A V.A. hospital is a big place. I should know, I work in one.

But that morning it wasn’t big enough. Not with my newly ex-husband and fellow nurse, Mark, roaming the halls. I’d managed to avoid him for a few weeks since our divorce had become final, but now, there he was, dressed in his scrubs, escorting a patient to the radiology room.

He saw me and smiled. At least I thought it was a smile.

“Just thirty-six more days until retirement!” he announced blithely. My blood ran cold. I’d almost forgotten. When we’d married 25 years ago, we’d planned to retire and travel around the world right about now.

I guessed that was still Mark’s plan, but thanks to him, it couldn’t be mine anymore. No way could I afford retirement.

I tried to be civil. “So, still planning to do some traveling?” I asked.

“Moving to Alaska,” he said. “Maybe do a little consulting, but for the most part, I’ll just fly and live the good life.”

“Fly?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I bought that vintage airplane I always wanted.”

No. He didn’t tell me. Now my blood was boiling. Even the knowledge he’d be thousands of miles away didn’t soothe me. He was going to live it up while I spent the next five years or more digging out from the financial mess he’d left me in. I stormed off before I made a scene.

The words from the Bible that Mark and I had pledged to each other on our wedding day came to mind: “Whither thou goest I will go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge.” How meaningless those words had been to Mark! Maybe he could go on like nothing happened, but I couldn’t!

Since I was a teenager, I’d suffered health problems that could cause debilitating pain and other complications. Stress made it worse, and living with Mark didn’t help. At first, he’d made me laugh with his crazy brand of humor. He’d stood by me through all the doctor’s appointments and treatments.

I put almost every cent I earned into paying off our house and making it beautiful. It was even featured in a few home magazines. I pictured us growing old there, together. But instead, we grew apart.

Things changed. Mark’s good qualities gave way to the bad ones. He had a miserable temper, and could fly into rages over the littlest things. Bad feelings built up between us.

For eight years I’d worked an extra job to get us by while he’d gone back to school for an advanced degree. Then when I mentioned that my boss urged me to consider going on disability during one of my more severe health flare-ups, Mark flew off the handle.

“Wait one minute!” he yelled. “I didn’t sign up for this. You’re not going to up and quit your job and expect me to pick up the slack.”

That was the last straw. After all I’d put up with, when I needed him the most, he turned his back. I’d never forgive him for that.

Mark stayed in our house while we worked out the details of the divorce. I moved to a ramshackle log cabin. I thought I could fix it up to start anew.

I tried to put a good spin on things to my friends, laughing about how I called my new home The Leaning Log because everywhere I stood in it, the uneven floor made me lean. “I’m so sorry, Roberta,” they’d say. “He just treated you awful.”

“No,” I’d say, “we just needed to go our separate ways.”

What I couldn’t bear to bring up was how little I got in the divorce settlement, how the lawyers’ fees and the low sale price we’d taken on our house didn’t leave nearly enough to fix up the cabin. I didn’t know how I’d manage. I wondered how Mark could afford his retirement. It wasn’t fair!

At a checkup, my doctor said, “Your blood pressure’s up, Roberta. Anything bothering you?” I started to say I was fine when all at once it came out, all the anger I’d been storing up.

I told him how Mark had left me with almost nothing in the divorce, how I still had to see him at work, how it seemed he was rubbing it in my face with his quips about retirement, doing all the stuff we’d dreamed about.

Dr. Brownfield shook his head. “Stress can aggravate your condition. You know that. Take care of yourself. Eat right. Get rest. You’ve got to find a way to let this go.”

Let it go? How? I knew the doctor was right. But I wasn’t done being angry.

For a solid week afterward, I couldn’t sleep. I felt myself getting more and more sick. By the weekend, I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to go in to work the following Monday. I collapsed on my bed. I did the only thing I knew to do. I prayed.

Not for the first time, of course, not by a long shot. But with a desperation I’d never experienced. “Lord, I know I need to let go of this,” I cried out. “But how? Even when he’s gone, every day at work will just remind me I have no one and he’s out having the time of his life.”

I knew what God’s answer was. Forgive Mark. Focus on the future, not the past. But I simply didn’t know how to forgive Mark. I tried. I couldn’t.

