The Bottom Three

We’ve all had bad days, right? Overslept, had a cat hork up a hairball in an inconvenient spot, got into a fender-bender on the way to work, kid mouthed off, dinner got burnt, washed a red towel with the whites. Life happens.

But there’s a difference between a garden-variety “bad day” and what I refer to as a “terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.”

(I stole that phrase from author Judith Viorst’s wonderful book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. One of my very favorite titles.)

I’ve had childhood THNGVB days. Going with my dad when we had to get our Cinnamon Ann Dog put to sleep. Breaking my wrist at recess and puking (spectacularly, I’ve been told) all over the hospital’s fancy MRI machine. Getting ostracized by my former-best-friend on the first day of middle school. Being utterly convinced there was a wolverine in the basement and refusing to go to sleep until my dad checked…and then double-checked. He drew the line at the third request.

(That last one was thanks to an old episode of the television show Growing Pains where somehow a wolverine got loose in the house. It was only on camera for about two seconds but that was enough to totally freak me out.)

And I’ve had THNGVB days as an adult. The day I had to tell my mother I flunked out of college comes to mind. I was eighteen and out from under my parents’ thumbs for the first time. Ended up with a GPA of 1.12. I still remember walking up the road by our house to meet her as she came home from work. The first time I heard the words “breast cancer” ranks right up there, too. I will never forgive the snotty little radiologist who--after droning on in technical language--summed up his report with, “well, it is cancer, so what you’ll want to do is…” I don’t remember the rest of what he said. I just remember tissues and an incredibly kind group of nurses gently explaining what “breast cancer” would mean for me.

But. I’ve also got my “Bottom Three.” The three single-worst days of my life. Days that make THNGVB days look spectacularly wonderful by comparison (well…maybe not my breast cancer day…)

The three worst days of my life, in chronological order:

• The night before my father died. I was twenty, and he was in the last throes of bone cancer. The hospital moved him to an empty room and suspended visitation rules for my mother and me. We spent the night, sleeping in turns on the other bed (which the hospital charged us for the use of, if I remember rightly). It was my first close-up experience with dying, and the delirium that can accompany it. My father moaned, tossed and turned, and kept reaching his arms up to grab at something I couldn’t see. I felt utterly impotent, and to this day I’m convinced that night was at least a year long.

• The day my mother died. I was forty, and she’d been going steadily downhill for the last few years. Nine months beforehand she’d fallen and moved to an assisted care facility. I was at the car repair shop, getting routine maintenance before heading downstate to visit family, when I got a call from one of the nurses. My mother wasn’t doing well, the nurse said, and I should make plans to head over ASAP. I sat by her bed alone hour after hour and watched her slip away. I remember I could not get warm. I had my coat and scarf and hat, and the nurses kept me supplied with as much hot tea as I could stomach. I just sat and shivered. At one point a volunteer came in and said “so, what’s her deal?” and jerked a thumb at my mother. The things I said at that point do not bear repeating.

• The night I broke up with my long-term boyfriend. That was only a couple of months ago. We’d known each other since our college days, and started dating in 2009. Slowly, I became dissatisfied to the point where I finally, finally got up the nerve to break things off. I told him I was tired of being the responsible one. The one who paid the bills (no job, no apparent motivation to get one), managed his communications with the outside world (broken phone, no desire to replace it), etc. I sat him down and said the four most terrifying words in a relationship: “we need to talk.” I hated every second of it. I don’t do confrontation, even the completely peaceful kind.

Each of these three was unbelievably beyond the THNGVB day rating for all involved. I didn’t just lose a father, my mother lost her husband. I didn’t just lose a mother, my mother lost her life. I might have lost a boyfriend, but he lost a girlfriend and his place of residence.

The good thing about my Bottom Three is that they didn’t last for an indefinite period. As awful as they were when I was going through them, they had definite “end dates.” I still mourn them, but I don’t re-live them over and over. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve come out stronger, wiser, and able to weather the sometimes-shit-show that life can be.