They were how the two of us stayed human through it.

It would have been easy, in that house, to become nothing but fear, to let the constant vigilance and the constant pretending hollow us both out.

The laughter kept that from happening.

When Raymond made his dry little jokes about his own performance, when I had to smother a laugh with my hand over a dying man’s bed, we were reminding each other that we were still people, still capable of lightness, that the darkness in that house had not yet swallowed everything.

I have thought since that this is one of the ways good people survive terrible situations.