The next day at work, I could barely function. “You okay?” asked Sandy, one of the other nurses. She’d recently lost her husband. If she was asking me if I was okay, I must have looked in really bad shape.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

Sandy sat down with one of our long-term patients, Mr. Lansing. He’d once told me how seeing her was the best part of his day. I’d meant to tell Sandy that but had let it slip my mind. At my desk I spied a box of pansy-patterned cards a student I’d once mentored had given me. An inspiration struck. 

I pulled one out and wrote, “Dear Sandy, you make the biggest difference in your patients’ lives. I see it every day. Especially this afternoon with Mr. Lansing. He told me that he watches the clock for 8:00 a.m. when your shift begins. Thank you for caring so much about our veteran patients.”

I gave Sandy the card. “You don’t know how much this means,” she said, grasping my hands tight. Seeing her smile meant a lot to me. Being thankful for a person and letting her know felt so much better than being resentful.

I decided to write “Caught in the Act of Caring” notes whenever I saw someone doing a good job or when someone brightened my day. Every time I wrote a note, it seemed my eyes were opened to new people I could give a kind word to. People I’d overlooked because I was so focused on my misery.

Giving kindness was like the antidote to the poison of my resentment toward Mark. I felt energized when I came home. Enough to work on my garden at the Leaning Log, which was looking nicer every day.

I potted some red geraniums and gave them out to coworkers. The day Mark left the hospital for good, I barely took note. He’s moving on with his life. I’m moving on with mine.

“Has your diet changed?” Dr. Brownfield asked at my next appointment. My blood pressure had dropped 20 points.

“No, just my attitude,” I said.

One night, home at the Leaning Log, sorting through some boxes, I came across an old anniversary card from Mark. Slowly, I opened it up. It was sweet, funny—the Mark I’d fallen in love with. At least those moments I’d always be thankful for.

Thankful for Mark? A few weeks ago, I probably would have ripped up the card. But I wasn’t in the same place anymore. All my caring notes had moved me to a different place. A place of forgiveness and letting go. I didn’t want resentment to rule my life anymore.

“Lord,” I said, “wherever Mark is right now, I forgive him. Forgiveness is how I show my love for you in return for the unending love you give me.”

It was strange, but the last bit of weight that seemed to sit on my shoulders lifted away.

I’ve heard from friends that Mark’s doing well in Alaska. He’s enjoying life. And it doesn’t make me unhappy. Anger and resentment did. Mark can’t hurt me anymore. As soon as I stopped counting my grievances, I could see my blessings. I could let go of the pain and embrace the future.

My log cabin is paid in full and renovations are progressing well. My health is stable. I love my job more than ever, and my life too, free of the past.

Last year when I went back to visit my family in the old home town–Tyler, Texas–I went to a party at which someone came up to me and said, “Sandy, you probably don’t remember me, but…”

Peggy Boocock. Peggy Boocock from my class in Hogg Junior High. Because I’d been away from Tyler a long time, she figured I had forgotten.

But how could I forget, forget Peggy or Josie Caldwell or Alice Lee Swapp or Phyllis Semple or any of those girls who were a more important part of my life than they knew?

I remember Peggy best from the spring when I was 15 years old and life was more packed and more frantic and more normal than probably it will ever be again.

I remember the closing weeks of our eighth-grade year when most of my energy and seemingly all of my hopes were centered on one important goal: I wanted to be one of the six girls selected as cheerleader for the next football season.

Of course, now it seems amusing to think that this could have been the most important thing in the world to me, but at the time there was nothing amusing about it. Everybody at school took it seriously. Football was important. What happened to our Razorbacks was of prime importance.

If I won the competition, I would go away to a special summer clinic for cheerleaders where we would be taught the finer points of whipping a crowd into a frenzy of enthusiasm, and in the fall I’d go to all the games and be in on all the parties and pep rallies.

Furthermore, being a cheerleader meant that you’d hit the top. It guaranteed you popularity in your class, in your crowd.

To tell the truth, I really didn’t have a crowd. I think I was not exactly unpopular, but in the lunch room I always seemed to be sitting with an “un-in” group, often a group of two.

