A good laugh can be the best of medicines

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

There are often funny moments in our lives that make us laugh. Cycling home from work last Wednesday I started laughing at something that happened at work that  day. My laughing was so severe or intense that my bicycle actually swerved and for a microsecond I thought I was going to land on the ground.

Earlier in the afternoon there was a reception for Margaret, who was retiring after 45 years and seven months working in the catering department in our hospital.

As readers will know I work as a hospital chaplain. 

It’s a job that brings me face-to-face with pain and suffering. I’ve learned firsthand how fragile we are. But there are also moments of humour and laughter.

I began in the job six years ago. I had come from working in the press office in Concern Worldwide and before that The Kerryman newspaper. Both jobs involved scribbling. Chaplaincy was new territory.

 

The first days I was nervous, had a feeling of being out of place and not quite sure what I was to do. I knew no one in the hospital. I once heard a university chaplain say that his job involved ‘loitering with intent’. That’s how I felt in my first days as chaplain.

Every time Margaret passed me she would say: ‘Hello Fr Michael’. She gave me my first tiny sense of feeling as if I belonged here. Last Wednesday at our reception I told the gathering how Margaret had welcomed me. I said that during my first days in the hospital I was shy and nervous and how Margaret had been such a help to me in settling in and most likely she had no idea the lovely effect she had on me. 

Having said my few words, just as I sat down, the staff member sitting beside me said: ‘Shy me arse’. It was brilliant, brilliant in every respect, the timing, the wit, the way she said it, the spontaneity, the sarcasm, the pure funniness, the context, the moment and in the company of the people who were there. It was something direct out of a Brendan Behan, James Joyce or Samuel Beckett work. 

A one liner with a perfect fit in either of Roddy Doyle’s films The Commitments or The Snapper. And there could never have been any sort of a sensible reply. Pure magic.

It so happens that Margaret reads this column every week as it’s her regional newspaper, so in the weeks before she retired I approached her on many occasions and asked her if she would sit down and I’d write a column about her. Every time I asked her in her own quiet way she ran me. 

On the day of her retirement party I asked her again. This time she told me in no uncertain terms what to do with myself. Another moment for a great laugh.

The daughter of a former patient came to me and told me how wonderful Margaret had been to her father when he had been in our hospital. He also noted how funny she was. 

That says it all about a wonderful woman who gave a life of service to sick people. She gave a good laugh to so many of our patients. And she was also the cause of my breaking down in laughter having been ‘rebuked’ for saying I was shy.

Happy retirement Margaret and I shall miss you.