I am so glad this week is over. Mid terms were due this week so I had major tests on Monday (astronomy), Tuesday (philosophy) and Friday (TN history.) I also had projects due in Graphic Design due and they nearly did me in. I needed to have as close to five brouchure layouts done in Graphic Design as possible, only I didn't have the first one finished. We have new, unfamiliar software - InDesign on Macs, no less - and we're all having to learn how the stuff works. Even my instructor isn't all that familiar with it yet. I spent six and a half hours on it Thursday, only to leave with no progress made. It wasn't until she and I sat down Friday with several reference and "how-to" books for over an hour that progress was made but I still stayed five more hours to get something done. I still haven't gotten the kinks out of my shoulders and I still want to take a sledgehammer to the damn thing.
I've sat down several times to write an entry here but the words won't come. I especially wanted to write on the days leading up to October 9 but I couldn't do it. The nineth was the one year anniversary of my paternal grandmother's death and I still feel unsettled and out of sorts about it. It isn't so much her actual death that bothers me but rather, it's everything that surrounded it and her funeral. As much as it hurts me to say it, it's caused me to question my own faith - more appropriately, my very self - more than ever, even a year later.
Well hell. I wanted to sit down and talk about the pow wow in Mt. Juliet this afternoon but I guess it'll have to wait. I don't want it to wait, though. I don't want to talk about this. Well hell, indeed.
Death is not an ending. It is simply a change of state. I've had too many "visits" from relatives after they have passed to think of it any other way. If possible, it should be a celebration, because it is a liberation of the soul from this heavy, ponderous body into our natural spiritual state. One of my favorite memories is of the ritual I did for my maternal grandmother. I knew she was Christian, so I called on the four archangels to watch over her in her coming journey - and they answered. There were four very powerful beings who came and stood at the four cardinal points around her bed. There was a fifth being as well, who stood by my left side. It felt for all the world as if this person was offering me support for what I was doing.
My paternal grandmother dies and I'm still trying to figure things out a year later. There needs to be some kind of closure but I don't know if I'll ever get it - to be honest, her death went pretty as our relationship had. I was an outsider, held at more than arm's length. I may have been family but I wasn't allowed in very far. I think I can accept that.
What I can't accept is how...runover...I feel to this day. Even though I fought with everything I had to give my grandmother a dignified death, I still feel runover. I feel runover by the damn church group that came by to visit at the hospital. Obnoxious, loud, overbearing sonsabitches who laid on the false cheer so thick, someone would get hurt from the fall. They didn't even know my grandmother, yet they blocked the damn door while they pa-rade loud enough to be heard in the next county. Sonsabitches didn't even ask if anyone minded a prayer was said. Can you say "RUDE?"
I still feel that I got runover at the funeral home. Still, I got up and fought and the word "appropriate" is now permanently banished from my vocabulary. I am still deeply offended there were people who were more concerned about all appearances being ":::_insert that BANNED WORD here_:::" and not offending those goddamned, obnoxious church folk that never even met my grandmother than with honoring her memory. Damnit, I had to fight about what casket she got, what clothes she wore and the freakshow that was happening in front of her casket on visiting day.
The Heir Apparent to Hell (and believe me, if I really believed in hell or Satan, he'd be cringing at the thought of having to surrender to her) decided to hold court in front of her coffin. The woman should not have been there at all. She did not belong. She and her demonspawn are not family, I don't give a damn who she trapped into marrying. This woman would not allow my grandmother to come over and spend Christmas with her own son, yet she tried to take over the planning of the funeral and choose some godawful pink monstrosity with these huge, tacky roses painted all over it. It literally looked, as one person said when I described it to them, "like something Belle Whatling would be buried in." (She's the whore from Gone with the Wind.) She also arranged to have the most godawful singers to sing the absolute worst hymnals I have ever heard. Then she had the nerve to stand in front of my grandmother's coffin on visiting day, and greet people as if she were the Belle of the County.
The worse thing of all? I wasn't mentioned at all during the funeral. After it was all said and done, I wasn't acknowledged once during the funeral. Not once. Here I was, one of only two members of the immediate family left and I was left out. My grandmother was dead and our relationship hadn't changed one whit. It still hasn't as far as I can see. It's been pretty quiet around here - no one non corporeal has come to visit in a long while.
You know what? It's taken me over a year to get all of this out. I could say more about the surreal, bizarre and just plain stupid events that made up the thing but I won't. I'm tired of carrying it around and I refuse to do so anymore.
I'm done.
Page and graphics Copyright 2004 D. Firewolf
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