Laughter Is the Best Medicine All people have at one point in their lives felt some type of pain either emotionally or physically. Perhaps it was you breaking a bone, or maybe your grandmother passing. And I’m sure all of you have found something that makes those times a little easier to deal with. I personally have always found it easier to cope when you are inflicted by pain to find some humor in the situation to make the situation a little more tolerable. Whether faced with the pain of injury or being hurt emotionally, I have always found that just a bit of laughter can make the situation one hundred times better. When I lived in Alaska, my family and I faced some of the harshest winters on record. Moving from Maryland where it was odd if we even accumulated a foot of snow during the winter months, we were in for a big change. We moved to Anchorage Alaska in January, right in the middle of the winter. I had never seen so much snow in my life. Because of so much snow accumulation, businesses would constantly have to use giant snowplows to remove all of the snow from the parking lots. After the plows had scraped all the snow off the top of the surface, it was not out of the ordinary for there to be a solid sheet of ice covering the parking lots. Being a new resident of the state, I underestimated at how much ice would actually be throughout the parking lot. When the parking lots were full of ice I always thought that it was the most fun thing in the world to slide across the ice on my feet. I found this fun and all, until one day it took a turn for the worst. We were at the local Wal-Mart and we had just got dumped on with four feet of snow. The snowplows were right in the middle of clearing out the parking lot so they were leaving paths of solid ice, perfect for sliding on. My mom never fancied me sliding across the ice. She would always say “You’re going to hurt yourself” being the little rebel I was I refused to listen to my mom and started to run at full speed so that I could slide to my full potential. I started my slide flawless like always, but coming up was a patch of concrete that was uncovered by ice. I didn’t even notice it until I was plummeting to the earth full force. All I felt was my face crushing against the ground. I thought to myself “My nose is surely broken”. I tried to recover from the spill quickly and with style so that I wouldn’t have to deal with my mother and brother making fun of me. I got up and my brother was already rolling on the ground with laughter. My mom also had come to a sudden stop and was laughing more than I had ever seen her laugh before. Both of them were too busy laughing that they couldn’t even come to see if I was okay. Instead my brother comes up to me still in the midst of his laughter trying to do a play by play of what had happened. My frown was instantly turned into rolling laughter as I could begin to just imagine how foolish I had to have just looked. The laughter almost instantly made me forget about the injury that had just happened to my face. For weeks after the incident, every time I would look at my injuries in the mirror I would just laugh at myself and at how foolish I was.
Another time that laughter presented itself and made a hurtful time easier to deal with, was when our Golden Retriever Chloe passed away. That dog was a part of our family for 12 years and it was the toughest thing to deal with when she died. But of all times to find laughter I found it when we were burying her in our backyard. My dad had dug a hole right out between 2 trees in the woods behind our house to put her in. The ceremony had every intention of being completely serious, to mourn the death of our dog. But then the mood was lightened a little bit. We buried the dog and my mom thought it would be a good idea to go around and say our fondest memory of Chloe. I started by saying how much I liked it when she he would come and wake me up every morning by jumping on my bed and lick my face. My dad talked about how she had been such a good dog to take camping and hunting. My mom always loved just having someone to cuddle with. Then my brothers turn came and he made us all look out into the woods, and in the brush was a pair of underpants. We all knew that Chloe had taken a liking to stealing the underpants out of the dirty clothes and ripping them apart outside. At that instant we all got giant smiles on our faces and broke out in laughter. What had intended to be a sad day instantly turned into not a day of mourning but a day of celebrating the life of our dog. When bitter things present themselves in life, I’m sure everyone has their own way of coping with the situation trying to make it good as possible. Laughter has always been my way of getting out of those problems and getting through life with a smile on my face. No matter what, laughter is always there to make the hurt, hurt less. I will continue to cherish the moments where laughter has brought happiness into an otherwise rough situation.