An Anecdote for Alzheimer’s and Depression

Discover the healing powers of laughter.

By Greg O’Brien

Source: Lidya Nada on Unsplash

“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” —Mark Twain

It’s often easy to feel sorry for oneself—the pity thing.

Let’s face it; there’s a bit of Eeyore in all of us—the forever gloomy old, gray donkey in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree: “I was so upset, I forgot to be happy…”

But I’ve learned, the hard way that a pity party is a lonely party of one. No candles to blow out.

So, in my battle against Alzheimer’s, prostate cancer, depression, internal bleeding, and a gradual shutdown of my mind and body, I look for silver linings and have turned to laughter—a subject well documented in Psychology Today and elsewhere and one that helps to sustain me.

I’m not the first to write about the therapies of laughter and won’t be the last. While laughter, to some extent, can be infectious, it’s also deeply personal, given we all tend to laugh at different things. It’s one thing to laugh, another to cause laughter—we're all the better for both. One must learn to laugh at oneself—self-deprecating humor!

For me, laughter has made all the difference in lifting my faith and hope while the brightest minds in the world race for a cure for Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Patience is a virtue that I am chasing. Laughter has given me a side road.

There are many different forms of laughter. The recent celebrated solar eclipse put a smile on my face, made me feel small but secure in the universe that there is something far bigger than I. Made me laugh in delight—a release from distress.

“Many people feel they can’t laugh in the face of a serious thing like Alzheimer’s,” says dementia educator Lori La Bey, founder of "Alzheimer’s Speaks," a radio show about Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s care. “But laughter is the core ingredient of a good relationship—the moments that bind you, melt your heart, and stay with you.”

The VeryWell Mind website says, “Research has shown that the health benefits of laughter are far-ranging. Studies so far have shown that laughter can help relieve pain, bring greater happiness, and even increase immunity. Unfortunately, many don't get enough laughter in their lives. In fact, one study suggests that healthy children may laugh as much as 400 times per day, but adults tend to laugh only 15 times per day.”

“In conversations between men and women, females laughed 126 percent more than their male counterparts, meaning that females do the most laughing while males do the most laugh-getting—a difference that begins in childhood. The class clown is usually male,” writes therapist Suzanne B. Phillip in Psychology Today.

The turning point for me in Alzheimer’s—a disease that has taken several family members—was two attempts at suicide. I’m not proud of that. It was a come-to-Jesus moment for me or wisdom from the universe, depending on one’s perspective: “Not my time," I heard in my soul.

I then realized that I needed to laugh more, and I’ve never looked back. Walking in faith, hope, and humor, I wrote a book titled: On Pluto, Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s. It opened doors to laughter, to a serious inside look at Alzheimer’s, and to speaking engagements around the country with my son, Conor, by my side so I didn’t get lost.

In Alzheimer’s, brain cells in charge of short-term memory are losing the war, but long-term memory is still safely tucked away. We all need memories. Saul Bellow, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner, once observed that memories “keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”

In my Irish Catholic family of 10, humor and laughter were the coins of our life. And so I tell a lot of nun stories from my years at Resurrection Grammar School in Rye, NY, to catch a discerning audience off-guard and prepare them for the punchline: Laughter, if allowed to flow freely, can get one through the toughest of days.

Like penguins, my siblings and I generally walked the mile to school together with the oldest, my sister Maureen, in the lead and my sister Lauren and me following up in the rear. Once at Resurrection, regardless of the temperature—5 below or pushing 90—we gathered in the playground behind the large, red brick schoolhouse before the start of class. We were sorted in class by cracks in the playground pavement. Apparently it was a blueprint to avoid chaos—the equivalent today of those invisible electronic dog fences. If you crossed a line, you’d be zapped by the nuns. There we engaged in kickball, punchball, casually flipping Mickey Mantle and Roger Marris baseball cards, now worth thousands of dollars, or just yapping. Then, with great thunder, an oversized glass window in the principal’s office opened—the ancient kind that moved on string cords, not tracks—and made a noise like the trumpeting of angels in the Book of Revelations. The hairy, muscular arm of the Mother Superior then reached out with a cowbell the size of a boxcar. She rang it three times:

DA-DING, DA-DING, DA-DING!

The first da-ding ordered one to stop in motion. Yes, instantly. Didn’t matter if you were in the air, mid-sentence, or taking a pee in the hedges, you held your position. The second da-ding was a call to line up in silence like prisoners of war; the third, heralded your entrance to the cellblock, er...school. All in stillness, mind you, looking straight ahead.

Given our anxieties of the day, the nuns made it clear to us not to bother Jesus; the Lord, they instructed, is too busy with the whole world in hand. FYI: Catholic-educated comedian Kathleen Madigan has an excellent YouTube segment on “Bothering Jesus.” Worth a listen.

Back to the nuns: We were directed to reach out to Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of Jesus. She (and she alone), we were told, would discern whose petitions had the greatest value and would pass them along to Jesus. And so, on May Day—May 1st, ironically not the distress signal Mayday—the nuns instructed us to write private letters to the Blessed Virgin with our personal prayer requests—nothing was to be held back. We then were assembled, as if awaiting the Rapture, in the parking lot behind Resurrection Cathedral in front of a tall concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin. At the base of the statue was a large wire bin into which we tossed our prayers. Then the church sexton, a gnarly man with an Irish brogue as thick as Guinness and looking a bit like Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of The Rings, would, on cue, light the prayers on fire, and we all watched our petitions drift up to Heaven in smoke. We prayed there would be no fog that day to impede their progress.

In advance of a Boston Alzheimer’s race several years ago, I was asked to speak before a large audience at a pre-event held at the Improv Asylum Comedy Club in the North End of the city—sketch comedy in the style of Saturday Night Live and Second City. I was told to keep my remarks brief with a sharp focus on fundraising for an Alzheimer’s cure.

“Can I be funny?” I asked the club manager, taking a leap at humor.

“Funny???” he replied.

“I thought this was a comedy club!” I responded.

“But you have Alzheimer’s, and that’s not funny,” he said.

“Yeah, but you have no idea,” I interrupted.

After more back-and-forth, a compromise was reached for me to try my Alzheimer’s humor for about three minutes. The manager would give me a sign if I needed to be more serious.

After I recounted funny stories of getting lost, seeing things that weren’t there, loss of self and loss of place that had the audience and Conor in shrill laughter, the manager signaled me to “Go for it!” And so I did for about 40 minutes—a comedy club appearance from a guy with Alzheimer’s who could make people laugh.

It doesn’t get any better.

Having just turned 74, Alzheimer’s has taught me to look for silver linings in life. Unexpectedly, I saw one recently in a Wall Street Journal piece titled, “Viagra Could Be Good for Your Brain.”

“New research from the Cleveland Clinic suggests the erectile-dysfunction drug could ward off cognitive decline, illustrating how artificial intelligence can help scientists repurpose old medications for new diseases,” the story reported, noting the study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Can’t make this stuff up!

Gotta laugh…

Or maybe I’m just trying to be the class clown.

(Greg O’Brien is a career journalist, writer, and author. He lost his maternal grandfather, mother, and paternal uncle to Alzheimer’s, and before his father’s death, his dad was diagnosed with dementia.)