Can Death and Dying be funny?

Death, Dying, and the Odd Girl: A Comedy was born during a season when I lost several loved ones to terminal illness. Thanks to my late father (featured on the left), my family learned to laugh at life, death, and everything in between. That ability has carried the O’Neill family through some tough times and made it all a little more bearable.

Maybe it’s the mental health therapist in me (my day job), but I wanted to explore how people relate to grief and death—without bogging them down or making them avoid the topic altogether. Humor gives heavy topics an entrance into the human psyche in a palatable format. But what kind of story could make death… funny?

An image of a petite young woman attending funerals to face her fears of dying was stuck in my head for weeks. I knew I’d write a story about her, but no plot arrived. Then, in 2021, my mother had a stroke. Once again, my sisters and I found ourselves on hospital rotations. We’d been through it all when Dad passed in 2020, and we were exhausted—but we were also pros at the process.

One night, it was my turn to stay with Mom. At 10 p.m., she was asleep, and I wasn’t in the mood to watch TV or read. I had a mental itch that needed scratching. I’ve always processed my emotions through writing, so I pulled out my laptop, opened Pages, and just started typing. The first line came out of nowhere:

“The first time I saw Maribeth Graves, she was in a coffin. My coffin.”

That’s all I had. I didn’t know who Maribeth was or who was talking about her. I made a deal with myself: if I got stuck, the only way to un-stick myself was to choose the most ridiculous thing I could think of next. I hammered out the first two chapters that night. It felt good. It was fun. And my emotions were resolved—for the time being.

My main character, Exa Faye Dowden, is a recent widow who joins Maribeth Graves on a quest to find and make peace with the person of Death. Through Exa Faye, readers get to experience grief through snarky wit, a cranky worldview, and a willingness to be adventurous. She’s the key to the question above: Can death and dying be funny? The answer is no—death isn’t funny. It’s painful and hard. But what is funny is us. How we relate and react to death can be humorous. We’re a quirky species, after all.

For the characters, I’ve created fun locations like Poppy’s Pretty Pygmies and Milly’s Ugly Mugs, and even a scene where the main characters attend a funeral that’s also a fair. It’s a weird story—or perhaps “odd” is more appropriate.

I’ve woven in moments from my personal life, altering them to fit the narrative. I think it helps to ground the humor in reality. You might not read the word “death” as much anywhere else, but I promise you’ll also chuckle—and, hopefully, find a little more peace with the losses in your life.