outer-jessie's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The dust When I was little, I was losing relatives all the time. A lot of the edges of my family were very old, the elder siblings of my grandparents, and my great-grandparents, and distant cousins. We'd wake up one morning and find out, oh dear, Uncle Donald passed away, Aunt Caroline died, Aunt Violet's funeral is on Thursday. I was taken to funerals when I was pretty small, or at least wakes or church ceremonies. They were serious events. Not necessarily sad though. Old people die, that's all. As I've gotten older, I've been exposed to more of the process of dying. It wasn't just that my grandparents died one day; they became sick, they had extensive treatments, hope was lost, goodbyes were said. There was an implicit countdown to the end of life. There was a progressive release of attachment. There was a deepening realization of the fact of the hole they would leave. There was increasing sadness. It took me years to realize that funerals are not the end of sadness, but the tip of the iceberg. Funerals are like birthdays - they are ceremonies to mark a moment, but they are no more a stopping point than a birthday is. True, a funeral happens and we all move on, like they show in movies (bad ones). But we all move on every day. And moving on doesn't mean we're not still sad. We're moving on whether we like it or not. We're moving on even as we sit in our sadness. We're moving on because we have no choice. Motion is the state of the Universe, but the Universe has no emotion. The Universe doesn't know that we live every day of our lives, aching. Aching, among other things. This is all to say, my grandmother's last sister died today. We all knew she was dying, she knew she was dying, and it happened fast in relative terms. She said goodbye to her life. We said goodbye to her. Now, she's gone. I am only sad if I think about it. I loved my aunt, but I don't feel her absence in my life. I feel it empathically for my grandmother and mother and aunts, and my cousins for whom my aunt was mother and grandmother. I feel shitty about that. I did love her, but my sadness is intellectual which feels false. What I do feel is the changing. My aunt was an anchor in our family traditions, which she had become after her own mother and her elder sisters passed away. So her death means either someone else becomes the anchor - like my grandmother, poor sweet soul - or the tradition is lost. That's sad. Who does my grandmother have left? Her brother-in-law, being my grandfather's little brother; some friends of the family; and her nieces and nephews and daughters and us. She, the youngest daughter, becomes the matriarch. Everything shifts. Maybe new traditions spring up. Maybe old relationships fade out. Maybe she becomes everyone's grandmother in the absence of her sisters. She is the most loving person I know, and she could do that. She became the grandmother for her best friend's daughters after their grandmother died, at least while they were still children. She could become the mothering figure for my aunt's sons, and for the adult kids of her other nieces and nephews whose mothers passed before. Perhaps, fostering these orphaned kids and grandkids will add to her remaining years. That would be nice. I'll watch and see if that happens. My aunts would probably be jealous if they were alive to see that happen. But the whole point is, they're not. Grief is complicated. 11:21 a.m. - 2015-08-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||