Exit Laughing (7 page)

A loud “Ha-ha-ha!” escaped, and I immediately clamped my hand over my mouth and looked around. I was home alone, but I was mortified. How dare Miller joke about such tragedy—even her own? And how dare I laugh? The death of a baby in the womb plus
humor
? Those two topics simply don’t
mix. Yet the first sentence had piqued my interest. I took a deep breath before reading on.

Miller filled an entire page as she yammered on in an amusing way about her three losses.

It felt good to laugh. I had never cracked a smile over my miscarriage, or any of the infertility struggles that followed. But that day, I wondered if laughing about it could help me cope. At least a little?

The day I found Miller’s essay, my eyes were glued to my computer screen. I read the entire piece over and over. I was hooked. Miller’s essay opened up a whole new world. It takes a lot to make me, a super-serious person, laugh. And Miller had not only found a way to reach my funny bone, but she did so in an area of my personal life I considered off-limits to any jokes, wisecracks, or shenanigans. I cracked up when she wrote, “I’m being sent to genetic counseling. Genetic counseling? Like my DNA could actually change. I think in order for my DNA to change, it has to want to change.” For a moment, her comic perspective took the sting out of miscarriage.

I wrote an article about my new discovery—miscarriage humor—for
Babble.com
. The
New York Times Motherlode
blog picked up my article, and that’s when the comments started rolling in. Suddenly, I was immersed in miscarriage humor (and its sister topic, infertility humor) from readers who wanted to share their own funny stories or send me links to irreverent blogs and amusing cartoons on the subject. It made me speculate about how many women were out there—stuck in waves of grief—searching for a path, a road, anything to bring them out of their darkness.

For the longest time I hadn’t wanted to associate with other women going through similar struggles. I wasn’t in the mood to sit around and wallow even more. But with the flurry of good-humored tales, I realized other women could offer positive encouragement. Maybe talking about miscarriage openly would help me. I heard about a national infertility association called RESOLVE that offers support groups throughout the country. The group in Northern Virginia met at La Madeleine French Bakery in McLean. I sat with six women around the table and listened as they took turns sharing their story. Some women broke down crying at the end of their tale; some began after a few sentences; some would suck in a deep breath, and the tears would start rolling before they’d even uttered a single word. It took a lot of patience to sit through that meeting—and a lot of La Madeleine’s napkins. I survived my turn without crying, but I worried my suspicions had been right—maybe a support group would be too depressing.

After practically everyone had burst into tears, our group leader Jane said, “Humor has helped me deal with infertility trials.”

All of us paused, and the group’s sniffles dwindled into silence as our eyes fell on Jane.

There it was: humor, again.

“It’s true,” she said. “I memorized a comedy routine. Each time I felt myself losing control of my emotions, like at my best friend’s baby shower, I’d recite it. I went from stifling tears to stifling a laugh.”

Jane tossed out the idea of going around the circle so we could all share the stupidest thing another person had ever
said to us about our situation. “The exercise makes you recognize how ridiculous life can be, and it will help you get unstuck from the refrain ‘I’m so sad; this is awful.’ ”

We didn’t try the assignment that night, but I’ve always wondered what would have happened if we had. Perhaps I would have learned that much sooner how humor serves as a way to give me perspective—to keep me from growing bitter and resentful. Laughing is not my natural instinct, the way it is for some people, but Jane’s point about humor was intriguing: that in hard times, we have to make an effort to seek it out. First Wendy Miller and then Jane. It was truly a revelation to me when I realized that even in a place as dark as where miscarriage takes me, humor might help to lighten me up.

A few months later, my younger brother Greg called. I had been suspecting for quite a while that his wife was pregnant, but when I’d inquired about a potential niece or nephew, my probing questions were shut down. I knew the news was going to break as soon as his wife passed the three-month mark, but I didn’t know exactly when that was. By the time Greg called, I had completely forgotten about my suspicions.

“Can you do me a favor?” Greg said. “Check your email and click on the link I sent a few minutes ago. I’m thinking of giving Emily this as a Christmas gift. Do you think she’ll like it?”

