Jean-Paul Bell | Clown Doctor / Comic Mime / Humour Therapist

My Death Letter.

Talking about death seems to me as easy as breathing or not breathing, as the case may be.

My mother at only 20 years old and pregnant with my older brother had a cataclysmic event when her father on returning home for the evening suffered a fatal heart attack sitting in his armchair whilst she was in the kitchen making him a cup of tea.

The shock of this pushed her into the premature labour of my brother Joe who died 4 days later. A few months later she was again pregnant with me and I was also 3 months premature.

Fortunately for me I was lucky enough to be placed in a humidicrib for some months, I think that’s why I love caravans. She never really talked about her grief in a family that talked about everything.

Humour has always been a major part of my life and my career has taken me around the world. As a mime clown you know half of all languages on earth. The world declared I had a face that could launch a thousand laughs. Though the biggest change in my performing life was becoming a Clown Doctor.

With my friend Dr Peter Spitzer we created the Humour Foundation Clown Doctor program in Australia. Peter was a doctor who wanted to be a clown and I was a clown who wanted to be a doctor.

We decided that it was important to include humour with health. Next year this successful program will celebrate 30 years of compassionate clowning in Children’s hospitals, some general hospitals and aged care facilities all around Australia.

There is perhaps no worse nightmare for a parent to have a seriously or terminally ill child in hospital, it turns family life completely upside down causing massive disruption to daily life, income, mortgages, change of location, relationships and friendships.

People just expect children to have normal lives and grow into adulthood, unfortunately the universe can just say no, the law of averages needs to fill the negative side as well as the positive side of the register of life.

 Felicity’s story is of a great awareness that children can gain when they know their young lives are short. She was 9 years old and had spent three quarters of her life fighting a brain tumour that just refused to stop growing. At the end stage of her life her parents recreated her bedroom in her private hospital room and it looked beautiful with her posters and pictures on the walls, soft toys everywhere and colourful quilts on her bed.

Friends and family visited constantly, her favourite Clown Doctors and Starlight Captains kept dropping in.

Her deterioration was starting to become obvious and for the family heartbreaking even though the efforts of Felicity, her parents and staff never ceased.

Some days after her death her mum and dad entered her room to pack up her life and the protective world they created, packing dolls, toys, photos and piling them into a supermarket shopping trolley. They left her bed for last, folding her quilts and her fairy satin pillow.

Whilst lifting it up they saw a little note that read: “If you two take care of each other as well as you have taken care of me, you will both be fine.”

My view of death is influenced by my experiences both personally and professionally as well as my study of Zen Buddhism.

‘There is no coming.

There is no going.’

With the observation that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.

—Jean-Paul Bell (2025)

Editor’s note: Jean-Paul Bell was the first Clown Doctor in Australia. Trained as a comic mime, he co-founded the Humour Foundation with friend and Doctor Peter Spitzer at the Sydney Children's Hospital in 1996. The program then spread throughout Australia and is still operating at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. After his time as a Clown Doctor Jean-Paul has worked as a comic mime with the elderly and in Palliative care.

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