Dead Brothers Aren't Funny

Now that Kyle is dead, I have to tell people about it. I try not to do it too often - it's a pretty big burden to drop on a casual acquaintance - but occasionally I find myself with a choice to make: I can either tell someone I don't know too well that my brother died this past summer, or I can lie.

Last week, I met with my craft teacher to discuss the lack of progress my fiction's been making these days. She asked about my "novel" - eighty directionless pages set in Cayucos, a beach town my family used to visit in the summers - and I told her that I couldn't really work on it anymore, at least not now, and that I was flailing around, looking for other subject matter.

"Short stories?"

"Well, yes, but I really still want to write a novel, see. I'm craving a longer project--"

"But you already have a novel. Why aren't you working on it?"

I looked away. Should I tell her the truth - that this novel of mine is set in a real place with a real beach and my brother and I in sweatshirts and shorts would take real dollar bills to a real candy store with huge glass jars and buy plastic bags of candy to eat while we watched old men fish off the pier? That the fact that my novel lacked a plot and a purpose was the least of its problems, because the real reason I couldn't write about Cayucos was my brother, who was dead?

I started to bullshit. "Well, it was a pretty ambitious project, a bit more than I could chew, really..." But I trailed off. I was here for help, she might as well have all the facts.

Then, before I could start over, before I could affect the tone and stance of the bereaved and softly explain that there had been an accident, I did the most inappropriate thing.

I laughed.

I laughed kind of wearily, like I was about to launch into a three-part story about how my laptop caught a nasty virus and now the tech people were having trouble retrieving my Word files.

And while laughing, I learned something: laughter is the wrong preface to a death announcement. It throws people off, sets them up for a humorous anecdote, not news of a kid dying. Laughing, you sound like you don't take the death seriously, like you're more concerned about making someone uncomfortable than the death of your loved one. It makes you sound crazy.

So I laughed, pulled myself together, and told my teacher that my brother had died. I could see her trying to figure out what I was saying, the expressions clashing on her face as she guessed how to respond.

We got everything clear, eventually. She asked what happened, how old he was, and expressed her condolences. And then she said what I was afraid she'd say: that I could never expect to find, or fix, a novel if I wasn't writing fiction every day.

I thanked her and left. I would take her advice. I would write fiction everyday. But first I would go home and write a blog about inappropriate laughter, because I'm not crazy. Or cold-hearted. I laughed because there is something inherently funny about that moment before you tell someone that your 22-year-old brother died in a train accident. Here you are, holding this really horrible information and someone asks you for it, and you know that they don't really want it, that it's awful and sad and will just make their day worse for knowing, but they're asking you and you don't want to be rude or a liar so you're going to give it to them. But before you do you laugh, because man, they have no idea what they're getting themselves into.

I don't regret telling my teacher about my brother, even if I did seem crazy. Maybe she'll look on me a little more kindly when my attention drifts in class. But, in the future, I have to remember not to laugh first. You can't laugh and then dump news like that on someone. That's why we have things like social cues and body language - information of that magnitude needs to be prefaced. Otherwise, it's too much of a shock to the system.