Broken isn’t bad.
That is what Joann told me, plainly and without apology. She said she is broken, that she is part of a group she never asked to join, and that broken isn’t bad. I told her I am eight years out from losing Andy and that the same is true for me. I am broken. My whole family is broken. It does not look the way it did in those first days, but I would be lying if I said it has gone away.
We spend so much energy hiding it, apologizing for it, or waiting for the day we can say we are fine. Joann just says it out loud, and she is not ashamed of it.
Recently, someone who had just lost his son sent me a text that said, I feel so broken. I did not know what he wanted me to say. I could not promise him he would not always feel that way. What I can tell him is what Joann told me: it is not a flaw. It is just the way we are now.
Joann lost her twenty-nine-year-old son Philippe in Brooklyn in August of 2024. In the two years since, she has gotten a dangerous street closed, cared for her husband through a serious illness, and started doing stand-up comedy, where she says the words my son was killed out loud and then gets a room full of strangers laughing at the things people say at funerals. God needed another angel? What, is heaven understaffed?
That is what broken looks like when it is honest. She cries in the supermarket and does not care who sees. She laughs on stage at five o’clock, the early bird slot. She hates the word heal. What she believes in is being comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and giving ourselves a break.
If you have ever been made to feel that you should be fixed by now, or that something is wrong with you because you are still broken, this conversation is for you. Bring a tissue, and be ready to laugh.
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