...and we're back.
We spent so much focus and time on eating whenever food was available (and the few times I actually felt hungry), sleeping wherever floor or couch or extra bed was available, sitting around staring blankly into space, pre-arranging funeral, slide show, obituary, and the like, that there really I think wasn't time for anyone to take it in and really grasp, understand, GET, what was really going on. Our mourning was as much for her pain and suffering as it was for her impending death, and it was watching her whither away (and how it affected everyone else) that hurt the most. Watching the people you most admire in your life- uncles, parents, brothers and sister, brought to their knees by the experience is something that rocks you to your core. Seeing both old friends and family, and strangers alike sobbing at seeing the state she was in, was difficult as well, and not only because part of me wished I could have every one of those moments of the day with her myself.
It wasn't until afterwards that I could focus on the more self-centered mourning of feeling sorry for myself that she was no longer there, that I couldn't share any more moments of my future with her, that she would never get to meet Tiffany's mom. I continually am in such disbelief that she's gone that I am stuck in a feeling of wanting to lash out at whoever keeps telling me this lie- shut up! But its me, and its the truth. I see all the events of the future in a fresh new light- things I imagined sharing with her, moments I had already created in my mind, I now have to reconstruct with here presence erased and her memory inserted, a memory that I know will fade frighteningly fast.
Going through events that perpetuated the acceptance of her passing was terribly hard. It felt as if I was making it happen, making it real, by going to the wake, as if not seeing her there looking better than she had in days would keep it from actually being so. I hated, despised, (strongly disliked, Mom) that I had to attend my grandma's funeral, that I had to pick up a box of her funeral programs with her face on the front, and that staring at that face I quickly felt her transforming from person into memory. In many ways I wanted no part of the dubious honor of pall bearer, escorting her around for her last day above soil, but of course I would have had it no other way.
Saying goodbye was the hardest part, and I had to do it many times. First, when I came back to Chicago for three days, when I thought might be the last time I'd see her alive. I had to get on the train and leave town. Coming back, I was shivering with dread by the time Nathan my brother picked me up from the train because I knew I was on the way to watch her breath her last, and it felt again as if I was setting the wheels in motion to make it happen just by my coming with that very expectation. I said goodbye to her in small ways every time I left the room, when I went to bed at night. I said goodbye to her as I entered the room around 4am that last night, and again when I finally left the room much later. But the goodbye when I walked away from her casket the last time, tore me apart. The last time I felt I'd ever be in her presence again. Knowing again that it really was for real. Visiting the grave of my grandpa I had seen many times, with a freshly opened hole next to him, as she was about to lay next to him again after all these years.
I've accepted him as a memory to be shared with her- but now I don't have her to share that memory with, and that I have not yet well accepted.
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