Should We Laugh AT Death or WITH Death? - Mickey Hadick the Writer

When I was fifteen, I attended the funeral of a distant relative who died, tragically, in his thirties. He suffered from a rare, congenital disorder and finally succumbed. For some reason, I got a case of the giggles at the funeral.

I was there with my parents and one of my older brothers. As we sat in the pew during the lutheran funeral service, my brother and I heard something, or said something, or something-something and it set us off with the giggles. You’d think it would have been something like a fart, but I know it wasn’t a fart.

Our farts were not a laughing matter.

The harder we tried to stop the giggles, the more we giggled. I’ve never seen my mother as angry as the look she shot at us at that funeral. She dug through her purse and I was pretty sure she was looking for a sharp object with which to stab us.

The deceased was a cousin-in-law, having married my aunt’s cousin. That aunt wasn’t a blood relative, having married my mother’s brother. So, technically, the deceased was a first cousin in-law, once removed. I’m not saying that gave us carte blanch to laugh at his death.

I’m saying we were idiot kids who didn’t understand death.

When I first visited my wife-to-be’s hometown, which is in the northern part of Wisconsin, there had recently been a heinous crime committed. Five members of a family were shot to death in their one-room home. A sixth member was missing.

The family was infamous in the small town because three generations lived together in the one-room shack sharing two beds. It was pretty clear they were incestuous.

The local news followed the story for three years. Their deaths are described in a collection of strange Wisconsin deaths. A nonfiction book, Blood Relatives, was written about the incident. The killings were dramatized in a one-hour, true crime television show. Despite all that coverage, I’ve always wanted to write a fictionalized version.

How arrogant am I that I think I can say something more interesting than what has already been said? (As my wife will tell you after a glass of wine, I’m plenty arrogant.)

The story has eluded me, though, for all these years. It’s a funny thing finding your way into writing a novel. The setting, characters and plot all have to gel, plus there is another, spiritual component that must bind it all together. Thirty-four years later, I’m still not sure I found it.

This past weekend, someone may have given me a way into the story of that horrible family murder.

The high school reunion

This past Saturday, my wife and I were back in her Wisconsin hometown for her high school reunion. At the afternoon picnic, as we pounded beers and cheese curds, a family friend joined us and offered a new anecdote about the murders.

I mentioned that a sixth member of the family—a woman in her late sixties—was missing from the killing scene. Speculations ran wild as to where she might be, and that she may have murdered her family and ran off to the northern woods.

It kind of makes sense that she could have murdered them. Seven people lived under the same roof, used the same outhouse, and shared two beds. I grew up in a two-bedroom bungalow, sharing the converted attic with my two brothers. We fought each other to the point of strangulation and waving butcher knives.

We never caused mortal damage, but I can understand what goes through the mind when space is tight and tempers run wild. When you add in the burden that the father of your child, who is also your sibling—and possibly your uncle—is hogging the covers on a cold winter night, you can see why you might actually pull the trigger.

Here is the story told to me at the high school reunion

During that time while the woman was missing, some fucking Illinois bastards (FIBs) came into one of the bars in town. They were on their way to a resort in the northern woods and thought they’d slum it for the evening in the town where the incestuous family was murdered.

The bartender, a woman in her thirties who had heard all the rumors about the murdered family for years, told the FIBs all the latest gossip about the tragedy and still they wanted more. Sensing an opportunity, the bartender called one of the waitresses aside and sent her out to the scene of the crime with specific instructions.

A few minutes later, the bartender offered to drive the FIBs out to the dilapidated shack to check out the scene. It was dark out, and rural Wisconsin is especially dark when you’re on an abandoned logging road which was skipped by the rural electrification efforts. The bartender approached slowly because the driveway was nothing more than a gap in the brush.

The car’s headlights cast an eerie glow on the shack. The tree branches hung low over the yard like bony arms reaching for the dead. With the windows rolled down, crickets chirruped from the tall grass lining the road. The air smelled of rotting wood and clay dust.

The bartender inched the car forward along the rutted track, but the car’s engine cut out and she gasped. Everyone in the car tensed up.

A woman groaned in the darkness and a cloaked figure emerged from the trees along the path to the house. It was a hunched figure, limping but moving fast, shielding her face from the car’s headlights.

The FIBs screamed and shouted in despair.

But the bartender could no longer contain her laughter. Of course, she had sent the waitress ahead to hide and wait for their arrival. The car’s engine stopped with a simple turn of the key.

Why gallows humor is such a thing

At that moment, the murdered woman’s corpse was floating in a swamp thirty miles away. It would be discovered a few weeks later, once deer season opened. May she and her family rest in peace.

Some would say it was in poor taste to treat the murdered family as the material for a joke. It probably is poor taste, but it’s also a common human reaction. Few of us want to confront death; having fun about it, such as the bartender’s prank, or my case of the giggles at the funeral, is a way to deflect the inevitable.

Stories about death are another way of dealing with our ultimate demise, and that may be why crime thrillers are popular genres in fiction. If you don’t want to wait to find out what I do with this story about the murdered family, you could check out Ruthless.

Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…

I had a humor piece published in Little Old Lady Comedy called:

Walden Pool, The Billionaires-Only, Ultra-Luxury Community For Self-Reflection And Simple Living

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