Laughter Through Tears

The death of a loved one, perhaps more especially a parent, occasions such an intense grief that your soul cries out for any moment of relief or respite. I am reminded of that scene in "Steel Magnolias" where Dolly Parton's character says, "laughter through tears is my favorite emotion". It's my favorite emotion as well. It always serves to remind me that, no matter how bleak or how horrible I feel at the moment, that there will be a time when I will smile and laugh again.

When a moment of levity bursts the dam that holds your grief and laughter floods forth with tears...as you laugh, little moments flash across your memory...moments of joy and laughter that you had shared with the person you now mourn. It is the most wonderful, bittersweet feeling in the world.

The funeral home and cemetary at the corner of Dairy Ashford and Westheimer in Houston, Texas is where we buried both of my parents. It was also the scene of two of these moments for me.

When my mother died, we held the viewing at the funeral home associated with the cemetary. Our family huddled in a corner, our heads bowed with grief as scores of people who loved my mother shuffled past her coffin and paid their last respects, then made their way over to where we were to offer a word of condolence or relate a favorite memory.

As we accepted these offerings of love, out of the corner of my eye I saw my son Daniel in line with the the rest of the mourners. Although the halmark of a person with autism is an inability to understand or respect social conventions that most of us take for granted, Daniel waited patiently and respectfully in line with the rest of the mourners.

When my son got to the side of my mother's coffin, he quiety whispered to her, "Goodbye Grandma, I'll miss you". Then he sweetly bent forward and kissed her brow. We were all about to breath a sigh of relief thinking that Daniel had somehow managed to hold back the autism long enough to act normally when my son's condition reasserted itself.

As Daniel raised himself from that kiss, a worried look clouded his face and he turned to us and said, "Oh, she's cold!" Then, as if that wasn't awkward enough, he said, "I better check her pulse". I was just about to rise up and try to salvage the situation when Daniel sadly raised his eyes to me, his hand still on my mother's wrist, and slowly shook his head, announcing his prognosis,

"I don't think she's gonna make it"

That did it, the dam of our grief burst and laughter with tears overcame the whole family. I looked at the faces of my wife and children, my brother and sisters and their families and we all had the same expression...pure joy. Joy at the realization that we had shared this life with such a grand lady...that, above all people, we were blessed to call her mother or grandma. In that moment of mourning our loss, we were reminded of how priviledged we really were.

My father's funeral was held at the same location and, years later, I found myself standing in the same place as I had years earlier, once again looking into the coffin of a beloved parent and wondering to myself if I would ever feel happy again.

Before I was born, my father had accidentally cut off the first two fingers of his right hand at the first knuckle. Although, he was technically handicapped, one would never know it. There were more than a few times when I would look at my father holding a pencil and drafting, his work so beautiful and masterful that it eclipsed the work of other drafters with all of their digits, and realize that the most amazing feats are sometimes the ones that seem effortless.

Later on in life, when I spent a year learning to manipulate my own hands again, my father's example served as a quiet and constant inspiration to me.

The funeral directors had supposed my father's right hand to be a deformity and so, when they prepared the body, they hid it under his left hand. Well, my father's grandchildren were not having any of that! Every single one of them had teethed upon those bony nubs of what remained of his first two digits. They convened a quiet council in the corner, agreed upon a proper course of action, and elected one of them to go and correct the funeral home's blunder and place my father's right hand on top for all to see.

As I looked at my father's fingers and these thoughts crossed my mind, my eyes wandered down to a banner placed on the coffin. One of my sisters had seen to it that the final words my father always said to anyone who ever came to visit him were inscribed thereupon, "I'm glad you had a chance to see me"

Because this was a private moment, the laughter was a bit quieter but the emotion and release no less sweet.

There is another instance I wanted to relate concerning this funeral home...something that happened years before any of the first two. I was commissioned to redesign the air conditioning systems and had to go and visit the place and access the existing conditions.

The building had multi-level mansard type roofs...flat rooftops with 4 foot steep sloping sides so when I had to get from the higher roof down to a lower roof, all I had to do is sit down on the steep slope and let gravity do the rest. After checking the unit in question, getting from the lower roof up to the higher roof was a different question altogether...now gravity was working against me...gravity and quite a few extra pounds of weight. I tried to grab onto the upper roof and scramble with my feet but they would not gain purchase. I seemed to be doomed to waiting on the lower roof until the fire department came and rescued me...then a sudden inspiration hit. I won't go into any great detail but, if you've ever seen Shamu come out of the water at Sea World, you have a fair idea of how I finally made it up to the upper part of the roof.

There was only one more obstacle now to getting back down to solid ground...the roof hatch. If you've never had to climb onto the roof of a commercial building, there's alwas a long ladder attached to a roof hatch which is mounted onto a 18" curb. The reason for the curb is to keep rain water from leaking from the roof down to the utility room below. The way to install these is to put the ladder on one side of the hole with the hinge to the cover on the opposite side so that, when you try to transfer from the ladder onto the roof, you don't have to negotiate your way around a trap door facing you. The people who installed this roof hatch installed the ladder and the hinge on the same side so that when I got to the top and opened the trap door, I was, in effect, facing a wall that I had to climb around and get onto the roof...no easy but doable.

Getting back down was a whole 'nother story though...now I had to try and figure out how to step off of the roof, into a hole that dropped twenty feet, around the trap door and somehow make sure my foot landed onto the rung of the ladder....it's actually about ten times as difficult as it sounds, especially for a fat man.

I finally decided that the safe way to do this would be to sit down, straddle the roof curb and swing my dangling left foot onto the ladder rung.

The edge of a roof curb...the part the trap door rests upon, is about two inches thick...so (how do I say this delicately?)when I straddled the curb, one of the (ahem) 'boys' went on one side of the curb and one of them went on the other side.

All fine and good until I swung my leg to reach the rung and that had the effect of sqeezing one of the lads rather painfully.

For those of you who have not experienced this type of pain, let me state right here and now that the movies don't do justice to it. First off, the movies show a kick to the groin and the reciever of the injury immediately doubling over in pain....that's not how it goes down...it usually takes a few moments because, although there's an immediate pain associated with the injury, the REAL pain comes anout three seconds later when a huge all-encompasing cramp siezes everything from the groin up to the lungs....it's like having a charley horse in your midsection.

What actually happens is that the person recieving the injury realizes that something bad has happened and he says to himself, "that's gonna hurt ----------------------------- oh yeah...there it is"

So I when I realized I had done myself an injury, there was actually a second or two when I realized that, if I didn't roll onto the roof immediately, the possibility was very real that I would be plummeting twenty feet onto some very nasty electrical transformers with some very sharp corners, so I rolled onto the roof"

When the cramps hit, I doubled up in pain, groaned and moaned and cursed and generally made enough noise to convince anyone happening by that I was being dismembered by a rusty, slow-moving chain saw. When the pain began to ebb, I began to realize where I was and how loudly and profanely, I had complained....I crawled to the edge of the roof and saw my worst fears confirmed.

Just below me, a group of mourners had, apparently, been in the process of loading their loved one into a hearse when my screams and moans and complaints that I was dying wafted down to their ears from the roof above.

They had stopped what they were doing and stared in wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonderment and what they were certain were the death throes of a dying man above them.

There was a second or two when we just stared at each other and then I meekly said, "I'm sorry"....it started with just a snicker from one of the mourners and then a giggle...then some half-suppressed snorts. Before long, every one of the mourners were laughing uproarisly

Laughter through tears...it's the best.