the dress i hoped i'd never have to wear

i bet you never thought i’d blog my “funeral look” for nathan’s funeral and you know what… you’re right. but the more i thought about this story, the funnier it gets and i can’t NOT share it. so lets back up about a month….

a month ago i could see things didn’t seem to be getting better for nate. i thought “if this is going to end in a funeral, i need to pick out what i’m wearing while he’s still here and while i can still think.” either nate lives and i have a black dress or nate dies and i have my outfit already out of the way… either way i thought i should go ahead and do it. as most all of you reading know, i love clothes….like a lot, definitely more than the average person. its been a huge passion of mine since i was literally 5. nathan, on the other hand, had some of the WORST fashion. of course mom and i tried to help him before there was Elizabeth and then Elizabeth did as much as she could with him. he was sweet and usually took my advice for most of our lives, but if it was up to nate, he was buying lee jeans at walmart or target. he didn’t care about clothes….BUT he did care about shoes. he LOVED running shoes, the crazier the better. he would spend a fortune on shoes but barely a dime on his clothes. it was just his thing. after his diagnosis, sweet alan of fast break became a great friend to nate. he was always throwing new and crazy shoes his way and nate ALWAYS called me to brag on his new kicks. i remember him being the most excited that alan had gotten him the 2016 olympic shoes of the USA track and field team (nike zoom streaks.) he went on and on like i knew what kind of treasure they were, haha! truth be told, i had to text alan just now and found out the actual name of the shoes. he was always checking out all my shoes when i’d come over to see him and always asking questions about them. for christmas, mom and i got him some ugg slippers after it had become too hard for him to get real shoes on. he always hated uggs and said “they’re fugly” when we’d talk about them. when he opened the slippers he said “you spent too much!” and i said “be grateful i didn’t get you the gucci fur slides, because thats what you deserve” and he rolled his eyes at me. (ps. he LOVED the slippers and took back the nasty things he said about uggs)

so i had decided that i wanted to wear a funky pair of shoes for him.  it crossed my mind to wear running shoes for him, but lets be serious 1) i don’t run 2) fashion. so i knew exactly what pair of shoes i wanted to wear… my snake boots. i also knew exactly what dress i wanted to wear: long, lacey, black, and long sleeve. i spent a lot of time every morning searching the internet for my vision and photoshopping my boots in with the dress to make sure it worked. it was getting to be absurd the amount of time i was spending, for real. but i’m an enneagram type 1 over here and, dammit, it had to be perfect. every day that nathan declined, i knew i had less time to look. i was finally getting to the point of not caring if i had to take money out of savings because i needed this done. nathan would’ve been SO pissed at the amount of time i had spent looking for this stupid dress. i can hear him saying “who gives a shit? pick one out of your closet you already have!”

so i caved and went to one of my favorite websites, thats usually out of my budget, and found the EXACT dress i had been looking for, on sale, only one left, in my size, one of my favorite brands, made in Paris (which was one of my favorite trips with nate) and THEY HAD PAIRED IT WITH SNAKE BOOTS JUST LIKE MINE. i knew this was the one, FINALLY! i bought it, had it overnighted (just in case!) when it arrived, i immediately threw it on with my boots…it fit like a glove and looked exactly how i wanted it to with the boots. i took a few pictures to send to my friends and then realized something…..

THE LACE WAS BANANAS AND PINEAPPLES. this was clearly some kind of joke nathan wanted played on me. i had taken this all way too seriously and it was time to lighten up. who wears a banana dress to their brother’s funeral in the dead of winter? apparently me. i knew i wasn’t supposed to send it back, this was my fashion punishment. well played, nate. it actually ended up being great comic relief on a really hard day.

so if life throws you a hannah banana dress, wear that shit to the funeral.

xoxo-hannah