In the hospital one day when they had thrown me out of Jane’s room so they could change her bed clothes I encountered a couple. The male had been through open heart surgery and was brimming with advice about what I needed to do to help Jane recover. His wife sat through the conversation nodding her head. Then the husband got a phone call.
As he wandered off she leaned in towards me: “His advice is good. But he
does not know what it is to be a caregiver. He does not know the challenges in that. I don’t know what it is to be a patient. But he does not know what it means to be us.”
She told me the hardest thing was to stay positive all the time. She urged me to watch as many comedies as I could. She said, “Even when this is over, the most important thing for you to do is to laugh. Get every comedy you can find. Watch one every night. If you don’t laugh, you will make yourself sick.”
When Jane died, I did not have the energy to go looking for comedy DVDs. Nor did I have the desire to laugh. In January I tried watching sitcoms on TV. I tried the British comedies on PBS. Once in a while I would smile, but it was as though laughter had left the building. I went out looking for DVDs late in the month. And slowly, I rediscovered the power of film and of comedy to take me out of my grief–if only for a few hours.
The healing power of laughter has become increasingly important to me in recent weeks. I suspect it will become even more so in the month ahead as I re-encounter the last testing days of Jane’s life.
But sometimes, out of nowhere, a film will reduce me to tears. About two months ago I watched Shakespeare in Love for the first time. I laughed my way through scene after scene, finding the building of the plot of Twelfth Night in the background fascinating, in part because it is a play I developed a real fondness for after acting in it a quarter century ago. But at the end of the film, with its images of the shipwreck and the total loss of the woman Shakespeare loves, I lost my mind for a time. I cried mindlessly and uncontrollably for over an hour.
Last week, I watched The Fisher King. In it, Robin Williams’ character has lost his mind following the death of his girlfriend. Then I watched Patch Adams, and discovered it too had a great loss in the middle of it that struck too close to home. And last night I watched Good Will Hunting with its psychologist who has lost his wife to cancer two years earlier.
Jane and I did not see these films when they were in theaters because we were too busy with teaching and with life. Now they seem like notes from her, reminding me of what I have lost, certainly, but also reminding me of the power of both tears and laughter.
