‘Laugh through the pain’: Horrific series of events leaves woman down a brother and a dad, but up one on-point bumper sticker

Life can be funny sometimes. It can also be unbelievably, horrifically harsh, and — on rare, unexpected occasions — it can be both at the same time.

Sometimes life gives you all the ingredients for a truly horrible day, but finishes it off with something so perfect, so utterly unexpected, that it brings the whole situation full-circle. Life decided to give TikToker @icaruspendragon one such full-circle moment in early July, and she’s doing her best to laugh through the pain.

See, @icaruspendragon’s no stranger to tragedy. She lost her brother unexpectedly a few years back, on her birthday no less, and she’s been grappling with the pain since. In hopes of making her birthday a bit better this year, her parents gifted @icaruspendragon tickets to New York City for her big day, but her journey didn’t quite go as planned. Less than a day after arriving at her destination, @icaruspendragon got a call from her stepmom informing her that her father had passed.

So, to recap, this unfortunate creator lost her beloved brother, out of the blue, on her birthday, in 2022, and two years plus a month or so later, she’s now lost her father too. Imagine, if you will, the pain of two such monumental losses, both conveniently situated right around your birthday, only for the cherry on top of an absolute gut-punch of a week to come crashing down.

That cherry? A bumper sticker. So innocuous only a day before, but @icaruspendragon didn’t receive her shipping notice the day before. She received it the same day she learned of her father’s death, and as such the first item in her silly little Etsy order plunged her TikTok into the darkest corner of macabre humor.

For what had @icaruspendragon ordered, long before she knew how terrible this trip would turn out to be, but a bumper sticker with the words “I [heart] my absent father” plastered across it. It was almost certainly funny before, but with news of her father’s death looming over the TikToker, @icaruspendragon was in painful, disbelieving stitches over the incredible timing of the delivery, and she couldn’t help but share it with the world.

She got what she was looking for in the response from commenters, who were split between laughing right alongside her — what else are you supposed to do in such an awful situation? — and offering up their sympathies, but there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t all-in on the insane irony of that timing. “That’s objectively hilarious. But also, I’m so sorry,” pretty much sums up the entire comment section, as people rush to share hilarious takeaways and also their deepest sympathies.

@icaruspendragon’s humorous response to the loss of her father is quite a typical way to initially deal with grief. Particularly when we’re not expecting it, humans can have a broad range of emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one, and humor is by no means the wrong way to respond. It tends to join denial, anger, and guilt — several of the typical stages of grief — in serving as the first reaction people have to news of a loss.

There’s no wrong way to grieve, and at least @icaruspendragon found some solidarity in her suffering. She’s got plenty of people on her side, in the wake of her father’s loss, and she’ll always have that perfectly-timed bumper sticker to look back on and remember him.