Give me a sense of humor, Lord, give me the grace to see a joke.
To get some humor out of life, and pass it on to other folk. Bob Hope

Some days are just heavy, and the weight of them is almost too much to bear.  We need laughter to help release the emotions that we have been well practiced in holding back.  Reading Bob Hope’s words today brought a memory back so strongly…

My mother died 21 years ago, and my heart still breaks from missing her.  My Grannie passed almost three years ago, but the memory of attending her service in New Orleans recently came to me like it was yesterday.   I not only mourned my grannie again, but the loss of my mother returned to the surface.  My grannie had taken care of my mother through her cancer.   I witnessed as she lovingly walked my mother, her child, to the end of her life.

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In New Orleans, LA most burial plots are above ground, and my mother was buried in a mausoleum.  Her plot belonged to my grandparents, and my understanding is there was room for three bodies, but not three coffins.   When my grandmother passed, and her body was to join her husband’s and their child’s.   My mother’s body was removed, wrapped and returned to the plot without her coffin.  Even I, as a grown woman, had a great deal of curiosity about this whole process.  So, I tried to peek into the curtain covered space.  When I did, I whispered, too loudly (there is quite an echo in the corridors),  “I want to see my mummy.”  As you can imagine some laughed with me and others did not.  But my quiet laugh turned into a fit of quiet giggles and my giggles to tears, and I felt so much better for the emotional release.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
 Ecclesiastes 3 (NRSV)

Has there been a time in your life when the seasons mingle together?  Spend time in the memory.  It is a moment of grace.