“The Last Laugh: A Love Story”

Beyond Words Literary Magazine, August 2024

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me ...
-Christina Rosetti

In the summer of 1973, sandwiched between our junior and senior year of high school, our job was mowing our church’s cemetery weekly. It was just Joelle and me, guiding two old push mowers around an acre of gravestones in the stifling midwestern summer heat. By the second week, we were sick of the humidity and exhausted by acres of mowing and trimming. We were, however, happy for some spending money, for the satisfaction of getting a job that they usually gave to the boys, and for the fun we had working together.

Carefully we mowed and trimmed around graves proclaiming deaths as old as a hundred years and as recent as this summer. Some names I knew: my grandpa, a great uncle, the old woman who gave me candy on Sunday morning when my mother wasn’t looking. The gravestone of the old woman reminded me of Sunday mornings sitting on the wooden church bench beside her, waiting for her to open her big black purse and pull out the striped Neapolitan Coconut Bars she stowed there.

Most graves were long covered over with green grass, but one was still bare dirt heaped atop a newly-dug grave. This mound covered the body of a boy our age who had died in a plane crash that spring, a disquieting reminder that, despite our youthful hopes and delusions, we were not immortal.

We stopped frequently to rest under a hickory tree, to drink ice water or lemonade, and to talk. The job was monotonous and the heat was suffocating. Regardless, we laughed a lot—at ourselves, at our community, and at the world around us. In these moments of rest, we shared places we wanted to see, things we hoped to experience. Our future seemed promising enough, better than these boring, stressful high school days.

On one break, late that summer when the temperature hovered near 100, Joelle sat up and stared at me with her characteristic forcefulness. “I want you to promise me something.”

I picked at the weeds, put a blade of jimson grass between my thumbs and blew a shrill whistle before responding. I knew how to hold her intensity at arm’s length. “Okay. But I need to know what it is before I promise.”

“Promise me first,” she said.

“Not going to happen.” I was determined to hold out.

She must have heard my edge, because for once, she didn’t insist. “Someday, wherever you are when you hear that I’m dead, I want you to laugh.”

I looked at her and started to laugh, but she stopped me. “I’m. Dead. Serious. I need to know that someone will laugh when I die.” I told her that people would think I’m crazy if I laughed at her funeral, but she shrugged. “Why would you care? It’s what I want.”

We entered our senior year that fall, followed the Watergate hearings closely, attended our high school’s basketball games across the state. We studied, partied and prayed with our youth group, and went to the Junior-Senior Banquet together. We were the wallflowers of our high school, but we laughed at everything. That’s what I remember most—the never-ending laughter. In the spring, we graduated from high school, ready to move on. When I thought of my future, I thought that no matter where I ended up, Joelle would be nearby. We never discussed her request again.

For several years, we kept touch. I was Maid of Honor at her wedding. She moved to Texas, married a minister, and began having kids. I was restless and moved around the country for a few years before starting classes at the university. By then, we had stopped writing letters, stopped timing our visits home to coincide. Our lives had gone in decidedly different directions.

I have not yet heard that she died. I wonder sometimes if she remembers what she made me promise that long-ago summer. I haven’t forgotten. For years I wondered how I’ll feel when I find out that she has taken her last breath.

With the passing of years, I don’t wonder anymore if I will be able to fulfill her wish. I will laugh. And when I laugh, I will be remembering that lazy summer afternoon so long ago when we chatted in the shade of the hickory trees between rounds mowing the cemetery. I will be thinking about the fun we shared even though we didn’t quite fit in anywhere. And I will laugh in gratitude for this memory of  my once-upon-a-time best friend who just wanted to know that someone will laugh when she dies.

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