In those days my “best friend” was probably my grandfather, Jeff Scott. Jeff–I always called him that –was my one strong ally, and in anything as important as becoming a cheerleader, you needed all the encouragement you could get.

At home my parents watched my feverish pursuits with varying enthusiasms. Dad, who still operates a gas station there in Tyler, was a solid man–he’s part Cherokee Indian–with a great sense of humor, and it made him smile, I think, to see me twirling about the house shaking my pompons.

Mom’s temperament was different from Dad’s. She was the artistic one. I think she was afraid I wouldn’t make the most of any creative talent I might possess, so it was Mom who was behind my debut in a dance recital when I was five.

It was Mom who watched me at my ballet lessons in the American Legion hall where we’d use the edge of a poker table for a practice bar. It was Mom, even though she herself had been a drum majorette in one of her schools, who had quiet doubts about my being a cheerleader.

“But I can win it,” I’d tell her. “I have timing and rhythm. I can jump higher than the other girls.”

“Maybe I’m just a little afraid of that,” Mom would say. I knew what she was referring to. My ballet teacher, Utah Ground, had warned that I might misuse some of the leg muscles so specifically trained for dancing.

And so it was that more and more I’d seek out Jeff. He was a lovable man, blond and slender, little like me, with a pied-piper personality. At that time he had the night watch at an oil field outside Overton.

I’d go out to see him and we’d sit together in a work shack called the “dog house” and he’d whittle on a stick and we’d talk until he had to go out and do something about one of the pumps.

Jeff loved politics, and to tell stories, and though he was amazingly well-read, he was always jumbling up his quotes. “As the Bible says,” he’d tell me, “‘To thine own self be true.’” Or, “Ralph Waldo Emerson said a mouthful when he declared that ‘God is our refuge and strength.’”

He may have mixed up the name tags but the product was always solid. “You’ll get no junk from Jeff,” he used to say to me, and he was right.

Some 40 girls were trying out for cheerleader. On the morning of the competition, the bleachers of the school gym were filled, not just with students, but with parents as well. It was a big event.

One by one we were announced, and then each girl had to run out into the center of the gym and give a solo performance.

“Sandra Duncan!” the announcer boomed, and I bounded out, bursting with personality, showing all my dancer’s tricks, whirling and swaying and shouting:

“Gimme an ‘H’

Gimme an ‘O’

Gimme a ‘G’…”

And then a fantastic jump, coming down to a dazzling split at the end.

I knew I was good, and the applause verified it. Then we had to go back to our home rooms to wait interminably for the decisions. Finally, the public address system crackled and I sat frozen at my desk while the six outgoing cheerleaders began to speak.

“Hi, this is Alva Bloomquist. The girl who is taking my place as cheerleader next year is Peggy Boocock!”

“Hi … and the girl who’s taking my place is … Phyllis Semple.” Phyllis was in my home room, and she whooped and jumped up and the kids applauded while she ran out of the room to claim her victory.

Alice Lee Swapp … Josie Caldwell … Jane Brandt.

They said later I placed seventh. It didn’t matter; that didn’t make me a cheerleader. I was dazed. Out in the hall between classes, Tom Stokes was waiting for me. Tom and I were going together. We were barely in the hand-holding stage but he was my boyfriend. Tom squeezed my hand. “Sandy, I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It just doesn’t matter.” Then I hurried off to class. But it did matter. The rest of the day was a torture and when I left school that afternoon I wanted never to go back there again.

At home Mom was gentle with me and Dad said that the important thing was that I had done my best. But it was Jeff whom I wanted to see. I found him at dusk in the dog house, the thick smell of petroleum and the churning sound of machinery all around us.

“Oh Jeff,” I said, burying my head in his chest and letting the tears flow. “I worked so hard and I wanted it so much. Why didn’t I win?”

You would have thought that Jeff himself had been out there in the gym trying to be a cheerleader, that he too had lost out. We were two of a kind and as for why we had failed, there was no answer between us. “But it hurts, doesn’t it,” he asked.

I nodded. “The awful thing is it’s probably going to hurt for a long time, maybe always.”

