Echoes of Laughter

My Mother Laughed at Everything, even Death

"A merry heart doeth good like medicine”

While we are not laughing during or at our genealogy research here, this is a story of my mother & her laughter that lives on in me. So, I am connecting this piece to

Genealogy Matters’ Storyteller Tuesday Challenge: LOUD LAUGHS. (How could I not?)

One of mom’s last outings to watch a ballet recital & thoroughly enjoy it

All who knew my mother remember her laugh even though, since re-examining my childhood, I wonder if she suffered from depression and used her hilarity as a defense mechanism just as she used what she called her most trusted friend, The Whiskey Bottle.

We laughed at everything, even death. She outwitted that Grim Reaper for 11 years after specialists told her she had a couple months to live. [Read about that HERE]

The end stages of cirrhosis of the liver plays an ironic trick on the body: without drinking alcohol, you can slip into a drunken state when you’ve had too much protein that won’t break down, leaving ammonia to float up to the brain and cause all kinds of havoc. This is called hepatic encephalopathy.

The temporary remedy is to drink this diabolical syrup called lactulose which causes you to flush out your system . . . literally. 🚽 Sounds fun, right?

My mom said she’d rather die.

And we laughed about it . . . because what else were we to do?

She was living with us at this stage, and we had young children. I’m too embarrassed to share all the creative lyrics to a camp song we made up about Gramma rushing to the bathroom to the tune of 💩

“When you know your brain is toast & you grab the lactulose . . .

Mom could laugh at herself as we enjoyed getting her going.

One time, she went from being perfectly lucid & steady to sliding off her chair in slow motion to my surprise just watching it happen.

We about died laughing and had a difficult time getting her off the floor, and she kept trying to finish her exclamation through raucous laughter, “I fell out of my chair!”

It was reminiscent of a movie I can’t even believe I laughed at in younger years—when Dudley Moore keeps repeating, “Hobson, I fell out of the car! Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?” in his role as the drunken Arthur.

She couldn’t wait to tell my husband when he got home.

I’ll never forget nights when we traveled to Florida, just the two of us, to visit her mother. I lay in bed after hours listening to the two of them out on the screened-in lanai cackling like teenagers. Stories told in belly laughs. Laughter turning to tears.

I have to check myself. Do I laugh like that often enough these days?

Do you?

It’s certainly not that my mother didn’t have a whole bag of sorrow to carry around.

She did, indeed, experience a lot of, let’s say, issues:

Some vague stories of abuse when she was young.

An unhappy marriage.

An unplanned, very inconvenient, pregnancy.

Various surgeries.

Impending divorce.

Feeling unloved.

Addiction.

A deteriorating disease.

Death of loved ones.

And more.

Yet her laughter fed us all and kept her alive longer than predicted.

There’s a lot of sadness in the loss of my mother, especially after my discovery of a family secret she guarded to her death.

Processing this ground-shifting revelation without her led me to write the memoir, 🔗My Father’s Daughter, which, by its nature, must feature my mother as well as my father, for she was the secret keeper.

To embark on such a project without tainting my mother’s reputation was a work of The Spirit, and family members who have read the book thanked me for not throwing my mom under the bus.

How could I? She gave me life and made sure I enjoyed it. And I am grateful.

It’s easy to forgive her “mistakes” as I’ve always held on top of mind the adage,

There but for the grace of God go I.

And besides, forgiveness is for you just as much as (or more than) it is for the offender.

I’m quite certain that if my mom read my book, we’d be laughing at some of the antics recorded.

We’d probably cry too, but the laughter would echo the loudest.

[Thank you for reading Stories With Shell. Liking ❤️ & Sharing helps us connect, grow and heal. If you want to read more details about the life-altering revelation and how one can overcome such an identity shift, check out My Father’s Daughter. This is an added perk to Substack; you can talk directly to an author after reading her work. I am happy to discuss. 😉]

A line from my book: ⬇️

“The sound of my mother’s laughter can barge into my memories and cheer me at times all these years after her death, like the trill from the cardinals she often imitated.”