Make 'em laugh, Make 'em laugh...
My daughter had a tiny little coffin. It was small and white. It was also free. They don’t charge for baby coffins in England. How do you put a price on honouring the memory of your child? They don’t charge for baby funerals at all, unless you want something out-of-the-ordinary.
We wanted ordinary. We wanted the ordinary alive baby that other people took home. Instead we had an ordinary little coffin.
We discussed our wishes with the funeral director. She showed us a death catalogue: the caskets, the urns, the cars. She said ‘you can have any car you want, even a Limo.’ We turned away, our shoulders shaking. She left the room, respectful of our grief.
But we weren’t crying.
She offered us the limo and our eyes met. We knew we were thinking the same thing. We were thinking of driving up and down the main drag of our city hanging out the windows of the limo like kids on their way to prom; whooping it up with our little tiny corpse.
We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?
The day after we’d been to see Iris for the last time, I was gathering the hot, fresh laundry from our dryer. I held it in my arms and breathed deeply. David said ‘isn’t it nice, having something warm to hold?’ Loaded silence. Hysterical laughter.
We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?
We overheard our living daughter and her little friend. They were playing a crying game. They were sobbing huge, fake sobs. ‘Oh boo hoo. Oh boo hoo hoo. We are so sad. Boo hoo hoo hoo. We are so sad that baby Iris is dead. Boo hoo.’
We laughed.
A relative brought a gift for me. A lovely, well-meaning, slightly misguided gift. Iris scented soap-on-a-rope. Because who wouldn’t wash their armpits with sweet babylost memories?
We laughed.
A former colleague bemoaned the lack of sympathy extended to her when her cat had an operation: ‘when Jess’ baby died, everyone was so supportive, but no one seems to care as much about my cat.’
We laughed.
When I was pregnant with my son, we'd high-five after every sonogram: 'Woohoo! Let's give it up for an evident HEARTBEAT!'
We laughed
Today my husband had a bad day. A very bad day. He said 'well... no one died... No, wait, actually she did!'
We laughed.
We laughed.
We laughed.
Because what the fuck else would we do?
What makes you laugh now, following the loss of your baby or babies? Do you find humour in the darkest of places, or are some things Just Not Funny?
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Reader Comments (32)
Another example I can think of - fast forward 15 months and I was sitting in hospital cradling my newborn son, born alive thankfully (and we often had the same reactions after our many ultrasounds). Our photographer friend from Heartfelt (the Australian version of Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep) came in to take some happy family shots for us as a special gift after having taken photos of us as a broken family when Hope was stillborn and when he walked in to our room the first thing he said was "whoo hoo, you got a live one!" We all lost the plot in laughter. He too had lost a child, hence why he joined Heartfelt, so somehow a black joke like that, coming from someone like him, was ok. I think if anyone else had said it, I might have smacked them one.
Through all the tears and blackness, there has been much laughter in the past three years. Sometimes it is the only way to survive. I wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't maintained some sort of sense of humour.
Laughing with you in this post, Jess. Think we have a similar sense of humour.
xo
Most aspects of R's death have fallen into the 'just not funny' category but, every so often, something is just so absurd (usually something some clueless bystander says) that we have to laugh.
On a sidenote, I think that this is an important topic for this community. It's hard to accept that you'll laugh and smile again after your baby dies but, you will...eventually.
A month or so after Calla died we decided to watch 'The Hangover." I nearly lost my shit--in a bad way--whenever that baby made an appearance. As in, hyperventilating, racing pulse, pounding in my brain. File under Not Funny for me.
My relatively dark sense of humor really helped me through a lot of times where it may have been more appropriate to cry or at least turn away in disgust.
And that incident about your co-worker's cat vs. your baby re: attention? Priceless. you can't make that shit up.
My husband is a pastor, and we had our daughter's funeral at our church, and most of the members of the church came. I'm very introverted, so I slipped away from everything with my best friend during the reception. We were sitting in the pews talking, when a parishioner found us there. Now, you have to know that this particular woman appears to have no filter. A good heart, but no filter. When my husband and I were engaged, she said to me, "We're so glad he's marrying YOU, because you're not one of those girls who'll get drunk and dance on the table with a lampshade on your head." I laughed when I told this to my then fiance and asked him what kind of girls he'd been dating. So, when this woman found me with my friend on the day of my daughter's funeral, I was prepared. She began speaking to me while my best friend's back was still toward her. And what she said was, "Just think, if you'd only been able to stay pregnant a couple more weeks, you're baby would have probably lived!" Having had lots of practice with this woman, I kept a straight face with no effort and told her that, yes, that was very sad, indeed. But my friend... The look on her face was of absolute horror. I could see her, but the woman could not. It was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing. And when she finally left, I couldn't hold it in. I laughed and laughed.
