Tears of a Clown

While spending time with my mother during her last few days at the curiously named "Crosslands" nursing facility, I found myself thinking about how tricksters are mediators between life and death, boundary crossers, gods of the crossroads, and the significance of being human and somehow not entirely human in a situation where death is close at hand. I found myself pondering the need for deathbed humor, and wishing I could come by more of it. I found myself thinking about how tricksters are not always so hilarious.

The trickster experience is the human experience, the navigation of dealing with uncertainty in an often scary universe, of trying to make some sort of sense of the seeming entropy of our existence. What good can come of this terrible thing that is in front of me?

Well, at her funeral, there was laughter..... talk of her leaving the car running all through church, memories of her pedaling across town on an undersized bike trying to rescue my sister on the back of my dad's car in her fuzzy carpet slippers, and dropping one on the way, images of her -- at 78 -- sledding down a snow covered hill and laughing.... her stories, her smiles... This is the emergent phenomenon, the tricksterly outgrowth of release from pain.

But I also know that tricksters must cry.