How laughter helped Gordon Kirkland overcome his disability – and find success

Reader’s Digest, April 2006, 1,953 words

By Karin Mark

Gordon Kirkland limps toward his living room, at times supporting his six-foot-four frame on the oversized furniture that crowds his condo. “I joke about being disabled. I tell them it was a golfing accident – it really changed my handicap,” he quips, after gratefully settling into a sofa with a fresh mug of coffee. His service dog Tara, a cream Labrador, lies on the floor nearby.

The joke – as well worn and comfortable as an old t-shirt – is a souvenir of two defining moments for the British Columbia award-winning humourist and author. One was the car crash that sentenced him to a life of disability and chronic pain. The other was his decision to laugh instead of cry.

Aug. 3, 1990 began as the kind of day that reminded Kirkland why he had moved to a West Coast from Ontario. It was a sunny Friday morning and he was heading to the company golf tournament. The car window was rolled down and the music was playing as he drove leisurely towards the University of B.C. Golf Club in Vancouver.

Life was good – fantastic, even. He was 36 and getting paid to travel the world as an international trade consultant. He was happily married, with two sons and a house in the suburbs.

Traffic stopped for a moment and Kirkland reached over to turn down the stereo. Suddenly the car lurched forward, torquing his torso around and crunching the seatbelt into his chest and abdomen. He’d been rear-ended. And then came the pain – excruciating pain, shooting up in a V from the base of his spine and across his shoulders. But when Gordon realized he could still walk, he figured he would be fine. So he sorted out the crash details with the other driver and continued on to the golf course.

However, the pain intensified as the hours passed; by nightfall Kirkland was in the busy ER of a local hospital. He received a cursory examination and an X-ray of his upper spine and was discharged with a neck brace for whiplash, Tylenol for the pain and a recommendation to rest and put alternating heat and cold on his back.

Kirkland stayed home for a month after the crash, continuing to work from bed, then returned to the office, using a cane. The severe pain stayed with him. He buried himself in work and was uncharacteristically sullen and bitter.

Three months after the crash, when a specialist ordered a second set of X-rays, he was diagnosed with incomplete paraplegia. His spinal cord was permanently damaged. (Today, he as about 65 per cent use of his right leg and 35 per cent use of his left. To get around outside his home, he uses a wheelchair or forearm crutches.)

By autumn of 1991 he was in a wheelchair, and he watched friends drift away one by one because they were uncomfortable with his disability. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t find anything to laugh about.

Humour had been a fixture in the suburban London, Ont. home where Gordon grew up. He and his two siblings had learned the power of laughter from their mother Vera, who had grown up during the Depression. Dinnertime in the Kirkland home was a whirlwind of teasing, pranks and jokes. Vera kept a point system – for example, ten points for getting someone to shoot liquid from their nose – a tradition Gordon continued with his own family.

Following the crash, however, pain and misery crowded out his sense of humour – and, where his job was concerned, his memory of what happened from one day to the next. In early 1992, when he returned to work after the Christmas break, he couldn’t recognize any of the papers on his desk. He was devastated; The accident has cost him the only job he had ever enjoyed. He made an appointment to see his doctor, then he left his office for the last time.

Kirkland thought he’d reached rock bottom. He decided the only way up was to more proactive about his injuries, so he spent a month in intensive rehabilitation at the GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre . He left there feeling stronger and walking on crutches.

But on Aug. 29, 1992, he was rear-ended again while stopped at an intersection. He spent ten weeks in hospital and slid into a downward spiral fueled by pain and depression.

“His humour was not there. He was not there. He was not a nice guy,” said Kirkland’s wife Diane, a stockbroker. This was not the man she had fallen in love with as a teenager and married right after high school. Their relationship was a case of opposites attracting: she was shy and petite, he was outgoing and very tall. She had a head for math and science, he for the arts. She loved his goofy side. “But there wasn’t any of that after the accident.”

After his second car accident, Gordon had joined a waiting list for a pain-management program at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. By the time he was finally admitted in January of 1994, almost a year and a half later, he was desperate for relief.

The three-week program included a daily regimen of physical therapy and counseling. It operated out of a lounge-type room, a throwback from the 1970s, with big easy chairs and plenty of Naugahyde. A video was on the agenda one day, so as Kirkland and the two other patients settled in, staff dimmed the lights and closed the curtains. It was a recording of a live presentation by a humour therapist who talked about the physiological changes that take place when a person laughs.

As he sat there in the dark, something twigged in Kirkland. “The video inspired me to think that maybe there is a back door to all of this. Yeah, things are lousy, but it showed me there was another way.”

