the morbs viii: paranoia's end

I'm going to a wedding. One of my lifelong food paranoias finally dies.

This week’s issue of the MORBS is going to be a shorter one, due to me having to prepare to leave town for a few days for the wedding of my high school best friend.

I love weddings. My parents had a good marriage — arguably the best kind, the kind where you make the promise (we will stay together and love and support each other until one of us dies), and then you get to keep it. Framed this way, losing my mother to cancer when I was nine feels less like a tragedy, and more like a love story ending the way love stories end when they work out. Nobody angry. Nobody at fault. Nobody sad or disappointed or abandoned. Just somebody dying, the way people do. I love my stepmother, and my dad has had another happy and healthy marriage — two, in one life. Who gets to be so lucky? Framed in this way, also, it’s not like I have no mother. Instead, I have an abundance of them. I think that promising you’ll love someone forever (or until one of you dies, which is the closest we get, probably) is probably a silly thing to do — a lofty vow, less an ending than the beginning of something much harder than the alternative. I don’t think that makes it stupid. I think that makes it very brave. And romantic. And sexy.