"No Laughing Matter" by Nikki Campo
– send it off, Babe
A daughter blogs during her mother’s journey with cancer, discovering that journal to be the ultimate tribute.
Nikki Campo lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and three young children. She is a member of the Charlotte Writers’ Club and Charlotte Lit. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Charlotte Parent Magazine, and various humor publications. Her personal essay “Queen of Birthdays” took first prize in the Charlotte Writers’ Club 2019-2020 Nonfiction contest.
Author’s Talk
No Laughing Matter. When I told my husband I was going to write a story on the theme of “Luck and Opportunity” about writing my mom’s eulogy, he gave me a strange look. Would we classify eulogy writing as an opportunity? Not normally, no. But this story, like my mom and our experience together in her last years of life, was an exception.
With most pieces I write, I start with a scene or an emotion—sometimes both—and see where it takes me. For this piece, I started the night before my mom’s funeral. Curled up in my dad’s desk chair, I stared at the blank screen and thought “How can I write her eulogy when I’ve just spent two years writing a funny and hopeful blog about her wonderful life?” When she was diagnosed, I’d quit my job in business consulting, left my new husband in another state, and moved in with my mom. Then we’d moved to New York and spent six months hob knobbing around the city during her clinical trial. We’d licked ice cream cones in the West Village and laughed so hard we cried in our 200-square foot rental studio in Chelsea. I’d spent my first pregnancy with my mom, texting photos of my growing middle to my husband. We experimented with vegan eating, exercised, and wrote silly blog posts to keep everyone around us laughing. Now, to be writing a eulogy felt, well, impossible.
I wrote the eulogy for the same reasons and with the same energy I’d written the blog: with my mom in mind. She wanted me to write, so I did. She preferred the funny, so it was. And I kept writing, at my mom’s insistence, after she died. I left my career in business behind (though it took losing my mom to realize that spending a life in work I didn’t love was silliness), had three children, and moved to Charlotte, NC from Chicago. Now, in my third year of writing, I still miss my mom daily … but I feel her when I'm writing. In fact, many of my published works circle around our time together. I hope you’ll enjoy this one.
Nikki Campo
