2012
Tom McAllister
When my wife LauraBeth’s older brother showed up to my 30th birthday party with a video camera, and told me to say something to his unborn child—she was due in 3 months—I said, “This is the last time you’re ever going to see me.” In my head, it sounded funny, but it’s hard now to see how it even qualifies as a joke, and my delivery made it feel very bleak (impossible to count how many jokes in my life have failed to even register for others as jokes). Nobody laughed. I pretended I had to do something urgently in the kitchen so I could get away from the camera.
Back in college, I used to tell LauraBeth that I planned on being dead by the time I was 35. She didn’t like me talking like that, but I thought joking about being dead made me seem introspective and thoughtful (I’d never read Nietzsche, but I aspired to be the kind of guy who would have read Nietzsche). I didn’t want to be deep so much as I wanted to be perceived by others as deep, and I often confused depression with depth.
I had been moping since Christmas about this birthday. I no longer wanted, or expected, to be dead at 35, but for the first time in my life my mortality felt real. The previous summer, I had injured my back carrying a suitcase, and I had never felt older or more decrepit than that morning when I was in too much pain to brush my teeth, let alone to put on clothes or leave the house; LauraBeth had gently lowered me down into a rolling office chair and wheeled me around our AirBnB until I felt well enough to move. I did not want to have a party, and I did not want gifts, and I did not want to talk about it (most years, I don’t want any of these things anyway, and LauraBeth reminds me that it’s not just about me, the birthday celebration is for everyone). I declared that my ideal birthday would be spent alone in the dark in the basement, maybe with one balloon. I was unpleasant company for months.
Someone asked during dinner why I was so sad, and I resented that I was expected to talk about it. Every subsequent birthday, I will be asked if I’m feeling as depressed as I was on my 30th, and the answer is no, thankfully, but I also don’t think I should have to justify having been sad. At some point, you realize you are stuck inside this one flawed body, forever. Having a brain is one thing but having to house it inside a body is a whole new indignity.
After a few drinks I was more talkative and pleasant (this kind of positive reinforcement from alcohol causes me a whole different set of problems). I got a dartboard with a nice cabinet for the bar in my basement. I got a beautiful scrapbook from my aunt, who had spent weeks laboring over it. We ate prime rib—the butcher had cut ten percent off the price when he heard it was my birthday—and I was surrounded by people who loved me. A fat corgi named Maggie slept under the table while we ate. I forget too often how many good things I have, because I’m so focused on finding new ways to complain about the things I don’t have.
My mid-30s have been the happiest and healthiest period of my life. My body is still in decent shape, and my mind works as well as it ever has. I have more confidence than I used to in navigating most social situations. I am better at my job than I have ever been, and I have more money than I did ten years ago. Sure, my hairline is receding, and I have now reached the age at which I would be grotesque to sports broadcasters (if an athlete over 35 makes a big play, they act as if he’s performed a miracle, as if a mummy has escaped from its tomb and performed a back-flip), but overall I like the person I am. I almost never feel bad about being alive.
At 30, I couldn’t have seen anything like contentment coming on. All I saw was 40, and then 50, and then maybe that would be it, like my father dead long before 60. It’s possible I am well past the midpoint of my life. This is true of every living thing, and it becomes truer each day. A friend from high school recently died of an overdose, and there have been close calls for several other friends: cancer and accidents and suicide attempts. Around my thirtieth birthday, I woke up some nights from dreams in which people from my past—friends and enemies, people who were enemies but thought they were friends—were walking past my coffin and looking down at me and mouthing their prayers. Stripping off my clothes and writing messages on my body in magic marker, every inch of me covered in words I could never read because my eyes had been sewn shut. For most of this year, I felt worse than I had the day before, and then one day I didn’t. I have a nice, safe life, and I have hardly done anything to deserve it. I don’t know how it all works. I keep trying to figure out how one is supposed to handle that.
The day my niece was born, I was sitting along the banks of the Schuylkill River, watching LauraBeth and her co-workers row to a last-place finish in a charity boat race as part of the Dad Vail Regatta, one of the biggest rowing events in the country. Her older brother was already in the hospital with his wife and newborn daughter. For months, LauraBeth had been training after work, and when people asked her why she was doing it, she shrugged. It wasn’t really fun, but it was something to do. A new way to challenge herself in her downtime (one thing I admire about her is that she’s always trying to improve, to be a better person). I waited for her during some of her practices, sitting on a bench by the river and straining to read a book in the dark. They knew all along that they would lose, but they kept showing up anyway. Watching her group cross the finish line, I applauded along with her father and her younger brother, and I thought: isn’t it nice to be alive? None of it had ever felt possible, and yet here we were.
Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook, and the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He is the co-host of the Book Fight! podcast, and nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse. He teaches at Temple University and lives in New Jersey.