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Obits: And, wellerer. What to take away, what has been learnt, and facing the music.
Tue, 31 Oct 2006

Like so many recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica, I shall start at the end and work backwards. (Apologies to the walking souls on this Halloween Day for having miraculously tied Battlstar Galactica to funerals. Point, game.) This is the last in this series of Obit posts.. a quick walk through the funeral that was yesterday. I had actually written a more sorrow-oriented opener to this entry yesterday right before leaving for the funeral, so that my writing style shift from begin to end would be more obvious.. but this next morning my spirits about the matter have so changed that I cannot keep it. With the passing of the funeral has gone the period of mourning and my eternal happyness is returning so I cannot write in that same frame anymore. I am sorry to see that emotional context gone, but it is my way -- it is time for the living now.

There was something I took away from the funeral of my grandfather a few years ago, and now something I take from this one. I expect a few more funerals in the next few years and then hopefully not for another decade or so, but will try to always learn something from the experience of each I think. Perhaps you really never understand the truth of the event until your own is near coming, instead only seeing them as from a distance - a rain storm racing across a lake towards you where you can see the pattern of interference in the otherwise smooth surface. It is a cynical reality to view life as a discrete timeline like an FM radio wave - that rain storm has its rugged and shapeless beauty, its inevitible approach, but we do not see it for the physics underneath. We do not look at a painting solely for its brushstrokes. Anyway, I will take away from this one the faces of family and some of their stories as we talked at dinner afterwards. The casket was being lowered and we were chatting and you know -- it felt okay, it felt good - it felt right. So many were in attendance -- young to old, from my nephew up to an uncle-in-law - bright faces, defiant faces, happy faces. How can a funeral be sad when there was a newborn baby present, and stories of relatives going to Pakistan to help restore the shattered lives of that terrible earthquake? You can obsess over the utter truth of a removed life, but that is not why we are here .. the funeral reinforces that message - we are here to live, right now. As trite as it sounds, as if from the very mouth of a glam rock band -- live and love now. (I can almost see it in Star Trek from a Klingon -- "live now, for tomorrow we all may die!")

The day began with some.. not dread, but pensiveness. I thought it would be a hard day, to listen to my mothers eulogy and to the service at the grave. I won't dwell much on either but to say -- my mother found an itemized list of proceedings for grandmums funeral: the Bible readings, the songs to be sung, the fees to be paid. I could say that she was well prepared but that would not be as strong a statement as it needs to be -- the readings grandmum had chosen were perfect and comforting, some of the most powerful available in the Christian bible. I suspect this is why grandmum didn't leave us any letters or goodbyes -- this customized service were them, to all of us gathered. One song was I think a shorter version of "It is well with my soul", and one of the readings was about being "uncrushable" -- very good representations of her spirit as a very strong woman, an intelligent and proud mother, who was satisfied with her life and ready to go on to meet her waiting husband. In there was also one of my favourite readings, present so far at I think every funeral I've attended - the moving Psalm 23. I was raised an athiest (I think that is the correct term; I always forget the exact difference between agnostics, atheists, and others. I do not disbelieve per se, and like Darwin do not see any real collision between theology and science, but simply do not really care since it is all, by definition, unknowable. Instead, I try to live well and Do Right. The Bible and others do exist as guidelines for Right, but I've never read one.) but many of the readings are still powerful. I always said that when the darkness comes, I will be taken screaming and fighting for desire to live, so Psalm 23 hits me many levels: "Even when I walk in the valley of darkness, I will fear no evil".

The eulogy was not sad but instead a precise of grandmums life, her meeting grandpa, the difficulties of life during the Great Depression and War, from stories of climbing down the woodpile to go out with friends and to literally hopping on and off moving trains to travel from town to town. It was a wonderful history and a beautiful way to say goodbye. It was also the test -- sitting beside my mum and holding her hand as the minister read - would we all break our proud masks.. but being a stubborn bunch we did okay. You can cry at funerals but not this family... not much anyway.

Likewise the service at the grave, though that was a quick one. I suppose it is quite final -- what more is to be done than to send the body off to its new home and to apply the last goodbye. I know a few times in the last few days I deliberately baited myself or made hard thoughts to ensure I would cry a little and remember the good times, but watching my mum crumble a little was perhaps the hardest part of all these days. Still, she is as strong as her mother and only wept a little at the end before putting on her mask and helping people to pick a flower or two from the arragements. At the end, I knocked on the casket near to where grandmums left shoulder would be I think, said my traditional "Happy Trails", patted my grandfathers headstone lightly, and walked off.. any more would've made me tear up and this round, I am refusing that to occur.

But as we drove away to the restaurant, I was calm.. almost happy. It was over. Grandma was taken care of just the way she wanted, and its not like she was taken early. She soldiered on past the point of even wanting to live, and it was a beautiful send off. I should only hope my service could come off as well, in the hopefully distant future.

I imagine my nephew took it hard, but he took it all pretty well -- he can't have been to many funerals yet, so still has his innocence. I know for sure my heart broke for the first time when my dog of many years died, back when I was a tot. It is tough to come to terms with new tenses for people and on the funeral day you always notice when people switch from "she is" to "she was". I guess one other observation .. my grandparents both got to our wedding years ago, so that was nice; I last saw my grandfather alive at the hospital, hours before he died.. but I couldn't stay for I had to head to the wedding of a friend of mine. Likewise, at this funeral there was a newborn baby. Perhaps all funerals are tempered by good, since there is always something new occuring despite our eyes seeing only the bad during these times.

Anyway, my spirit is restored and my memories are intact. I only need to enter the date into my family tree application, type in some stories I do not wish forgotten, file away the many found photos, and move boxes of goods to the basement so they don't scare the children coming for tricks-or-treats tonight. Time to close the chapter and stop making my blog readers cry :)

A piece of the original opener to the blog is here:

My goals this day are simple -- try to not cry much during the service or lowering of the casket, be strong for my wife so she doesn't feel sorry for me and stress the little one in her belly, and be there for my mum if needed. Such little but at this moment so important duties... but when my mother gets up to read the eulogy I imagine there will be few dry eyes, if she can even manage it at all. A cynic might say that the funeral is where you take thoughts from the active part of the mind and stuff them in the closet of memories at the back, that this is the natural defense mechanism for life so we don't go around with regrets clouding our vision all the time. For sure there is some truth there, but I would suggest the funeral is where the family gathers to share some memories, to finally stand and face what has happened and say goodbye, to close the last few days off and begin anew to face forward for the living. Thats what the deceased (see how quickly it became impersonal as we shove the hard thoughts aside) -- thats how Grandma H would have wanted it anyway. No sadness -- this is how life works, we all face it, and we all move on. Remember the joy of life, and of their life.

Time to start getting ready. I do wish I'd snapped a picture from my phonecam of the grands place before it had gotten dismantled, but such is life and perhaps best it wasn't done anyway

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