One of my favorite Louis CK jokes is when he talks about performing some self-love directly after 9/11. Specifically, he said it was "Some time between the falling of the first tower, and the second tower. Because I figure, if I didn't, then the terrorists win."
I don't know if I can accurately describe what this joke means to me. That in the face of tragedy, one would dare to laugh. One would dare to tell a childish, morally irredeemable joke. One would dare to be happy. It's like taking your pain and throwing a knife in its gut. The pain will come back, of course. With a vengeance. It doesn't go away because we stand up and yell, in our most melodic Nelson Muntz impersonation, "HA ha!!" First up, and then down.
But laughing at pain does something inside us. It pits grit against grit. The gravitational vortex of grief pulls you into the vacuum of time, and laughter is a crumb of a moment that is your own. It is a dry-heave when you're drowning. It is a sandy oxygen tank. Maybe it's no more noble than saying "You can't do worse to me than I could already do to myself." But as Atreyu tells the assassin of the amorphous Nothing, "If we're going to die anyway, I'd rather die fighting."
Galway Kinnell's masterpiece Book of Nightmares contains two quotes that I'm heavily considering getting tattoo'd on me. One is "the wages of dying is love," meaning that the darkness of mortality leaves us with no other option but to connect with each other for short time we have. The second quote is darker, and means the same thing. "On the body, on the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing."
If you're struggling today, try to find the flea that is laughing, and then find what he is laughing at. And then practice a smile. Because you have to keep going, because we're dying anyway, because you deserve to smile, and most importantly, because if you don't, then the terrorists win.
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