y maternal grandmother died, after a long and lingering series of illnesses, in early June, 2003. The following blogs recount the experience, first in dry factual discussion, and then, later, with much more emotion and philosophical pondering.

More recent additions are added at the bottom of this page.

June 9, 2003

weekend of fun began Thursday morning early.  Mom called me around 6am, just as I was about to go to bed (I was literally brushing my teeth).  She left a long message about how Granny (her mom) was dead and issues with Gramps (her step-dad) being weird about it, and how she was probably going to be on a plane Thursday afternoon, and the Wake was Friday night, and the funereal was Saturday morning, and she hoped I would go but she'd understand if I couldn't find the time/heart to do it, and so on.

I read the end of her message and just didn't want to deal with it then, and went to bed.

That sounds horrible, but Granny has been clearly on her way out for about two years.  Numerous physical problems including nerve conditions, difficulty breathing, and the big one, dementia.  Which isn't fatal, but not to put too fine a point on it, she had lost her mind.  She wasn't a raving lunatic or anything, but she was just gone.  Didn't know anyone, couldn't even begin to feed herself or do anything else for herself, etc.  I'm not going to go into the whole story, since it's depressing. Anyway, she was going to die, she was miserable, and no one with any common sense or objectivity would say death was a bad thing for a person in her condition.

So while I was shocked to her it, I was sort of glad that she wasn't suffering anymore now. And since it was 6am and I'd been up for like 20 hours, I was really too tired to think clearly.

And yes, I went to bed upon hearing the news. And laid there.  And laid there.  And laid there.  All the while my mind was going like a sewing machine, but I couldn't decide what to do.  Could I stand myself if I didn't go to the funereal?  If I didn't go with mom, how likely was I to go at all given that I'd have to book my own flight, rent a car, and drive the 3.5 hours over many backroads to the small town the grandparents live (lived) in.

Around 30 minutes later I gave up on sleep, since I was no longer tired, but also since I realized I should go that day (Thursday) and with mom, or I probably won't go at all. And while I didn't want to go, I felt like I had to.

It's too late to get into the whole "what my grandmother meant to me" blog, tonight.  I'll write about that some more in the immediate future, though.

Anyway, suffice to say that I loved Granny and had spent a great portion of my childhood with her and Gramps, and that I realized it would be horrible of me to not attend her funereal. So I got up and called Mom, and talked to her a bit and she got my stepdad on the task of buying us 3 tickets to StL as soon as possible.  He was already on the task via the Internet, through the magic of a cable modem.

I'm skipping more details here, but he soon had tickets going out, and for a flight that morning, San Diego time. The problem is that I had been up for around 20 hours by that point, and the flight was leaving in about 4 hours.  So basically I had time for a 45-60 minute nap that night.  I laid down and took it, my brain still going 600 meters a second, but did fall asleep pretty rapidly.

What felt like 5 minutes later my alarm went off, and I struggled to my feet and set about making up something to eat whilst I packed madly.  Fortunately I didn't need too many clothes for just 4 days, though I had to take some sorta dress clothing for the Wake and Funereal, of course.  Which was nothing I wanted to do, since I wear formal clothing about as often as Anna Nicole Smith turns down seconds.

Long story shorter (mostly since I'm yawning dangerously): I went, I slept about 8 hours the first three days combined (just couldn't get to sleep at night in strange beds), all of the relatives other than my granddad were quite cool, I returned Sunday evening after spending around 8 hours in StL and on the plane that afternoon/evening/night, and after arriving back here about 3.5 hours ago, I've showered, bath'ed, talked to Malaya, eaten a bowl of shrimp ramen, surfed, read some emails, and written this.  And with that much accomplished, I can go to bed without hating myself.

June 16, 2003

Just to be autobiographical for a bit I'll catch up on the events of the last few days.  I was up here for a week in late May. Got home and worked every day for 9 days, and got word of my Granny's death last Thursday morning, early.  I was on a plane with my mom about 5 hours later and then drove all evening to get down to Dexter, MO Thursday night.  We got in late and Gramps went to bed right after we got there.  I slept on the hospital bed they'd been using for Granny in the later days, when she was too sick to get into a real bed, which was in their dining room, up against a mirrored wall, with the dining table pushed over to the side to make more room.  Why there?  Christ knows. Despite having been awake for something like 40 straight hours at that point, my mind was going like mad and I didn't sleep at all.  Literally, I got about 2 hours of sleep and at 5am my granddad was up brewing coffee in a drip maker about six feet from my head, in the kitchen.

Friday was gruesome, sat around twiddling thumbs for most of the day until it was time for the Wake, which ran from 5-8pm.  It was creepy and touching in roughly equal measures.  He (gramps) had pretty much spared no expense, and rented out the biggest cathedral type room at the funereal parlor.  It was a church-like setting with a central aisle and pews on both sides; probably 25 or 30 rows, each of which would seat about 7 people.  So just rough estimate, I'd say 400+ could fit in there.  I think there were at most 30 or 40 at a time during the wake, and then about 25 for the funereal.  Yes, we could have used a much smaller room.

There were a ton of gorgeous flower bouquets though, lined up behind and to the sides of the open coffin.  And yes, I said open coffin.  As in embalmed granny, lying there looking very dead and waxen, on display for all to see.

My first thought was that the whole thing looked like a voodoo ceremony, with the coffin and the flowers and the corpse.  I guess it was nice, I mean I got a sort of sense of closure out of seeing her stuffed carcass, and it seemed to be helping gramps, who was beyond freaked out for the entire duration of the visit, but it was still very creepy.  They had her made up somewhat, and her hair done nicely (now there's a job, eh?) but she was still obviously dead in appearance.  I can't say exactly what it was about it that made it obvious, but at no point did I think she'd sit up and start laughing madly about what a great joke she'd pulled off on us all. She looked like a nicely-made up corpse.

