Follow the Fortune Cookie

Lilium Inter Spinas

"Memory is a way to hold on to the things you love,
the things you are, the things you never want to lose." ~Kevin Arnold
Currently listening to: "As" - Stevie Wonder
Currently reading: Nothing at the moment...

The process of mourning is a complicated one. It is an experience I kind of suck at. Whether upbringing, genetics, or the sheer quirks of my personality, I can't allow myself to cry...even if I want to. Ever since I received the news of my grandfather's death, I have felt a vast hole in my heart, and yet I can't bring myself to let the tears fall. It just builds and builds and builds until one of these days when the well will overflow...

I went up the day after I heard he had passed with a change of clothes. The family came in cars and planes within days. The structure of the family house is more long than tall, shaped like a wide "U". The colors are black, brown, and ivory; black is dominant, even on the carpets. Nothing has really changed in the past thirty years. In odd moments a passerby might feel it is a tomb while those more frequent visitors feel it is a staple in time. It sure is something...grand might be fitting. No matter the issues I have with it, I ended up staying almost two weeks with a small abbreviation back home for some new clothes and technology I had left at home.

Being who we are, the family got to work right away. The burial and memorial were things of beauty pulled together by the daughters-in-law, helped by the sons. I worked for my aunts that their catch-all, including putting together a photo montage of my grandfather to play at both ceremonies. There was a lot of pomp-and-circumstance for my grandmother, but not too much that my grandfather would have wholly disapproved of. It was tasteful, fun, and took a lot of work to throw together in a week.

However, more than the work we accomplished, it was the conversations between music choices and where roses should be placed that really made the experience. I haven't felt more close to my father's side of the family since I was very little girl. This past time was like little windows into the lives of the giants I saw my aunts and uncles as. My cousins, pushed into the folding programs trenches - all 500 of them, came out with a little more sympathy, a few more smiles, and understanding to the people we are now. Granddad would have loved that.

We don't mourn as a family, as a rule. We share words, a rare some times we share our emotions, but we do not grieve together or in the house where he died. That, as my grandmother put it, is done on our own time. I'm not sure I'll ever find that time. The tears have been held in for so long that I'm not sure that I wouldn't drowned if they escaped. I can only hope he knows that I miss him every day and hope he'll save me a spot when that day comes to see each other again.

Really have to work on this mourning thing...