Grief is like laughter. It’s triggered by living. Something happens, something is said, a memory flashes and there it is, carbonating up from your belly or toes or throat. A laugh. You can’t help it. It just happens.

Like grief. Like my son’s birthday is the expiration on the carton of milk I recently bought for his sister’s boba teas. Like I saw a funny meme about Wayne’s World and I automatically hit the little arrow “send” button to forward to my dad, who’s been dead almost two years. Like a client tells me about her partner dying suddenly from a heart attack without heart disease at 50 and suddenly my Uncle Kimmy’s 40 year old, fluffy mustache, black Ray Bans and huge smile come into sharp focus in my mind’s eye, because he died like that, too, 30 something years ago. It just bubbles up.

Grief is like a time machine, like laughter. Like when we’d all crack up at my dad’s story of his boyhood hound dog, Question, who was scared of the back steps but would still bark there to be let in before running around to the front door’s not-scary steps. How I might as well have been right there with my teenage dad as he told the story for the hundredth time, getting up off the couch to open the front door, Question excitedly circling us before belonging to the kitchen for his food dish. Like when my baby, small enough to lay vertically on my lap, looked up at me and laughed for the first time, eyes shining, and there was nowhere else in the whole world but right there, right then. Like when “Build Me Up Buttercup” is background music at a kitchy boutique on the Oregon coast and I quietly sing along but I might as well be belting it out with Theresa as we shoved ourselves out the doors of our high school one sunny day, the year before she died driving too fast on a windy country road known for crashes.

Grief has all these different sizes and tenors and other emotions threaded through like laughter does, too. Like when the kids couldn’t go to the movie theatre (or the water park or their favorite restaurant or inside friends’ houses or school) during the pandemic and so we made our bedroom into a movie theatre- complete with tickets, concessions, and their own little chairs at the base of the bed- and we had the best, most fun, laughter filled, normal feeling night in a long continuum of weeks and months of constant uncertainty and disappointments. Like how I got my daughter from her dad once when she was 5 and relatively new to this one-parent-a-time business and she burst into tears the minute we drove away and all I could think to do was tell her how sad what was happening to her was and then roll the windows down, blast her favorite song and drive a little too fast down the highway, showing her that sometimes matching the intensity of the inside to the outside can be potent medicine, at least for a few moments.

Like how we think grief is only big and obvious. Like it’s only for death. As if it’s not the loss we feel after the baby is born or the vows are said or the new house paperwork is signed for the life we lived before all of this and how we’ll never be that person again. As if it’s not when your mission driven company, with your dedicated coworkers, unheard of benefits package and work you love, dissolves and you can’t find that kind of meaning or camaraderie at your job again. As if it’s not how time just keeps going and buildings that have always been there are torn down for standard-issue apartment complexes and your favorite restaurant shutters and you have to move somewhere completely new to you, anyway.

Grief is so natural, it’s like laughter. So woven into our daily lives. Sometimes so acute we can’t fight and sometimes just a little shutter through our bodies. Sometimes, grief is laughter and sometimes, laughting is grieving. The gift of both being complex and nuanced and human. Of just being a consequence of being alive.