by Claire A. Berman

As I took my seat in the audience, a hundred of us crammed into the ground floor of a college freshman dorm, I took inventory of the dads around me. They were all middle-aged, adorned in button-down shirts and a quiet pride for their kids that made me ache. I found myself irrationally upset at them for existing still, when mine no longer did.

A spare, black makeshift stage stood before us, with a hand-drawn “Harvard” insignia taped to a black curtain to set the scene for Legally Blonde: The Musical. The crowd grew hushed as a baby-faced student conductor raised his hands to the three-piece pit “orchestra.” They started to play, and then abruptly, the conductor lowered his hands and sat down again, the music extinguished. “Sorry,” he mouthed, palms up to the audience. “Too early.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. This first mishap had worried me that this would be embarrassing for the performers, who were college students in my friend’s amateur theater club. When the orchestra started playing again, Elle Woods burst onto the stage, a tattered blonde wig askew on her head, giving her a side part that went to her ear. The stage curtains repeatedly crashed into the actors. At one point, someone fell off the stage, and later, a large, heavy prop was accidentally left offstage, leaving Elle to lug it up a flight of stairs as she huffed through her lines and readjusted her lopsided wig.

My friend had convinced me to come to this performance, knowing how much I was struggling since my Dad died. I was thirty-four and didn’t know many people my age who’d lost a parent. Early grief was a gravity unto itself, tugging even the corners of my mouth toward the earth. If I felt a flash of happiness—joking with my nephews or laughing at a TV show—it was overtaken immediately by guilt for having any moments of pleasure in the wake of our family tragedy.

Laughing had become fraught in a way that surprised me, because I had grown up with a jokester Dad. He could inject levity into any situation, spinning a turn of phrase that would make our whole family crack up. “Please pick up two glazed donuts on way home, emaciated, haven’t eaten in half an hour,” he once texted my Mom. From him, I learned to cope with hard things by laughing. Yet now, this skill eluded me, compounding my sense of loss and lostness.

At first, as each mistake was laid bare, secondhand humiliation swelled in me for the performers. But if I was worried they’d be the butt of any jokes, I needn’t have been. The audience loved it. Each time an actor came on stage, their friends hooted with excitement. “Yoooo, that’s Danny!” remarked a backwards-hat bro, fist over his mouth. It didn’t matter that Danny was completely off-key. The audience was simply proud of Danny for trying.

In an unexpected way, something about this performance reminded me of grief. It was messy, and it could have been an irrecoverable downward spiral. And yet. The actors themselves start to break character and crack up. As one thing after another went wrong, and as the cast and crew good-naturedly recovered and kept going, I too gave into uncontrollable laughter along with the rest of the audience. And I thought about the night my Dad died.

That night, we drove from the ICU to my childhood home, suddenly foreign-feeling without him there. His notebook sat open on the dining table, full of random notes in his sloppy handwriting. Flipping through it, we stumbled on a list of punny Halloween jokes.

Why do ghosts make good cheerleaders? They have a lot of spirit. 

What do vampires take when sick? Coffin drops.

Maybe he’d been saving them for just the right moment. And here it was! Even dead, he was ready with jokes to lighten the mood.

“Geez, who died?” I could imagine him saying.

My mom began to giggle first, and soon my siblings and I were all shrieking with laughter as we read each joke aloud.

As the play ended, I joined the standing ovation, wiping tears from my eyes. It was the first time I had laughed that much since the night we’d come home from the hospital. And when familiar guilt threatened to creep in, I realized that, actually, I was doing exactly what my Dad had taught me to do.

So I let myself laugh. I let myself be my father’s daughter.

Image by Monica Sylvestre via Pexels