Grief & Jokes
I find myself in a period where death seems to gravitate to me. And not in a close encounter with the loss of my life, but as an invitation to finally properly grieve. This December will be 15 years since Jon died. I’m shocked that I still need to grieve, but when I look back in the years past, I recognize that I’ve been tempering my anger and pain. I had been following grieving traditions that weren’t mine. I accepted the invitation. After fourteen years, my cousin finally came to me in a dream. Shortly after that, Anderson Cooper released All There Is, his podcast about grief. Five episodes into that podcast, a random Amazon book recommendation caught my eye, Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat In Difficult Times. I am speaking of Jon more. His death. His life. And no longer in embarrassment or in shame. I am finally free of the customs that kept me from my ancestors. They are here. I can feel them.
In the All There Is episode titled Anticipatory Grief, Anderson’s guest Kirsten Johnson speaks on how she talks about death with her children. Kirsten is a filmmaker and she made a film about her dad who has dementia called, Dick Johnson is Dead. She welcomed her kids into this creative project. This is what she shared:
“I’m building something with my kids around a new way to be around death. That it’s not only something that you have to be respectful, hallowed, sad. It’s also, like, grief can also be playfulness. Grief can be invention.”
Anderson Cooper agrees, saying, “And their name can be spoken without the heaviness of that grief.”
The grief of my cousin’s death always came with a sense of playfulness. The day he died, everyone gathered at my Tita’s house. His friends, even those who lived an hour away, left school early and we gathered in his bedroom. One friend asked how he died. I told him it was a head on collision with a school bus. The friend said, “I always said school was never good for you.” We all laughed. And then we cried.
When I met my husband, we were barely friends when he told me this joke. “Why did the kid drop his ice cream cone? Because he was hit by a school bus.” With a deadpan face I told him, “My cousin was hit and killed by a school bus.” I knew Jon was loving this moment. When Jordan and I got engaged, Jordan had a dream about Jon and he got to know his sense of humor. What an ass. Jordan. Not Jon. But also Jon because I prayed every day for a dream and he barely knew Jordan. What an ass. I can see Jon laughing as I type this.
At the start of the new school year, my son overly shared his excitement for riding a school bus. “I can’t wait to ride a school bus! I’m so excited! By the way, didn’t Tito Jon-Jon die because he was hit by a school bus?” I swiftly turned toward him and in an Andy Sandburg-esque whiny voice said, “Yeah, he did. And you kids keep talking about how great school buses are. Oh, school buses are so cool! They’re so big. They’re so yellow. Oooo, school buses! And every time you point out one of those yellow school buses, I get triggered!” We laughed. Jordan made an impression of me being triggered, jerking his body each time we saw a school bus. We laughed some more. And Jon was with us.
Yesterday, we did more of the same. We told stories, the happy ones and the sad ones. We made jokes, the real jokes and then there were the ones my kid made that would’ve been seen as insensitive. They help his seven year old mind make sense of this very normal human experience. We welcome it so that the stories and the conversations can continue. And when the stories and conversations happen, there you will find playfulness because that’s how Jon was and that’s how he’ll always be.
