I’m re-sharing the very first episode I ever put out because (1) the holidays are a charged little gremlin of a season and (2) this story is the whole reason Dying Of Laughter exists. In this episode, I walk you through the “quick version of the last million years of my life”: growing up while my dad lived with ALS for 15 years and my mom navigated breast cancer—first when I was a kid, and then again when it came back as stage four metastatic breast cancer in her bones. I explain what ALS looked like in my house: the slow loss of muscle function, full-time care, the weirdness of being a middle schooler visiting your dad in a care home where people disappear because they die, and the heartbreak of him being fully coherent while his body couldn’t move or speak. I also talk about my mom—the work she did to keep our lives functioning while caregiving, and how her cancer returning at 25 for me changed everything. My big takeaway: grief is love with nowhere to go, so I made this podcast a place for it to go—where we can be holly, jolly, or nolly, and still keep living.