Andy has a tragic/comic story he tells about a family member’s funeral he was attending at a church in downtown Albany. At some point in wheeling the casket out, it got loose and began rolling down one of the steeper streets in the area. His Mom caught sight of the ordeal and promptly started laughing. It was a bit of her biting humor, which she passed along to him. Finding something funny in the macabre is one of the surest ways of getting through this life. Andy’s Mom knew that, and Andy knows it, and both have gone some way toward helping me learn it.
As I walk past that church at lunch, I remember that story. Some days I chuckle, some days it makes me sad, and some days I simply marvel at the paradoxes this life provides, the way laughter and sorrow can somehow mingle, how the darker and the lighter shades of life can so beautifully and harmoniously intertwine. It makes me happy and miserable at once, and if there’s any chance we stand of making it through the holidays, it’s the hope that through our occasional tears we may find the grace of laughter. A casket rolling down the streets of Albany seems a fitting embodiment of such a sentiment.
