We had posed in these matching outfits for a holiday photo just weeks before, with my mother propped up in a hospital bed, wearing a wig to cover the ravages of chemotherapy, and with chocolate bunnies cradled in our arms. For me, death will always be associated with pale pink dresses, a color made horrid but soon faded to nothing in a San Jose cemetery. I remain fascinated by this bizarre and tragic scene from my childhood, by this symbolic joining through shared pinkness of still living daughters with a dead mother. With the distance of twenty-four years, the cruel association between the survivors and the deceased strikes me as darkly humorous. The extremes of grief push us to the extremes of reaction.
Laughter can shriek with the same agony as tears.
In Zeffirelli's film, Hamlet at first appears oddly delighted to inspect the skull. He places the bony remnant on a grassy mound, touches the cold cheekbone fondly, and then recoils in horror. Shakespeare plays on the appearance of skullbones, the exposed jaw pulled back as grin or grimace. Toying with bones demystifies the great unknown and trivializes questions of eternity. The skull of Yorick provides a simpler focus for inquiry than the fate of jolly Yorick's soul, just as my mother's burial attire distracts me from the painful question of why death stole her so soon.