The Funeral Where I Laughed
Grief short-circuited, and the worst sound left me at the worst time.
I laughed at my grandfather's funeral, out loud, during the eulogy, in the second pew, wearing his watch. If you want to stop reading here and judge me, I understand. I judged me for three years.
Let me set the scene properly, because the scene matters. St. Brigid's in November, radiators clanking like someone trapped in the walls, that church smell of wax and wet wool and old paper. My grandfather, Walter, dead at eighty-four of a heart that had been threatening to quit since the nineties and finally made good on it. An open casket he had specifically requested, because, quote, people should have to look at me one last time, I earned it. That was Walter. He wore a suit exactly twice in the years I knew him: his retirement party and, now, this.
I was twenty-six and I had been assigned the middle of the second pew, wedged between my mother, who cries the way weather happens, hugely and without apology, and my Aunt Carol, who does not cry but vibrates. In front of us, the casket. Inside the casket, the man who taught me to fish, to whistle through my fingers, and to always check a restaurant's bathroom before trusting its kitchen.
The priest, Father Malloy, was new. This is important. He had never met Walter. He was working entirely from a notecard interview with my grandmother, who is a lovely woman and a catastrophically bad summarizer of human beings. And so Father Malloy stood up there, kind and doomed, and delivered a eulogy about a gentle, quiet man. A man of few words, he said. A man of humble silences. A man who, and I will hear this phrase on my own deathbed, never had a bad word for anyone.
Walter once got ejected from a little league game. As a spectator. He called the umpire a term I cannot print, in front of forty families, over a call involving his grandson, me, who was, for the record, absolutely out.
A man of humble silences.
I felt it start in my sternum, a sort of hot carbonation... I clamped down. I did the funeral math we all know: bite your cheek, study the stained glass, think about taxes. I dug my thumbnail into my palm. And I would have made it, I genuinely would have, except that Father Malloy looked tenderly at the casket and said, and I quote exactly, because the sentence is tattooed on my brainstem: he was a man at peace with quiet.
And from the third pew, my Uncle Dave, Walter's firstborn, whispered, to no one and everyone... well, he is now.
The sound that left me was not a giggle. I want to be honest with you, because I have read other people's accounts of laughing at a funeral and they always soften it. A giggle escaped, they write. No.
What left me was a bark.
A single, full-volume, seal-at-feeding-time HA that hit the stone walls of St. Brigid's and echoed. Echoed. The acoustics in that church were designed to carry a choir to heaven and they gave my bark the same treatment.
Father Malloy stopped. Two hundred heads turned like a field of terrible sunflowers. My mother's hand froze mid-tissue. And I did the only thing my body would agree to, which was to disguise the next three laughs as sobs, which fooled no one, because grief and laughter are twins but they are not identical, and everyone in that room could hear the difference.
Aunt Carol got me out a side door. In the parking lot I laughed until I couldn't stand up straight, hands on my knees next to a stranger's Buick, and then, mid-laugh, with no transition at all... no border checkpoint, I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe.
Both sounds used the same muscles. Nobody warns you about that. Grief had short-circuited somewhere behind my ribs and both wires were live.
The guilt moved in that night and paid no rent for three years. I skipped the family Christmas that year because I could not face my grandmother. In my head I had defiled the funeral, hijacked Walter's last hour, made his death about my broken wiring. I actually wrote about it eventually, sideways, the way you do, a poem I filed under grief when it was really about shame, and even then I could not write the bark itself. I wrote around the sound like it was a crime scene.
Here is the turn, and like all the important turns in my life, it happened at a kitchen table.
Three years later, my grandmother's eighty-first birthday. Everyone gone home but me, both of us doing dishes, and she said, out of absolutely nowhere, with her hands still in the sink: you know he did that at his own father's funeral.
I said, did what.
She said, laughed. Nineteen fifty-eight. His father, your great-grandfather, was being remembered as a pillar of sobriety. Walter was twenty. The word sobriety came out and Walter laughed so hard his brother had to walk him out of the church, and his mother did not speak to him for a month.
I stood there holding a wet plate like it was evidence.
Then she said the thing I think about at least once a week. She said: when you made that sound, in the second pew, I knew exactly where it came from. It is his laugh, you know. You have his laugh.
And for one second, in that awful church, with him lying up there in a suit he hated, I got to hear it one more time.
I thought I had ruined his funeral. His widow heard the only part of him that was still alive in the room.
She dried her hands and patted my cheek, done with the subject forever, the way her generation closes topics like drawers. And I drove home on the dark highway understanding, slowly, at about mile forty, that I had spent three years asking the wrong court for forgiveness. The only two people with standing in the case, Walter and his wife, had both ruled in my favor before I even left the parking lot. One of them, if the family record was any guide, would have been proud.
Laughing at a funeral was not my malfunction.
It was my inheritance, passed down the same line as the watch on my wrist, ejected from the same little league games, whistling through the same two fingers.
It took me a while longer to write about the bark directly, to give the sound its own page instead of a chalk outline. When I finally did, I posted it where other writers could see it, and the comments filled up with confessions: a woman who laughed at her sister's wake because the florist misspelled Beloved, a man undone by a bagpiper's phone going off mid-lament. Dozens of us, a whole secret congregation of people whose grief had blown a fuse at the worst moment, all of us still working on forgiving ourselves for being wired the way the dead wired us.
My grandmother died two springs ago, at ninety, in her sleep, no drama, closed casket, her choice. Her funeral was flawless and quiet and I held it together the whole time.
I have never told anyone this part. I was a little disappointed. The whole service, some low corner of me kept waiting, hoping... for a bark from the second pew.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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