What Buddy Taught Me About Frankl

My situation is a strange one.

In the same stretch of time, I have written about terror in hospice contexts and about humor. That contrast is not theoretical. It is how things actually feel.

One of my regular readers helped me make sense of that tension. She sent me a Viktor Frankl quote that had not stayed with me from my reading of Man’s Search for Meaning, a book I would always recommend without hesitation:

“Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

He survived three concentration camps. What stays with me is his use of the word aloofness.

I sat with that word this morning. It feels slightly out of place, almost too detached, and I wanted to understand why he chose it.

To be aloof is to create distance, either physical or emotional. Frankl understood that in a situation of total confinement, you cannot step away in any practical sense. Your world presses in on you from all sides. But humor creates space inside the mind. It lifts you just enough to change your vantage point. You are no longer beneath the weight of the experience. You are, briefly, looking at it.

He went further. Aloofness, in his view, was not a personality trait but a skill. Something you could practice.

He describes working with a fellow prisoner, a surgeon, encouraging him to invent one amusing story each day about life after liberation. In one example, he imagined the surgeon back in an operating theatre when an assistant bursts in shouting, “Action! Action!” echoing the commands used in the camp. The absurdity was deliberate. It created distance, even if only for a moment.

This was not distraction. It was training.

Right now in my own PSP journey, I am not yet fully trapped. From that still-open space, humor and terror exist alongside each other in a way that might seem contradictory from the outside. Most of my time is calm, even content. I do not want to distort that. But I also cannot ignore what is coming. There will be a point where communication fades, where the sense of being enclosed becomes constant rather than occasional. That is the source of the terror I wrote about. Not today. The future.

That is where aloofness matters to me.

I will need to use humor deliberately, the way Frankl described it. Not as denial. As a weapon. A way to step back, or actually above, from something I will not be able to escape.

I can already feel the early shape of it. When I freeze or power down, I can usually find a path to calm. But that is still temporary, like visiting the edge of the experience and then returning. What I am preparing for is staying there longer.

Last night, from a completely different angle, gave me reason to think I am on the right track.

Buddy, our dog, who I love a great deal, is unwell and on medication for a serious condition. One of the side effects is occasional loss of bladder control. At 3 a.m., wheeling into the bathroom in low light, I put my feet straight into a puddle of fresh urine. I could not smell it. I had no warning.

For a moment there was only confusion and discomfort. It was cold, unexpected, and unwelcome. Anyone with pets or young children will probably recognise that feeling.

And then something shifted.

I thought about him. About the fact that it was not his fault. And almost without effort, the whole scene became faintly absurd. There I was in the middle of the night, in a wheelchair, holding up a phone as a torch, trying to work out what had just happened and how to clean it up. My feet, my floor, my life.

I did not feel angry. I did not feel overwhelmed. I felt, for a few seconds, separate from it. Not detached from the reality, but lifted just enough to see it clearly. To stand a little outside it.

It is a trivial example compared to what Frankl endured, and far removed from what PSP will bring. But the mechanism has a similarity.

That moment did not change anything about the situation. The floor still needed cleaning. My condition did not improve. But it changed my position within the experience. It gave me space.

Frankl believed that kind of distance could be cultivated. I find myself believing him.

I already lean toward seeing the glass half full. Now I have a clearer idea of the skill I am trying to strengthen, and a word for it.

So how can terror and humor exist together?

Because they already do.

And in the middle of the night, standing in something I would much rather have avoided, I realized that one of them might quietly be teaching me how to live with the other.

I truly hope Buddy gets better soon, for reasons much greater than my feet.