Sermon on Indigestion

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow. ” 

But, dear Friedrich, I say, what if life forces you to barf your experience back up and spew it all over the cold marble tiles of the bathroom in your honeymoon suite?

I never expected to use that quote as a prelude to a reflection on my own wedding.  But when an easy third of your wedding guests vomit their way out of town after witnessing your "I dos", you can't help but try to draw some sliver of wisdom from the experience.

It started with my mother-in-law.

I could stop there, right?  It's already funny enough.  She didn't even make it through the vows before her stomach began its awful churning and she had to rush between two suited groomsmen to the side door exit.  If this were the beginning of a Franzen or Eugenides novel--I was born twice or The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through-- the fate of my marriage would be sealed from chapter one: The first person to to puke was my mother-in-law.  I might also win a literary prize.

But it really started with my grandmother-in-law, the night before, who was the first unfortunate victim of a nasty virus that within days had sent at least 25 of us into the same fiery inferno whose particular rings of hell include intestinal cramping, fever sweats, porcelain thrones, and strawberry-flavored Pedialyte.  

In our honeymoon suite, after the beautiful (and it WAS beautiful) wedding, I screamed at my new husband, "I can't believe you drank too much on our wedding night!"

"I didn't, baby," he gasped, dry-heaving.  "I swear.  I only had three drinks.  I think I'm sick."

"That's what everyone who drinks too much says."

It went on like that until the first waves of Poseidon-angry nausea hit me too.   I was sucker-punched out of self-righteousness and into apology.

Afterward, everybody said, "You should write about this.  You should write about this.  It's so funny.  Everybody getting sick from a wedding."

My first thought: You wouldn't find it so funny if it was YOUR wedding, jerk-face.

My second thought: But why?  Why should I write about it?  I'm not David Sedaris.

Because now I feel like David Sedaris at the end of his essay, "Big Boy", where he tries to draw enlightenment from an embarrassing Easter experience with a giant turd he encounters "circling like a lazy burrito" in the toilet of friend's house.  He spends the whole essay figuring out how to get rid of it before other guests think it's his turd, which it isn't, and the injustice irks him to no end.  Then, at the end, in a comic statement about the personal essay he tries to bring the turd experience into the universal: what, if anything, he asks, does this turd have to tell us about Easter?

What, if anything, does all this upchucking have to tell me about marriage?  About God?  About humanity?

Nothing.  Except maybe that the whole "sickness and health" thing is real.  Very real.  Or maybe that a wedding is a kind of purging of your old life?  That's a stretch.  Or maybe that the family who pukes together stays together?  Great.  Or maybe that God has a sense of humor?  Well, with all due respect, play your practical jokes on someone else, old man.  

Or, that as Mr. Nietzsche tells us in his usual petulant, tight-assed way, we'll all have to develop strong constitutions to digest our lives.  

Especially, perhaps, if those lives happen to be beautiful.

Amen.