The best way to cope with cancer? Treat it as a joke... It killed her husband and her nine-year-old, then hit her too. But Lindsay Nicholson has a strange way of dealing with the disease

About a week after my second round of chemo, when I was being treated for breast cancer, my hair started falling out in great clumps.

Long, dark strands covered my pillow in the morning and clogged the plug-hole after a shower. My hair even fell into my food as I was eating. It was, as you may well imagine, devastating.

Until my daughter Hope, then aged 14, piped up: ‘Face it Mum, you’ve  always had c*** hair. At least now you can get a wig!’

We laughed until our sides hurt. And now, whenever I hear some po-faced commentator banging on about the (undeniable) distress that cancer-related hair loss causes, I want to blurt out: ‘But on the upside — no more bad hair days!’

I don’t say that, obviously, because it could be considered in terrible taste, if not downright offensive, especially if you don’t know how the people concerned will take it.

But in my experience of cancer, sadly now quite extensive, it’s always those who have endured the most tragedy and devastation who take greatest delight in sending up their situation.

I was in my early 30s and the mother of a toddler when my first husband, the investigative journalist John Merritt, was diagnosed with the blood cancer leukaemia. He died two years later in 1990, when I was pregnant with Hope.

Five years after that, my elder daughter, Ellie, also had leukaemia diagnosed. She died at the age of nine in 1998, and a light went out in my world.

Then, in 2006, not long after I had married my second husband, Mark, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I have just marked five years of being clear of the disease.

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I’m not saying my life has been a laugh a minute. Far from it. But when I read that Iain Banks — the hugely talented writer who died on Sunday just three months after having terminal cancer diagnosed — used ghoulish jokes to help him and his family come to terms with the inevitable, I could certainly understand.

Banks announced his marriage to his long-term partner on his website with the words: ‘I have asked Adele to do me the honour of becoming my widow.’

When crime writer Ian Rankin saw  him after the ceremony, he told Banks: ‘Sorry, I didn’t get you a wedding  present. What do you get for the man who has everything?’ Banks replied: ‘Well, maybe a cure?’

Black humour is a coping mechanism for those afflicted with the devastating disease, says Lindsay Nicholson, pictured with her daughter, Ellie, and first husband, John

If some people found that his deathbed joking made them feel uncomfortable, or thought it was in poor taste, I would venture this is because they are lucky enough to have lived a life in which nothing really bad has happened to them.

Those of us who have had to ‘peer into the abyss’ have discovered  that laughter and tears are more closely related than might ever  be imagined.

While it is often said that humour is tragedy after sufficient time has passed, a terminal diagnosis means that time must necessarily be telescoped and everything gets rolled into one until you don’t know whether you are weeping tears of laughter, or grief, or both.

Children know this instinctively. Before she succumbed to leukaemia, Ellie spent many months on a cancer ward in Great Ormond Street Hospital, which you might expect to be a place of desperate sadness.

Lindsay and John on their wedding day. He died from leukaemia in 1992, aged 35, when Lindsay was five months pregnant

But the kids there were every bit as cheeky as healthy kids, maybe even naughtier.

And the nurses, who do as tough a job as anyone can imagine, also had to put up with an unending stream of practical jokes — children swapping beds, going missing and hiding equipment.

One little boy sent out for pizzas for the entire ward, delivered by limo, safe in the knowledge that no one would make his mum pay — not with her child so gravely ill!

Until recently this knowledge — that in the depths of despair there can be humour and even comedy — has felt like a dark secret between those of us who have been through serious illness and bereavement.

The unwritten rule was that we were expected to waft about looking dignified but sad (not too sad, mind you) so as to meet the expectations of the rest of society and not distress anyone by revealing the full tumult of our emotions.

Mordant humour makes onlookers uncomfortable because they don’t know if they could be as brave in the circumstances. But that’s the point. They don’t know.

And if — no, make that when  — it happens to them, they may well find a welcome release in being able to make a joke. Laughter in the face of adversity is powerful medicine.

I can see how the unfiltered nature of the internet is helping to break down taboos regarding sickness and humour.

The journalist Lisa Lynch, who died this year aged 33, gained 140,000 followers for her blog about her terminal cancer, not because what she wrote tugged the heartstrings but because she was funny.

Her most high-profile admirer was Stephen Fry, who knows a thing or two about comic writing. Lisa’s musings were turned into a book, The C-Word, which was subtitled ‘Just your average 28-year-old . . . Friends, Family, Facebook, Cancer’.

Meanwhile, 30-year-old Kate Granger, a doctor specialising in care of the elderly, has taken to tweeting about her own terminal cancer diagnosis, which means she may not live longer than another five years.

She plans to keep going until she is on her deathbed. Her goal is to open up the dialogue about dying.

Good for her. It’s about time the ‘lucky ones’ in our midst — those who haven’t had to face these things — realised they don’t have the copyright on humour.

For a decade I was patron of the WAY (Widowed and Young) Foundation, which supports those aged 50 and under whose partners have died. As you may imagine, such bereavement often occurs in terrible circumstances and often involves leaving young children motherless or fatherless.

Lindsay Nicholson with her daughter Hope, who died aged just nine of the same disease that took her father

You might expect the members of WAY to be mired in depression, barely able to speak because of their distress. Yet their meetings, while not non-stop joke-fests,  are invariably life-enhancing  and full of fun.

These are people who have learnt the hardest way possible that life is short and should be lived to the full. They see shared jokes as a great way to offset some of the awful practical problems caused by the death of a partner.

Indeed, support groups for widows and widowers are not the only places where dark humour flourishes. Chemotherapy suites, cancer wards, hospices and funerals all encourage an undercurrent of black comedy, albeit often as a guilty secret.

After all, we know there is  nothing more likely to relieve the tension than a funny story in the middle of a eulogy.

It reminds us of the humanity of the deceased and is, bizarrely, even more affecting than a dull recitation of their good deeds and worthiness.

Chuckling through the tears can be a wonderful way of remembering someone as a rounded person, not a cardboard cutout.

At my father’s funeral, we would hardly have been true to his memory if we hadn’t mentioned his sharp tongue and acerbic wit. At the wake, we delighted in telling a story from his last days in the hospice, his final destination after battling cancer.

'This knowledge — that in the depths of despair there can be humour and even comedy — has felt like a dark secret between those of us who have been through serious illness and bereavement.'

High on morphine, he floated in and out of consciousness while we, his family — me, my mother and brothers, plus his sister and aunt — gathered weeping at his bedside. During periods of wakefulness, he liked to reminisce.

On one occasion he was telling stories of his childhood in the East End of London and of the escapades he and his sister enjoyed.

‘Such a slip of a thing, she was,’ he sighed, before opening his eyes  and, spotting her rather rotund figure, adding slyly: ‘Not so tiny now, are you?’

Cue complete collapse of the deathbed party. Even my poor aunt saw the funny side, though perhaps she didn’t laugh quite as much as the rest of us.

No nurses came running to hush us up. As I know only too well, hospices are not silent, morose places. Yes, there were tears, but there was also laughter and joy. When time is short, it is sometimes necessary to live through all the emotions at breakneck speed.

My father died a couple of  days later, having lost consciousness not long after making his barbed comment.

His humour may not have been in the best possible taste. But that was the man we knew, and despite the illness, despite the morphine, it was a sign that he had remained the person we  loved to the last.

And, in the end, there is more comfort in that than in refusing to admit that sad events can also have their funny moments.

After all, if you can’t die laughing, then at least you may be able to leave your loved ones with memories that will put a smile on their faces.

* Lindsay Nicholson is the editor of Good Housekeeping.