Down the Rabbit Hole

Storms We Weather and Humor in a time of Grief

Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 2418 December 1, 2021
Prompt: "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship." Louisa May Alcott Write about this in your Blog entry today.

Writing again this morning has the same strain and pull of one easing arthritic joints back into motion. Work demands have kept me away from the keyboard, even as I birthed characters to life, and strung plots together in my brain. Now, sitting here, trying to warm the literary machine between my temples with prompt-driven prose - feels awkward and heavy somehow.

"I am not afraid of storms"...the first part of Louisa May Alcott's famous quote rings falsely in my ears. I am afraid of storms, at least metaphorical ones. I don't fear the kind of storms you can see far off, forming as dark and ominous clouds on the horizon. One can plan for those, you have time to prepare for the potential emotional damages those kind of disturbances will knowingly leave in their wake. The storms I fear are the ones that come upon you with no warning, brutal and violent disruptions that leave you floundering and overwhelmed when they roll away. These are the storms for which there is no time to prepare. They will devastate you in much the same way a siphon will curl down from the heavens and wipe out an entire town in a few moments of time.

"...for I am learning how to sail my ship." Maybe...but my ship is a weakened hull from the pounding of such storms and sometimes the fact that it still sails on feels, like a minor miracle. Still, if the storms don't sink the ship maybe that's what matters in the end. Weathering the storms of life make all the blissful, happy moments that much richer. We would all love to live in a landscape dominated by blue skies and calm seas but what kind of humans would all that make us? How would we raise warriors if we did not learn to be ones ourselves? I try to remember that. I try to take stock of all I've weathered each time I see threatening darkness on the horizon and I try to be brave. It is all we can ever do.



"Blogging Circle of Friends "
Day 3310: December 1, 2021
Prompt: “The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.”
― Mark Twain
What do you think? Can we find humor in sorrow? Have you ever found humor in sorrow?

I used to say if you can't laugh at yourself, you will end up crying all the time. I don't know if that is the same thing really. Humor seems be the relief valve from grief sometimes, that little spark that pulls you back from the edge of sadness when you most need it.

I think back to my grandfather's funeral. He committed suicide and that violent act left us all in this heavy fog of grief and anger. There was so much more to process than if he had just passed from our world naturally. It made the preparations all that much harder and we had spent the days before the service, each in our own spaces, morose and distracted. At the wake my grandmother, parents, siblings and I, stood in the receiving line aside of his casket. We were all lined up in front of room full of sympathetic mourners, nodding numbly, accepting hugs and handshakes. My 6-year old little brother was getting twitchy in his Sunday best. He began going up to each of us in turn, desperate to get our attention. He was waved off by each of us, solemnly dismissed and told to "just be quiet". Instead of being deterred, his interruptions became more insistent and each time he was shuffled back to his place in the line. Until finally, he marched up to me again. He planted his feet, hooked the fingers of both hands into the collar of his neck-tied shirt and said, in his loudest, most desperate whisper..."But it's chocking me!"

We all realized at the same time that his tie must have been knotted too tightly around his neck, slowly cutting off his air. He'd been trying to get our attention for the last ten mins to no avail. His exasperated whisper had bounced of the walls of the funeral parlor and ignited, among our solemn group, a sudden and infectious fit of giggles. I dropped to one knee and worked the tie off him, trying to keep from laughing at his frustrated but grateful little face and at the way his little boy voice had reverberated around the artificially quiet space. My little brother, delighted by the sudden attention, let loose with a campy and exaggerated display of relief. It was the moment we needed to break us all from the place of solitary sadness.

The laughter traveled down the line, lighting across each of our faces and we hid our smiles behind our hands and each other's shoulders. It reached all the way to my grandmother at the head of the line and when she succumbed to her own giggles, it was the first time she had smiled in weeks. There was a special kind of release in the way the lines of her face gave way to the laughter, that tiny pocket of sudden and surprising joy. It rolled out across the faces of the mourners, our friends and family, it gave them permission to, just for a moment, find humor in the midst of sadness. It had felt like a gift at the moment - for each and every one of us. It has become one of my strongest memories from one of the darkest times of my life.