“It hasn’t all totally completely sucked”

Edison’s phrase “It hasn’t all totally completely sucked” is a deliberately modest reckoning with disappointment: it does not redeem what went wrong, but makes room for the companionship he and his sister found in the midst of it. Offered as a line for his gravestone, it becomes a compact statement of the value he places on their time together.

The Phrase in Conversation

The phrase comes after his sister recalls trying to describe the great letdown in April and sensing that Edison did not believe her. When he asks whether the story’s moral is that everything sucks, she resists that bleak conclusion: food sucks, she says, but being together has not always been bad. Her answer gives the phrase its defining contrast. The disappointments remain real; they simply do not account for everything.

An Epitaph Without Triumph

Edison immediately adopts the wording as his proposed gravestone inscription. Its awkward accumulation of “all totally completely” makes the claim sound emphatically limited rather than grand: the point is not that everything turned out well, only that it was not all wholly awful. His request converts a passing exchange into a prospective epitaph, while the line’s understatement resists the usual shape of a triumphant lesson.

What the Phrase Preserves

The sister answers that this is more than most people could claim. The exchange therefore places the phrase between two judgments: Edison’s rueful inventory of failure and his sister’s recognition that their shared experience still counts. It offers no explanation that makes the letdown disappear and no sweeping claim that suffering was worthwhile. Instead, the modest exception—“Us, here. Sometimes.”—is enough to complicate the verdict.

The Closing Reassessment

Edison then asks whether his sister regrets putting him on the plane, and whether she would make the same choice again. After considering the question, she says she would, though she cannot know whether her marriage to Fletcher might have gone off the rails anyway. Her answer ends not in certainty about what her decision caused, but in the importance of not being alone. Heard in that context, Edison’s phrase is less a moral that everything works out than a shared acknowledgment that, despite what failed, they had one another.