If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry
Death is something that I believe has followed me my entire life with a form of no escape. My family and I have often discussed how we feel like we may be cursed due to the amount of funerals that we have attended.
The first death I remember experiencing was my grandmother’s during my freshman year of high school. After that loss, it felt like they never stopped. Next, it was my mom’s best friend, my aunt, my uncle, another uncle and distant relatives. I started to notice that someone in my family would die every year without fail.
At first, I thought they were just coincidences but, after successive years of losses, I began to question if the bad things that happen really have no correlation.
Just this past weekend, my dad got a call that one of his college best friends had passed away. I have become so desensitized to death that when I see anyone get a call and have a shocked look on their face, I wonder, “Who died?”
My friends have always joked that I could be Batman due to all the death and bad luck I’ve experienced. I’ve learned to develop a sense of humor over everything because it helps me navigate my emotions better.
I have never been good at handling my emotions, so I tend to bottle them up.
I had never cried at a funeral until last year, where I didn’t expect to cry as much as I did. For some reason, my uncle’s death last June hit me harder than others, and I never really understood why as each person that I have lost has influenced my life in an immense way. I believe everything came crashing down with the stress of school and having to attend the funeral services. I became overwhelmed.
Before that, I had only ever cried at shows or movies. After his funeral, I felt like I was just going through the motions of life, but everything felt a bit odd.
I ended up watching one of my favorite childhood movies a few days after the funeral, “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” by Zach Helm, just to have a sense of normalcy and try to make myself feel better. I enjoyed the movie when I was a child because I loved the idea of owning a toy store. While rewatching, I noticed the movie also focuses on the stages of grief, which I hadn’t remembered.
There is a specific scene I loved as a child: A kid is run over by an enormous dodgeball as the sentient, magical toy store starts misbehaving because it feels its owner is close to passing away.
The movie helped me grieve the deaths in my family because it showed me that everyone in our lives may influence us in different ways.
I think my uncle may have influenced my life unintentionally because he would always ask me to grab him a copy of the school newspaper when I would come to campus.
The last time he asked me to grab him a newspaper, I kept forgetting to give it to him, never once thinking I would end up working for The Rider.
