Funeral (“memorial”) Preparations

So my grandmother passed on the 26th. I was, I suppose, lucky to see her on Christmas Eve. I qualify that statement because she was so far gone—gaunt, incoherent— that there was largely no there there. Still, I got to say goodbye, even if I was the only one of us two to know it. But, being 15 years DA’d, my grandmother and I had a strange relationship. I quit at 17, and I continued to live with my grandparents who raised me until I was 21. After she got over her hurt feelings, she largely let me live my life. Obviously, there were the comments about “if only you’d come back to the truth,” but she was happy for me even when I made “worldly” accomplishments like getting my Master’s or becoming a teacher. But still, she vacillated between periods of treating me like any one of my never-baptized siblings and treating me how she was “supposed” to: that is, at arms length. This hurt. It hurt a lot. But I think a lot of that melted when I saw her on Christmas Eve. If there is some sort of cosmic entity dishing out punishments (I doubt it) was this it? To be on hospice care and in a liminal space between life and death? To be so wholly pitiful that it makes any well-founded anger wash away? Or is it an act of benevolence from above that we could reconcile? I don’t know. I’m rambling. I just hate that all of us have grief processes that are always complicated on top of the fact that death is always terribly complicated. I’m sorry for my grandmother, I’m sorry for myself, and I’m sorry for us. I just want to let you know that I’m here for you, as are all of us. We’re a community, even when it feels like that’s the very thing we lost.

That’s it, just wanted to vent in this very strange time in my life.