I was horrified to think that I might have to endure what I was feeling then for the rest of my life. But Jeff wasn’t giving me any junk, and I knew it.

“Listen, honey,” he said, “I know a proverb you ought to be thinking about. It’s just four words, but I’ve tested these four words in my own life, and I can tell you they’re true.”

Curious, I lifted my head from his lap and looked into his serious face. Then, as though it were a secret for my ears alone, he told me the four words that sounded too simple and too cute to be profound.

“No pains, no gains.”

Hogg Junior High is a good many years in the past now, and though I smile a little, I still hurt a little when I think about not making cheerleader. Yet over the years I’ve done some testing of my own with Jeff’s four words, and he’s right, of course–they’re true.

Easy living doesn’t strengthen us, our muscles don’t develop without the soreness from stretching them, and pain seems to be part of God’s design for our lives from childbirth to growing pains to all the hurts that find us, though we don’t know why.

I haven’t liked the recent shock of my television show’s sudden closing notice, or the misery of a failing first marriage or the unbelievable pain of the tumor that took the sight of my left eye a year ago. But I do not believe that these things have come without reason.

I have come to respect the anguish of mind and body. Today I’m more aware of living than I ever was, and more grateful. I think I’m more aware of other people and what they are feeling, and I know that when I’m thinking of them, I worry less about myself.

If Jeff were here today (he’s not; he died ten years ago while out in the woods reaching up for some branches to whittle on), I’d tell him about a proverb that I, his own little granddaughter, discovered along the way: “There’s nothing evil about pain, unless it conquers you.”

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Once when I was in Shreveport, Louisiana, a minister offered me his pulpit for a sermon on “God and Hollywood.”

Hastily I explained that in my business, success was measured by “yocks” versus “boffs.” When that just confused him I said, “You know, yocks … little laughs … and boffs … great big ones. And if I got up there in your church I might still, unconsciously, be trying for those boffs.”

We let the matter drop. But afterward, during a nightmare, I found myself in a pulpit and the laughs were rolling down the aisle shaking the dignified old rafters. I told a friend of this dream.

“And what would be so wrong about that?” he wanted to know. “Laughter has a spiritual value. An Englishman named John Donne had that pegged over 400 years ago. He said, ‘Religion is not a melancholy, the spirit of God is not a dampe’.”

He had a point. Certainly I knew that laughter has a constructive power. I have seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful.

Overseas in 1944 with USO Camp Shows Frances Langford and I saw it lift a whole ward at the service hospital in Pearl Harbor. We were working our way up a long aisle when a nurse touched my arm.

“That boy near the end in the very high bed. They pulled him out of a B-17. Herbert hasn’t spoken a word for weeks. If there’s anything you can do…”

As we got to that end of the ward I winked at Frances. “Okay, boys,” I said. “Frances Langford is going to sing you a song … and Herbert,” I pointed to the bed where we could just see a white face, bandages covering, the eyes, “Herbert, this is for you.”

Frances approached the bed slowly, beginning her song… “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you.” An unnatural stillness settled over the entire ward. One of those that doesn’t feel right, too hushed and breathless. All you could hear was Frances’ low plaintive song, “Embrace me, you irreplaceable you…”

And then, just as she reached him, her voice broke off.

In two steps I was beside her looking down at Herbert. Where his arms had been there were only short stumps.

For several seconds we all just stood there stunned. No one moved. But the part of the mind where habit and involuntary reaction holds sway provided me with a diversion.

A couple of guys laughed, bless ‘em. On I rushed trying to build that chain of laughter while Frances regained her composure. But the miracle was Herbert. Herbert spoke, for the first time in weeks.

“It’s all right, Miss Langford,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Laughter binds men together in a kind of secret free masonry.

Hear it sometime travel around a circle … then notice that, however large that circle may be, it is a closed one.

For a brief few hours in 1944 I met 15,000 Marines of the 21st Division at Pavuvu. They were on their way to the invasion of Peleliu. We were doing a routine series of camp shows on the Pacific Islands.

When an officer suggested the unscheduled stop he said, “We’ll have to fly you over, a few at a time in small planes, and land you on a road. There’s no airport. But it’ll be worth it to them.”

