Laughing Lessons 

Eileen Vorbach Collins

Your death wasn’t real. I knew you’d come back, that it was, all of it, a bad dream. The worst dream ever dreamed. When after the first day of shiva— after I laughed and chatted, served cake and coffee, after the people went home to their lives—it became real, I thought I would never laugh again. I couldn’t hear, the silence was so loud without you.

Those tickets to a comedy show bought long before, now felt so wrong. But just months after you died, I went, meeting up with friends I seldom saw. I don’t remember the show. I fixed my face into a grimacing grin and tried to laugh with the crowd but I don’t think it sounded gleeful. Laughter was no longer a part of my world. The next time I remember laughing, it was more genuine. A new friend told a joke on the steps of the Holy Comforter Church after our suicide support group meeting. We were both all cried out. Her mascara had run giving her a slightly deranged look.

I don’t want to know what I looked like. I was beyond caring about that. But I laughed and my face cracked into a million pieces. My lips split open and all my teeth crumbled into calcium dust I spit out onto the church steps as I guffawed. I heard myself laughing and it was like thunder—frightening and powerful. I drove home with a lump of festering guilt stuck in my gut. A raptor’s claw clutching at my heart. How could I laugh when you were dead? What kind of mother does that?

But with time, lots of time, funny things kept happening. My memories of you began to make me smile. When I tell people some of the comical things you did or said, they look uncomfortable, change the subject, want me to forget. Don’t mention it. Too sad. Why would I bring that up? Should I still be talking about you? Am I stuck somewhere on my grief journey? Isn’t there a pill I can take for that? Maybe ten or twenty sessions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? At the very least, some self-help book that will show me the way to joy in ten simple steps?

When I was finally able to laugh with other grieving parents it felt okay. Actually, it felt great. We’d all just had a colossal sob fest, starting a practice that would become a sacred ritual whenever we gathered, sending off letters to all of you. We rolled our words in birch bark with a bit of tobacco to carry them to you in the spirit world, tied them with twine and ceremoniously tossed them into a bonfire. We called it the peace fire.

It was quite an emotional experience; none of us knew what we were doing, but we needed to do something. Afterward, we debriefed in the kitchen and wondered what the neighbors must have thought. Bonnie, our wiccan momma, lighting the fire in her black robe, a group of people out at night howling and crying. A movie set for a sequel to Rosemary’s Baby? Some kind of occult ritual? Devil worship? We started composing hypothetical headlines for the little local newspaper and before long we were all laughing.

• • •

D.L.R.O.W. At the traffic light I practice spelling World backward. I say it out loud three times. Sing it to the tune of B.I.N.G.O. At the next light I practice counting backward from 100 in serial sevens. 93, 86, 79. I scribble the numbers on the back of an old grocery list, the one I left in the car last time I shopped and forgot most of the stuff. Twenty-three years after you died, I’m on my way to my annual Medicare Wellness visit. The one where they ask all those questions and give you a mini-mental exam. I figure it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.

I answered all the questions online about falls and family history, mammograms, screening for colon cancer. Sadness. Yes, I answered. Sometimes I am sad. The doctor sees all of my answers in the computer Glancing up from his laptop, he asks,

“So, I see you’re feeling sad sometimes?”

Yes. But that’s just me. That’s who I am.

“We have medicine that can help with that,” he says.

 I doubt it. No thanks, I say. A pill? Really? I don’t think so. He pushes back, gently. We’ve had this conversation before, but I wouldn’t expect him to remember. He means well, I can tell.

“Maybe I never told you,” I say, “but my daughter died. Suicide. That’s not something you get over.”

I will always be sad, but not the kind of sad a pill can fix. And I have tried a few. I’m not sad all the time, but show me a parent who’s lost a child and says they’re over it. That they never think of that child and feel sadness for what they’ve lost. Still, I laugh and dance and get together with friends.

Ever since the addition of the new “diagnosis” of Prolonged Grief Disorder to the DSM-5, everyone’s writing articles about how there’s new help for those stuck in grief. Every writer repeats the same tired, annoying things, as though giving it a name and categorizing it makes it truth.

According to the grief experts, after six months to a year, it’s a problem that I still long for my daughter. I call bullshit. She wasn’t a pet hamster. I never expected to outlive her.

The doctor moves on to talk about my BMI. Tells me I could stand to lose a few pounds and with this, I agree. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a pill for that. He never asks me to spell World backward. I don’t have to count backward either. There is no cognitive function test. Perhaps I’ve thrown him off guard. He hasn’t looked at me since I told him why I’m sad. He walks ahead of me out the door as we say our polite goodbyes, and says he’ll see me in a year.

“I practiced, you know,” I tell him. “I practiced counting backward by serial sevens all the way here.”

 He laughs awkwardly but I think it’s pretty funny. And laughing is good for me.

About the Author

Eileen Vorbach Collins is a retired RN with a master’s degree in pastoral care. After her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia’s suicide, she wondered how she would survive. Eventually, she began to write. Eileen’s award-winning essay collection, Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, was published in 2023 by Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press. This essay appears in the collection.