Levity

Humor, if nothing else, makes us feel better about the absurdity of life. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this more than a story from my own.

On the day of my mom’s funeral when I was 23, my brother and I sat in the front row of a church, during a mass held in her memory conducted in Spanish, and we laughed. We threw back our heads and snorted loudly at everything the priest said, every song that was sung and every ‘Hail Mary’ or ‘Our father” recited aloud. We laughed the type of laughter that you try to stifle but in stifling it, only gets more pronounced.

People looked on in stunned disbelief, and attempted to silence us by placing their fingers to their lips. But seeing that only made my brother and I laugh harder. It’s not that we didn’t feel the loss of our mom, because we did. But we just felt the absurdity of the situation even greater at that moment. We were staring at our mom’s coffin, listening to people speak a language neither of us felt particularly comfortable speaking, in a church we had never been to, surrounded by family we hadn’t seen frequently, mourning a larger than life figure in both of our lives, who had been in seemingly normal health only a week earlier.

It was all too much to handle.

Our laughter was an acknowledgment of not just our discomfort with what was happening but also of how inauthentic the “performance” aspect of our grief felt. Nothing about it reminded me of my mom, so I laughed.

That moment of irrational laughter, of course, was emblematic of much larger issues occurring in my life at that time and within myself, but the humor I found during such an inopportune time, is also quintessentially me.

I don’t actively go searching for humor, it usually finds me. I don’t like the idea of expecting something to be funny and it is. There’s no surprise in that. I do however love finding the humor in mundane, trivial, and even serious things.

I like to discover humor myself.

Life is usually filled with moments that are many things at once.

No one’s life is a series of only continually more dramatic and absurd events, and conversely no one’s life is series of conveniently funny mishaps setting up a punchline.

The world is grayer than it is black and white. So laugh when you should cry and cry when you should be amused.