What a happy person looks like

As a kid, my sister Kim fell into a cactus terrarium we kept on the windowsill (don’t ask why we kept cactus terrarium on the windowsill), and spent hours in the ER where they pulled out one needle at a time. She got a Cocoa Puff up her nose while pretending to eat her cereal like a dog, and it was so far up there she had to, yup, go to the hospital so they could pluck it out of her upper nasal passage, the closest anyone’s breakfast cereal ever got to their brain.

Another time she stepped right through a glass picture frame by accident. Stepping through it wasn’t so bad—the worst of it happened when she pulled it back out. I remember seeing her do it, standing there with glass at her feet, that moment when you’re not sure what just happened.

One summer we were about head to Sesame Place again, a family-themed amusement park in Langhorne, PA, one of our favorite summertime destinations. We were most excited about a huge pit filled with balls that you could flop around in. It smelled like feet. We were piling into the station wagon and Kim ran back inside to retrieve something, tripped, and broke her arm. No ball pit for her. I thought about how fate was a cruel mistress as we lurched onto the highway without her.  

While vacationing in the Poconos, Kim came down with the very worst case of poison ivy anyone I know has ever seen. She doesn’t even recall where she got it—a whisper of a leaf against her ankle, perhaps she then pushed a hair out of her face. It wasn’t the typical biological response (a rash, raised welts). When she woke up that next morning, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see, and walked into the bathroom and gasped out loud—her eyes had been swallowed by her swollen face. We took pictures and called her Rocky Dennis for the rest of the week.

Kim coughed her way into a hernia at one point, which was odd because our youngest sister Lori had had one too not long before. They had both crouped so hard that their intestines had punched a hole in their guts. It was a nauseating, terrifying idea, as I was so sure I was next and so I spent every morning that year in the shower fake-coughing with my hand on my groin, just to be sure.

During Christmas break her junior year, Kim’s house burned down. She was already home for the holiday when she got the call: Her roommates had finished their last exam, gone Christmas shopping, and returned home to find the house in flames.

I went there to inspect the damage myself (a faulty surge protector and dried out Christmas tree were to blame), and couldn’t believe how a space could be transfigured like that, blackened and ashen, a negative image of what it had been, dark in all the bright places. It looked like some kind of burned out abandoned crack house, not a cheerful college girls’ home that not a week before had been filled with people and blinking with Christmas lights.

I had Kim on the phone so I wouldn’t have to walk through alone.

“How bad is it,” she said. And I burst into tears.

It helps that Kim has the highest happiness set-point of anyone I know, and floats relentlessly upward like a balloon. The rest of us earthbound family and friends gaze up at her with a mix of admiration, and annoyance.

If you happen to glance at her Facebook feed, you might be tempted to believe she must be hiding something, must be secretly miserable. No one can be that happy that often, look that good, or have that much fun. On a Wednesday. But since I happen to be close enough to the source, I can tell you, it’s all quite real. She’s heavy on the Snapchat filters, but still, I can tell you that even up close, there isn’t a false note to be found.

What you may not know about are the long, sobbing years when her kids were babies, and she was lonely and exhausted and could barely face the day. Or when her son Mason turned two, then three and didn’t speak. And when he wouldn’t eat solid food, or really any food at all, except for milk and a couple dry handfuls of Cheerios, for months on end. Mason was diagnosed on the spectrum, and when the gastroenterologist wanted to insert a feeding tube, her husband Joe said No fucking way. This is not how this will go down. Then, one day, when he was almost four, after 10 weeks of no eating, he pointed to a loaf of bread, and Kim broke down in great, heaving sobs.

Then, just two years ago, Kim texted her old high school boyfriend on his 39th birthday. They were still quite close, and had just spoken days ago, traded barbs, talked about their kids. And instead of his usual snarky reply, she got a text from his wife: Justin had died in his sleep.

“Are you fucking with me?” she wrote back.

“I’m so sorry, Kim. No, this is not a joke.”

It’s like watching a building collapse in slow motion around you—you know it’s falling, you know there’s no stopping it, and there’s no getting out of its way. But you flail anyway, thinking if you move fast enough you can rewind, go back to a place before it happens, when everything was fine and exactly where it should be.

I picked up her call as I was headed down Broadway, eyeing yoga pants in the window of Lululemon. I couldn’t even understand at first what she was saying, and it certainly didn’t sound like her. But it was the sound of my sweet sister’s heart breaking, not in tiny, quiet cracks but in chaos and panic and gushing fury, the way a heart would really break if it could. It was the first and earliest loss, and so it took her breath away. As it does, any time it happens. Every time.

So you know what she does? She throws a huge blowout for her 40th, complete with ballroom and DJ and disco lights and everyone in sequins. Why? Because Kim loves nothing more than a good party and a crowded dance floor, the music lifting us off our feet, the lights bouncing off everyone’s dresses, filling the room with stars. A kind of heaven, right there on earth.