I watched the video and I didn’t see what you saw. I saw a smile in recognition of someone he probably knew but I didn’t see the “laughing” and “swaggering” you did, he didn’t appear to be “happy-go-lucky” to me but YMMV. I saw someone who was trying to compose himself, steeling himself to talk about something incredibly painful. Have you ever spoken in public before, ever spoken in front of live TV cameras? I have. It’s quite intimidating. I felt fine and calm and perfectly composed until just before the camera started rolling; I took a few deep breaths and tried to hide the fact I was shaking and was barely able to remember the words that I had rehearsed for days and that wasn’t even over something so devastating as the loss of a child – it was just about a golf tournament.
As for what you said about finding humor and levity in one's grief, that may happen when a parent or adult who has been dying for a long time finally dies. But for someone whose life has been shattered by the death of a young child, there is no laughter for a very long time.
Within a few short years I attended the viewings and memorial services of several different families who I knew who had a family member die very suddenly. One family lost a pre-teen child in an auto accident as the result of a drunk driver; one lost an 8 year old daughter after her very short battle with leukemia (from diagnosis to death – about 4 weeks – not much time for her parents to prepare).
One family lost a husband and father of three young children while he was riding his motorcycle one Sunday morning and was killed by a hit and run driver who according to the police accident report must have been going at a very high rate of speed when blowing through a stop sign, hitting my friend’s husband, throwing him several hundred feet and killing him instantly. They never found the driver BTW. My friend’s husband was so mutilated that they had a closed casket. This guy was a wonderful and much respected person, a successful small business owner, a very devoted husband and father, a very religious man and youth minister and as a recovering alcoholic, he devoted his life to helping young people not make the same mistakes he had made. It was ironic that, although never proven as the driver who killed him was never found, was most likely killed by a drunk driver. This man’s wife went from sobbing one minute to smiling and hugging and laughing the next and then back to sobbing. And she certainly wasn’t acting.
The last funeral I attended of someone who died very suddenly and unexpectedly was that of a young man, husband and father of a newborn who was killed in a horrific workplace accident at the company my husband worked for at the time, an excavating contractor. The young man was working in the yard when another worker, the son of the owner of the company and the guy’s very good friend was backing up a large piece of equipment. The young man didn’t move out of the way in time even though the OSHA investigation proved the backup alarm was in working order. Long story short, the owner’s son crushed his friend and co-worker to death. This was also closed casket for obvious reasons. The range of emotions I saw that night was incredible. The family and wife of the young man killed seemed to appreciate that the owner of the company and his son, the man who accidently killed their loved one where there, but yet they were also distraught and even under the surface, angry with them; the owner of the company and most especially his son who were trying their best to walk a fine line of showing respect and dealing with their own grief and guilt over what happened; nobody seemed to know what to say or how to act. But even in this most horrific of circumstances, I did see smiles and even at times much laughter.
In this situation as with all the others, I still saw, in between the uncontrollable tears, the inconsolable grief, some smiles and even laughter as people were trying to reconcile their grief with remembering the happier times, even the humorous times and memories they shared with the deceased and the ones gathered to remember them, and the smiles between them even in their grief. It’s how most human being deal with loss, it brings up a wide range of emotions.
I remember by grandmother’s funeral service. A woman from my grandmother’s Norwegian church “sang” a hymn during the service. And by “sing” I should say, not very well. It wouldn’t have been so bad except she kept singing and singing – verse after a verse, she’d stop singing and the pastor started making his way back to the podium and then after take a long pause and just when you thought it was mercifully over, she’d start “singing” again and the pastor would back up. It was like something out of a sit-com or comedy skit. My mother was sitting in the pew in front of me and my brother and we saw her shoulders shaking up and down and presumed it was because she was crying. But no: it was because she had started laughing. My brother and I also started laughing and had to bite our lips and kick each other. We could hardly contain ourselves. We didn’t mean disrespect to my grandmother and certainly appreciated the woman’s sincerity but I guarantee you, if you had been there, you would have laughed too.
When my mother in law was laid to rest it was an unusually warm day in mid March. But as we were gathered in the cemetery on a hill top for the internment, the horizon was filled with black-green-purplish clouds and numerous lightning bolts. As the pastor started saying the Lord’s Prayer, the wind whipped up to a frenzy and it was sort of like he started off the prayer like a minister and ended the prayer like a frenzied auctioneer: “Our Lord in Heaven, Hollowed by thy, going once, going twice, AMEN!” I’ve never heard the Lord’s Prayer recited so quickly. We barely made it to our cars before the torrential rains came, and then the sleet and then the snow. When we got back to my SIL’s house all we could do was laugh and think how appropriate an exit it was for Evelyn who raised quite the storm in life.
On December 30th 1995 my mother, who was only in her early 70’s and in good health, was rushed to the hospital with what was thought at the time to be a mild heart attack. I spent all that night and the following day with her and my dad at the hospital. She was admitted to a coronary ICU for observation and I left her at about 10PM that night, her last words to me was “pray for me”. I had just gotten to bed at about 11:30 when I got a phone call from the hospital saying my mother was in respiratory distress and asking my permission to put her on a ventilator. I threw my clothes back on and rushed back to the hospital as my husband went to my parent’s apartment to get my father. I remember seeing the New Years fireworks light up all over the city as I drove. One I got the hospital; things quickly went from bad to worse as what was thought to be minor heart attack was actually acute Pancreatitis.
I spent the next two days at the hospital with no sleep and little food, lived mostly on bad vending machine coffee. I was awake for over 60 hours straight, I didn’t think it possible to stay awake that long. My brother drove in from NJ, my nieces and nephews and their families all gathered at my house.
We were all gathered at my kitchen table, deeply concerned, exhausted, trying to eat some bad convenience store subs, when my husband suddenly came in and said (for reasons unknown other than exhaustion) said, “Whomp! There It Is!” Of course we looked at him like he had three heads and then we all started laughing uncontrollably. It was such a relief to laugh and we kept laughing and then we started related funny stories about mom, and for a few more hours, we laughed until we cried, and then laughed some more before finally catching a little sleep. My mother passed two weeks later but one of the things I will always remember about that time is the laughter and the funny stories we shared between us about my mother, some that I had never heard before and that stupid phrase “Whomp! There It Is!” It became part of my family’s lexicon, something you say when you are sleep deprived or just need to inject some humor into a situation that needs some.
Overall this thread is stupid and the conspiracy theories proposed here are along the lines of the 9-11 conspiracy theories.
Thank you for speaking from the heart. It always irritated me when I heard police speak of people of didn’t react ‘normal’ when faced with abnormal circumstances. I am a birther, I believe that people in charge intentionally chose to ignore legal abnormalities. I even question the possibility of usage of crazy a$$ drugs, not likely, but I question. However, THIS video, THIS issue of the daughter photo as “proof” is NOT PROOF! And the dad of Emilie... grief is expressed in many forms. Hell, I don’t remember cursing out the Walmart cashier the day my mom died, but my husband swears I did. Grief is Grief.