In Loving Mockery

If I cannot make fun of a dead man, then who, exactly, is left for me to mock?

If ridicule is reserved only for the living, for the warm and oxygenated, then what are we to do with those who once laughed, once sulked, once slammed cabinet doors, cried in on the shower floor, and said ridiculous things in the kitchen at 8:14 p.m.?

What special immunity does death confer, that life did not?

Perhaps you worry he will haunt me for it.

I can only hope.

There are days I think I would welcome a haunting—some small, petulant disturbance in the night, some evidence that he is still, in some infuriating way, available to me. A door shifting on its hinge. A lamp flickering. The sudden feeling of being watched while I say, to an empty room, You always were a drama queen.

If I am honest, there are moments I miss him in precisely this register.

Not in the grand, cinematic ways grief is supposed to announce itself, but in the stupid, ordinary way of missing his annoying habits, his predictable indignations, the particular shape his face took when he was offended by something that was, almost always, true.

I miss making fun of him to his face.

I miss making fun of him behind his back.

I miss the way he would pretend not to enjoy the attention of being known that well.

And if your objection is that the dead cannot defend themselves, I would gently remind you that he was never especially gifted at defense in the first place.

Besides, what is haunting if not rebuttal?

What is a ghost, if not someone still refusing to let the conversation end?

Because this, too, is how love works.

Not only in tenderness, not only in reverence, but in teasing, in laughter, in the exquisite familiarity of knowing exactly where another person is soft. We learn each other’s weak seams, the little unguarded places beneath the armor, and—if we are lucky, if we are close enough—we press there gently, sometimes not so gently, just to feel the proof of life beneath it.

To love someone is, in part, to know where they are ridiculous.

To love someone well is to know it with and without cruelty.

To be loved well is to be seen in your absurdity and missed anyway.

So why should death make saints of the people who never were?

Why should it sand down all their foolish edges,

bleach them into solemnity,

make them too sacred to laugh at?

If I loved him in life by joking with him, by needling him, by rolling my eyes and laughing at the exact same flaws I once secretly found endearing, then perhaps the truest way to keep loving him now is not silence, but continuation.

Not canonization.

Not polite grief.

Not the false dignity of pretending he was better, smoother, kinder, or less ridiculous than he really was.

No—let me love him as he was.

Annoying. Stupid. Defenseless. Awful. Rude. Selfish. Pouting.
A man I would marry and divorce, and possibly be stupid enough to do it again.

Shouldn’t death, if it means anything at all, at least permit us the mercy of honesty?

And shouldn’t love, if it is real, survive even that?