Widow Shares 3 Things That Were Funnier Before Her Husband Died — 'Dark Humor Is How I Cope'
Laughing through our hardest times shows how grief and joy can coexist.
Ground Picture / Shutterstock Grief can take varied forms, showing itself through anger, hopelessness, and even humor. A woman named Tiffany Barry showed how she’s using laughter to mourn after unexpectedly losing her husband.
The widow shared 3 things that were funnier before her husband died.
In a series of TikTok videos, Barry commemorated both her husband’s dark sense of humor and the lighter moments they shared together.
1. The wallet he gave her
“Welcome to Things That Were Funnier Before My Husband Died: Part 1,” she exclaimed, before revealing the wallet that he gave her as a gift. The wallet looked like a book, titled, “Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” a reference from the movie "Beetlejuice."
“And yes, for anyone who sees it out in public from here on out and tells me how much they love my wallet, I will be telling them that my dead husband bought it for me,” she continued.
While some might find her attitude macabre, others may take solace in her honesty, her openness, and how she’s able to find light moments amidst the darkness.
Barry doesn’t shy away from discussing the gray space that grief has created in her life, something that seems especially weighted, as she revealed that she and her husband had been separated for six months before his death.
2. Addiction and recovery
In the second part of her grief-humor series, Barry shared a recording of her husband. She qualified the video by noting, “My husband did die of an overdose, so that makes this either worse or better.”
The footage she shared showed her husband “just going through and deleting all the ADHD pictures from TikTok.”
“It’s going to take forever,” he said. “I know if I had some crystal meth, I would’ve been done with this 20 minutes ago.”
Barry’s raucous laughter can be heard offscreen, as she said, “Recovery is possible but you’ll do everything slower.” She acknowledged in the caption that “Not everyone understood our dark humor, but it got us through 15 years together with all the highs and lows of addiction and recovery.”
"Dark humor is how I cope," she explained, highlighting how present-day grief and joyful memories can coexist. As someone said in the comments, “It is totally possible for something both to be worse and funnier at the same [time]. Emotions are complicated.”
3. That he would haunt her after he passed
Barry made a third installment of Things That Were Funnier Before My Husband Died, saying, “My husband used to joke that if he ever died, he was going to haunt me forever.”
“And this was endearing, only now, every [expletive] night, my dog runs out of the hallway, barking at nothing, or runs into the corner of my room, barking at nothing.” She described how “all the random little noises that happen all around my house in the middle of the night,” make her feel like she’s “losing” it.
“I 100% have shouted into the void of my house, ‘Matthew Barry, if that’s you [expletive] with me, stop it,’” she said. “Because, at this point, I just don’t [expletive] know.”
Barry has laid her vulnerability out in the open. By posting celebrations of her deceased husband’s life while acknowledging the toll his loss has on her and her children, she’s able to capture the extremely mixed feelings that arise from loving and losing someone who battled addiction.
Grief humor is a way through the heaviness of losing a loved one. Laughing at the dark parts of life lets us know our hearts are still beating, that we’re still here, alive, despite how hard it may feel.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers relationships, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.