Grandma.

This should have been written a while ago but we decided to keep it more or less chronological to the posts in blog. Also, when I should have written it for it to be relevant in real time I couldn't a computer that was built before 1987... and internet was hard to get ahold of.

My Grandma has died. She was the last of my grandparents still alive and so her death comes as a loss... the final connection to people two generations removed from myself (not entirely... but of my direct family) and I will miss her. She was a sweet, caring, and feisty woman, a great friend to my Mom and as stubborn as an ass when she wanted to be. But like all of us, she was born and recently she died. Her death is a loss for me, as she was the closest of all my grandparents. So it was a sad email I received in Kathmandu informing me of her death, funeral, and internment... all of which I missed.
Read the rest...

A more poignant moment about her death is that I have now NOT attended the funerals of all of my grandparents, something I vowed I would not do before she passed away. But I was in Kathmandu, literally the other side of the world and while I might have been able to get back in time for the funeral it would have been the end of this trip and the end of our finances. My family didn't ask me to come, I didn't think I could if I had wanted to... and so I did the thing I was dead set against and missed another funeral. It is not the end of the world and every funeral missed the reasons were quite legitimate but that doesn't take away that I feel mildly guilty that I missed them. That there is something internally that feels inadequate because I was not able to attend those non-repeatable moments.

Aside from missing a moment I had vowed not to there was also something jarring about reading about the end of bodily existence through a monitor. It was a rather surreal experience to know that these pixels were the only way I would have to say goodbye in the next few months... feeling the loss of life in the real world as communicated through the cyber world. I sat and tried to put the right inflection and emotion into my mother's email informing me of her death but it didn't seem to work. A message that should be full of sorrow and pain, felt flat and stoic and in the end I didn't really believe it had happened (and parietally still don't). I know she is dead, I know when I next go to Iowa she won't be there... but I don't really believe it and won't till I see her grave. Intellectually I know it but emotionally there is no real conclusion, no answer. There is something important in the physicality of a funeral, a grave, that is missing when the only information you receive is communicated to you through email.

There was another surreal surreal moment that added to this feeling of (dis)reality. On the day of her funeral I was trying to find a computer that would let me call home. It was about 9:00 at night and I was wandering around the streets of Kathmandu looking for someone with skype and trying to explain (in pigeon English) that it was important because my grandmother had just died. I finally find a place and call home, only to have a conversation with my Mother that was digitized and broken, further the connection from reality via technology. I was glad we had talked, and it was certainly better than nothing, but I missed talking in person and a sense of actually knowing what was happening.

And in the end, it is just death which, like birth, happens everyday (one of the most ordinary and one of the most magical events). She is just one of thousands that died on that day. She died peacefully (so I am told). She had lived a full life and her death is a conclusion to everything that had come before. I think it is silly to hope that she had lived longer or didn't die... after all death is the nature of our life. But that doesn't make dealing with her death any easier or less important.

I end with an excerpt from my journal the day after I found out. It is perhaps less polished but there is something more real in how I felt about it at the time.

8/4/07

What is sad is that I can't come home in time to make the funeral, nor am I expected to I was hoping that she would live till the fall so I could make a proper show of a goodbye, but that is no longer possible. So it will be another funeral I will not be attending, leaving a trace a guilt for a situation barely (or not at all) within my control. The person I most want to know I care enough to come is already dead and will miss (at least physically) the event. My family doesn't seem to expect me to come and while it would be good for me I don't NEED to come for my own sense of well being. Also it simply doesn't make sense to spend over $1000 to go to Iowa for a day or two, barely awake, only to return... but not going also feels inappropriate. So, I won't attend and need to deal with my own thoughts on the issue. It will resolve itself as is necessary, I am sure. I will miss her...