My friend

My friend is moving to Australia.  You know Australia?  On the other side of the world?  

My friend gets me.  We’ve known each other less than a year and yet I feel like we get each other on an emotional level; we click.  I can tell her things I’d hesitate to tell other people, even friends of much longer standing because I know she won’t judge. 

 My friend is hilarious.  She has a properly infectious giggle and just a glance will set me off.  She is as inappropriate and bawdy as I am which I admit is probably quite annoying for other people (especially in the midst of a choir rehearsal when we’re stifling our cackles).

My friend is very loyal.  She is the sort of person other people open up to and she takes on the burden of being secret keeper. 

My friend has great kids.  I’ve never enjoyed the company of children more, they truly are a credit to her and I am going to miss them more than I can say.

My friend has been more of a support to me over the last eight months than she knows.  When we met I was approaching my lowest ebb, she helped to pick me up. 

I set up Skype last night so I can (time difference allowing) talk to her often and we have Twitter as well.  I am going to miss the real her though.  I am going to miss my friend. 

Laugh? I nearly died!

On Saturday it was the fourth anniversary of my mum’s death, someone I follow on Twitter lost a parent and I met up with a friend whose father is terminally ill. Not much scope for laughter there, is there? Except that, well, there is. I made a joke about my mum being to blame for The Rapture, the tweep got straight back on the joke horse and my friend did what any right-minded person would do and went to a club and laughed at fey indie boys. It all got me to thinking about how we use humour to cope with death and the spectre of it.

When my mum was dying, my family spent many hours in the relatives’ room outside ITU at the Royal Free Hospital. We saw other families come and go as their loved ones improved or ceased to be, and what struck me was how much everyone in that depressing little room laughed.

The whole situation is so absolutely bizarre and terrifying, that a quick dose of mild hysteria is sometimes just what the doctor ordered and allows you to express the sheer depth of your fears without frightening the bejeezuz out of your loved ones or uttering some of the many unspeakable truths about a long drawn out death – namely that once they’re gone you will be wholly relieved not to have to traipse up the hospital any more, you’ll get to talk about something other than catheters and blood sugar levels and you might feel just the tiniest bit of relief that your days won’t be so inconvenienced and you can get back to having a life.

Sometimes life is so eye-wateringly bad that the only way to cope with the prospect of death is to laugh heartily in the face of it. My mum was a funny lady, not always intentionally and never more so than when stroke-ridden and confused. Sorry, but there it is. Watching her try and give herself her insulin injection but not being co-ordinated enough to locate her arse from her elbow (as it were) was terrible, but also terribly funny as she had a major fit of the giggles as she near stabbed herself in the head and we ended up wrestling the needle out of her hand. Of course, I cried buckets about it after; seeing this active, intelligent woman reduced to a bumbling, confused mess is not all that funny, but at the time the only way to deal with the situation was to laugh at it. It was also funny when she rose from near death, drugged up, traecheotomied up, with laboured breathing to vilify my dad for having the cheek to go home from the hospital for a break; “the GALL of that man!” she hissed and we all collapsed in fits. Poor dad, he didn’t deserve it but the sight of this tiny, dying woman screwing up her waning strength to slag off her husband was class!

I’m hardly the first to note the connection between grief and humour; clever people have done studies on it, but the amount of stuff I did find to laugh at in the lead up to and the aftermath of my mum’s death took my by surprise. Some of it made me feel guilty, some of it made me cry but all of it helped me come to terms with losing my mum. It still does.