Love Bites: What Remains of a Laugh

My cousin Kenneth had a laugh that made you feel you had said something far more interesting than you actually had. This was his gift and, depending on the situation, his curse. Once, during a family gathering in which my aunt had served a stew of uncertain origin, Kenneth laughed at something I said about the meat and everyone assumed I had made a joke. I had not. I was genuinely asking.

He was the kind of person you wanted in your corner, not because he was particularly useful in a crisis (as he was not) but because he made the crisis feel like material: something to be examined, turned over, laughed at from a safe distance. We were going to get old together and be terrible about it. We had an agreement.

Karatina, June 2025 – a stray bullet. The phrase has a bureaucratic tidiness to it that I find genuinely offensive, as though death, when it cannot be attributed, simply gets filed under miscellaneous.

I keep returning to the laugh. The way it had no agenda. The way it arrived ahead of the rest of him into every room, announcing: "Something good is about to happen, adjust yourselves accordingly." Grief, I have discovered, is mostly just love with nowhere to go. You keep producing this love and there is no address for it anymore and so it sits in you, taking up room – and, occasionally, embarrassing you in public.

Last month, at the local butchery, a man behind me laughed at something on his phone. It was not Kenneth’s laugh. It was not even close. But it began like his – that little intake of breath like a man about to dive into water, and by the time the butcher turned to ask what I wanted, my eyes had filled and my voice had gone somewhere. The butcher waited. The man behind me kept laughing. I stood there, a grown man crying at meat.

Kenneth would have found this very funny. He would have laughed that laugh. I would have pretended it was only about the meat.