They have to be accepted and released.

And while we have now celebrated six birthdays without him (which feels insane) this one was by far the most notable because, milestones are milestones and 50 is a big one.

Also, and I will come back to this later — I threw Hal a party on his 40th and his refusal to drink the good champagne that night or any night after, sparked an entire TED talk that I regularly deliver to friends and family who refuse to live their lives like they’re gonna die someday.

THIS IS IT, YOU GUYS! THE WORLD MAY BE ON FIRE BUT SO THE FUCK ARE YOU! BOTTOMS UP!

Hal and I may have wanted to kill each other at the end of our marriage, but now that he’s been dead for almost six years I have yet to find anyone (besides him, and naturally, our kids) who can match the gallows humor we spent fourteen years perfecting. And I love that for us. I love that our legacy as an unhappily married couple are jokes that would offend almost everyone.

I love that whenever any of my kids say something darkly humorous, I can shake my head, look them dead in the eye and say, “you know who you would have loved this joke?” and get the exact same answer: “Dad.”