Odd, I thought. I could hear Emily talking in the background. Why would he be on an Internet shopping spree buying her a present right under her nose?

I brushed aside the niggling awareness that something was off and bounded up the stairs, where I pulled up my Gmail
account. I opened Greg’s message, and there was an ultrasound image of a baby.

A wrecking ball swung into my gut.

A lump the size of a fist bobbed in my throat.

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again. I couldn’t help comparing it to the filmy printout my doctor had given me. Greg’s child looked so different in this early image. His baby had a distinct head and body, whereas mine had not, having gotten stuck somewhere along the way and never forming into anything past a small, fuzzy blob.

I felt weak. My hands shook, and I had to muster every last bit of strength to squeak out two words: “Aw. Congratulations.”

Downstairs, I filled Ron in on the news. He looked at me, trying to gauge my emotions so he could offer the appropriate response. “Well. That’s … neat?” he said.

“I’m so happy,” I wailed. I buried my face in his shirt as he stroked my wet cheeks.

That winter, I took a ski trip to Colorado with my other brother Adam. After a long weekend on the slopes, we were in the car heading back east, and our conversation stumbled upon the topic of Emily’s pregnancy.

“How do you feel about that?” Adam asked. “I mean, are you okay with her baby and everything?”

I was touched. Out of all the people in my family, Adam was the only one, other than Ron, who had been brave enough to ask how I was coping.

“I’m fine about it now. I’m genuinely happy for them, and I’m excited to have a niece or nephew.”

“Me, too. I just feel bad for you and Ron.”

I sighed and leaned my head against the headrest. We still had a five-hour drive down to Santa Fe, and that would be just the first of three legs. The next day, and the one after that would be even longer. But the trip had been worth it. Skiing down steep slopes, through mounds of fresh powder in the Colorado sun. And at the end of the day, a salty margarita at a local hangout. For a moment, I told myself that, if I had been pregnant, I wouldn’t have been able to bum around with my brother for a ski vacation. And if I had a baby, I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it. But no matter what I told myself, I knew that I’d trade a weekend skiing—or any type of vacation—and an icy margarita for a baby, any time.

Sitting in that car, wanting to push away the pain of my reality, I thought of Wendy Miller and Jane. I thought about how the past few months had been difficult, as I struggled to accept the fact that I might only be an aunt—never a mother. As these thoughts began to well up, I remembered that there was a way out, if only temporarily.

“Know any comedy routines?” I asked Adam.

My brother’s face brightened up, and he veered off the highway and into the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to go buy a CD. It’s hilarious.”

I groaned. I adore my brother, but our humor is so different. I was sure he was in the store rummaging through a pile of some sort of silly
South Park, The Simpsons
, or
Family Guy
type of nonsense, full of potty talk and lines about diarrhea.

Adam climbed back into the car.

“I’m not in the mood for fart jokes,” I said.

“Trust me. You’ll like this,” he said.

I examined the plastic case as he slid the CD into the player. Who was this pale white guy with a scruffy beard—this Jim Gaffigan?

Turns out, he’s a very funny guy. He has the ability to take mundane events—riding an escalator, eating a waffle—and find the humor in them. He even dipped into some black comedy, like joking about the Old Testament story of Abraham climbing a mountain to sacrifice his son.

Adam and I drove on, munching on cheap gas-station candy, watching the New Mexico sky turn pink, and listening to Jim Gaffigan. I was laughing so hard at times I had to wipe tears from my eyes. The good kind of tears.

In the fall of 1992, my wife, Jill, and I got a call from a close friend of Cleavon Little, telling us that Cleavon had decided to take his hospice care at home. She said that friends would be stopping over through the week and that he had asked for us to be included. The sad news was not a surprise—when I had worked with him in Toronto not nine months before, the cancer had already been taking its toll.

