Let’s call it the human guessing game. There comes a point in life when we find ourselves playing it whether we want to or not. Hallelujah for a sense of humor. It gives (temporary) relief from the unrelenting unknown . . . of dying.
Yeah, I said it, not abstractly or politically, but personally. It’s not simply that “people” are going to die, or “you” are going to die. I’m going to die. I don’t know when. I’m full of determination, just shy of age 79, to stay alive and functional, but doing so ain’t what it used to be. Ouch. Simply standing up now takes the sort of effort I once exerted walking a mile. Our Hero (as I call myself) is functionally ebbing.
Change is coming! The basic term for this change is “death.” – certainly one of the most avoided words in the language, at least when the discussion is personal. Some people fortify their reaction to that word by embracing a certainty – religious or secular – about what happens next. Others, myself included, essentially embrace “wait and see,” but nonetheless grasp for fragments of possibility that occasionally spurt out of the unknown.
Such fragments are rare and easy to shrug off, often via humor, which offers, as I say, a temporary sense of relief from fear. I call this Death Humor, which helps us share this looming reality (or end of reality) with others. Death Humor is a collective shrug, a collective “who knows?”
This concept penetrated my awareness a few days ago, during a phone chat with my daughter, Alison, who happened to mention something unusual she and her boyfriend, Hugo, noticed recently, at a park in Paris, where they live. They saw a cute little baby (I assume he was cute), who reminded them, for some reason, of . . . me! In particular, they were pulled in by the look of what she called “quizzical confusion” on his face.
You might say I was taken aback, but I quickly seized the humor in the situation, goofily complaining that some existential mistake had just occurred. “I’m not supposed to be reincarnated until after I’m dead!” I shouted. “Now what?”
End of the humor. Ha ha. Move on. But I remained ensnared in it – so much so that I knew I needed to write about it, though I didn’t know why. Joking about death? Why would anyone engage in such a thing?
Then I started realizing that we the people do so all the time. Paging through a recent New Yorker, I encountered this cartoon by Roz Chast.. I couldn’t contain my laughter. It was one of the funniest I’d ever seen.
Some ho hum, ordinary guy is standing in from of a bookstore window, which is full of Holy Bibles. Beneath the Bibles there’s a sign: “Meet the author.”
And, oh yeah, just above the guy’s head there’s an air conditioner plummeting down, about to smack him.
Meet the author!
Here’s another one, by David Sipress. A man and a woman are sitting on a cloud, bedecked in angelware: wings on their backs, halos over their heads. One says to the other: “Do you ever wish you’d brought along something to read?”
Enough! Death Humor takes place among the living. Why is it so funny? Why is the topic so enticing? The humor is a juxtaposition of lame certainty and total unknown. It unites us in the one thing we know: We have no idea what happens next, but it probably isn’t this.
Still . . . life not only goes on, it also ends. Or does it? As most Death Humor seems to imply . . . something continues after the heart stops beating. But it sure isn’t anything that has been officially declared. When I encounter people who have just been present at the death of a loved one, not by an accident but in an expected passing, I often sense energetic awe, even joy – definitely not because the person is deceased, but because . . . something beyond-remarkable has just happened. God only knows what.
I remember the big smile on my face the day I returned to work after my wife’s death from pancreatic cancer. It was an inner glow, coinciding with my outer grief.
All I know is that I felt something beyond what I knew. I had been at her bedside, holding her hands. Before she passed, the pain furrows on her face loosened and she became beautiful again. This is no joke.