‘Go On’ Is an Evergreen Comedic Series That Helped Me Navigate Through My Mother’s Death

Humor is a beautiful lock pick set, the perfect tool for any situation. Humor can open people up, it can get you out of trouble, it can even be a defense mechanism to protect you. However, these things usually stop short when death is involved. When dealing with the loss of someone, humor often becomes a tool without “a right time” to be used. To me though, humor is a way of making death, this infinite unavoidable circumstance… smaller. “Death is a joke you don’t make once it’s in the room”- Thuli Zuma My first best friend in this world is my mother, she’s my tag team partner, my first audience, my first roommate. She died on September 9, 2011. Since that day it has not stopped being September 9th, 2011. On the best days, I’m at her bedside still trying to make her laugh. On the worst days, it’s the voicemail saying that she is gone, or my first step into the loud silence of her hospital room. She once told me, “It was always you and me against the world” and when my teammate needed me I wasn’t there. The last words I heard her say to me was “Go” assuring me to take care of this task and come back, and for the first time in my life I was too late. My way of dealing with not being there when she died was not talking about it. The weight of it would pop up (sometimes at weird places)… “Yeah, lemme get the strawberry ice cream with Reese’s pieces *oh god she’s really gone* ah–arheem ah, woooo- lemme get some sprinkles on that too… What?” …but I’d push it down and keep …