Hospice alters the emotional order in ways I never anticipated. Grief no longer waits for death; it arrives early and without ceremony, reshaping the landscape of each day. The hours become an uneven mixture of gratitude and sorrow, a daily choreography in which tenderness and despair take turns leading. To sit beside someone you love as they slowly recede is to inhabit two realities at once. You care for a living body while grieving the person already slipping from reach. This dissonance exhausts you in ways that naming alone cannot relieve. And so, when the emotional weight begins to compress the chest, you look instinctively for the smallest openings. For me, those are moments of humor, absurdity, or surprise that allow you to breathe.
It was in that state that I found myself returning again and again to an engraving from 1774, The Most Effectual Method of Recovering a Drowned Person. At first glance, it is a piece of comic grotesque: a limp figure stretched on a riverbank while earnest men attempt resuscitation through the rather spectacular method of blowing tobacco smoke, rectally, into the body. The scene is almost slapstick in its composition: a dramatic river, a twisted tree, and a group of well-meaning men performing a procedure that appears as outlandish as it is invasive. Yet the more I sat with it, the more it offered a strangely appropriate form of comfort. Its absurdity functioned as a release valve, giving me permission to laugh without guilt while navigating the emotional terrain of hospice care.
The humor makes more sense within its historical frame. In eighteenth-century Europe, sudden death was a persistent cultural anxiety, particularly drowning which claimed thousands of lives annually in rapidly expanding cities. The Royal Humane Society, newly formed, promoted resuscitation techniques with evangelical fervor, including the now-infamous tobacco-smoke enema. The printmakers of London seized on this moment with a blend of satire and social commentary. Prints like this one exposed the line between scientific advancement and public desperation, mocking the earnestness of men who wanted so badly to conquer mortality that they embraced any method promising even a sliver of hope.
What strikes me now is how sincerely these figures seem to believe in what they’re doing. Their technique may be laughable, but their desire to save a life is not. The satire targets the method, not the yearning. That distinction matters, because caregiving, whether in 1774 or now, is always an act caught between limited tools and limitless love.
Psychologists describe hospice-era mourning as ambiguous loss. It is a grief without closure, a sorrow without finality. Pauline Boss writes that ambiguous loss “freezes the grief process,” leaving the bereaved suspended between hope and resignation. That is exactly how these days feel. I cannot fully mourn my grandmother while she is still breathing, and I cannot fully celebrate the time remaining because each breath feels borrowed. The mind oscillates between presence and anticipatory absence. Every kindness becomes both a gift and a farewell.
It reminds me of another moment in my life when grief and humor collided in unexpected harmony. When my grandfather, her husband, died in 2002, the sorrow was overwhelming. It was raw, unmediated, and immediate. After the funeral, heavy with exhaustion and the ache of such a sudden goodbye, my brother, my friends, and I went to the movies simply because we needed somewhere to put our emotions. Austin Powers in Goldmember was playing. We sat in that darkened theater and laughed harder than felt reasonable. Tears and laughter blended into something cathartic. It was grief’s tension easing through ridiculousness. I didn’t understand it then, but I felt its truth: the body reaches for humor when sorrow becomes uncontainable.
Now, as I sit beside my grandmother, listening to the irregular rhythm of her breathing, I feel that familiar collision once more. My days are spent adjusting blankets, moistening lips, repositioning pillows. All tasks that carry the quiet solemnity of ritual, not cure. These actions do not repair the body; instead, they honor it. Care becomes a gesture of devotion in the face of irreversibility. And in the midst of this devotion, humor becomes a companion. Humor becomes an acknowledgment that the emotional experience of dying is too heavy to carry without moments of levity.
The engraving reflects this truth with surprising philosophical clarity. It embodies what Camus called the absurd: the human refusal to accept the limits imposed by an indifferent universe. These men with their improvised tools and misguided confidence are not fools so much as emblems of the human condition. They believe they can interrupt death through ingenuity, however flawed. It is easy to laugh at them, but their desperation is familiar. In our own ways, we all attempt to stave off mortality through medical interventions, rituals of care, or the simple act of sitting close and refusing to abandon someone in their final days.
Even Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, which urges us to acknowledge mortality as an existential horizon, feels softened here. The artwork does not present death as philosophical abstraction but as an emotional predicament. The absurdity of the procedure becomes an allegory for our collective unease with the finitude of life. Satire becomes a language for expressing what we fear to say plainly: that we cannot bear the thought of losing each other.
What feels most significant is how the past and present converse through this image. In eighteenth-century London, communities used satire to grapple with the terror of sudden death. In July 2002, I laughed in a movie theater because my heart needed space to heal. And today, in the quiet hours of hospice care, humor allows me to stay present. It allows me to love without collapsing under the weight of anticipatory grief.
When I return to the engraving now, I see it differently. It is no longer merely an artifact of misguided science but a reminder of the strange and tender ways humans navigate loss. Its absurdity mirrors the emotional distortions of hospice. Of the way sorrow presses so close that the heart instinctively searches for relief wherever it can find it.
Grief rarely arrives in order. Humor does not replace sorrow, nor does it cheapen it. Instead, it offers a momentary clearing, a brief suspension of the heaviness that allows us to continue. Love, it seems, is expressed not only in vigil and care but also in laughter that breaks through despair.
At the edge of loss, we reach for whatever makes us human: tenderness, memory, ritual, absurdity, and the sudden, unexpected grace of humor when we need it most.