Funny stuff happens when you have cancer. Seriously.
Take last winter, when I was in the middle of hormone therapy and radiation for an aggressive case of prostate cancer. One of my relatives came by the house and said: "You know, if you need any weed to get you through this, I know where to get it."
After politely declining — I was truly and deeply touched — I just cracked up. The laughter and the tears made me feel better than any amount of marijuana would have. All I could imagine was this relative getting busted and then pleading, "But, officer, I'm getting this for a guy who has cancer."
As I've recovered from cancer surgery, treatment and its aftermath, it has been important to me to try to see the absurd plaid lining in a difficult situation. Just because the stakes with cancer are dark and mortal, that doesn't mean there aren't moments of high hilarity.
The classic family one-liner that stems from me having cancer is this one: "You take the dog out. I have cancer." That soon morphed into infinite variations, along the lines of: "Can I sit in that chair? I have cancer," or "Do you mind switching from HGTV to the Patriots game? I have cancer."
So, please, read this post and e-mail it to a friend. I had cancer.
Being able to laugh in the face of cancer lets you continue to own yourself, as hard as that might be, rather than ceding ownership to the disease. A good laugh reminds you that you are not your cancer.
After surgery, I was swollen, urinating blood and had drains hanging from my body that the nurses called "grenades" (because of their shape), and it hurt to laugh.
But I laughed, anyway, because there was a certain earthy humor to all these bodily insults. And in telling these stories to my friends with a grin after the fact, I could let the listener know that I'd journeyed to a narrow place of darkness, but had come back.
There's a part of me that would like nothing better than to do cancer stand-up comedy — please cue up a neurotic, put-upon Rodney Dangerfield voice:
Or there was this moment.
I know that sometimes laughter seems impossible. After my cancer diagnosis I plunged into a bleak funk. And these days I'm struggling with a post-treatment depression that leaves my days swaddled in wearying grays.
But no matter how remorseless the gloom, we humans tend to have our antennae for humor out. We're the animal that wants to laugh, wants to unlock itself through a chuckle and a chortle. And laughter lets us cope, even in awkward moments.
There was the time last winter when a colleague gave me the get-well gift of a book. Being a wiseguy (maybe I should blame it on the hormone therapy), I cracked, "Oh, great, it's probably '1,000 Places to See Before You Die.'"
My colleague gasped, then blushed as she handed me a copy of "1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die." We both laughed (and I apologized for wising off). But she only laughed after I laughed first.
