My Favorite F***ing Movie: Tell Me Now About Entanglement

My mom died last October and ever since—and despite being a pretty skeptical agnostic most of my life—I haven’t been able to help imagining some sort of afterlife. The possibility of it. Coupled with Valentine’s Day and my tenth wedding anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about love, romance, and relationships that can endure a lifetime—or longer.

The first couple of days, all I wanted was for people to stop reminding me she was dead.

Like maybe if I smoked enough weed and remained ensconced inside the safe, small bubble of my living room—movies running endlessly while I stared at the television, numb, my husband posted up next to me on the couch like a sentry—then it might sink in slowly, osmosis-like.

That seemed preferable.

But I kept getting texts. And messages. Condolences. People telling me, so infuriatingly-fucking-kindly, how very sorry they were that my mom was dead.

*ding* I’m so sorry. *ding* I just heard. *ding* Your mom’s dead. *ding* Hey, did you forget for a second—dead mom alert! *ding* *ding**ding*

I’d never lost anyone who meant so much to me, not even close. Suddenly, there was a hole torn in the universe. Just an awful, empty space.

A couple of days later I was poring over flights to Philadelphia, my tongue worrying at the hollow in the back of my mouth where, up until recently, a tooth implant used to be.

The fucking rotten tooth.

A dentist had convinced me to get the cursed object installed almost seven years earlier, after he botched two root canals and left my jaw permanently aching, the root of the tooth sore despite not having any actual roots left inside it. He referred me to a specialist who yanked that tooth out of my head in pieces and screwed a shiny new fake one deep into my jawbone. It never felt right, and it still ached.

The day before my mom died, like some kind of portent, the implant failed. That’s what the dentist called it, like my mouth had taken a test and been found lacking.

“It just happens sometimes,” the dentist said, examining the bloody screw she’d pulled from my skull only moments earlier. “Though not usually after so many years. Have you been clenching your jaw?”

Honey, I’ve been clenching my jaw since kindergarten.

It was another costly misfortune in a string of unfortunate, health-related incidents that plagued me throughout 2024. By October, I was already referring to 2024 as “the worst year of my life.”

You know what they say: The universe has a great sense of humor, you just need to learn how to take a joke.

And so I was heading home, from west coast to east, with a new hole in my head and a gaping hole in my world.

The only person I felt sorrier for than myself was my dad.

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