There were many things about that day that were horrible and feel weighty and bad even four years later. But, I smile when I think of the beer cooler.
Love the Iris soap-on-a-rope. :)
Later, we started watching Portlandia--a TV show that I thought would be pretty funny, although we don't live in Portland, our composting, Prius-driving, organic-gardening household would fit in there, and I still talk wistfully about when grunge was fashionable. So we figured we could do some laughing at ourselves. Anyway, the show was great--until it made some joke about a coffee drink that "looks like a stillbirth." And that was it. We turned it off, and I will never watch that show again.
Then there was wondering if she got legacy status when her tissue was sent to a doctor at our alma mater, discussing what we would do with the "I'm a Big Sister" book someone gave to Bella if given the chance (there were asses and fire involved), and the never ending debate about whether to get those stupid stick figure family stickers for the back of our car window, including a baby image with a circle around her and a line drawn through it.
We crack ourselves up. Because if we didn't, we'd be suicidal. Like you said, what the fuck else could we do?
Yes, sometimes you have to laugh. Thanks for this post.
I laughed my head off at the nurse driving me mad at tidying up all the time.
I laughed at being given the choice of colours of memory box.
I laughed when the only thing that could raise Freddie out of brain damaged torpor was having a suppository shoved up his bum.
We laughed when we named him, called him Freddie the Unready.
But oh my god, my favourite laugh was the nurses insistence that the cot sides were always safely up in case he fell out. I'd have been fucking thrilled if he'd thrown himself out. At least a head injury from spontaneous movement would go nicely with the brain damage for absolutely no reason at all.
It's a funny thing though, funny weird. But it gets you through.
Oh god, we said when we got home, now we have to have sex again.
I have a dark sense of humor. My birthday was Lucia's due date. Two weeks after she was born and died. And we ended up going bowling and to Mexican food, because it is also my twin sister's birthday. And I still was trying to be normal. For some God forsaken reason, my mother told the waiter it was out birthday, who then brought out two huge fucking sombreros and margaritas for us while the entire staff sang in front of God and everyone ending with a loud OLE! They then took a picture. I look like I'm about to cut a bitch. In the days and weeks after, my husband would ask me how I am, and I would always answer, "Not as bad as when I was wearing the sombrero." Or simply ole, spoken deadpan.! Still makes me lose it, for some sick reason.
My husband and I laugh a lot. That is our thing. To make each other cringe and laugh. So, yeah, privately at home, black humor reigns. Or as Tash said, we would off ourselves.
At the hospital, Lee was constantly cracking jokes. Nothing new there. It felt weird, but still good to be able to laugh with him even though it was the worst time of our lives.
Tash the stick people on the van is my kind of funny.
Jess, great topic and examples.
Angie the Mexican restaurant scene is simultaneously horrific and hilarious.
The cat surgery co worker lady story - honourable mention.
Our biggest snort-worthy moment was when we were in the funeral home, selecting an urn for our little guy. And you know, there are a lot of fan-dancy urns out there that are big and ornate and...had no connection whatsoever to us or our kid.
The one WE liked was a small pewter heart. It was perfect but for one thing - it had paw prints on it. Yep, it was meant for a dog. So between snorts of hysterical laughter we had to ask our funeral director person if, possibly, we could arrange to have the company who made the urn make us one WITHOUT the paw prints.
For what it's worth they obliged....but it still makes me laugh to realize that my son's mortal remains are stored in a pet urn. Awesome.
It has been 6 weeks since Camille died and I have laughed a lot. I have a 2.5 year old... Laughter is unavoidable.
One night as I was putting Kai down to sleep I asked him if he was happy and he said "yes", I said "is papa happy?" and he said "yes, and mama is happy but sometimes sad about baby Camille. Because baby Camille died" and I said "yes, baby Camille died". He then shouts at the top of his lungs to his father downstairs "Papa, Baby Camille died" there was no response so he shouts again "Papa, baby Camille died". Daryl yells up..."Yes Kai"
This almost makes me laugh and cry...that my 2.5 year old is shouting about his baby sister being dead...at least he is talking about her and feels comfortable to communicate about it...even if it is shouting to someone downstairs about it.
I laughed out loud for the first time the other day while driving in the car. My mother is coming to visit this next weekend and Kai said "talk about Grandma Lorna" So I said "she has brown hair and a round face, she smiles a lot and likes to do art" He sits quietly for a minute and then he said "talk about Grandma Lorna's testicles" I just started busting up laughing. My husband explained that girls don't have testicles and we generally don't talk about peoples testicles...But I was still laughing out loud in the front seat.
Gotta love a 2.5 year old for bringing the lighter side to everything.