As we circled for our landing such a shout arose from 15,000 throats that we could actually feel it like a cushion of sound under our wings. We were from home! We were the promise of laughter … today. Tomorrow, and they knew it, they were staging a little show of their own and 40% wouldn’t come back.

We laughed and clowned as we landed. But looking at those faces I knew how Charles Lamb must have felt when he “jested that he might not weep.”

Later back in the States, my wife and I at the dedication of Oak Knoll Hospital, walked into a ward to be greeted with that same laughter. One of those explosions that happen between old friends.

Voices kept yelling, “Pavuvu! Pavuvu!” Dolores was a bewildered outsider. But I was in. It was the 1st Marines… or what was left of them.

Laughter can sometimes appeal beyond reason, prejudice and cynicism.

In a jungle I heard the jokes of padres lift G.I.’s spirits into wanting the fearlessness and gaiety of the men of God, where no amount of solemn approach would have inspired them.

And I have heard a minister devastate a profane agnostic with quiet wit.

It happened at a very swank club one night. After a pointless and slightly blasphemous story the comedian noticed that all eyes were suddenly fastened on the collar insignia of a big, silent man at the end of the table.

“F’r crissakes,” blustered the story-teller. “Are you a chaplain?”

With a light smile and deliberate emphasis the chaplain replied. “Yes, for Christ’s sake, I am.”

Laughter can return a sense of proportion to a troubled mind, for it erases self pity, self justification, self importance.

But perhaps the most important thing laughter can do is to bring back the will to live—and, when the time comes, give us the courage to go with good cheer.

I’ve seen the ones who aren’t going to make it—American boys smiling their way right up to St. Peter’s gate, and I’ve got a hunch they’re holding a sure pass. Like one youngster who was stretched out on the ground getting a blood transfusion. “I see they’re giving you the old raspberry, son,” I said.

“It sure feels good,” he laughed. “The guy who gave this must have been tax exempt or raised his own beef. It’s strong stuff.”

Before I had gotten 20 yards he had gone his way, smiling.

My young brother Sydney passed on 5 years ago and, for quite a while, he knew he was going. Someone with a very long face and a “religion of melancholy” had urged him to “prepare to meet his Maker” … to “petition Providence to provide for his poor little orphans.”

It took the whole family and his five kids to convince him that “the spirit of God is not a dampe,” here or hereafter, except for those who choose to have it so.

Every gay thing, every joyous or humorous or good thing that came to our attention we offered to my brother as proof of the infinite wisdom and kindness of God. When he went, he went smiling—and trusting. And, we had done such a good job for him that we had healed ourselves of much of our grief.

A comedian can’t take much credit either, because people insist they are funny. You become a habit—a laugh habit. Sometimes people laugh at me before I open my mouth—even when they can’t see me.

Mention the arrival of someone they’ve laughed at before and they relax. They drop their strain. They expect to laugh and so they do.

They depend, too, on the laugh-maker to stay the same. They want new jokes but not too much change. I don’t think they’ve ever forgiven Charlie Chaplin for abandoning his big shoes, cane and derby hat.

When I go into a service hospital they expect me to louse up the joint. To go on being me. No sympathy. They want me to walk into a ward filled with guys harnessed to torturous contraptions and say, “Don’t get up fellows.”

When I come to a Christmas party if I notice the lone star atop a pathetic Christmas tree I’m supposed to say, “Don’t tell me a Brigadier General is running this show too.”

So I say it. And when people wonder how a guy can go on and on like that … well, the answer is that the results themselves keep you up. You can’t possibly not do it. The power works both ways. You are sustained by their laughter.

Nor does the power belong exclusively to the professional funnyman. There is a kind of geniality that brings mirth, and confidence. Bing Crosby has that. If there are two kinds of people, people who lift and people who lean, Bing is a lifter. Geniality might be defined as strength to spare.

The power of laughter lies in its ability to lift the spirit. For laughter cannot exist with clipped wings. It cannot be dictated to. It must be spontaneous and free as the air you breathe. Thus it is a special property of free men in a free land who are able to laugh at anything … or anyone … especially themselves.

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