Are You Laughing or Crying?

When I was a little kid, my older brothers knew how to stop me from crying.  They asked me this simple question: “Are you laughing or crying?”  And while repeatedly asking the question, they did “schtick.”  I would start to giggle, because they were very funny; but the tears had not completely dried up, and for a few seconds I would be laughing and crying at the same time, ping-ponging back and forth between “boo-hoo” and “ha-ha.”

That feeling of laughing and crying at the same time — of mixing tears of joy with tears of sorrow — returned to me in the days following the death of my father.  There was gut-wrenching grief, but there was also a measure of comfort that his long and painful struggle with cancer had come to an end.  There was such relief and such release that at times a lightheartedness overtook us.  At no time did this feel in any way disloyal to Dad because he had an abiding sense of humor and often found the funny when the going was the toughest.  

My mother decided to stay with my family for a few days, and we shared memories of Ted.  We would start out maudlin, sobbing one minute; then one of us would remember an anecdote about Dad or relate one of the stories from his repertoire, and we would descend into stand-up.    

One moment we were passing the Kleenex, and in the next moment my mom was repeating the joke that my dad had told about a woman whose husband had died.  She gave to the mortician her husband’s best blue suit, in which she wanted him to be buried.  The mortician apologized, saying it was impossible, because her husband had died in a brown suit, and rigor mortis had already set in.  The woman wailed and insisted, and the mortician said he would do what he could.  When she came to the viewing, her husband was laid out in the coffin, resplendent in a blue suit.  The widow was delirious with gratitude.  The mortician said it worked out because another man died the same day in a blue suit, and his wife wanted him buried in a brown one.  They just switched their heads.

I could SO hear my dad.

Mom and I could be sobbing on each other’s shoulders one minute and giddy the next; but we felt the pressure to put on a straight face, because it was time to visit the mortuary to finalize funeral arrangements and pick out a coffin.

The coffin room was in the basement, dimly lit with a low ceiling, and the attendant spoke in the hushed and reverential tones that are reserved for the lately bereaved. There were about a dozen coffins in the room, and these floor samples were wildly different.  Two or three were simple and unadorned, but many of them were over the top, gaudy and garish.  They were festooned with expensive brass fittings or fuzzy, felt-like exteriors, or expensive inlays, or completely clad in copper.  One-half of the lid was raised on each one so you could see the interior.

On top of each one was a little sign with the price of the box, which included a list of “extras” if you wanted to pay for the “memorial service package.” It all seemed pricey for something that would be buried forever, and it made you wonder if the price of the coffin was a measure of how much you loved the dearly departed.  The little sign also read, “All major credit cards accepted.” 

There was one coffin that was very high-end with burnished chrome on the outside and tuck-and-roll satin upholstery on the inside.  It could have been confused with a shiny new ’56 Cadillac convertible, fins and all. 

“Hey Mom.  Check out this beauty.”

She came over, took one look, and without missing a beat, said,

“Your dad wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing.”

We laughed out loud, right there in the coffin store; and Ted would have said, “Good one, Audrey.” 

My dad’s needs were simple, and his demands were few.  In the end we picked the one he would have preferred – the budget box of polished wood.   

The funeral service was appropriately somber, especially when our friend Mary Lou played keyboard and her friend sang “How Great Thou Art,” my dad’s favorite hymn.  The solemnity of the High Mass had us all on simmer, but when my brothers and I and our wives and our mom all piled into the same stretch limo for the drive to the cemetery, the morose disappeared.

Anything we saw, everything we uttered, and every single thought for the next 15 minutes turned to laughter. Here we were filling the limo with laughter, while mourners in the following cars were no doubt dabbing their eyes; that made us laugh even more. The driver of the limo, our family friend Jack the Mortician, was giving us the fisheye, and that made us laugh even more. The fact that we were giggling and not crying made us laugh even more.

When we arrived at the cemetery, people poured out of their cars.  We stumbled around that big pile of dirt and gathered at the gravesite under a spreading oak tree; but someone was missing – the priest.  Father Jack was a longtime family friend who drove from Los Angeles to officiate at the mass; but why wasn’t he at the graveside?  We waited, and waited, and waited.  No Jack.  We finally rounded up a substitute priest and carried on.  Now everyone was chuckling, not just the family.  Where the heck was Jack?  Ted would have laughed at that for sure.   

What happened next sobered everyone up.  My dad was a 17-year-old kid in the year 1917 when he enlisted in the Army and was shipped to the fields of France as a “Doughboy” in World War One.  Because of that, he was accorded full military honors.  Three soldiers were there, two of whom displayed the Stars and Stripes, while the other played “Taps.” If there is anything more mournful than the soft blare of a bugle floating over the gravestones, I am yet to hear it.  They folded the flag into a neat triangle and one of the soldiers knelt before my mom.      

“This flag is presented to you, Mrs. Piatt, in honor of your husband’s service to his country.”

He placed the flag in her lap.  Then he stood and saluted.

Audrey hugged that flag to her chest and bawled uncontrollably.  That was the moment when the full weight of her loss sank in, and that was the real and honest beginning of her grief.

By the time we returned to the house, Audrey had composed herself, but she was still clutching the flag.  Someone cracked open the champagne and the wake began.  It had always struck me as odd that you would end the funeral with a party, but not anymore.  I can think of nothing better to do than to celebrate someone’s life.  For two or three hours we frowned a little less because he was gone, and we smiled a little more because we knew him.  We enjoyed some grape, hugged one another, cried some, laughed as much, and all agreed that Ted would have loved his own funeral.

But what about Jack?  We had told him that the burial was at Sacred Heart Cemetery, and he said he knew how to get there.  But what we did not know, and what Jack did not know, was that there are two cemeteries with the same name.  He drove to the one in Los Angeles, while we were waiting at the one in Pomona. 

We laughed at Jack’s expense.  We laughed that we stood at a graveside, waiting for a priest.  We laughed even harder that — at the same time — there was a priest wandering around a graveyard, looking for a funeral.

Oh, how Ted would have loved it! 

Note:

“Doughboy” was the nickname given to grunts in World War One. The nickname “G.I.” is from World War Two, when every single item from a tin of Spam to a Sherman tank was stencil-stamped “Government Issue,” or “G.I.”