Dead and Gone… The Day the Stories Became Funny Again

By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of Funeral Cost Ontario One of the things that has surprised me over the years is that families rarely notice the day certain stories become funny again. It is not something anyone plans for, and there is certainly no conversation where people decide that enough time has passed. Like so many things in family life, the change seems to happen gradually until one day everyone realizes they have been laughing for the last ten minutes about something that, years earlier, they could barely bring themselves to mention. I have often thought that every family has a small collection of stories that eventually become part of its own language. They are not always the biggest moments in a person's life, either. More often they involve something that went spectacularly wrong, a vacation that did not go according to plan, an old family dog, a burned Christmas turkey, a car that refused to start at exactly the wrong moment, or a joke that somebody insisted on telling every year whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. Those stories seem to gather a little more detail every time they are told, and somewhere along the way the family stops worrying about whether every fact is perfectly accurate because that was never really the point. Immediately after someone dies, those stories can become strangely quiet. Not because people have forgotten them, but because everyone is trying to look after everyone else. Someone starts a story, hesitates for a moment, and lets the conversation drift somewhere else instead. Nobody says that certain stories should wait, it simply seems to happen. The interesting part is that nobody notices when the change begins. No one decides certain stories are safe to tell again. One day at some family function or on a call, somebody starts telling one almost without thinking about it. Maybe there's a brief pause while everyone decides where the story is headed, then someone interrupts because they are convinced it happened the year before. Another person insists everyone has remembered it wrong for years. Before long the discussion has drifted away from the loss entirely and into the familiar family debate about who actually remembers the story properly. By then, nobody is trying very hard to settle the argument because the disagreement has quietly become part of the story itself. I have seen that in my own family over the past couple of years since my father passed away. We now find ourselves telling many of the stories he loved to tell, along with plenty of stories about him. I honestly could not tell you when we started doing that again. I only know that somewhere along the way those conversations stopped feeling difficult and started feeling familiar. They have become some of the moments I enjoy most when we are together, and I suspect everyone around the table would probably say the same thing. What strikes me is that the stories themselves have not really changed. We probably have a little, but the details are still argued over. Somebody still remembers the ending differently. Someone else always adds the part everybody forgot. The stories continue to evolve in the way family stories always do, but they no longer feel tied to one particular day or one particular loss. They have simply found their way back into ordinary conversation, which is undoubtedly where they belonged all along. The longer I have watched families gather around kitchen tables, holiday dinners, birthday celebrations, and ordinary Sunday afternoons, the more I have come to believe that the stories we tell each other eventually find their own way home. Nobody decides when that should happen, and perhaps that is why it feels so natural when it finally does. One day the story is told again, somebody remembers a detail everyone else had forgotten, another person laughs before the ending arrives, and without anyone noticing exactly when it happened, the family has quietly welcomed that story back into the room.