Last Laugh

Last year, during a solo trip to Lisbon I was seated at a coffee shop near Campo de Santa Clara after touching a highly satisfying number of vintage tiles at a nearby flea market. As I sipped my latte, suddenly across the cafe an older woman dropped to the ground out of her chair. I would say she was around 75 or 80, but based on the European average rate of visual aging she could have been 152. 

It was clear this was a serious medical event, but I was trapped in order limbo, not sure if simply getting up and leaving would constitute walking out on the bill. As her family cried and tried to revive her, the medics arrived and cut her shirt open to begin CPR, prepared to issue shocks from the charging defibrillator. I fully intended to do the right thing and look away, and bestow this vulnerable moment with the sacred privacy it warranted. 

I want to lie to you and recall how I respectfully closed my eyes, and sent a small prayer up to whatever god might be live streaming this episode of Earth. But I didn’t. And as her chest laid bare, jostled by compressions, I was overcome with a single blasphemous thought— god, her tits look incredible for her age. Now, I feel deep shame about this. But I say it reverently, as the only possible eulogy I have for a woman I do not know, who may or may not have dropped dead outside of that coffee shop in Portugal, her boobs really did look so good.

Abandoning the scene after leaving behind a 10 euro note for a 3 euro latte, I felt the jealousy of the impressive if not ill-fated bosom I’d so crudely observed chasing me. On one hand, I do believe the body is a vessel through which we are given and regiven the lessons we have come into this plane of existence to learn. On the other hand, I am also of the Dolly Parton philosophic school of enhancement, wherein if you wanna put a few more pumps into your own birthday balloons, that's entirely your own business. 

Thankfully, I have never had the financial resources wherein this titillating debate exists anywhere outside of the abstract. After all, a really truly spectacular boob job requires a gifted surgeon which requires a gifted budget in life. But — the thought intruded deeper — what about in death? 

Now that really struck the absurdist electrical field which constantly buzzes in my brain. All things considered once you remove all the expenses related to keeping someone alive through such a surgical procedure, it’s really just the cost of materials, right? A posthumous boob job would really be like revisionist taxidermy. Of course I would likely still splurge for saline or silicone, no cotton ball or sawdust stuffing. I highly doubt anyone is going to reach into the casket for a quick honkhonk, but just to be sure.

I imagine a somber gathering. One by one people shuffle past the open casket. No one wants to say it outloud. But somebody will eventually have to be the first. Quietly, in a way that doesn’t directly accuse, but simply suggests — were her boobs…always so…big? People might hold their phones below the pew, hidden behind black hems, pointing out old pictures. No, they were definitely smaller, right? Like, way smaller. In fact, as I am writing this, I actually want to go bigger. I want there to be an absolutely devastatingly hilarious moment wherein the pallbearers attempt to gently shut my casket, only to have my post-mortem knockers obstruct the peaceful closing. I want there to be a half second panic as they try to silently decide whether to allow it to remain propped open during the recessional, held ever so ajar by my belated jugs, or whether to try and put some elbow grease into it. It will be like my overly-inflated rage against the dying light.

But what is this impulse to get one more joke in as the reaper drags me offstage? It’s possible that knowing we all have almost no choice in when the curtain falls, it gives me comfort to feel as though in death I could be in control of something small, or at least average sized (currently a sloping but full C). Perhaps my long held belief that I am not enough leads me to want to persuade people to remember me as more than I was, in numerous ways. 

I think back to the moments before that older woman with the incredible rack collapsed. What a beautiful day she must have had before that moment, spent walking the streets of Lisbon with her family, sipping coffee together al fresco in the sunshine. Though I can’t say what her fate ultimately was, she didn’t seem to be in any pain, it would not have been such a bad way to go, with a bang and a flash, ogled by an envious, already sagging 32 year old. 

I think maybe I just want to get the last laugh. But like all things both tragic and comic, I guess it will come down to timing.