Farty Humor
For as long as I can remember, the humorous value of bodily functions has been deeply ingrained in my family. Whether someone starts to giggle uncontrollably as an odoriferous cloud spreads around them, or anything, anything at all, hints at the subject of farts, my family soon has tears of laughter running down their cheeks.
Strangely enough, we’ve always prided ourselves on our intellectual properties, our higher reasoning. Yet, relate a story involving someone passing gas, and all that brainpower disintegrates into a sobbing-with-laughter mess.
In the world of dementia, it can sometimes be a struggle to find things to talk about, let alone to laugh about. We lose so many ways to communicate with our loved ones, one after another, that it becomes more and more difficult to experience moments of closeness and understanding.
And so it was with unrestrained joy that I discovered that our family’s holy grail of humor not only survived in my mother, but flourishes. Sitting next to her as she lets one rip, and then breaks out in a cascade of laughter has me hugging and kissing her and laughing along with her.
In a way, dementia can be quite liberating. Tossing aside societal conventions for a roaring laugh about a fart that makes my mother’s wheelchair tremble is absolutely worth the multitude of offended stares it attracts; not to mention my 4-year old and 2-year old’s excitement to have a partner in crime in “stink-bombing” an entire room.
Over the course of the last year, my oldest sister has been working hard to clean out our parent’s storage unit. One day she found a cartoon of a little boy blowing with great effort into a trumpet; the only result of the efforts being a small music note hovering next to his behind. (I would have liked to post the image here. However, I couldn’t track down the copyrights, so thought better of it. If any of you know who holds the copyright, please, let me know, and I’ll see whether they let me post it.)
I have since taped that cartoon to my mother’s closet where she can see it from her bed. And, so many times when I’ve visited her, I’ve seen her studying the image with a smirk on her face and a twinkle in her eyes.
Dementia for me (in my mother) has been a journey of discovery, of unexpected twists and turns, many sad, but also a great many happy, enriching, and down-right funny. You never know where you might find a connection, some closeness, some shared memories; and it doesn’t pay to be picky and choosy. I intend to make every one of those moments count.