This goes out to all my friends who don’t laugh quite as loud or as hard or as often as they once did.

Several weeks ago I was working and I heard some friends and customers laughing. There were sudden outbursts of laughter. Genuine laughter. Uninhibited laughter. As their laughter echoed, a deep longing erupted inside of me.

I used to laugh like that everyday. When I was in college, I parked myself in the lower level of one our academic buildings in the cafe for hours. Various friends would stop by during these hours and laughter echoed throughout the open staircase.  Laughter echoing all the way up to the third floor.

I had one friend who would stop by my apartment in college just to hear my cousin and I laugh in stereo together. He knocked on our door and when we opened, he would say, “laugh for me.”  We would laugh hysterically at the request and then he would leave, satisfied and with a little more joy.

What is it that I used to laugh about? Often, I think it was for nearly no reason at all.

When did I stop laughing? Like really, really laughing? Maybe at some point someone I loved told me it was annoying or obnoxious or immature. (Maybe? This definitely happened.) Maybe I felt at some point that I needed to try to fulfill a role or maintain a certain image.

There are times when I laugh now that it almost doesn’t feel real, almost like an out of body experience. It feels somehow  inauthentic. And that is a painful reality to acknowledge.

Belly laughs and snorts and laughter in stereo with my cousins and sisters are the most real parts of my life. I am determined to reclaim these moments.

Thankfully, I can recall some moments of real and genuine laughter in more recent years.

When I visited Scotland several years ago, a student and I laughed until we cried through the streets and castles of Edinburgh.

Not long ago, my husband (when he was my husband) and I sat on the bed and made up silly lyrics to an old hymn and laughed hysterically. In that moment, we were the funniest people on earth, and nobody could convince us otherwise.

I often find myself laughing without reservation as I sit across the table from my closest friend as I gorge myself on chips and salsa and sip on a margarita.

I am blessed with co-workers at both of my jobs who possess absolutely beautiful (and appropriately inappropriate) senses of humor.

It seems like the most genuine and pure laughter comes one on one with people I love. I want more of those people and more of those moments.

I have been thinking about death more often than usual, given more loss in my family. The intrusive thought recently came to me, “Who will be at my casket?” (As a side note, I want to live a long life and outlive everyone I know except for my children, but that is a commentary for another day.) Who will be at my casket? It’s a sobering thought for this hot-mess of a middle-aged woman! Or, is it?

As this uninvited thought entered my mind, I quickly decided that it really doesn’t matter who is standing at my casket. I simply want to die laughing, to die with joy.

I suppose that the only way to die laughing is to live laughing.

Let’s laugh together.