I Laughed and Felt Guilty

Every page on this site starts here and this one does too. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing here is treatment, and nothing on this page ever takes the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If the one you look after has you worried, ring somebody qualified today. That is not fussing, that is the first useful thing.

Now. It happened in the kitchen, probably.

Something on the radio, or something your sister said on the phone, or a completely stupid thing the dog did. And you laughed. Properly laughed, the kind that surprises you, the kind that takes a second to come back from.

And then it stopped, and the house came back into focus, and the next feeling arrived within about two seconds and it was not a good one.

I want to name that second feeling exactly, because I think you have been carrying the wrong word for it. It is not respect and it is not grief. It is guilt, and it is aimed at your own laughing, and you have been quietly punishing yourself for it ever since.

Joy is named as a strength, not as a lapse

There is a line in Nehemiah, said on a day when people were weeping, and the thing I want you to see is what joy is called.

Neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:10, King James Version)

Your strength. Not your reward. Not your luxury. Not the thing to be enjoyed once the difficulty is finished and everybody is well.

Strength is a working word. It is what a person carries a load with. And it is said to people who were in the middle of something hard, on a day when weeping was the natural response and was happening all around.

You are being handed joy as equipment rather than as a treat, and equipment has never once been something to apologize for using. Nehemiah 8:10 puts the joy of the Lord and the word strength in the same short clause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a carer stop treating her own laughter as theft.

And look at who it is said to. Not to people at a party. To people who were sorry, in the middle of it, being told plainly not to be.

You have been trying to carry this with the one thing that was given to you to carry it with put down. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a working word back its meaning, and it is written that the joy is the strength, which makes the laughing part of the load bearing rather than a break from it.

What your laughing does to the person in that bed

Let me say the practical half, because it is the half that will actually move you.

A sick house that has no laughing in it is a frightening place to be ill in. That is the part nobody says to carers. The person in that bed is reading the atmosphere all day long, because they cannot do anything else, and a house that has gone completely solemn tells them something about how bad this is.

Your laughing is information to them, and the information is good.

You are giving somebody a signal that nothing else in that house can give them. Nehemiah 8:10 addresses a whole gathered people and tells them what their strength is, in the plural, as a shared thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a carer what her own voice is doing in the next room.

And there is a second thing. The guilt is not neutral. It teaches you to suppress, and a person who suppresses the laughing usually ends up suppressing everything, and what is left is a very quiet, very careful person in a house that badly needs a living one.

You were never asked to become quiet, and no household has ever once been served by a person switching themselves off. The Spirit of God is the one who stops a carer sanding herself down, and what is written forbids the sorrow in that verse rather than the joy.

The plain routing, and a laugh is not one of the things it covers

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on an article for carers it points both ways.

If something is happening right now with the person you look after, that is 911, and it goes ahead of everything else here. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, and particularly if what stopped is not only the laughing but everything, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if you have not been looked at in a long time, that is a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are inside every one of those lines, and being the one on her feet has never once put anybody outside them. Nehemiah 8:10 speaks to people in the middle of a hard day rather than to people who have come out the far side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a carer to make a call about herself.

I want to underline the middle one. If the laughing stopped months ago and has not come back at all, that is not guilt and it is not respect, and it is worth saying out loud to somebody trained.

You have a plain thing to report and it has never once been too small to mention. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a conversation about a carer rather than a patient, and what is written puts joy in the same sentence as strength, which makes its absence worth noticing.