I vividly remember a strange conversation with the crematorium. I was booking the chapel for the burial of his ashes. Everything runs quite smoothly concidering my broken voice until she gives me the booking. For a funeral. For me. I turn back, stating that something went weird with the booking, I'm not reallly wanting my own funeral right now. Silence. She looks in the computer. Saying confused that "we cremated E... in april". Silence. And then I break down in laughter. Somehow they managed to put my name down as his. Really, when he died I wanted to die too. I even said a couple of times I wished I could be buried with him and disappear... but to go as far as actually being cremated - thats just ridiculous. But that's exactly what the paperwork said. I died. I was cremated. And yet I was allowed to book my own burial. Not bad for a cremated corpse...
A few weeks later, after the burial (of HIS ashes I might add), I was back in the hospital. I asked for the autopsy results. And get the answer that autopsy isn't completed yet. Again silence. She looks sympathetic enough saying that everyone feels the wait. "It's not that" I barely whisper... "OK?" I continue to whisper "What was in the casket?". This time it's actually the nurse who cracks up first. And through the laughter she tries to explain that they've taken biopsies to analyze and gone through him well enough and kept the placenta - but my baby was surely in his casket when it was cremated. During those few splitseconds I saw the burial of the ashes of an empty casket before my eyes, picturing how I clung to his urn and this just made me laugh my head of as well... the thought of us all mourning his casket... with him still in the morgue...
When we were finally alone after I delivered my (stillborn) daughter, my husband let out a HUGE fart! He had been holding it in all day because there were so many nurses and visitors around. Here I was holding my dead baby, still in shock and devastated, but I was also laughing like a 3rd grader! It was one of the most memorable moments we had as a family of three!
Just a few weeks ago, the elliptical machine at the gym was not working, and it flashed, "no heart rate detected," but I read it as "no heart BEAT detected," I was cracking up in the middle of the gym, I'm sure I looked crazy.
I loved reading everyone else's "funny" moments.
A therapist I worked with for a few years prior to Otis's death lives in our neighborhood. I was no longer working with her when Otis died, but I did have a friend contact her to let her know, since I knew she knew I was pregnant, and didn't want an awkward run-in in the neighborhood with her.
Anyhow, about 3 weeks after Otis died, we were walking the dogs in the neighborhood and passing her house. It was October, and her lawn was fully decorated for Halloween, with grave stones and skeletons. My little dog, a dachshund/chihuahua mutt, started growling and then barking uncontrollably at the tombstones. Then he started running around them, in circles, on his long flexi-leash. His leash then clipped two of the tombstones and picked up the skeleton and sent them all flying into my therapists bushes, just outside her front window.
I tried to make a break for it, scampering away down the street, but my husband was like, "You can't do that! You have to go fix that!"
So I hand the dog's leash to him, and begin rummaging around in my former psychiatrist's bushes, pulling out bones and tombstones and rearranging them on her lawn. Then I have this flash in my imagination of her peeking out her window to see me, the bereaved mother who has clearly lost her shit, cradling bones and tombstones and crawling through her bushes....and burst into laughter. It all just seemed like it was straight out of a movie, like I'd lost my mind so completely and ended up on my psychiatrist's lawn rummaging with her macabre decorations...luckily, to the best of my knowledge, she never did come out or see me...but I still get a smirk out of remembering the whole ordeal.
We have a lot of black humor moments in our home too, making "oh wait, our baby died" comments that put everyone in total discomfort and allow my husband and I to have a moment of shared laughter...
Yes, to echo everyone else - we do what we can to make it through, otherwise we'd disintegrate.
I remember that the first time I laughed, within two days I know that, I cried immediately after and I hated myself for finding amusement or joy in anything since he was dead. And yet I knew even then that laughter was going to be a benchmark for me. And that if I could laugh, I could live.
Sometimes it was midnight black, sometimes it was gales of laughter with a slightly hysterical tone to it because the alternative was a total fucking breakdown. But the more time that passed, the more it was just things that were plain funny. I remember, about two months out, how surprised I was when I was accused of dwelling and being at rock bottom, because not only did I function perfectly well in a normal sense of the word, I could laugh and I did enjoy things.
The only thing I can remember is a joke about dead baby bingo, something I've also thrown sarcastically out there in a fit of bitterness about our subsequent sub-fertility and odds of successful pregnancy, and I remember how much my husband and I laughed at it and how horrified my coworker was by it.
I think I wrote a post on black humor around the six-month time period. I remember saying thoughtfully to a friend that when we'd started ttc, I'd expected to be trying for my second child by that point in time. And then I paused, realization hitting me, and said, "Huh. Guess I am after all." and dissolving into the sort of piles of laughter that make your sides hurt and your lungs beg for air. It all just struck me as so funny in that moment.