The night we went to his house, there were six or seven other people already there. We gathered in the kitchen, while the nurse was upstairs preparing Cleavon to hold court in his bedroom. I remember mentioning to Jill that these other friends were much more intimately connected to him than we were, but she reminded me that we had known him almost the entire span of our acting careers, starting when he and Jill did a Broadway play together in 1974. It was the rollicking comedy
All over Town
by Murray Schisgal. Cleavon was the star, and he was great at keeping the laughter rolling.

Jill tells the story of a performance when one of the actors went up on his lines, and Cleavon tried to help by giving him the cue again. When that had no effect, Cleavon actually tried saying the actor’s line for him. But that didn’t help either—the poor guy was lost; his eyeballs looked like little bull’s-eyes and
the flop-sweat was rolling. So, Cleavon casually strolled off stage, found the prompter’s script, brought it back out onto the stage, and handed it to him.

“There you go, son. Just read it—nice and slow.” And he gave him that look that he was famous for—kind of judgmental and wary at the same time, as if to say, “Whoa, this boy’s so slow he’s
dangerous
.”

The audience, of course, was having a grand time.

Eight years later, I had my first acting experience with Cleavon in
Two Fish in the Sky
, produced by the venerable Phoenix Theatre. It was a disaster of historic proportion—historic in that the Phoenix, a New York cultural institution since 1953, was plunged ignominiously into the ashes by our production, never to rise again. Cleavon played a London-based Jamaican flim-flam artist with an accent that, despite all his hard work, was completely unintelligible. Added to that was my character, a rabbi who spoke in a pronounced London-Jewish dialect.

The scene between the two of us was like listening to the United Nations on the day the simultaneous translators went on the fritz. We could see the people in the audience shrugging and looking at each other, as if to say “What’s going on? Do you understand any of this?” Cleavon, as I recall, remained blithely above the fray, never letting the audience’s confusion affect in any way his ebullient good time.

He was irrepressible. From his New York debut in the political satire
Macbird
to his Tony Award–winning performance in the musical
Purlie
to his unforgettable portrayal of
Sheriff Bart in Mel Brooks’s
Blazing Saddles
, you could always count on Cleavon Little to light up the moment.

The nurse came down to the kitchen and announced that he was ready to receive visitors. We filed silently up the stairs. Most of the other friends had been around all week; we were the newbies. Jill and I pulled up chairs, while a few of his closer friends sat on the edge of the bed. Cleavon looked like Gandhi: his hair was gone and his body emaciated. He was hooked up to a morphine drip, but the effort it took to move his body made it obvious he was still in a lot of pain. He was at the end of his struggle.

“Well,” he said in a small crackly voice, “look at you two little cuties.” We were, as I recall, the only white people in the room. “You come to say goodbye?”

We nodded, and Jill went over and kissed him on the cheek.

“If I knew there was a kiss in it, I would have done this years ago.”

We all laughed. He started to say something else, but he didn’t have much breath. He looked at the man sitting closest to him on the bed and reached his hand out to him. I recognized him as an actor we’d seen years before in New York, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name. I wish I could, because his face and his presence will be with me forever.

“Tell them about the show they missed last night,” Cleavon said to him.

All the friends chuckled quietly, and Jill and I waited, not knowing what kind of show he was talking about.

“Well,” said the friend, and he smiled and shook his head. “Last night, Cleave told us he was ready to die.”

“Yes, he was,” said a woman who was standing next to the nurse.

“I mean, he’d been suffering this damn cancer long enough, and he knew it was his time, and he had made his peace.”

“Amen,” said someone softly.

“Yeah, I made the best deal I could get, I suppose,” said Cleavon in his crackly voice.

“He said goodbye to each one of us, and we hugged him and kissed him and told him how much we loved him. We were all sitting around on the bed by then. And he said that he was going to close his eyes and let the Lord take him, and we all nodded.”

Cleavon closed his eyes as the story was rolling out, so as to give us the proper visual.

“So, his eyes were closed and we each did our individual thing. Some of us, I know, were praying.”

“And some of us were crying,” said the woman standing beside the nurse. “As quiet as we could be.”