Permission to Laugh Not Required

The week Robert was in the hospital, people came and went in waves. Friends and family, the kind of crowd that collects around a crisis. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the stories started. Robert was loud, opinionated, and completely himself at all times, and the people who loved him had no shortage of material. We laughed. A lot. Enough that my brother pulled my sister aside at some point and said, "She doesn't seem that upset."

When I heard about that comment years later, I was embarrassed but more bothered that he couldn't see past the surface of what was happening in that room. At the time, though, I felt it without anyone having to say a word. Robert was lying motionless in the next room and I was laughing at stories about him; some part of me wondered what that said about me.

Well, it said that I loved him enough to laugh at who he was... that's all it said.

Guilt is one of grief's most reliable companions, and it shows up in a lot of forms. There's the guilt that comes from inside: the nagging suspicion that laughing means you've forgotten, that a good day means you've moved on, that happiness is somehow a betrayal of the person you lost. Then there's the guilt that comes from outside, from the people in the room who expect a widow to look a certain way and raise an eyebrow when she doesn't.

Both show up regularly, and both are worth pushing back on.

Widowhood has never come with a dress code for how sad you're supposed to look. The idea that you must be visibly broken at all times to prove your love is not something Robert would have recognized, and it's not something most of the people we lose would ask of us. The people who knew him expected laughter at his stories. That was the appropriate response. His absence didn't change what he was.

The internal guilt is harder to shake because it’s rooted in love. That sudden drop of shame after a laugh is just your heart still keeping track of who's missing. You're still oriented toward the person you lost. In the early months especially, joy can feel like a gap in your attention, like you looked away for a second and got caught. You didn't; grieving doesn't require your full attention every waking hour, and laughter in the middle of it is not a lapse.

The external guilt, the kind that comes from other people's expectations, is more complicated because you can't always control what people observe or conclude. Shock looks different on everyone, and what it looks like from the outside rarely matches what's actually happening on the inside. No one response is a measure of love, and the people drawing conclusions from your behavior on the worst days of your life are working with incomplete information.

What other people think grief should look like is about them, not about you.

Laughter is not a signal that you're fine. It's not a signal that you've forgotten. In the early days it's often just the only thing that makes the unbearable bearable for five minutes at a time, and further out, it's one of the ways we keep the people we lost present in our lives. The stories that made us laugh when they were alive don't stop being funny; laughing at them is not a contradiction.

Scripture doesn't call us to perpetual mourning. Ecclesiastes names a time to weep and a time to laugh, not as opposites, but as part of the same life. The work is recognizing guilt as misdirected grief, and letting laughter remain what it always was: evidence of a life worth remembering.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef