Saturday - 02/20/2021 — Six or seven years ago, a woman who is very dear to me was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. She spent a great deal of time getting various treatments. She lost her hair. She threw up a lot. There wasn’t anything I could do to help—except … I could bolster her with laughter, so I started emailing her a joke each day, numbering them. Day 1, day 2, day 3 …
That went on for a couple of hundred days until she’d healed enough not to need it. She thanked me and told me that there were a lot of days when she could barely comprehend the jokes, but that her husband or children always read them and at least they got a good boost from the laughter, and she enjoyed hearing them laugh as she lay there in the hospital. “You don’t need to send them anymore,” she told me. “They did their job, since laughter does heal (along with good medical care).”
So, I stopped sending them. Fortunately, I’d kept copies of them in a Word document, which meant that 725 days ago, when another dear friend of mine told me she’d been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, I pulled them out, dusted them off, and began sending them again.
You know what a really good part of this is? I get the healing power of the laughter as well. Every day.
Here’s a sample from a year ago. Go ahead and laugh a little. It feels good.