I remember lots of conversations with my sister in which we mercilessly mocked the well-meaning idiocy of many around us. My favourite running joke was choosing meaningful phrases to have engraved on those little serenity stones for me and my husband (you know, they usually say 'Breathe' or 'Hope' or 'Live Love Laugh'. My favourite idea was to get them inscribed with 'Oh Well' and 'Shit Happens.' I still find those ones funny, actually.
Another truly fabulous thing was hearing a distant relative's sage pronouncement that "they should savour this moment, try to find the joy in it, because who knows how bad things could be ten years from now?" To imagine comforting grieving parents with a promise that yes, things could get WAY worse, it's just baffling, and awesomely funny.
I think a lot of the humour from this situation was a private joke between my husband and myself, to the exclusion of the rest of the family, and of the 'you have to laugh or you'd cry' variety. And we'd just got tired of crying.
One thing that always used to make us dissolve was people getting the twins muddled up and enquiring after, or offering us condolences for, the 'wrong' twin. That old comedy chestnut, still dead, worked for us.
I think my sense of humour has become slightly gentler as a result of the loss of my daughter. I used to feel as though nothing was off limits but, increasingly, I find myself in the that's Just. Not. Funny. camp.
Thank you for this post.
When we were in the hospital after losing Margot, and almost losing Kari, and Kari's kidneys were failing and she had 50 pounds of water weight on her, we watched a show called "The League" and had to turn it off several times because we were laughing so hard it hurt. I remember thinking, as you so poignantly expressed, what the fuck else can we do?
I know we laughed a lot early on - mainly because we had the older two who made us laugh. But it was laughter around Emma's death, rather than because of it.
I do remember that on the anniversary of the due date of the baby we miscarried, I commented to my husband that we had been trying to bring home another baby for nearly three years. "Yes ... we've not been terribly successful at that, have we?" remarked my other half. We just fell about laughing at the great British art of understatement.
We also laughed when we visited the stonemasons to choose Emma's headstone. The stonemason was a big, gruff bloke and when we mentioned we wanted a headstone for a baby, he immediately took us over to the cutesiet, kitschest stones ... all Dis.ney characters and saccharine sentiment. Just. Not. Us. He was very pleasant but he just kept going back to them and seems entirely disbelieving that we wanted something much less "babyish". It was just so incongruous and that's what made us laugh.
One of the things that strikes me is that other people so do not find our dark humor as funny as we do. When I laughed and said in front of my brother-in-law that sometimes I get the weird urge to stop pregnant women on the street and say, "watch out, your baby might die" his response was a dry, "Well, however you guys want to handle it."
Hello, I didn't actually say it and life is as bad as it gets and we have to find something to laugh at.
I had allergy shots four days after Bear was born and after we told the nurse that our baby had just died and she started preparing my shots she said in an upbeat voice "So are you doing anything fun this weekend?" Umm, yeah we just told you our baby just died...
The inappropriately happy tone provided much needed comic relief as we drove to our next errand which was picking up Bear's ashes from the funeral home. We really needed something to laugh about for a minute!
We talk about things we can ask for in lieu of flowers...
"In lieu of flowers, please send Caps king sized snickers bars (or insert anything else here that we enjoy that would be inappropriate to ask for but what the fuck are flowers going to help anyway?)
The day after Xavier died, I felt it was time to get out of bed and walk around. My milk came in and the L&D nurse who had come up to my ICU room bound my breasts.
When she left I asked my sister to help me get back into bed. So let me set the scene for you:
Bound breasts and naked from the waist down, I was trying to gingerly get back into my bed by backing into it, legs splayed open, hands behind me. at this exact moment as my bits were on open display the nurse popped her head into the room and said
"The priest is here to see you, can I send him in?"
I looked over at my sister and we both exploded into laughter. I couldn't even answer the nurse. She began laughing and said it was probably a bad time.
Once we started we couldn't stop. I remember thinking it wasn't right to be laughing so hard as my son lay dead two floors down in the Serenity Room.
"Do you need oxygen?" he asked again. I looked at my girlfriend, who rolled her eyes and said "I know." Aren't they supposed to inform these guys of the circumstances beforehand?. "Are you fucking kidding me? Just get me to the fucking hospital so I can get some pain medication" I yelled. He looked at my midwife, asking if she had my vitals. "I've got them all written down." "Good," he said and walked out. I never saw him again. Minutes later the paramedics arrived, but later my girlfriend and I laughed for days about that fireman, and how he's probably terrified of laboring women now.
Her choice of words to reassure me that my little boy would be safe until I got to see him the next day: "Tonight he'll be chilling out downstairs..." There was a moment of silence and her hands flew to her mouth as she realised what she'd said - because actually, that's exactly what he would be doing, down in the morgue. Mum and I just burst out laughing.
I'm sure the midwife was horribly embarrassed, but Mum and I still laugh about it.