Dead Funny

Why I laughed the night my mom died.

The night my mom died, I sat at the foot of her bed in shock.

Tears didn’t roll down my face, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t crying. I was still, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t shaking. Even though I was there, I really was anywhere else.

I looked down at her in disbelief, with emotions creeping single-file over my skin like ants on a sidewalk. As much as it already had, I didn’t want this moment to haunt me for the rest of my life. I wanted to deal with it in a way consistent with the optimism I tried to maintain during her nine months of leukemia.

She was diagnosed on Friday the 13th of January and died in October, both in 2012, the year the Mayans predicted the world would end; it didn’t, but it did. Until then, I didn’t really believe in superstition.

But those nine months made me sceptical of logic. They convinced me that with positive thinking I could cure a deadly disease, and they instructed me in how I looked at my mom when her eyes closed and her skin turned rigid.

In that moment, it was hard not to believe in heaven because I wanted it so badly. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what had happened, I just thought that maybe this would be the first time in human history that a son could bring his mom back to life with a simple thought.

Time moved sluggishly in those moments, though I wished it had started to slow in the gruelling months before. One moment it was winter and in a second it was the start of next year’s version. In nine months, my life became unrecognizable. To say it was my hardest year was an understatement. Those nine months might have been my hardest decade.

Cancer changes everything, though. It hides your car keys when you want to drive away, fogs up your glasses and makes you bump into walls you never knew existed. It sticks a straw into your life’s milkshake and sucks until you hear the rattling of the empty cup.

I looked at her, frozen there, with her hair short and downy from round after round of chemotherapy, eyebrows slightly raised.

The lights were on in her room, but I felt total darkness. I thought about who she was and always would be: a car horn honking, a funny face, and a booming voice echoing up the staircase and down the hallway.

She was a hug in the form of a woman, equipped with wit, flare and smarts. Her mind knew no bounds, and she could have gone down any path in life and gone unchanged.

Even in her last year, my mom made dinner as often as she could. Excellent plating.

My mom’s name is Carol Leszcz. “L-E-S, Z-C-Z,” she’d spell out, always with the same pacing. She taught a junior kindergarten class at a Jewish day school, and I don’t think there was ever a person more suited to a job than she was to hers.

She’d arrive every morning with enthusiasm I could never mimic. “Hey dude!” “High Five!” “I love your hat, Sam! Could I try it on?” She’d take bananas out of kids’ lunchboxes and talk on the banana phone, having full conversations with whoever was on the other line. I think she must have done that every day for over 20 years, and the laughs kept coming. She knew her audience.

Me and my mom in her classroom on my 4th birthday.

Kids never really looked at her with anything but a smile, and years after they’d left her classroom to move onto the next grade, they’d still give her hugs in the hallway and love her just the same.

I may not have always appreciated her humour, but when I thought back in that moment, sitting at the foot of her bed, the only memories that came to mind involved laughter. I didn’t even have to search for specific jokes. It was enough to just look at her to see who she was before the straw finished sucking.

My mom loved to bug me, and she knew me well enough to do it with precision. A simple word or movement would do the trick.

When I walked into our family room, she would sometimes lay perfectly still on the couch. Her head would be turned facing the back cushions and a barely audible snore muffled outward. She’d lay there with the clicker lodged underneath her head or her arm. This was her lure.

Naturally, I’d carefully reach for the clicker and slowly begin to pull it away so I could change the channel. A second before I fully pulled it away, she turned to me.

“BAH,” she screamed.

I’d jump back, every time, in shock.

“Hehehe,” she smiled. “You’re so easy.”

We’d both burst out laughing and I’d tell her she was mean and that I hated her.

She laughed some more.

So when I looked at my mom, lying frozen in bed with her hands folded over her stomach, I couldn’t help but imagine her popping up and screaming.

“BAH.”

And even then, knowing she was dead, I jumped back at that thought and giggled.

She was right.

I’m so easy.