And while I'm making light of it now, and thought it was rather creepy at the time, I was also emotional about it and feeling sad.  Mostly on the flight out there, when mom came back and sat next to me for a bit and she talked about her memories of her mother, and I did as well, and tears flowed.  I realized at the time, and really realize now, that all of my sadness was based on thoughts of her from the past; memories of the good times.  And I was thinking about how those days were really gone for good.

As I said previously, she'd been very sick and going downhill for over two years, and it was quite obvious she was never going to get any better.  She was pretty much senile-dementia for the last 18 months or more, and was losing weight and having heart tremors and other such things, and there was nothing the doctors could do for her at that point.  Both of her parents died in their early 50's, and she had pretty much the same fatty, meat-intensive diet that most everyone in the Midwest does, and she smoked heavily from about 14 until 50 (Stopping cold turkey while on a plane flying out to Syracuse, New York, going to see her new baby grandson for the first time, after swearing that she would never smoke around the baby.  Yes, I was that grandson.)

Anyway, my point is that she lived way way longer than she ever really expected to live, and she was nearly 80 when she died, and was very sick, so it was a mercy that she finally stopped suffering, and a mercy that my grandfather let her die at last, and didn't order them to stick feeding tubes into her stomach once her swallowing reflex stopped in the latest days of her coma-like illness, after he'd had them basically revive her several times previously, when obviously she was never going to get any better.

As events reminded me, I don't see how anyone can ever have any association at all with a relative or close friend dying from any wasting disease and not fully support physician-assisted suicide, but that's a topic for another day.

This has gotten well off topic, and Malaya and Dusty-Bo are distracting me, but I'm trying to explain that while I'm summarizing the funereal and wake flippantly now, I was far from jovial or flippant at the time, and I was very sad that granny was dead, even though I had sort of mentally written off her life a couple of years ago, when it became obvious (to me, but not to gramps, as events showed) that she'd never get any better.

So moving right along (at last), events there other than the wake and funereal did not go very well, mostly since gramps was totally freaking out and pretty clearly didn't want anyone around.  Other than his younger brother, who had driven in from West Virginia.  His relationship with my mom and especially her husband has been pretty poor for several years, mostly since he had his way of dealing with Granny's illness, and mom didn't think he was doing things very well.

Gramps was old fashioned and Midwestern and very much "The doctor's say this so that's what we'll do and any other opinion or discussion is out of the question." Not that I'm saying the doctors killed her or anything, but she had diseases that were not responding in any way to the traditional drugs/scalpels techniques of modern Western medicine, and the best prognosis the doctors ever gave were along the lines of "lingering death", which made it seem pretty clear to me that other tactics might be a good idea.  Plus, any mention of "She's going to die so we should look into ways to not prolong her suffering." were met with "You just want to kill us both!" paranoia.

This is all TMI, but the point is that he was freaking out and didn't want us around, so mom's initial plans to stay there for a few days after the funereal and help sort Granny's belongings and claim things of sentimental value were just not going over well.  And rather than stay there and have a big argument with the out of his head Grandfather, we just left right after the funereal and drove back to St. Louis and stayed at the gorgeous mansion of a close childhood friend of mom's.  I took a bunch of photos, and will probably post a few at some point.  Don't have them, or the various creepy Granny's Wake photos, or various cemetery (Granny's and another one we walked through while in Missouri) photos on this computer, so those will be once I'm back in San Diego, or possibly in a few weeks when/if I've moved up here with all of my belongings, including computer #1.

I got home late Sunday night from that sudden excursion, and returning briefly to the "no sleep" topic, I can say that I got something like 7 hours of sleep over three days, then about 5 hours the last night in Missouri, before finally getting a solid 9 hours the first (and only) night back in San Diego.  Which was Sunday night.  Monday I ran a bunch of errands and wrote bills and packed and washed clothing and got a haircut and other such things, before going to bed around 4am with my alarm set for 7am, so I could get up and drive to dad's house, from where he drove me to the airport, and my flight up to see Malaya for a week.

(Totally OT, but Malaya is on her machine next to me, surfing a bit, mostly on Dooce's sight, while waiting for me to write this, and Dusty is on her lap and half on the keyboard and keyboard tray.  He just hit Caps Lock and she said, "Dusty, I don't want you to hit caps lock; you'll look like a noob."  Sorry, but it cracked me up.)

Not that this is any sort of closure, and I shouldn't worry about this sort of thing, but I'm really trying to save money so that once I move up here and I'm not working at the stadium ever more (Praise deity of your choice!) I'll be able to pay half the bills for a while, at least.  Ideally until I get a novel finished and published and begin my much-delayed journey to artistic self-sufficiency. I bring this up since I had to vanish from San Diego very suddenly Thursday morning, and missed work Thur-Sun, which cost me about $700 in lost earnings, and then I spent $700+ on the plane ticket and other travel expenses.  And I can't even begin to pretend to be able to afford that. And if you are curious, there was no reading or disclosure of Granny's will.  Not that she had that much money, but I'm assuming it was a sort of "I leave X and Y to my daughter and grandson, unless my husband is still alive in which case it goes to him until he dies." But I really don't know.  I imagine the 2+ years she spent needing nearly full time nursing care at home, as well as frequent hospital visits and very expensive pills and such must have taken a big chunk out of their finances, and I wasn't looking to turn a profit on the trip or anything; I'm just bringing it up since I figure someone would be wondering.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.