I Laughed And Then I Felt Sick

It was about nine seconds and you have thought about it for nine months.

Somebody said something at the table. It was not even particularly funny; it was the ordinary kind of thing that a family finds funny because of who said it and how. And you laughed, properly, before you had decided anything.

And then something arrived so fast that you barely had time to register the laugh finishing. Not thought. Something physical, in the middle of your chest, and it had a word attached to it and the word was: how.

You got up about forty seconds later. You said something about the kitchen. You stood in there with your hands on the counter for a couple of minutes and then you came back in and you were fine for the rest of the day.

And nobody in that house knows any of it happened.

Let me say the first thing plainly, because I think you have been carrying the opposite for nine months. That laugh was not a betrayal, it was not a lapse, and it was not evidence that you have started to forget her.

And before anything else: if the months since have taken you somewhere past what a person can hold, 988 is a crisis line and it is answered, and a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust is a lawful place to go. Nothing here stands in for a qualified human being.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh

There is a list in Ecclesiastes that people usually quote for the rhythm of it, and it is worth reading as an actual inventory.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. (Ecclesiastes 3:4, King James Version)

Four items, in two pairs, and every one of them is listed as having a time.

Now, people read that as a sequence: first the weeping, then later, once a person has healed, the laughing. That is not what the verse says. It is a list of things that have their times, and nothing in it says the times cannot be four minutes apart.

Because they are. Anybody who has been through a real loss can tell you that weeping and laughing come within minutes of each other, sometimes in the same conversation, and that this is not a malfunction. The list is an inventory of what a human life legitimately contains. Not a schedule.

You have not jumped ahead of anything, and Scripture puts the laughing in the inventory of what has a time. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a laugh and a grief in the same afternoon without either one canceling the other, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 3:4 as a list rather than as an order of service.

And notice that mourning and dancing are in there too, which is the harder pair.

You are inside a list rather than behind on a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is present in both halves of that verse at once. The written word names all four as legitimate, and Ecclesiastes 3:4 does not say that one has to be finished before the other may begin.

What the guilt was actually saying

Now let me take the guilt apart, because I think the argument has been with the wrong sentence.

The word that arrived was: how. And underneath it was something more specific, which is roughly: if I can laugh at the table nine months after she died, then she must not have mattered as much as I thought.

That is the actual charge, and it is worth stating plainly because once it is stated it can be looked at.

And it rests on an assumption that is not true, which is that grief is a quantity that gets spent, and that any laughing must be coming out of the same account.

You were never spending one on the other, and Ecclesiastes 3:4 puts them side by side without any arithmetic between them. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman that her own laugh was not a withdrawal from anything, and Scripture lists the weeping and the laughing as separate items with separate times.

And here is what the laugh actually was, which is worth having. It was your body doing something it has always done in the company of people who love it. It was not a verdict about her. It was not a statement about how far along you are. It was nine seconds of a nervous system responding to a room.

If anything, it was evidence that you were in the room, which is more than most people manage on the first one.

You were in the room rather than absent from it, and the Holy Spirit is present in nine seconds of an ordinary human reflex. Ecclesiastes 3:4 keeps both times in the same short verse, and the written word never once treats a laugh as an accounting entry against a grief.

Say what you were laughing at

So here is the assignment, and it is not what you would expect.

Say out loud the thing that was funny, and say it to God.

Not the guilt. Not an explanation of the guilt. The thing itself: what was said, who said it, and why it was funny.

You are able to say what was funny out loud, and Scripture does not put that outside anything. The Spirit of God receives an ordinary human moment from a grieving woman, and it is written into Ecclesiastes 3:4 that there is a time to laugh listed beside the time to weep.

And I want to say why this rather than arguing with the guilt.

Arguing with it does not work. Nine months of trying have ended every time with neither conviction nor freedom, because guilt of that kind is not reached by reasoning.

Saying the thing out loud does something different. It takes a moment that has been treated as evidence and turns it back into an event. A thing that happened, at a table, that was funny, and that can be told.

And telling it to God specifically, rather than to a person, matters, because a person would reassure you and the reassurance would bounce off. Told to the one who was in the room at the time, it is simply reported.

You are reporting rather than confessing, and the Holy Spirit was in that room when it happened and does not need to be brought up to date. The written word puts a time to laugh into the inventory in plain terms, and Ecclesiastes 3:4 lists all four times without ranking them.