Now That's a Good One

Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma.  After six weeks of radiation, it was history, and I had moved on with my life.

Little did I know at the time, I'd one day face its souped-up, muscular, and brutish cousin: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma...

So about a month after my diagnosis with this new and nastier lymphoma, my brother-in-law Thomas messages me on Facebook to ask this question:

What do you call someone who keeps getting lymphoma?

I don't know, I replied, what do you call someone who keeps getting lymphoma?

His reply: A lymphomaniac!

Now I don't know what your reaction is upon hearing a joke like that, especially proffered over the cold blue and white medium of a Facebook post, but my immediate reaction was to double over in laughter and call my wife over to the computer to laugh with me.

For my brother-in-law had just accomplished what in my family can only be described as a coup-de-grace.

He had combined word play, my personal health history, my current health crisis, my sometimes manic personality, and in the space of five well-played syllables, he had poked gentle fun at the whole lot of it.

In my family, making a good play on words, a really good one, one that weaves together various layers of meaning and history--now that's an accomplishment.  And my brother-in-law had just made a master stroke.  So I did my best to parry.

Now I can write a book, I wrote back between chortles--Living with Lymphomania: A Very Short Story.

Well, the conversation went on from there, and in your estimation, gentle reader, it may have still had yet a ways to go in order actually to arrive anywhere in the vicinity of Funny.

But there's something biblical, even theological, about a word like my brother-in-law coined that both names a reality and laughs at it.

Isaac, whose name means laughter, was the embodiment of the absurd notion that life could spring from the dead--namely an old man and old woman who were long past child-bearing (much less child rearing!) age.

Jesus, himself the Word made Flesh, remade words and reshaped vocabularies throughout his ministry:

He teased Nicodemus by saying "Be born anothen." Nicodemus heard it to mean be born "again," though it could easily mean be born "from above."

He nicknamed his star disciple "the Rock" without specifying whether it was a moniker of strength or a harbinger of his later tendency to crack under high pressure.

He even nicknamed the two rowdy brothers in his band, calling them "sons of thunder," which makes me think their fusses must have sometimes led to some grumbles, if not outright rumbles.

All of this leads me to the conviction that what my brother-in-law did for me is something God's been trying to help us do ever since Adam and Eve decided "to get serious" about gardening by trying some of the stuff God said was strictly for God.  To help us learn to laugh at ourselves: our weaknesses, our fears, our illnesses, our sins.  None of them, in the end, is strong enough to separate us from God.  God is like a parent watching a two-year-old stumble along with her father's backpack, acting the whole time like "I got this..." God laughs at our attempts to prop ourselves up, to act like we're getting along just fine. And what makes God laugh even louder and longer?  When we get the joke, too.  When we see that the joke finally is on death.  And the punch line, delivered in Person by the Word-Made-Flesh two millenia ago, reverberates through the ages like a deep and resonant laugh, inviting all who hear it to look into the darkness and chuckle: Now that's a Good One.