A Little Bit About Laughter

I used to get into a lot of discussions about God, faith, and religion with my mother during my teen years.  She was the only adult I knew who wouldn't ignore my spiritual confusion or berate me for feeling atheistic.  I think she got annoyed with me, but she's my mother.  She has a high tolerance for annoyance, or at least she should after having four children, all of whom are annoying, not in the least counting myself.  Furthermore, she can't stop interacting with me just because I ask questions about the nature of existence.  Darwin agrees with me.

Anyways, I remember one conversation where I brought up prayer, and my mother told me that post-operative patients who pray experience faster recovery times.  I didn't believe her at first, but then I did the research and discovered that she wasn't just filling my head with maternal niceties: patients actually do experience faster recovery times when they are faithful to a religious denomination and pray regularly.  Apparently, the act of praying relaxes the body, stimulates the mind, and keeps the patient's mood more level.  Whether this is a placebo effect or not, I can't deny it.  The science is actually out there, all conducted by competent medical officials and published in peer-reviewed journals.  Check out PubMed and you'll see what I mean.

Prayer isn't the only act that speeds up recovery and assists in the healing process though.  As I learned in my graduate Indigenous Literature class and my Aboriginal Education courses, laughter also has healing properties similar to prayer.  Laughter and, by extension, humour causes the body to relax, stimulates the mind, and keeps the patient's mood elevated or at the very least more level.  I don't mean to suggest that the effects on the body while laughing are the same as well praying, but they are nevertheless similar.

The reason I'm writing about praying and laughing is because the one thing that really sticks in my memory from Veronica Fedor's visit to our class was her laugh.  It was a whole-body laugh, a lean-your-head-to-the-sky laugh, an open-your-mouth-and-bare-your-teeth laugh.  It was a laugh that took all her intercostal muscles, diaphragm, lungs, heart, neck, throat, larynx, jaw, and tongue to accomplish, a laugh that started somewhere in the depths of her abdomen and rose up to the ceiling of the Bora Laskin auditorium with a strength and force greater than any army or nation.  Hers was a laugh with the weight of ages, one that turned terror into something else, something manageable, something that, in retrospect, could be laughed at.

It's hard to believe her face was the same as the one in her passport.  That Veronica was much more steely and stony than the woman who sat in front of us in the Bora Laskin.  It's difficult to imagine her smiling or laughing when those old photos were taken, but I can't imagine that laugh was born overnight.  That laugh was cultivated.  It was reinforced over the years to withstand the hardships, built like a prayer to accept what cannot be changed and see the humour in it, the dumb luck, the good fortune, and the wonder.