Laughter and tears are close allies, their arms often intertwined like besties, this I am finding out.
Charlotte has a bag of Dove chocolates sitting on her dresser that my darling sister gifts her each time she visits, knowing her penchant for sweet things. Like mother, like daughter…
Last night, as we were washing dishes and the three of us were cleaning up Don’s daily nourishing dinner (Acts of Kindness is his love language), we opened up the foil wrapped nuggets and read out our “fortunes.”
They’re hard to read because the writing is small and lightly inscribed on the inside of a teeny wrapper. When we got to mine, I could only decipher the word laugh with my faltering vision. Charlotte grabbed it and with her sharp eyes pronounced it to be, “Laugh it off.”
We all paused for a second, and then burst out laughing, the deep, emanating-from-the-stomach kind that lasted more than many seconds. Just the absurdity of it all – laughing off a daughter’s/sister’s death – it was blasphemy, but somehow it also gave us this pure joy that Emily, too, would have loved. She got irony, that girl.
As Don is painstakingly learning to knit, with rigid hands and soft heart, and Charlotte is ministering to him with the patience of a first grade teacher nestled side-by-side with a student not yet grasping the idea of how letters make sounds and sounds make words; as I click through my loosely-knit-bruised-sky blue scarf with an aching wrist and an indentation in my index finger from the bamboo needle, I smile. Our wobbly triangle has an aura of Emily around it. When a stitch slips, a damn-it slips out, my foot falls asleep, Don can’t find his glasses for the 10th time that day, as I fret about Charlotte’s shocking eating habits, which include midnight forays into the kitchen for spicy ramen noodle packets that she slurps with unselfconscious abandon, shirt off so she won’t stain, I will now be thinking, “laugh it off.”
I believe it is going to become a family catch-phrase, in both the best of times and the worst of times.
***********
