Let me begin by describing my day. Wait, better yet, my week! It began with the news that my favorite cousin lay dying of cancer in Virginia. Then our car broke down, and we learned that a deadly storm about to engulf us would be bigger and stronger than anyone expected.
The previous day, in fact, had already seen several broken windows in the upstairs bedroom plus a long power outage, resulting in a restless night without air conditioning in the sweaty room below. Where, I might add, enormous gusts of wind pounded the walls like cannonballs from Mars.
In the eternal words of Chandler Bing, my favorite character in the 1990s hit comedy series, Friends, played by Mathew Perry—who, incidentally, died last year of a drug overdose — “Could anything BE any worse?”
Then came the phone call from my wife in California, where she’s spending several months. “I miss you,” she balled, gushing actual tears. “I miss the kids. I miss our house in the Philippines. I hate it here.”
And that’s when I started laughing. Not out of spite or scorn, mind you, but out of an overwhelming comic relief. Wait, that doesn’t even describe it; my relief was truly cosmic.
“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair,” said Christopher Fry, an English poet and playwright who died in 2005. It is, he added, a “narrow escape into faith.”
Ah, faith. The belief—common here in the Philippines—that, no matter what happens and despite all evidence to the contrary, everything will turn out fine. Or, expressed religiously, if your faith is strong enough, it will ultimately be rewarded in heaven regardless of your suffering here on earth.
Having not yet left the planet—at least not knowingly or for very long —I am in no position to know the truth or falsity of the religious perspective on faith. Regarding the more earthy Filipino version, however, let me just say this: the historic evidence does not necessarily concur.
So what is the despair from which laughter helps us escape? Ultimately, I think, it’s the realization that life as we know it is just so damn short and miserable.
I recently read a wonderful Boston Globe essay about Sebastian Junger, the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm. Junger, 61, had a near-death experience after an artery in his pancreas ruptured, nearly killing him. Lying barely conscious on the operating table, he envisioned his dead father beckoning him from the other side.
“I was horrified,” he told journalist James Dao, “…it’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine.”
But it also opened a whole new area of inquiry leading to questions, conclusions, and, finally, another book. “Almost dying,” Junger says, “is an incredibly frightening, dark experience. But what I came [away] with was the feeling that death was sort of permanently perched on my shoulder.” It was an awareness, he says, that eventually helped him appreciate being “alive right now” with a new reverence for the “sheer miracle, the magic of this existence.”
I, too, getting older, often ponder the utter uncertainty of life and how none of us will survive it. Sometimes, contemplating the astounding statistical unlikelihood of our even being—let alone staying—here, the painful, jarring, gorgeous, unfathomable puzzle of it all moves me to tears, not of sadness, but of wonder.
Beyond tears, though, lies laughter. My recent bout of it was borne of a hearty relief; the gut-tingling joy of realizing that everything, in its deepest sense, is beyond our humble control.
Sometimes liberation can be liberating.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
