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Welcome to the first ever Grieving Room diary about the laughter and/or smiles that our deceased loved ones bring to our face.
Yes, your read that right. As you all know, even in the midst of our darkest grief, there remain those lighter moments with our loved ones that we will never forget. Perhaps that moment elicits a guffaw, or just a smile; please share that with us.
Tonight's diary is a compilation of stories many of you have already submitted. I look forward to reading the rest of your fond memories in the comments.
Starting out with a memory from AngryMouse, she really encapsulates what tonight's diary is about. And many thanks to BardoOne for insisting that The Grieving Room needed this diary .
From AngryMouse:
Laughter is Salvation; it's so important to be able to laugh through some of it. I remember, sometime in the first few days after my husband died, we were talking about his insane family, and my best friend said, "And he was the stable one." This was so funny to us that we started cracking up, but it only took a second for the laughter to turn into sobbing.
I'm grateful that these days, I can laugh without dissolving into tears. And I'm soooo grateful for the moments of laughter. If I had to survive on tears alone, I wouldn't make it.
From Flamingogrrl:
I'm sharing this particular memory because my best friend and I found ourselves guffawing out loud while we hung out in the deep end of our public pool taking a break from our workout! And we laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
The last time my husband Russell went to the hospital we thought he would be able to come home and live out his remaining days with hospice care. But to our doctor's annoyance, and ours, we learned that because it was a Saturday the hospital hospice team would not be available to us until Monday; they did not work weekends! Try as I might to shake some hospice support out of the healthcare tree I got nowhere! Monday came and went without anyone showing up; my friends at the house had cleared out the dining room for the hospital bed. Early Tuesday morning our doctor checked Russell's heart and told Russell he might not survive being transported home, that it was time to start the morphine drip, and he would be better off remaining at the hospital. A short time after the morphine was started, with me on one side of the bed and my friends on the other, a perky brunette in a white lab coat opened the door and announced "Hi, I'm from Hospice" to which Russell boomed out in his best radio announcer voice "We Don't Need You, WE'RE DYING IN HERE!! CLOSE THE DOOR"!!!!!! That had to be the LAST thing a hospice worker EVER expected to hear, and I bet you money there's no one but Russell that would've thought to say such a thing!!!!!!! I'm laughing right now as I type this, remembering how much presence of mind he had, even at a time like this; it's just SO funny in a macabre kind of way. :-)
From Dem in the Heart of Texas:
I have been wracking my brain to think of a funny story about my mom. She was just a fun, funny person, but all the stories seem so mundane and "you had to be there". The one that popped right into my mind first (and I believe I shared this on TGR once): in the weeks after her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, we cried many tears and at one point, were at that place were one feels all cried out. I looked at her and said, "Well, at least you no longer have to be terrified of getting Alzheimers" - and she looked at me and we had the loudest, longest laugh we had had in a long time. She was the kind of person who enjoyed snarky humor - that must be where I learned it! I don't remember laughing much that year, but this one was a rare light moment for both of us.
From CA coastsider:
I have a story I'd like to share about my father, Mel. I heard this story for the first time at his memorial service, after his death.
He was an executive with a multi-national firm until he retired (for the first time, but that's another story), and worked in a high-rise building downtown, with a secretary and an office and all that sort of thing. This was back in the day when one could smoke in the office, and when they called administrative assitants "secretaries".
He was dictating a letter to his secretary, who was fairly junior at the time, and he tossed his not-quite-extinguished cigarette into the trash can. Smoke soon arose from the trash can, and he didn't notice, but the secretary did. She grabbed the first liquid she could find, his coffee cup full of coffee, and tossed it into the trash can, putting out the fire.
"Why did you do that, Miss B.?" my father asked.
"The trash was on fire, Mr. G.", she replied.
"That was the last of the coffee, Miss B!" he retorted.
From KitsapRiver:
Here's one that still cracks me up, about Bob (my late husband):
Back when we were dating I took him to a Dead show at Stanford's Frost Amphitheatre as my guest. I introduced him around to the people on the sound booth, which is where I was (as usual) working head security, and he was invited to come up and sit on the couch. A guy came up to join him on the couch and they sat and talked for a while, and then the guy got up and I watched as he headed backstage. Bob asked me, knowing that I would know the answer, "Who was that I was talking to just now?" I replied "Peter Gabriel". Bob said "Oh", waited a moment, then asked me "Do I like his music?"
From cfk:
I guess the fun in my family had to do with our cats. We all had one or more cats. My dad did not like cats (or so he said) so guess whose lap they always went to first. And he didn't scootch them off, either.
Every time my sister left home she would stop and tell her cat where she was going and how long she would be gone. She said it was only the polite thing to do. I sometimes do that now just for the sake of her memory.
We would talk about what we were hanging on the lower branches of our Christmas trees that the cats could play with. My sister would make cards for us that had pictures of her cat or draw elves on name tags. Her handmade cards and tags were fun to get.
My funny story about my mom is that they had a small pond and the balloonists would go overhead on summer and fall evenings. One evening when the pond had a lot of algae covering it, a balloon came over so low that my mom yelled to my dad, "Get out the canoe, they are trying to land on the pond!"
We never knew if it was her yelling that stopped them or if they weren't meaning to land at all, but they hoisted back up into the sky in any case.
Love to all for the New Year!
From hpchicago:
I find that with the advent of hands free cell phones it is much easier to carry on imaginary conversations with Michael in the car without looking like one needs a stay in a rubber room ...I also find that I get to choose the radio station now. That NEVER happened before.
I know that he's very annoyed with me if he's tagging along now. I haven't listened to a frantic dance number on the car radio in 6 years (I'm the only gay man in the U.S. who can't stand whatever they're calling disco music this week).
And I've gotta say - it's really nice to be at a point where I can do a bit of giggling about the funny stuff. It's progress.
A link to all previous Grieving Room diaries