Laughter comes from understanding irony, timing, and the unbelievable, but true, life situations.

All my life, Dad loved to laugh.  He loved to bask in Mom’s aura and take in her stories.  He tried to tell a good story (not always so successfully).  He loved to play with kids and he laughed and smiled and shared in a child’s delight in playing the hokey pokey.  Ask any of my cousins.  (But he wasn’t always light and fun, I promise you.)

Dad also appreciated a good story or that welcomed relief from the pressures of the mundane, when you look at the world with your head tilted to the right or left and laugh at the sheer madness and irony of life.  Those “no-one-will-believe-it-but-it-is-true” episodes that life hurls at us.

And then, one day in this past year, and I don’t know the precise day, Dad stopped laughing.

It wasn’t the immediate result of his fall and brain bleed.  But the trauma probably accelerated, over time, the deterioration of his mental faculties and his logical reasoning.

Laughter is also the last stand against despair and the mundane. And now, Dad, when he needs that relief the most, it eludes him.

But, I will always remember his laughter, even if he can’t any more.