Being funny...

I was at a MS support group the other day and joking in that graveyard way a lot of us with MS have about the changes in the disease, the weird things that go on, the humour in our everyday challenges. It seems to me that a lot of us with MS have that kind of humour - there isn't much that can be done for the disease, so we may as well laugh and get on with things. As we can, lurching merrily about and etc, dropping things, wobbling here and there...

But one lass took exception to our joking about.  She was seriously upset about MS and felt we weren't taking things with the right sense of gravitas. She was right.  We weren't. Right then.

MS is so often invisible because we don't get seen when we are down and out.  We go to ground, we hide at home, we don't answer the phone, we rarely speak.  We deal with our sorrows and losses privately, knowing that there is a limit on what we can expect friends to tolerate, that daily complaints just bring us down, that our private struggles don't make for good press.  The disease doesn't go away, it doesn't get better, we aren't "fighting" it like one does with cancer (because fight as we might, we can't beat it).  It becomes boring to share. Even a disease like MS that changes every day can become same old, same old.
This doesn't mean we don't spend several days of our lives destroyed by grief, or struggling to get anything done, or depressed to black.

When we get together, we share our challenges, but we also have a good laugh.  People who don't deal with this chimera of a disease don't understand what we go through, and it feels so good to laugh with those who can nod and add to the joking. It helps. Like this drawing by Bill Watterson, seeing others laugh can't help but make you smile.

So I say, let's laugh, giggle, snort, guffaw, and hoot this disease into the corner as often as we can.  It will creep out again, but let's enjoy our sorrow-free moments.  Let's wallow in them.