John Callahan, cartoonist, musician, humorist beyond compare, died this weekend. He was 59 years old, an age which I may be perhaps indulged in claiming to be too young, far too young, to be gone.
It’s always too soon for the great ones to go, isn’t it? Make no mistake: John was one of the great ones. His work demonstrates to all of us the true value of humor. It is only when we laugh that we can transcend pain — gaining respite if only for a moment, garnering the strength we need to carry on another day.
He did all of this in a way that made many readers uncomfortable. Crass, rude, profane, vulgar – John’s cartoons were all of these and more. Callahan did not pull his punches. “This is a feminist bookstore!” one famous cartoon read. “There is no humor section here!”
We see in John’s work the use of humor to speak truth to power — wherever power might be. A quadriplegic since 1972, when he was injured in a car accident, John knew first hand what it was like to be powerless. Invisible. To be considered without worth, without meaning, without an identity as a complete man. And he raged against all of it.
That rage is something we don’t talk about. It’s not polite. It’s not nice conversation. It makes people feel uncomfortable. Yet Callahan, with his cartoons of blind people romancing on a park bench in broad daylight, or of a proctologist peering up a particularly large patient’s backside to observe that a new Starbucks was being built in there, provoked laughs. Started conversations. Made people think about things they’d never otherwise consider. We’re seeing rage here channeled, transformed from anger and vitriol into something useful, something affecting, all through the power of humor.
In health care, we have our fair share of rage. Too often, we’ve got nothing to do with that rage, no where to put it, no way to express it. It festers — the fact that the sweet, lovable mother of four dies, despite tons of prayer and active compliance with her treatment regime, while the non-compliant, abusive, aggressive, med-seeking jerks have years, decades, of life ahead. Doctors that snarl and scowl and find it impossible, inconceivable, that a nurse would call in the wee hours of the morning with anything relevant to say. Family members who neglect their loved ones for years at a time — and then bawl us out if the call light isn’t answered before the button is even fully depressed. Bureaucracy and politics and the threat of being eaten alive by colleagues and completely dismissed as nothing but a glorified butt-wiper by the general public.
Yeah. Rage happens.
John Callahan couldn’t walk away from his rage. He had no choice. He had to keep on. So do we. Yes, nurses can and do leave the profession, but for those who stay, whether it’s from a determination to help others or a bizarre fascination with having a regular paycheck, we have to find something to do with the anger, the rage, the frustration. We can learn from Callahan — to call things as we see them, to laugh at what we find funny — even if we find ourselves laughing alone — to reclaim our own identities and shake off the labels others slap on us. If we can laugh, Callahan taught us, then we are our own people. Not perfect people, not politically correct people, not idealized stereotypes of what we’re supposed to be — but who we really are.
At the end of the day, that’s not a bad legacy to leave.
Goodbye, John. I learned so much from you. I think we all did.