When he got home, he talked to Diane about the video and about getting his life back on track. Gradually, he regained his optimism. He started managing his son Brad’s hockey team, exercising and taking anti-depressants.

Then, in May of 1994, he was rear-ended yet again. He suffered no long-term effects, but quips: “After having an accident in ’90, ’92 and ’94, I wasn’t sure I wanted to drive in ’96.”

That summer, he bought a computer to do business research. He spent hours on it, trying to figure out how to rebuild his old career. One afternoon Diane came home from her job at the bank and, as usual, found him in the den, dabbling with the computer. When he expressed frustration about his situation, something in her snapped. She was working full-time to support the family while taking financial planning courses to further her career. She was tired of seeing her husband wasting his talents.

Diane reminded him of his high school interest in creative writing, abandoned to pursue more lucrative employment. “You’ve always written and wanted to write something fun,” she said. “Why don’t you just write something and see where you go with it?” But Kirkland still viewed his business skills as his greatest asset. However, as he talked to Diane, he started to consider the possibilities. He decided to give her suggestion a try.

He had just begun working on some short humour pieces when he mentioned his writing one day in an internet chat room. A New Brunswick newspaper editor who happened to be online invited him to submit something. Kirkland leaped at the opportunity.

His first piece – about the concurrent professional baseball and hockey strikes – was published in the Moncton Times & Transcript on Aug. 27, 1994. He submitted another column, and then another. Within a few months, Kirkland at Large was a weekly column.

“Instead of sitting and writing for months and months and collecting rejection slips, the fact that I was able to get published almost right away really helped my attitude,” he says.

To find material for his columns, he scrutinized his life as a husband, father, resident of suburban Pitt Meadows, person with a disability. He realized he was living with a teenage grocery-sucking appetite-on-legs (his younger son Brad) and the dumbest dog ever to get lost on a flight of stairs (their late dog Nipper).

A turning point came in 1996, when Kirkland at Large was picked up by a number of Canadian newspapers and he started branching into the U.S. market. His first book came three years later, a collection of columns called Justice is Blind – and Her Dog Just Peed in my Cornflakes. He was finally an author, following in the footsteps of humour writers such as Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry and Lewis Grizzard, whose works lined his bookshelf.

In 2000, Justice is Blind received the national Stephen Leacock Award of Merit for Humour. Kirkland’s calendar started filling up with book readings and writers conferences.
Two years ago, he became the first Canadian to be invited to join the faculty of the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop at the University of Dayton in Ohio, evidence of his growing popularity in the United States.

His second book, Never Stand Behind a Loaded Horse, came out in 2004, winning him his second Leacock Award of Merit. Last year, he published When My Mind Wanders it Brings Back Souvenirs and was named a keynote speaker for the 2006 Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop, along with Dave Barry and other notables. I Think I’m Having One of Those Decades, his fourth book, was launched last month during the Bombeck conference.

Kirkland’s specialty is making others laugh at him, at themselves and at life in general. His stories about family life generate some of the biggest chuckles during his public appearances.

On raising teenage sons, he says: “You know you’re in trouble when you run out of food before you finish unloading the groceries from the car.”

On marriage: “You know, marriage is not that hard, as long as men remember this: If a man says something in the forest and no one hears him, he’s still wrong.”

Not even his own health problems are off limits. When he talks about being an incomplete paraplegic, he adds, “My wife says I never finish anything.” He’s even considered devoting an entire book to humour about disabilities: “I’ve always wanted to write a book called Laughing Through Life at Fart Height.”

Kirkland continues to write weekly columns, and dedicates a month each year to helping develop new writing talent by speaking to up-and-coming writers at conferences, festivals and in classrooms. He visited his old high school, Oakridge Secondary School, in London last year to speak to writing students. “When they invited me back, I thought it was because I had some detentions I hadn’t served in 1972.”

In the years since the accidents, Kirkland’s chronic pain has not lessened, nor has his mobility improved. But his now-robust humour muscle keeps him focused on the positives.

Case in point: in 2003, Kirkland collapsed from a coronary event – not quite a heart attack, but close. It put him in the hospital for two weeks. He saw the incident as a valuable warning, and, of course, instant fodder for his columns. He recounts Tara’s attempt to revive him by throwing a ball at his crotch, and the confidence-inspiring sight of his doctor with his shirt inside out.

Gordon Kirkland sets his wisecracks aside for a moment to reflect on his life. “If you were to say to me right now, ‘You can have what you have right now – with the disability, with all of the baggage – or you can go back to when you are not disabled,’ I would take what I have today.”