Recently my sister was at a neighborhood barbecue with a number of other families and five sets of twins among them. In a circle of casual chit-chat with several other moms, one woman exclaimed, “I thought I wanted twins when I got pregnant, but now I just think, oh God, what a nightmare! Right?” She laughed.
“I just looked down,” my sister told me. “I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.”
I said, “Don’t you ever wish you could say ‘yeah! But you know what would be EVEN MORE NIGHTMARISH than twins?’”
My sister jumped in. “Dead twins!”
We both laughed. Full-body laugh. Doubled over, double-chin, eye-watering laugh.
My sister delivered stillborn twin girls six years ago. I was there when they were born. I can tell you two things for certain: first, that my nieces lived their whole lives warm, safe, and happy; and second, that miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss are not funny.
To describe the loss of a child as devastating is to describe the Grand Canyon as large. It’s true but paltry, a single pebble of a word, tossed into a deep, winding, complex chasm that is at once fixed and constantly in flux.
Friends of mine who have lost children don’t fear dying; they look forward to it. Many of them believe that their sons and daughters are waiting for them on the other side. And also, because no matter how hard they’re laughing at “Train Wreck,” or how much they’re looking forward to the Christmas cruise, it will be a relief when this life, and the grief that has carved out an empty, unfillable place inside it, is over.
Now I’m no professional humorist, but I think David Sedaris would agree with me when I say that heartbreak that makes you yearn for death? Not funny.
But it needs to be.
Yes, you read that right.
I’m not talking about mocking grief. I’m talking about sending up the awkwardness that surrounds grief. I’m talking about rejecting the respectful silence that follows grieving parents like their own personal rain clouds. I’m talking about remembering that you’re talking to a person who is more than a mourner.
We need to start finding ways to laugh with our loved ones. Yes, even when they joke about their dead babies.
Not because dead children are hilarious. They are not. But because laughing together is the first, best way to reach across the vast, bottomless canyon that surrounds the living parents of lost children. Because those parents are desperately alone. Because even if they are comfortable with death, they still live. And they want someone to go see Magic Mike XXL with them at the theater where they bring you wine.
Not because a story about losing a child is a knee-slapper. It is not. It is heartbreaking. But because the person who has lost that child still has knees that need a good slapping.
Not because a story about “the daughter we lost,” is considered polite small talk. It is not. But because fuck polite small talk. That daughter is not “distasteful.” That daughter is beloved. And at some point, she was not lost. There are stories about her that will crack you up, if you can hear them. She’s a kick in the pants, that one. She’s a spitfire.
We have to laugh. Because the children who were loved and lost are not Bloody Mary. They’re not Voldemort. We can say their names. Their parents wish we would.
We have to laugh. Because we are so fucking clumsy about grief and tragedy. If we stumbled over patio furniture the way we stumble over words of consolation when someone brings up “our son, who has passed,” we could retire on our America’s Funniest Home Video earnings.
Because the day we buried my sister’s twin girls, we accidentally locked my grandmother in the car. For some reason, she waited until we were two verses into “Jesus Loves Me” at the graveside before trying to get out. I’ll never forget the sound of the car alarm rolling across the green hills of the cemetery, or my Grandmother, flustered and tripping up the path, hollering in her thick Texas accent, “I got locked in the car, y’all! But I’m out now!”
That night, sitting around my parents’ kitchen table, over mugs of cold, undrunk tea, my heartbroken family laughed and laughed. Full-body laughs. Doubled-over, double-chin, eye-watering laughs.
Because that was fucking funny.
Katie Anthony lives in Seattle with her husband and two sons, ages 3 and 1. She is the only person in her house who cannot tell the difference between a backhoe loader and and excavator. Please do not try to explain it to her. Katie blogs at KatyKatiKate and tweets at @yokatykatikate.