Commentary: My brother's last joke changed how I understand grief

Here’s something funny. My brother Tom died seven years ago. (That’s not the funny part.)

Tom was a firefighter, like our father and both grandfathers. He was also on the Massachusetts FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force that worked at the World Trade Center during 9/11. He had run into burning buildings. He had saved lives. He had seen things most of us never will and could perform under extreme pressure. He was the man. A tall, handsome, stoic Irishman with a handlebar mustache. A man best photographed in sepia. A man who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019.

My other four brothers and I would visit Tom every few weeks or so, spending time recalling our childhood and mostly making fun of him, our way of showing love. When his condition worsened, Tom’s wife called to say we should visit as soon as possible. I arrived before my other brothers, who were driving together in one car. It was a cool May day, dogwoods and forsythia blooming in his well-manicured yard.

Tom was sitting in a recliner, a blanket over his thinning frame. But still himself, still in there somewhere, still sharp, still darkly funny. We talked and after a time I heard a car pull into the driveway and looked out the window.

“The others are here,” I said.

Buster Keaton quick, Tom dropped an arm off the side of the chair. Let his head fall to one side. And trying to suppress a grin he said, “Tell them they’re too late.”

I laughed. Out loud. Mouth open, shocked, laughing. It was gorgeous. A feeling so life-affirming in a moment of such pain and fear. It would be the last time I ever saw him alive.

Is it possible that laughter isn’t the opposite of grief, but maybe its most honest expression?

Sigmund Freud was fascinated with laughter’s relationship to grief. In the January 1928 edition of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Freud published an essay in which he wrote that “Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.”

More than 20 years earlier, Freud had published“Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious.” It is one of Freud’s favorites. “A rogue is being led out to the gallows to be hanged on a Monday morning. As they escort him out, he looks up at the sky, sighs, and cracks: ‘Well, this week is beginning nicely!’” (I’m sure it killed in Vienna.)

Like most of us walking the planet, I’ve been to my share of wakes and funerals, and perhaps more. Two brothers, a dear friend, two nephews, my father.

And my mother.

I remember the day of her funeral. I was 12. We sat, my father and five brothers, in the back of a black stretch Cadillac limousine, following the hearse on the short drive to the cemetery. We drove past people heading to the supermarket, the post office, the dry cleaners, the playground, pushing a stroller, going about their lives. The world did not stop. We passed Anna’s Donuts. Was I wrong for wanting a donut?

We pulled into the cemetery and stopped briefly in front of the small stone office. A U.S. Postal truck was blocking the way. Others had arrived earlier, parked on the edge of the grass and had begun filing to the grave site. It was my brother Tom who broke the silence. Tom, who was just 21 then, fully alive, so much ahead of him, unaware that in 45 years his brothers and his wife and daughters would stand at this very gravesite, where he would join his mother. Now, though, waiting for the postal truck to move so we could bury our mother, one of my other brothers said, “Who would get mail at a cemetery?” Tom replied, “Must be the dead letter office.”

Say you are a mourner who’s parked their car by the side of the road, half on the grass so the hearse and limo can get by. The limo rolls by slowly. You look over at the vehicle, at the poor family inside about to bury their mother, their wife, their world. And what you see is seven people laughing.

The world moved on, and almost immediately. I remember standing there that Monday afternoon, after the funeral mass and the burial and the reception at our house, after everyone had gone, the late afternoon ahead of me, the evening, tomorrow, the next day. Oh, I remember thinking. We have to live with this.

I needed something to help me make sense of the world then. Because it didn’t make sense.

And then one Sunday evening on WGBH, the Boston public TV station, I saw a show that began with a man sitting naked on a piano bench at the water’s edge, head turned to the camera, smiling like a lunatic as John Cleese’s voice rang out, “And now for something completely different.” Whatever the hell that was, I wanted it.

Monty Python and Bob Newhart records and Nichols & May and Steve Martin and National Lampoon. Funny seemed to me a language, one I wanted to learn. It wasn’t an escape for me. It was a way of being in the world. It was an outlook and a philosophy that filtered absurdity and pain and church and school and loneliness and confusion and said, make fun of it all. Go along with it, do it, try hard, but maybe take yourself a little less seriously. Maybe learn to play gracefully with your pain.

The first rule of Buddhism is that life is suffering. The second should be to make fun of suffering. Charlie Chaplin said, “To truly laugh, you must take your pain and play with it.”

Only the uninitiated would underestimate grief. The experience is ineffable — a kind of alternate universe. It suspends consciousness, alters reality with raw, sharp edges. Our senses are both heightened and numbed. Time moves differently, glacially. Sleep and peace aren’t really possible. As with all intense pain, it is impossible to believe it will end.

The world — in its awful pain, in its relentless beauty — dares us to look up at the sky, the birds, out across the ocean waves, to the hot cup of coffee on the table and the smiling friend sitting across from us, who knew we were having a bad day, who called and said let’s meet, the tears rolling down our cheeks while we laugh because they just said, “But other than your husband’s death, how was your day?”

Daily, in small, gorgeous ways, life dares us to live again, to laugh at the absurdity. It says: Everything is waiting for you. Bring your grief. We’ll all go forward together.

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John Kenney, a contributor to the New Yorker, is the author of “I See You’ve Called in Dead.”