Last night I was doing that thing I do when I’m mildly discouraged, just going through the motions, feeling no joy. I was convinced I’m not a good friend—and actually have no friends.

“I feel flat,” Mom used to say when she felt this way, “but I’m really trying.”

“Really trying,” for me, meant scrolling through old David Letterman and Stephen Colbert talk shows on YouTube, which is how I happened upon an interview with Jennifer Lawrence.

“You’re so relatable,” Stephen Colbert gushed, as Lawrence deflected the compliment, by scrunching up her cute nose and launching into a story about the time she vomited.

Now I know we are each relatable in our own way, like Donald Trump, with whom so many people can relate, although I do not, and Hillary Clinton, who must be relatable to someone somewhere somehow.

Yet there is this indisputable quality about a Jennifer Lawrence that is, truly, relatable.

So I watched the actress like a coach watches a tape after the big game trying to determine strategy, to suss out how she does it. Her timing, pauses, facial expressions, and laughter—so much laughter!

I can rarely summon the energy for laughter. Laughing happens most when I’m with my two sisters. A kind of helpless laughter that straddles joy and despair and bubbles up from our shared history.

Like the time we arrived late to Mom’s room in a senior housing facility to take her to church, and found our casually elegant mother leaning sideways in her wheelchair, in her Parkinson’s-weakened state, wearing sneakers, stained slacks, and Day-Glo socks with non-skid spots.

Unacceptable!

Springing to action, Kari wrestled her into clean slacks, while I wrenched open her dresser drawer to find black socks, and Siri touched up her lipstick. In the midst of our ministering, our mother appraised us; our travel rumpled clothes, our uncombed red-gray hair, our lack of make-up, and said, in her whispery fading voice: “So you want a perfect mother—but look at the three of you.”

During church, my sisters and I could barely contain our eruptions of laughter. Parkinson’s or no, Mom was still so astute, able to sum up, in the act of her three grown daughters, the desperate desire to restore their mother to the mother they knew.

“What are you up to out there?” Chris piped up in a friendly manner from the bath, perhaps curious about the intense silence that had fallen like fresh snow in the living room.

I confessed I was learning how to be relatable like Jennifer Lawrence.

Chris was not reassuring. He did not say: “Oh-darling-sweetheart-dearest-don’t-you-worry-one-bit-because-you’re-totally-relatable.”

No.

He said: “I hate the word relatable.”