Laughing to Keep From Crying

Live While You Can, It’s a Mistake Not To

            In the fall of 2011, I was put into service teaching a required class on literary theory, which was kind of like having an atheist give a sermon at a megachurch.  I got around this by having it really be a class on literature and interpretation—I think was the generic name of the course was Reading and Interpretation—and we were definitely doing those things, but I snuck in the lit ahead of the crit, and no one seemed to mind.  I began with two Shakespeare plays that were part of my regular teaching rotation, Hamlet and Othello, and I immediately became aware of a student who never sat with the others.  She was older and what I remember most about her was her laugh.  It is weird to think of making jokes during Hamlet and Othello, or maybe it was out of discomfort, but that laugh was really something else.  It came from the gut, but it had many layers to it.  This was a Weltschmerz laugh.  It was a laugh that said, I know Hamlet was an indecisive prince, and I know that Othello was a jealous general, yet even though the bodies piled up at the end of the plays, this laugh was still there to remind you that this is only a play, and being able to discuss it in this version of ENG 242 was really a privilege.  It really is a lovely way to spend the afternoon.  After all that tragedy, life is funny, isn’t it. Ha!

            I will call the owner of the laugh J.  J never said a word in class, but she did want to meet me for coffee, not on campus, but in the suburb where she lived.  I was in my 30s, she was in her 40s, and she told me it was important.  Some of my favorite students at Hunter College, where I taught when I was a grad student, were the older ones, including a retired Ailey dancer who was the same age as Madonna and said that she and her friends looked down on Madonna because she paid tuition.  I also had a retired Joffrey dancer who wrote an astounding paper on Hart Crane I still remember with awe.  These women, now in their 40s, had lived in their bodies when they were younger, and were now finding other ways to move through life. My mother had danced when she was young, and wished she had been allowed to dance more, and she took me to ballet and musical theatre and passed what she knew and felt down to me. 

            So there was J. and her laugh.  She had written me this in advance:

Life has run me over this week. I could fill you in on all the messy details but it doesn't change the reality that what I have written so far is incoherent babble.  I am hoping to pull it together this weekend.

She didn’t sound run over.  The laugh filled up the coffee shop, and she told me her story, a long way from being in a dance troupe.  J had been a matriculated Syracuse student starting at age 18.  Her father forced her to major in Aeronautics, and she said she hated every minute of it.  If that laugh came out, it probably wasn’t in class. Her junior year, she was in a car accident where the other driver was killed.  She survived, but her first takeaway was she did not want to study aeronautics anymore.  What followed was a series of decisions that did not feel like decisions.  She married a man she didn’t really like, much less love, and she said he didn’t even know how to kiss.  (Did that make the wedding ceremony awkward? I asked.  Big, hearty laugh on that one.)  It was only after her two boys got older and 40 came and went and she looked in the mirror and asked, “What do you really want to do?”  And the answer was to go back to Syracuse and study English, like she had always wanted.  And this led her and her laugh to me.

            But there was another beat: she had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer.  And as we know, there is no Stage 5.  We were going to talk about revisions on a paper.  Now, we were talking about revisions on life.  She looked great, and the laugh was as present as ever, maybe a little more.  Maybe it was keeping her going.  She told me she really enjoyed knowing me as her professor and she wanted to keep me in her life, whatever it might be.  She turned up at a Barnes & Noble reading I did, still looking fantastic.  I ran into her with her mom at the best French restaurant in town, and she was dressed to the nines, but she told me she was there to discuss her estate.  I participated in a surprise birthday party for her, where I met the husband who couldn’t kiss, and her handsome adolescent sons, and God knows how they were handling all of this.   She was still the picture of health.  A year before he died, Lester Young recorded an album called Laughin’ to Keep From Cryin’.

            The following July, I received an email from her friend.  She was in hospice and wanted to see me.  I had been under no illusions that this wouldn’t happen, but I was also, as Leonard Cohen put it, waiting for the miracle.  On the car ride, there, I listened to Lou Reed’s devastating cancer album Magic and Loss.  Not that Lou Reed would care, but I was grateful he made that album for that moment:

What good is life without living
What good's this lion that barks
You loved a life others throw away nightly
It's not fair, not fair at all
What's good?
Oh baby, what's good?

Life’s good, Lou tells us, but not fair at all.  No, it’s not.  J. looked like she had lost at least 40 pounds, maybe more.  But she still brought her A game—a stylish wig and full makeup.  She was going out in style.  She gave me a hug and clung to me, as if to say—Don’t let them take me.  Let me stay with you. 

            There were three friends on duty, all clearly operating on not enough sleep.  The usual, “Hi, thanks for coming” niceties were superfluous.  With a few gestures, I was silently led to her room.

            “Tell me something funny,” she said.  I said, “There was a student who complained that I gave her a nickname, and another who was jealous that she didn’t get one.”

            And I heard a classic laugh from J.  It lit up the room.  I wished I could have made it last longer.  And then the light went out.  The makeup was there, but she was spent.  The moment happened, and it was all she could do.

            I drove home and listened to Mark Eitzel, who wrote so many beautiful songs for people dying of AIDS.

I won't see you no more
Who am I to rate that high?
The world's a shadow of what went before
The world gives off none of its own light

So please be happy baby
And please don't cry
Even though the parade has passed us by
Well you can still see it shining in the western sky
So why won't you stop crying?
You can still see it shining

Two days later, I received this from her friend.

David,

So glad you saw J------.  She passed away Wednesday.  She will be forever missed.  Her service information is at this link.  Thank you for reaching out to her and her family at the end.  You are a good friend.

When she was alive, she knew what she wanted, and I was part of it.  I didn’t get to finish the semester with her.  I didn’t get to tell her about Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, where Ralph Touchett tells Isabel Archer that he wished to put the wind at her sails.  I wanted to do that.  In a later novel, James wrote, “Live while you can.  It’s a mistake not to.”  What a weird accident that we are here, and some of us get to be here, and some of us don’t.  There was so much music in that laugh.  She was laughing to keep from crying.  It was light, but it also had the weight of the world on it.  I can hear it as I type these words.  If I have a wasted day, a wasted moment, a moment of smallness or pettiness or anything else I don’t want to be, I try get back to where I am grateful to be here, grateful to still live while I can.  I can still hear Lou: You loved a life others throw away nightly. And I can still hear J:  Life has run me over this week.  Tell me something funny.