“I nearly died laughing.”

We’ve all heard this remark when something very funny occurs. What if the words were reversed to say, “I nearly laughed dying?”

When I speak with friends who are in their twilight years, the conversation inevitably gets to our aches and pains and the decline of everything from the neck down as well as the cataracts that slowly grow larger behind our eyeballs. There are more doctors’ visits, scheduled surgeries, and an army of prescription bottles that sit on top of refrigerators waiting to go to war against indigestion, high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, and arthritic pain.

As our bodies diminish our mobility and our quality of life, we try to manage the decline to avoid the day we have to be dependent on others to live out the rest of our lives. This is the grim reality of aging. There’s not much tread left on our tires.

Yet, we have one thing we can still have no matter what condition we are in; one capability that disease can never steal from us despite how bad our body aches right up to the moment of our last breath.

That one thing is a sense of humor.

You might say, dying is no laughing matter and you are 100% right, but there are many examples of spoken words that might have brought emotional relief to the dying and left the living with a wonderful memory

My sister suffered from an undetectable and uncurable illness for eight years that eventually took her life. Her husband took her across country to every possible pain clinic and diagnostic center they hoped would find her some relief from chronic pain.

When hope was finally lost and she realized that her death was imminent, she said to me one day in a weak and raspy voice, “I’ve given up praying to God to help me. I’m going to ask Santa Claus if he could give me a gift of one day when I can be free of pain.” We shared a good laugh. These would be the last words she would ever say to me.

Author Michael Bassey Johnson wrote, “You know the laughter that proceeds from the heart by the way it sounds, and how it makes you feel.”

When doctors told my very good friend that cancer had spread throughout his body and he had but days to live, this man who told jokes and made everyone laugh for years, called his son who was completely unaware what his father was about to say to him.

“Hey son, I’m ready to cross over. You want my four-wheeler? It has a full tank of gas.” He said that in one quick breath. Of course, his humor was not so obvious at that moment, but when his son repeated his father’s words at the funeral, the entire room was full of belly laughs.

Of course, the irony is incredible. Who laughs at their own demise? Before she was beheaded during the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette stepped on her executioner’s foot and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t do that on purpose.” Just before he was about to be electrocuted after he was convicted of murder, James Donald French lifted his head and said, “How’s this for your headline? French Fries!”

In the throes of fatal pneumonia, Groucho Marx said, “Die? Why that’s the last thing I’ll do.” Poet Oscar Wilde, moments before he passed away, said, “The wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.” Writer O’ Henry remarked, “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Just before he took his last breath, Australian politician Georg Appel said to his friends standing at his bedside, “Well, gentleman, your about to see a baked Appel.” Actor Humphrey Bogart’s last words were, “I never should have switched from scotch to martinis.” Comedian WC Field’s final remark was, “I’m looking for loopholes.” When entertainer Bob Hope’s wife asked him where he wanted to be buried, his final two words were, “Surprise me.” Radio announcer Charles Gussman said, “And now a word from our sponsor.”

My father never laughed much. I remember him being sick all the time before complications from emphysema ended his life. One night at the supper table, he, my mother and I ate without speaking as usual. Suddenly, my father dropped his fork to his plate and said, “I’m so sick even my hair hurts.” Mom and I looked at him. I couldn’t hold back. I started to laugh. Then mom laughed and then Dad laughed. It was the only time I remember that we enjoyed a moment of levity together. He would soon go onto a long coma before passing away.

Many years ago, a high school coach died a month or so after he had said this to me. “At my funeral, I’m going to have my wife tie a string to my thumb and every time someone who never came to see me when I was alive comes up to my casket to pay their respects, my wife will pull the string and lift my finger up to my nose.”

When all else fails and the end is near, if we have the opportunity for last words, why not say something funny before the inevitable happens?

I once heard someone say to me, “Life is a joke and death is the punch line.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com