Are We Dying For A Laugh?

Humour and laughter makes for good stress relief. We are going through some strange times, with more of a focus on dying, than on living. It may seem repugnant to some to realize there is humour in death, but it’s okay, and even good to laugh about it sometimes.

It comes in the form of dark humour in the back rooms of hospital ER departments. It comes from children. And it comes from within us, as a stroke of wit. Often it comes from the dying person themselves.

The closest near death experience I had, was an episode of anaphylaxis, which began while I was sleeping, so it had advanced to a critical level before I woke up. Throughout that ordeal death came so close, I thought I had taken my last breath. I just could not struggle any longer. When I accepted death, it was okay. I learned from that experience, more than I could ever describe.

In the days and weeks following that event, I gravitated to watching Youtube videos about death and near death experiences. One video is called “Dead Enough” and is a documentary giving the history of how hospitals and doctors learned to tell if someone is “really dead”.

A serious looking doctor with horn rimmed glasses described it. He said, “You see – there is nearly dead, there is dead, and then there is really dead.” Then he deadpanned: “You just want to make sure they are really dead”.

The video struck me as hilarious, more so because of the comic relief it brought after what I had just experienced. The doctor could have been in a Woody Allen movie. 

The video goes on to describe how in medieval times they used a bull horn, and screamed in the person’s ear to see if they could get a response. They poured ice water on them, did things to their eyeballs, and tried a range of other creative ideas on them. Anything conceivable that might rouse the dead.

There is also a philosophical aspect regarding death. Some believe it is when the personality is gone. The medical diagnosis can now be measured through various scans for brain wave activity. But medicine is full of miracles and surprises. Death is not always predictable.

During medieval times, they had large temporary holding places, for the newly dead. Hundreds of dead people would be on slabs, awaiting burial. There was a huge fear of being buried alive, or having someone sit up in their coffin. So they had the intermediate location for dead people, to make sure they were really dead before their burials.

Each of the deceased had a string tied to them, which would cause a bell to ring if they moved. A watchman would have to sit in in the building 24/7 in case any of the bells would ring. That would have been an eerie night shift job to have!

I remember one night shift working in a mid-size hospital, a group of nurses were sitting around talking, waiting for change of shift. The night supervisor came along on her morning rounds, and walked past a patient who was sitting in a geri chair in the hallway. The supervisor came into the conference room and said, “That woman in the hall looks dead”. One of the young nurses waved her away and said, “Oh she always looks like that”. Guess what? She was dead.

Another nurse friend’s mother died. She told us about a family outing, where they went to a designated place to take turns spreading her ashes. The kids were quite young, maybe six and eight, and started to fight over the ashes. One of them told the other, “You always hogged grandma”.

Months or maybe more than a year after my husband was killed, I was asked to participate in a television interview on the topic of young widows. They had invited three of us to be on the show. One of the women was a health executive working at VGH. The other was a woman whose husband was a police officer. He was killed in Thailand doing a drug bust.

The show for me is a bit of a blur. I really wasn’t up for it at the time. In getting ready to go, it seemed like it was all so dark. They put a lot of make up on my face and hands, which made my hair greasy. I still felt numb and hungover. I felt like I should have stayed home.

But it turned out to be kind of funny. The policeman’s wife really carried the show. She was a good story teller with a lively and animated presence. The situation for her, had been very dramatic. Two of us had faced sudden and accidental deaths of our spouses at an early age, and the VGH woman’s husband had been sick for awhile.

On the topic of ashes again, I think I told them how I had driven around with them in the trunk of my car for three weeks, because I did not know what to do with them. Mostly, I could not reconcile that those ashes were what was left of him. The policeman’s wife said she did not know what to do with the ashes either. So she put them in a Tupperware container under the bathroom sink.

She had two young children, who had an aquarium with turtles. She said, one morning she opened the bathroom cupboard and looked at the ashes, wondering once again, what to do with them. She said, “Guess what honey?” She impulsively took the ashes, and dumped them in with the turtles. I was grateful for her candid humour. It was a relief to laugh.

The best one liner I have ever read in a newspaper comment section, was about death. There was an article in National Post where Jane Fonda was quoted as saying her biggest regret in life was that she had not slept with Marvin Gaye, a talented musician, who died in 1984.

The comment – “She still can – Give her a shovel”.

One of the best comic shows I have seen about death is a 2003 film called the Barbarian Invasions. It is a Canadian French film with English sub-titles. The story line is about the death of Remy, a history professor terminally ill with cancer. His son was a business man, and the two of them were estranged for many years prior to his father getting sick. The hospital did not provide adequate pain relief, so the son sourced out heroin for him.

The father’s philandering had also been a huge part of what caused the rift between father and son. The movie is poignant, insightful, and exceptionally well done. It won many well-deserved awards. Once again, we can view a wonderful work of art from Montreal.

Montreal must be the creative capital of Canada – with so much talent in everything from fashion, to music, and film. What Montreal has done for Canada’s art scene, is immeasurable.

From the fringe festivals to the funerals – death is a topic we simply cannot shake off. A good laugh is the relief we might be looking for in these weird and wonky times.